1. You Can Count On Me To Do My Part (M. Allison)

2. Night Ferry (W. Jones)

3. Nathaniel (W. Jones)

4. Fresh As A Sweet Sunday Morning (Jansch)

5. Keep Your Lamp Trimmed & Burning (trad. arr. G. Davis)

6. 200 Miles Away (W. Jones)

7. Magical Flight (Tunbridge)

8. The Grapes Of Life (Tunbridge)

9. Massacre At Beziers (Tunbridge)

10. Mother It’s Me (W. Jones)

11. Black Dog (Winchester)

12. Cannot Keep From Crying Sometimes (trad. arr. D. Graham)

13. Young Fashioned Ways (W. Dixon)
 

Wizz Jones – acoustic guitar and vocals

Simeon Jones – tenor saxophone, flute and harmonica

John Renbourn – acoustic guitar and vocal on track 2

John Bentley – bass guitar on tracks 1, 4 and 13

Justin Hildreth – drums on tracks 1 and 13

Track 8 recorded at Spark Studios, London, October 1994. All other tracks recorded between October 1989 and February 1992 at Airwave Studios and Paul Metcalfe Studios, London

Artwork by Dean Stuart Ali (front cover by Danny Jones)

Produced and engineered by Barry Lane. The CD title is replicated by InsightVision.Biz, 2016

 

“Although we were very poor, culturally I had a middle-class upbringing. I reacted against it. I was stupid, but I know why I did it – I was trying to break away from those chains – and it worked! Jack Elliott was my original idol. 

The younger generation seems to say that they don’t want idols, don’t need heroes, but we cer¬tainly needed heroes, and Jack was one. I laid the ghost of Derroll Adams a few years ago by meeting him, recording with him and getting to know him; the whole relationship changes then. You still admire them and have great respect for them, but you suddenly realise they’re 

human! Jack didn’t remember, but I actually knew him before I played guitar, and to be riding up and down the autobahn with him and recording with him was great. Woody Guthrie was a true genius. As a writer he was absolute dynamite – I first listened to Blind Boy Fuller singing Weeping Willow Blues on a 1940s record about 30 years ago, and it still excites me in exactly the same way..

I went through all the music; I was a beatnik / bohemian, I was a jazz fan, then skiffle found its way into the jazz scene, and that led to folk. I used to go backwards and forwards across Lon¬don with a wire recorder recording Jack Elliott and Derroll Adams. I met Ewan MacColl on the train one day when I was living in Croydon, and he said, ‘Come along to my house and record Big Bill Broonzy, because he’s staying with me’. This was before I even played the guitar. And I passed up on the opportunity! And years later, when I met John Renbourn, his wife, Judy, said ‘Oh, you’re that bloke Wizz Jones! John used to drag me right across London to see you!’ So it continues; I hope there’ll always be someone dragging somebody else along to see a great musician they’ve discovered…

I met people like Pete Stanley because they were then on the very small folk scene, and that led to the discovery of bluegrass music. So I spent 4 or 5 years totally immersed in bluegrass; I never learnt to do real flash coun¬terpoint flatpicking, though. He was always getting furious with me at gigs because I’d play a bar of five and a bar of three, and didn’t know certain things that he wouldn’t do. There were certain points of honour. It was a very principled movement at first. The other thing is, a lot of people talk about living the life, but Wizz actually did live it; he’d pack the kids in the motor and just go, and if they were short of money, they’d go busking; put the washing in the launderette for half-an-hour and go out and do a set. At one time there were three boys in nappies inside a Ford Thames van. Phew! It was great for the people who ran the folk clubs in Cornwall to have all these itinerants wandering in and playing; they loved it, but it was kind of safe for them. They went back to their houses, Wizz went back to his van. It was definitely authentic! As Pete Stanley found out, Wizz doesn’t always stick rigidly to bar structures. He learnt to play in the same way as the black musicians that he admires so much learnt to play, i.e. by listening, but not by writing things down or checking a book of tab, so the music is fresh and original. Now you can try to do that and drop bars, it sounds contrived. But from Wizz you get this incredible live feel and tremendous energy, because nobody’s quite sure what’s going to happen. Last time I saw Wizz and Sim at Battersea Town Hall, Wizz dropped a bar in his usual way and Sim just looked up and raised an eyebrow, but immediately adjusted. It puts an edge in the music. It made me unlearn the conventional thing and listen again to the music. It’s completely uncontrived with Wizz. He’s a bit cynical, but he’s very romantic as well. He tries to give the impression that he doesn’t care but he does really; you only have to listen to the way he plays… 

I’d done it; and I was a very pushy bloke and would insist on leading all the time. 

He’d have to stop his Scruggs-style banjo roll and start it again because I’d dropped a beat. But it was a good show as far as it went... I’d known Clive Palmer when he was a teenager in Soho; he was at Hornsey Art School, and then I came across him again in Paris, sleeping under a bush in the Bois de Boulogne. We went and did the streets together, then I didn’t see him for years. Then I got a letter from him in Edinburgh, where he was living in a flat with Robin Williamson and Bert Jansch. I went up to see him, and then he came down to London for a short period, and that’s when we teamed up. 

We did the Cousins and so on; it was a very short partnership. We made an album that never came out, then he went off to Cornwall. 

I learnt a hell of a lot from him...

I was obstinate; when I could have been trendy in the 60s, I didn’t co-operate. And I’m not a writer – I’ve written probably 20 or 30 songs in that number of years, which is totally inad¬equate if you want to market that angle – and those songs were only ever written while on the road. I’m not in a position to sit down at home and write songs, it’s too chaotic. I’m not a dedicated songwriter; if songs happen, they happen. For this new album I’ve just done with Sim, one song happened; it’s called Mother It’s Me, and is about schizophrenia. My son Marty is schizophrenic, and there’s not really anything in medical knowledge that allows you to do more than cope with it, from one crisis to the 

next. Like all the boys, Marty was a talented musician, but it’s a regressive illness, it destroys the personality and you tend to go backwards in things like music; you lose a lot of what you had. We’ve had a hard time trying to get any kind of help. Of late things have improved a bit, but it’s taken years... I think it’s a very political and important song, and I put it on there for that reason, but it’s the only one.

I’ve always had Alan Tunbridge’s material, almost in a tap that I can turn on; a lot of those songs were my chord sequences anyway… Steve Tilston is another of my favourite writers; I learn a lot of his songs, though I only feature one or two of them – for every ten I learn, I only wind up keeping one.

Apart from a sighting on the beach, I first saw Wizz at Under The Olive Tree, a club in Croydon which used to run on a Sunday afternoon. Sim was just born then, so that will tell you how long ago it was; he was a tiny baby and he used to come down in the afternoon and Wizz would play. At about the same time, there was a club in London called the King’s Head, which l used to get a bus from Croydon to... Wizz was a living thread connecting me to the music that I loved, playing it almost as naturally as the old guys. It was just a joy to hear songs that I had no way of getting to know about otherwise. It was really hard to get material in those days – and it wasn’t just blues. I heard Eric Clapton doing a radio interview recently, and he pointed out how different he was when he was growing up and listening to music. When other people were listening to the fashionable thing, he was listening to Wizz Jones. Rod Stewart would be the same. And me! 

Wizz didn’t have records out, but he was occasionally persuaded to go round friends’ houses, and there was a kind of perverse delight in us lot knowing there was a living, breathing musician who was playing the kind of stuff we wanted to listen to, and was really alterna¬tive listening. Wizz recorded all those Radio Ballads, stuff like that, on a wire tape recorder. He was so pleased with the sound off it he recorded about 30 wonderful titles which have sadly been lost. He knew lots of MacColl stuff, as well. To me it was the acceptable, the exciting face of folk music; a slightly dangerous area. And guitar-based, as well. When the Beatles appeared and were billed as an R&B band, we all fell about laughing; I didn’t even listen to the Beatles until Sgt. Pepper. The Stones I liked – but we’d been listening to that stuff through Wizz and his kind for years.

Then I didn’t see much of Wizz for a while – I went off to Paris in ‘64 or ‘65, and when I came back he had a gig down in Cornwall. Pete 

Stanley, who he was working with at the time,

been up North a couple of times, and I’ve been impressed. Everyone used to say ‘the folk scene isn’t very well organised,’ but I can tell you it’s a damn sight better than it was 10 years ago. The clubs I’ve done have been very good. I’m not saying that I think I’ll be able to get 100% of all the gigs there are, but there’s got to be a certain amount of work for one of the old originals! Getting back in, of course, nobody’s heard of you; it’s another generation – which, by the way, seems to be great, all these kids coming up. When I last looked at it, that wasn’t there; young bands weren’t around much, it was still the singer-songwriter / comedian bit. There’s a whole mass of young musicians now, and that’s wonderful. I cajole Sim into doing gigs with me when he’s available, but he’s got his own career on the rock scene. 

I’ve got a 20 year-old Volkswagen van stood outside here, and I’m going to Cornwall in it in two weeks’ time; we’ll sleep in it. Whatever gigs I get finance the trip; we just go to where the gigs are... It doesn’t make for a very relaxed marital relationship! I get much more pleasure from watching other people playing than from playing myself, and I always lived with a dream that I’d go into something else in the media – ra¬dio, maybe… but if I was going to do it, I’d have done it by now, wouldn’t I?”