Manfred Mann's Paul Jones: Cliff Richard converted me to Christianity
Autumn 1963: the band signed to EMI less than six months earlier were already feeling the pressure. Their first single, a blues instrumental written by their keyboard player, titled Why Should We Not?, had failed to trouble the charts. The second, a number by their singer called Cock-a-Hoop, had lyrics and, also, what its composer describes now as 'the famous Bo Diddley rhythm. Well, people call it the Bo Diddley rhythm, but it was older than Bo Diddley.'
Unfortunately for Manfred Mann, their second single was another one that 'didn't do anything, sales-wise', acknowledges its writer, Paul Jones. Which, when you're labelmates with The Beatles and they have a 10-month and four-hit lead on you, is a problem.
Still, someone at the nation's new favourite pop show, Ready Steady Go!, which had launched in summer 1963, liked Cock-a-Hoop enough to book Manfred Mann to perform. 'Packing up the instruments at the end, somebody said to us: 'Would you guys be interested in writing us a theme tune?' Because they were using a Ventures track, a rock instrumental.'
Manfred Mann said they could oblige. Then the producers listed their demands: 'Use that rhythm that you use on Cock-a-Hoop. It must start with a countdown because this is the start of the weekend. Then, instrumental only until we're through with the opening credits on the screen. So that would be 30 seconds, maybe a bit more.'
It was a lot. But then, Manfred Mann were used to the controlling ways of the patrician Sixties record business. Their name, which was also the name of their South African-born keyboard player, had been imposed on them by their label after EMI baulked at their existing appellation: 'No one will ever get anywhere with a stupid name like The Blues Brothers.'
So, after leaving the TV studio, Manfred Mann piled into their van and headed off to their next commitment that evening, a pub booking. 'We started with a 12-bar blues. Manfred came up with the bit that goes down the tone. I came up with the lyrics because I was the lyricist. We had it written by with time we got to the gig!'
Within two months of their first appearance on Ready Steady Go!, Manfred Mann's 5-4-3-2-1, buoyed by Jones' alley-cat harmonica, was the clattering theme opening the show. A month after that, in January 1964, it was in the charts. Then, that summer, after another self-penned flop, Hubble Bubble (Toil and Trouble), their singer started raiding his record collection, his canny response to an EMI edict: 'No more singles written by the band.'
As Jones recalls it, 'I said: 'If we're not going to write them ourselves, at least I'm picking them,'' he said of the songs that would, ultimately, be Manfred Mann's next four singles, all of them originally sung by American female artists. 'I heard Do Wah Diddy Diddy by The Exciters on Radio Luxembourg and immediately ordered it, because you couldn't just buy an obscure record like that. It was even obscure in America. It made the Top 30, I think, but only just.'
It was the same, he says, with Sha-La-La (originally sung by The Shirelles), Come Tomorrow (sung by Marie Knight) and Oh No, Not My Baby (written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King). They were era-defining smashes for the Brit R&B group led by the blues-, jazz- and gospel-loving lead singer, a Black American music aficionado who knows his Hambone from his trombone, his Diddley from his Diddy.
In summer 1964, Do Wah Diddy Diddy gave Manfred Mann their first Number One and a career that rattles on, in more than one version, to this day. As he sang of himself in his hip-shaking 1965 R&B composition The One in the Middle – part of an EP, so EMI were OK with Jones writing it – ' there's a geezer called Paul, who's so thin and so tall, and so wants to be a star…'
'We were a band that played pubs and little clubs, and that was all we ever had in our mind. But, hey, suddenly we were – snap, snap, snap! ' Jones clicks his fingers rapidly as we drink tea and eat digestives in an elegant drawing room littered (neatly) with hefty coffee-table books about Buddy Holly and BB King. Those few minutes in a transit van 61 years ago were the start of a songwriting and performing career that – via a solo career, an acting career, a 32-year stint as host of BBC Radio 2's The Blues Show and a re-embracing of Christianity courtesy of Cliff Richard – ended up here, in a spacious country house with landscaped lawns and adjacent lake in a discretely affluent corner of Essex.
Except it doesn't sound like Jones – a boyishly trim, neat, coiffed, youthful and (his words) pedantic 83-year-old – is here much. When I traverse Jones' crunchy gravel drive on a soggy May afternoon, The Manfreds are still in the midst of what he calls their spring tour. It's Hastings, Isle of Wight, Shrewsbury, Lincoln, with no sleep till Ringwood, before Jones is off to France for dates with Dave Kelly from The Blues Band 'in a chateau for a couple of days. Then I get some time off!'
And that's not factoring in his fund-raising charity concerts (for Prostate Project and Cranleigh Arts venue in Surrey), his obligations as President and ambassador of Harmonica UK (formerly the National Harmonica League; Jones hands out cards to anyone asking for the tricks of his mouth-organ trade), and he and wife Fiona's regular church meetings 'telling people our story'.
For sure, the band of which he was a member for three-and-a-half years between 1962 and 1966 has lasted much, much longer in their current incarnation as The Manfreds. They first got back together in 1991 for the 50 th birthday of guitarist McGuinness (whose first band was The Roosters, alongside Eric Clapton).
'And all of a sudden, Manfred Mann was back together again – except for Manfred. He was the only one who wasn't there. He was on tour in Germany.'
It turned out that Mann – who'd reconfigured the group in 1971 as Manfred Mann's Earth Band (their biggest hit was their 1977 cover of Bruce Springsteen's Blinded by the Light) – was still wedded to that version of the group. 'So we talked about it,' says Jones, 'back and forth and back and forth. And I'm sorry to say that lawyers were involved, which was unnecessary, really. But in the end, it was settled that The Manfreds would not be easily confused with Manfred Mann's Earth Band. And,' he adds, clearly pleased at the mutual turning-of-the-cheek, 'we have become more and more friendly ever since.'
For a minute in the early 1960s, though, it seemed possible that Paul Jones's destiny lay with another band of blues-loving shouters.
Born in Portsmouth, he studied English at Oxford before quitting after one year to follow his first passion. 'I had a band at university, made up of various jazz musicians who wished it could be more of a jazz band, and me.' When the guitarist left, Jones offered the spot to a new friend, a fellow muso 'that I met at a party or a college ball or something like that'. Brian Jones (no relation) said he wasn't keen. Still, when, in 1962, Brian was mulling the formation of a new band, he reciprocated.
'Brian said: 'You and I have just been dilettantes. We haven't been taking this thing seriously.' I said: 'OK, so what's your remedy?' 'Well, first thing I'm going to do is move to London, because it's the centre of everything.' He was still in Cheltenham. 'Then: 'I'm going to get myself a flat, and I'm starting a band, and we're going to become rich and famous. Do you want to be my singer?''
Paul thought Brian was being 'preposterously optimistic. I knew [leading figure on the blues scene] Alexis Korner, and I knew every musician in his band. They all had day jobs. Or if they were lucky enough to be in another band as well, they perhaps didn't have a day job. But [late British R&B legend] Graham Bond [a member of Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated] was selling Hoovers! So I said to Brian: 'You're going to become rich and famous, playing blues? Come on… ''
Also, Jones had just landed a paying gig, as a singer in a dance band playing the easygoing hits of the day. He duly declined Brian's offer, telling him: 'I'm going to do this for money. And I'm going to play blues because I love it. And those two things probably will never meet.'
So, while Paul Jones was stuck in a residency in Slough's Adelphi Ballroom, togged out in a scarlet jacket and singing I Remember You, Brian Jones went off and formed The Rolling Stones.
The Stones, with Mick Jagger as (effectively) Brian's second choice singer after Paul, released their debut single, Chuck Berry cover Come On, the same summer that Manfred Mann released theirs. It wasn't long before they were far outpacing Paul's band. I ask him: when he saw what The Rolling Stones were achieving, did he ever kick himself that he hadn't taken Brian up in his offer?
'No, never,' he replies firmly. 'I admired those guys because they did a great job.' (It is very difficult to imagine the scrupulously polite Paul Jones, who was recently offended by the amount of swearing he heard coming from notorious rock'n'roll potty mouth Rick Astley, as part of the Stones' debauched rock'n'roll circus.)
But he will allow himself a small pat on the back for another part he played in their rise. After the success in early 1964 of 5-4-3-2-1, Manfred Mann booked a weekly residency at The Marquee Club in Soho. They would turn up in the afternoon to rehearse new songs, 'like an extended soundcheck, really'.
But one week they were told they'd have to wait a few hours as The Rolling Stones had booked the club for their own rehearsal, ahead of what Jones remembers as 'their first television appearance' (his pedantry is twinned with a fierce memory, so I don't doubt him).
'They were a covers band at the time. And after their rehearsal finished, and ours was about to begin, I said to Mick: 'Are you writing yet?' 'No, I can't write songs.' 'Mick, you will. You should get started now. And I'm not saying anything more on this subject. You've got to start writing songs.''
Jones pauses, a modest smile twitching his lips. 'Well: Andrew Loog Oldham, of course, gets that credit for locking Mick and Keith [Richards] in a room until they came up with a song. But I actually encouraged Mick before that.'
It all speaks, he reflects, of his and Manfred Mann's 'decent relationship' with The Rolling Stones. 'There was a certain amount of rivalry, but it was good-natured. Brian use to take the mickey out of me, and I used to try and take the mickey out of him. But, no, I never for a moment wanted to have gone back and made a different decision. I've enjoyed my career! A lot!'
It's a career that's been fired the his passion for the music he feels in his soul. In summer 1966, after Pretty Flamingo – another cover of a song by an American songwriter – went to Number One, Jones left Manfred Mann and went straight into an acting career that saw him star on stage and screen in Evita, The Beggar's Opera, The Sweeney, kids TV show Uncle Jack and the Jean Shrimpton curio Privilege. But there would, ultimately, be one other 1960s screen appearance that came back to bite Jones. He took part in a televised debate with Cliff Richard about their competing views on faith.
'Cliff was arguing the case for the evangelist Billy Graham. And I was – as an atheist, which I still was – bringing the opposite argument. Cliff was very gentlemanly and respectful. But I'm not proud of the way I behaved on that television programme.'
How did Jones behave? 'I kind of twisted things that he said. I said things like: 'You see, Cliff, what you've actually just said is...' And then I would say something that he hadn't just said… It wasn't clever.'
By the mid-1980s, Jones – who was raised Christian – began 'coming back to faith'. Around that time, he joined the cast of Guys and Dolls at London's National Theatre, taking over, from Ian Charleson, the part of Sky Masterson, as immortalised by Marlon Brando. One of the dancers in the company was Fiona Hendley.
'And we became lovers, but not married,' says Jones, whose first marriage had ended in 1976 (he has two songs from that relationship). 'And because of Fiona, we started to go to a church in London. They quickly realised that we were living as man and wife – but weren't! Then suddenly, one day, we had a call from Cliff Richard: 'Come and hear this preacher whose name is Luis Palau. You and Fiona both need to hear what he has to say.'
'And sure enough, he was preaching out of Paul's Letter to the Romans, chapter one,' he says of Bible passages about God's gift of salvation through faith. 'And it did the trick. I had been an atheist for 25 years, but I wasn't any more. But on the other hand, I hadn't [fully] become Christian either. So Cliff was very much responsible for that –' Jones claps his hands – 'complete change. Or, completing that change, as it were.'
That was in 1984. The following year Jones stopped drinking, which is certainly one reason for his good health. Forty years on, Paul Jones remains staunch – to his teetotality, to his faith and, ultimately, to The Manfreds.
But, I wonder as I look round his frankly fabulous home, what keeps him on the road at age 83, playing the – to be frank – secondary and tertiary concert markets of Shrewsbury and Lincoln?
'I hope they're only secondary, but you could be right,' he replies jovially. 'It's a very special band, The Manfreds. It's like being in a new band in a way – even though it's from 60-odd years ago. I find that deeply fulfilling, like some of the other stuff we do. Fiona and I are still doing churches. Ever since Luis Palau, we've been going round these churches and just telling people our story. We love it. So some of what I do is that, and I can't blame The Manfreds for everything. But there's a lot to be done,' Paul Jones says, beaming, 'and I'm still doing it!'
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