Page 15 - BiTS_03_MARCH_2022

The BiTS Interview: Wizz Jones

Raymond Wizz Jones was born in 1939, in Thornton Heath in what was then the leafy
County Borough of Croydon, now a part of Greater London. Like many of us ‘war babies’,
growing up he was hugely influenced by the massive presence of American service men
who remained in the UK post-war and for whom a good deal of entertainment—
particularly music—was generated. The American Forces Network (AFN) and later other
smaller European radio stations that broadcast jazz, blues and swing music on a regular
basis, were a go-to source. “We were all fascinated by American stuff in those days”.
Although Wizz and his brother could have been evacuated to the countryside far from
London, his mum was not an enthusiastic supporter and they both stayed on the outskirts

of London. At the age of 11, Raymond went to a local school,which proved to be a mistake.

Ian McKenzie spoke to him on the telephone.

WJ: I went to a grammar school, which was
Wizz Jones at
wrong for me because I didn’t really fit in. I was
work
very working class and quite uneducated and
most of the people there were fairly well to do
middle-class people, so I didn’t really fit in. I

left when I shouldn’t have left. I didn’t do any
exams much and I had to get some sort of a job
and they sent me off to some job, the labour
exchange, working in a textile warehouse in the
City of London. I was just a very naïve young
teenager listening to the radio and discovering
all this music on the radio - blues and folk and

while I was working, one of the guys who I
worked with, he came in one lunchtime with a
guitar and the skiffle thing had just started to
happen and he just got his guitar out in the
lunch hour and started strumming through chords, and I remember thinking what an amazing

sound, just those three chords, G, C and D. I thought I must go and get a guitar.

BiTS: You obviously started playing a guitar and got attracted by the blues. What was it about
blues music, beyond the American thing that we’ve already touched on, that grabbed you?

WJ: I don’t know. It was the starkness of it. It was very minimal, minimalistic hearing the likes of
Skip James and Blind Boy Fuller. It was like nothing you’d heard before. I first heard the blues on
the radio. The thing was when I was very young I was into the radio and I used to want to listen to
the radio, when I was very young I’d end up thinking well I get packed off to bed early and I came

up with this idea that you could buy fuse wire on cards, little rolls of fuse wire for mending the
fuse with, the box on the wall with the electricity, so I secretly, unknown to my parents, I hooked
up the output at the back of their radio up the stairs, secretly. You couldn’t see the fuse wire and a
length of fuse wire - I’ve never told anybody this - length of fuse wire each side of the stairs up to
my room and that way I could listen. I connected it to a pair of headphones. I used to get old radios

from the junk shop and fiddle around with them. I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t do any