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could get around it, of course, was with humour, so I never got set upon because I just became a bit
of a joker and people knowing me as Wizz and it just stuck. Then when I went to work, I used my
real name Raymond, but once I wasn’t working anymore and just bumming around, I went back to
being Wizz and then the whole world knew me as Wizz. It's a way of reinventing yourself, isn’t it? I
wasn’t ashamed of my roots. I could see they were dragging me down and all these wonderful
things I wanted to do - I wanted to travel and see the world and do all this stuff and be my own man
and the only way you could do that is kind of reinvent yourself, which is what I did, I suppose.
BiTS: You’ve certainly done all those things. You’ve travelled and been all over the world playing.
Is there anywhere outstanding that you went to? I gather you went to Marrakesh. Is that right?
WJ: Well, it was trendy to do all
that. I mean, I was only following
my heroes. You heard people like
Alex Campbell at The Davy Graham coming back and
Troubador, west saying I’ve just been to Paris. I’ve
London.
been hanging around in Paris and
I’ve been down to Greece and there
was a guy called Alex Campbell who
was a big folky bloke on the scene
from Scotland, and you’d hear all
these tales and you’d read all the
books about life in Paris and all that
and the literature. I didn’t do
literature at school, but I made sure
I read as much as I could, so it was
all very romantic and exciting, and
by then, I’d been thrown out of the
National Service because of my
migraine, which I had earlier today,
by the way. So, I didn’t do my
National Service. I was in for two
days and so I came out of there with
no job, so that’s when I started just
bumming around, as it were. I just
went across the channel like
everyone did and just made a living busking in Paris and then just literally down to the South of
France and just following what people had done before you, really. There was nothing original
about it. The only reason we managed to get to Morocco was that I was with my girlfriend and we
met someone who was driving to Morocco from the South of France and it’s a hell of a long story.
I’ve written all about it somewhere. My supposed biography, which I never ever finished. We
wound up living in Morocco in Kenitra, actually, near Rabat. We lived there for quite a while. A
whole summer and had lots of adventures, discovering the whole Moroccan way of life. It was still
quite French then. I think the Nigerian thing was on at the time. They were trying to get
independence, but Morocco already had it, but there was still a French culture there, so you had a
mixture of that culture and the French culture, and it was quite wonderful. Davy Graham, as you