Article published in Rave magazine – June 1965
When Alan Freeman met Manfred Mann vocalist Paul Jones for another of his fabulous Heart – to – Heart interviews, we knew there would be some explosive, exciting things said on the pop scene.
We were wrong.
Instead there emerged a compelling story of Paul’s battle to the top and some tales of his heart – breaking experiences on the way.
The whole idea of the Paul Jones dance is to move around the scene and get acquainted. Young Mr. Jones has been playing it that way for most of his twenty-three years, swinging a pick here, plucking a chord there . . . until one day the buzz went round the outer regions of the pop world that Manfred Mann had a vacancy for a singer.
“There was supposed to be an audition,” Paul said cheerfully. “But I was the only one who turned up. Two of the group thought I was absolutely terrible. Two thought I was good, and the other two said I’d do until a replacement came along.”
Well, that’s one way of making it, pop-pickers. Each to his own choice of invasion tactics. I’ve heard of many different stunts for scheming yourself into pop. Like getting yourself a dish-washing job in some elegant nosh house where Brian Epstein eats and singing loudly through the service hatch.
Or, again, you could lie awake dreaming of making the national press by riding up and down the West End in a platinum jacket on one of those safety bicycles.
Neither method, though, has the compelling simplicity of Mr. Jones’ device for arriving at instant fame. He just ambled quietly into the Roaring Twenties Club where the then seven Manfreds were appearing and announced: “I heard you were looking for a singer.”
A Happy Man(n)
Paul detests solemnity and self-importance. “I’m a very happy man,” he told me. “It’s all turned out fine.
“I’ve a wife and two sons and I’m doing the things I want to do. And I’m singing. You know, I get a really sensual pleasure out of singing.”
You might, in fact, call Paul one of the best-adjusted people in pop. You know the old bit about pop reflecting the insecurity and uncertainties of the age. Well, when he’s not singing or digging other singers, Paul surveys the whole caper with vague amusement.
Paul Jones must be the only pop singer who ever got slung out of Oxford University. “Basically I suppose it was for being lazy,” he said.
He was sitting in my flat watching the coffee percolator doing its stuff. With the mid-day sunshine flooding in, he looked all tawny and calm but not in the least lazy.
“I think it was also because I had a band. You’re not supposed to do any acting or plays or whatnot unless you get permission—a girl I know appeared in a play and her tutor saw her in it and they made them take the play off.
English Lessons
“I’d gone there to do English, but all the time I was there they were saying things like, ‘You’ve got to knuckle down, you know’ and ‘What’s all this I hear about you and this band swinging all over the Shire?’ All that stuff.
“I was fed up with the University after about half a term, which is six weeks. I had imagined it’d be a liberal, free-minded place. But it was more restricted than anywhere else I’d ever been.
“I felt there was a lot wrong with Oxford but I wasn’t articulate enough—or interested enough—to do anything about it. It seemed to me to be turning out a lot of elderly young men, all conforming like sausages.
“The last straw, the reason I was actually thrown out, was that I failed Prelims—the exams you take in the first year. I went back to Portsmouth, where I come from. And my father, who was a Captain in the Navy, said, ‘Yes, well, that’s it, isn’t it? You’ll have to earn a living.’ And he gave me five pounds.”
Paul Jones talks to Alan Freeman
I poured some coffee and passed it across. Paul took a pull at it and went on.
“I stayed with some friends in London and got myself a temporary job sorting cheques in the Midland Bank in the City. I used to go in every day in a grey suit and stand there until five and I really hated London at that time. It was so hot and dusty.
“I stuck that for five weeks and then I went up to Edinburgh. Two people I knew were up there for the Festival, poetry reading, all that bit. They said why didn’t I come back and share a flat with them in Oxford, which was much cheaper than living in London.
“So I went back with them, and I got this job marking exam papers, which was funny in the circumstances. Then I worked on the railways as a porter.
“I noticed that it had become winter, almost imperceptibly. It was very cold. I got a job with this man who was excavating a building site in Oxford. He was digging fifty-foot holes with a lot of funny machinery and sending the earth back in little jars so the architects could decide whether it was okay to build on.
“What I did was to turn the handle so that this machine knew where to dig. The boffins from the university kept coming around and saying, ‘If you find any bones or bits of old pot or anything interesting, let us know.’
I assembled this incredible team of layabouts . . . and we dug and dug . . .
“So I kept all these little bits of pots and they’d peer at them and say, ‘Mmm . . . how interesting. Early ninth century.’
After eight weeks the job finished, but the boffins came round again and said there was some old ninth century or something village, under the site. They said, ‘We’re going to work on it ourselves. Would you like to dig holes for us?’
“I said, “Yes, all right. I don’t mind.’
And instead of digging long narrow holes they told us to dig wide shallow holes. I assembled this incredible team of beatniks and layabouts and we all dug and dug, and the boffins were down on their knees scraping away with trowels at these little fragments of pots and exclaiming for all they were worth.
The Out Crowd
“Across the road was another crowd building a new Marks and Spencers. They were bashing away with great cranes and heavy drills but they kept finding beautiful stuff—whole vases and bottles. These working blokes would come over to us and say, wide-eyed, ‘Look what we found, guv’nor.’
“And the boffins would look down their noses at them and say, ‘Oh, yes. Only eighteenth century.’ And they’d start scraping away with their trowels again looking for more fiddling little bits.
“It was one of the funniest things of my life.”
A year after he was sent down from Oxford, Paul was still meeting up with his past.
“I got a job on the river in the summer, opening the lock gates on the Thames. I used to lie there reading a book in the sun with no shirt, and I’d hear this refined sort of shout up the river, ‘Lock!’
“Then I’d have to open the gates for the University rowing team and they’d rush off shouting, “In, out, pull together, men.’ And I’d go back to reading my book.”
Once again, Paul was expelled—this time from river service for turning up late.
“So I came up to London after that and got a job as a travelling salesman for a folk music label—Topic Records. Then I did the same kind of thing for Esquire Records.
“I’d been doing this for about six months when people started to say to each other, “Do you know of a singer?’
The word got to me eventually after about nineteen people had asked each other. I went along—and that’s how I got in with the group.’
I said, “When did you first decide you wanted to be a singer, Paul?”
He smiled. “I can remember to the exact day. It was the day ‘Rock Island Line’ got to Number One. I’d been given a guitar for my fifteenth birthday and I thought Lonnie Donegan was the greatest thing that ever happened.
“I think it was Lonnie who started the whole thing in England which is now the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
“I formed a skiffle group and we started to play around Portsmouth. The whole teenage thing was just beginning to move. It was all Elvis Presley and James Dean and isn’t youth wonderful?
“It was great to be in a group. You felt it was a sort of rebellion, that you were arousing something in people. I don’t think it’s the same any more. The group is an accepted thing now.
“It’s the individual who does that today: huddled in the spotlight, like Donovan. That was really what made Bob Dylan. A huge stage and just this one little bloke out there on his own.
“Funny, that. I would never have thought that pop music included Bob Dylan, but now that he’s in the Top Ten obviously it does. I think ‘chart music’ is a better term for it. Pop music is like some kind of huge plastic bag that changes its shape in this direction and then comes back and changes its shape in that
direction.
Paul Jones talks to Alan Freeman
“When the Beatles came along one of the things that made you love them was this freshness. Now that they’ve been around all this time they’ve no longer got it, I suppose.
“But they’ve got something nobody else has. They’re taking the mickey out of the whole pop thing. You know, when Cathy McGowan comes up to George with the mike and says, “George, if you were taking a girl out where would you take her?’
“And George just grunts, ‘Home.’ The thing is, he means it. The Beatles can be honest about it all. They don’t have to go on with any of your old pretence.’
Paul thumbed over some sheets of music lying on the coffee-table.
I asked if he was doing much writing for the group.
Want To Do More
He shook his head. “I want to do more than I’m doing now. Let’s see, of the stuff we’ve recorded, Manfred wrote ‘Why Should We Not?’. That was our first, an instrumental. The second, ‘Cock-a-Hoop’, I wrote as well as the B side.
Three of us wrote ‘Five-Four-Three-Two-One’ and I wrote the B side. ‘Hubble-Bubble’, which didn’t do well, was written by five of us, and Manfred and I wrote the B side.
As time has gone on, I’m writing less and less. Our recent A sides are songs that have been done before.
“Maybe it’s because I need to be alone before I can write anything. It’s not so easy now. When I’m not with the group I’m with my family, and if there’s any kind of activity going around me I can’t write two lines.
“When I was young I used to walk for hours just to be alone and to think things out. Today, I just can’t. There isn’t the time.”
Paul lives with his wife, Sheila—whom he met at Oxford—and their baby sons in a converted West London garage which is near several of the recording studios.
“Do you think,” I asked, “that one day you might regret not having gone ahead and taken a degree?”’
He shrugged. “Not yet. I keep thinking that one day I may be sorry, but it hasn’t happened. ‘
“My father was worried for a while, though. But he respects success in anything. He joined the Navy as a kid to keep his mother and he wound up as a Captain. Self-made man.”
“With a self-made son,” I said.
Paul nodded. “That’s it.”
He admits that his own good fortune was based on the slimmest of chances. “The only reason I got the job with Manfred, as I told you, was that nobody else turned up. Manfred reckoned I could just about be put up with until they got someone better, and in fact another bloke did come along four or six months later and say, ‘I can sing better than he can.’
“Which was probably true. I was going through a terrible phase, all out of tune. I’d done a few weeks standing in a blue blazer singing for three quid on Saturday night in a palais at Slough with seven dance band musicians who thought — Buddy Greco was the bee’s knees.
I packed it in and sat in sometimes with Alexis Korner, which straightened me out musically.
“But I’m convinced that I wouldn’t be anywhere if it weren’t for Manfred. He’s got a great gift of picking out what will go commercially. I haven’t. I used to sit around playing that record of ‘Do-Wah-Diddy’ by The Exciters, and it never occurred to me to record it, or that it’d be a hit.
“Our secret is in the arrangements. Manfred is very painstaking and he knows a terrific amount about harmony.
“No one’s boss in our group. Everyone has a say. There are no discountable voices. I’m not sure whether this is good or bad. It’s great when we’re having a round table conference, but maybe not so great when we go into television or into the recording studio.
Slight Disagreement
“There’s harassed Fred Producer putting his head out of his control booth saying, ‘What’s next, men?’ And somebody says ‘Watch Your Step’ and Manfred says ‘Water Melon Man’ and Mike is saying something else.
“We have to say, ‘Hold on a moment. Matter of slight disagreement here. Ha, ha.’ And we all go into a terrible sort of huddle with gritting of teeth and all that. But it works. It means that when we finally decide to do something we’ve all agreed to do it. It makes a sort of happiness.”’
Paul stood up, buttoning his green jungle jacket. I said, “Would you say it’s worked out for you?”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Yes. One hasn’t amassed anything like enough money to feel absolutely secure, like the Beatles, say. All the travelling brings me down from time to time, too. There’s just two places I want to be.
“One is home with my wife Sheila and my two sons, Matthew and Jacob, sandpapering a couple of chairs I’ve bought. The other is up on the stage singing.
“Singing for me is an actual physical pleasure.”
And thousands of his fans share it, I thought as we shook hands. It balances out all round.
Next month, pop-pickers. Stay bright.
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