Wizz Jones RIP

Obituary

I was sorry to hear that the great Wizz Jones has gone, yesterday. One of the all-time greats in acoustic music – a pioneer, a one-off, a wizard – who made a career out of Eeyore-ish self-deprecation because everyone he influenced went on to have careers more illustrious than his. Even by 1970 he could release an album called ‘The Legendary Me’ and everyone knew what he meant. Wizz played his last gig only two months ago and then decided it was enough.

Pete Paphides has given me permission to share he his beautiful tribute to the great man.

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“Thirteen years ago, casting around for an appropriate song to begin his show at the Berlin Olympiastadion, Bruce Springsteen remembered a tune he had heard almost 40 years previously. “This is something we learned just for you,” he told the crowd. When I Leave Berlin had originally been written and performed by Wizz Jones — inspired by the Quadripartite Agreement of September 1971, which allowed West Germans to visit their estranged friends and relations on the other side. While the song doesn’t quite mirror the events of 1971 (in the song, border controls are relaxed in both directions: “gone are the soldiers and the guns”), nevertheless it captures in the amber of notes and chords what so many East Germans must have been dreaming about in the preceding decade.
Wizz and Bruce’s versions are both beautiful in different ways. With Wizz, the protagonist sounds sick with nerves, excited but uncertain: “In Amsterdam, I’ll see my lady/I hope she’ll love me/Because I’m going to need her/When I leave Berlin.” In Bruce’s hands, the song becomes an emphatic celebration of reunification, delivered with the barnstorming brio that characterised his 2006 album The Seeger Sessions. A stadium full of fans who have almost certainly never heard the song are audibly singing along. But for one thing, you really couldn’t fault it. Bruce — usually so conscientious about crediting his sources, forgets to tell anyone the name of the person who actually wrote the song. In his terraced two-up, two-down in Balham, the first heard Wizz heard about it was a few weeks after Bruce’s show, when a friend mentioned it to him.

When I saw Wizz relating the story at one of his shows 11 years ago, it was all in the perfectly-weighted gaps and the occasionally knowing look that allowed you to know that he knew what you knew: that, like so many stories about Wizz Jones, the triumphant pay-off never quite materialised. In 2001, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore contacted Wizz with a view to having him open for Sonic Youth in Boston and New York. “But the day I was due to fly out was 9/11. We made it halfway over the Atlantic and had to turn back.” Another typical Wizz tale.

In his latter years, he barely resembled the young musician filmed in a 1960 documentary fronted by Alan Whicker about the increase in beatnik activity among young British people. The name on his birth certificate was Raymond Jones, but he’d been Wizz ever since his mother nicknamed him Wizzy The Wuzz after his fondness magic tricks made an aspiring wizard out of him. By the time he and Whicker crossed paths, he was clearly set on a different sort of wizardry, although it was perhaps for the best that the song he performed for Whicker — Hard Times In Newquay If You’ve Got Long Hair — dropped off his set several years previously. The hair remained long, but Wizz didn’t sound especially angry about people’s reactions to it, or indeed, his continued lack of reappraisal. Someone with a greater gift for self-promotion might have done more to cultivate their own mystique. Keith Richards has frequently reminisced about his days at art school and, in particular, skipping classes in order to meet up with Wizz for a blues picking lesson in the toilet. Rod Stewart claimed that the two travelled together in the early 60s. It wouldn’t have hurt Wizz’s profile to pretend he had some memory of either, but he simply couldn’t remember speaking with either of them and didn’t feel the need to lie about it decades later.

I was once convinced it must secretly bother Wizz that his influence never quite morphed into commercial success. But one time, when John Renbourn was staying at his house, John invited me over to hang out for the afternoon. Wizz made endless cups of tea and told a funny story about bumping into Peggy Seeger in a lift, decades after she had given him banjo lessons. Did she remember him, he wondered. She did: “That’s right. You never paid me, did you?” To misquote Jonathan Richman: “Was there bitterness in Wizz Jones?/It was never detected.”

A few days previously, I’d seen Wizz and John play both separately and together to a half-full Union Chapel. The contrast between the two was striking: John’s scholarly approach — somehow assimilating jazz, classical, folk and blues guitar into something uniquely his — found its most feted outlet in Pentangle. Wizz never quite found a Pentangular outlet though. His relentless self-deprecation meant that compliments would bounce off him like a beach ball on a speeding car: “People like Davy Graham and Bert Jansch took it way beyond the stars,” he said, “When Bert and I met, I could see we had the same roots, but he had added this extra thing… he was a genius. Davy was way ahead, I used to follow him around, and to this day, the handful of clichéd licks I do are from watching and listening to him.”

But the licks were anything but clichéd. There wasn’t a guitarist from Wizz’s generation that could play with the physicality he brought to his instrument. Eric Clapton was another musician who liked to reference Wizz, but the mellowing of Eric’s style was something that never extended to Wizz. At the Union Chapel, he played Davy Graham’s Anji for what might have been the 10,000th time, and in doing so, combined head-spinning virtuosity with punk intensity: hard and precise, occasionally slapping the body of the guitar and pulling back the neck with a force that made you momentarily fear it was going to break. This was the very opposite to the pernicious process of emotional disengagement that afflicts so many performers as they finesse their patter and technique over a period of decades.

Perhaps the weakest aspect of Wizz’s 1970s recordings was his singing. Reedy and undemonstrative on those records, his voice gradually matured into an extraordinarily expressive instrument. His performance stirred grit into the modal Appalachian blues of Cluck Old Hen — the resulting reverie broken only by an ovation well in excess of the numbers that had turned out to watch him. His version of Pete Atkin and Clive James’ Touch Has A Memory was a long-time staple of his live set. On Atkins’ 1970 album Beware Of The Beautiful Stranger, he delivered the song with the verve of a precocious chansonnier, which was fine, but really its brilliance only truly shone forth when it was sung by a voice seasoned by several decades: “When in a later day/Little of the vision lingers/Memory slips away/Every way but through the fingers/Textures come back to you real as can be/Making you feel time doesn’t heal/And touch has a memory.” Wizz might not have seen himself as a singer, but it’s a struggle to imagine anyone delivering these lines with the sort of careworn gentility that Wizz brought to them.
Wizz seemed happy to make more noise about the prowess of the people whose songs he covered rather than draw attention to his own songs. And yet, when you went to his shows, his own songs were the ones that, almost by stealth, utterly dismantled your emotional defences. Delivered with a subdued ragtime swing, The Burma Star, from Wizz’s 2011 live album Huldenberg Blues, is a tale of breathtaking economy, focusing on two episodes: the 1945 night that Wizz’s father appeared in the family home unannounced, three years after being declared missing in action; and the 1979 evening that saw him pass away “in a hospital bed by the door.” In between those two dates, the sparest of lyrical brush strokes depict three decades spent trying and failing to find his place in the world after military service. But The Burma Star was anything but judgemental, its author acknowledging that he was spared the horrors to which his father was exposed at a young age: “I was a man with an easy life/I never had to go to war.” Lullaby Of Battersea was no less moving, but for different reasons: a simple ode to the children in whose peacetime childhood he was able to play a full part.

Both here and, at the televised Bert Jansch memorial concert in 2013, where he stole the show, Wizz left me gasping for superlatives. Every show seemed to be better than the previous one. And when he no longer felt he could maintain that streak, he decided to stop. At his final ever gig on February 28th this year, he introduced a version of Alan Tunbridge’s song See How Time Is Flying with a few words: “I’ve been singing this song for more than 60 years. It was never more appropriate than tonight.” The voice was indeed frail, but all the more affecting in that moment, with its allusions to roses feeling the pain of barely being able to bloom and the sorrow that greets the news of a wizard’s departure. And, to so many, Wizz really was a wizard. His box of tricks was the guitar in his hands. Happiness was the opportunity to eke out a living from it. Because he had that, he was grateful. And because he shared it with us, we were grateful too.

In memory of Wizz Jones (25 April 1939 – 27 April 2025)

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