The rich voice of Manfred Mann, and nearly the Stones, he swung hard in Swinging London before God and his choirboy past caught up with him. In 2025 he still sings the blues – but not the naughty stuff. “I’ve changed a lot,” confesses Paul Jones.

Interview by MAT SNOW • Portrait by ROB BLACKHAM

Rob Blackham, ©Jan Malmstrom

‘‘WHEN’S PAUL JONES GOING to join The Pretty Things, then?”

It’s Monday afternoon, July 1, 1963, and Mick Jagger, second choice singer with The Rolling Stones, is bantering with the first choice – who’d turned down the opportunity the year before.

He and Paul Jones are both alumni of Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, British devotees of American R&B whose scuffling on a scene until recently more a cult than a career is suddenly bearing fruit. The Stones will make their first TV appearance on Thank Your Lucky Stars the following Sunday, and Paul’s band, Manfred Mann, have graciously ceded their Monday afternoon rehearsal time at Soho’s Marquee Club so the Stones can prepare their performance. Paul has turned up out of interest to hear them rehearse.

“They were doing covers, but as well as the blues standards we in the Manfreds were doing originals; I was already writing songs,” recalls Jones. “I said to Mick, Are you writing yet? And he said, ‘What do you mean?’ Writing songs, Mick. You will write songs – you may as well get started now. Sit down and see what happens.

“It was only later that, famously, Andrew Loog Oldham locked them in a room.”

Tall, slim and Mod-sharp save for a shapeless rambler’s hat more suited to his rural Essex home than our current location – ie. outside a London Bridge cafe with traffic roaring past – singer, harmonica player, radio DJ, stage and screen actor Paul Jones is 83 and, like the Stones, still on the road, still mad for the mid-century sounds of working-class black America.

WE’RE NOTWORTHY

Eric Bibb salutes a blues ambassador.

“When I was a kid in Queens hearing Manfred Mann on the radio, we thought it was an African-American group. Later, when I first came to Britain to play, Paul provided the ultimate soft landing, inviting me on his radio show countless times. He’s so incredibly well versed in the blues. In fact, I can’t think of another person in modern times who’s done more to help spread this marginalised music. He’s absolutely unique.”

But whereas Mick Jagger still sings Sympathy For The Devil, Jones repudiated the dark side 40 years ago. In 1985 he returned to the church he’d rejected as a teenager to become a militant atheist who in 1967 debated God on TV with Cliff Richard. Afterwards Cliff not only prayed for him but nearly two decades later invited him to hear Luis Palau evangelise at London’s White City. So moved were Jones and his girlfriend, fellow actor Fiona Hendley, that he proposed, she accepted, and the couple became Christian evangelists themselves.

Jones remained an R&B nut – “but with some pruning”. For instance, the dark arts-invoking chestnut Got My Mojo Working was dropped from his Blues Band’s set and likewise from the playlist of the BBC Radio 2 Blues Show he hosted for 32 years (MOJO refrains from reminding him which magazine he is talking to). Nor was it the only Muddy Waters casualty: “Champagne & Reefer? No, thank you!”

Though conceding that the Wedding at Cana and Song of Solomon embrace earthly pleasures, Jones is personally abstemious, requesting two jumbo croissants alongside his green tea in the guilty sotto voce of a country curate allowing himself perhaps one more small sherry.

“I think I’ve changed a lot,” he reflects. “But I’ve liked being in front of people since I was eight and my mother made me sing. In that respect, I haven’t changed one bit.”