29 f J
oe was five when Nic had the acci- dent and, apart from blurry recol- lections of hospital visits, recalls nothing of the horror, anguish and financial hardship of the peri- od. Indeed, he talks with moving warmth of a genuinely happy childhood. “I wouldn’t have swapped it for the world. I never felt I missed out on anything – ever. Mum maybe wishes she could have given us more but she more than made up for that with care and attention and love and affection and I’m more than happy to give up the flash things in life for what we had.”
He got his first guitar at 17 and Nic taught him a few chords “but I was too busy chasing girls and playing basketball to do anything with it.” It was only when he moved in with some musicians in New- castle a couple of years later that he began to play seriously. “Mum will tell you I dis- appeared for three years and when I came back I could play the guitar reasonably well. I’ve no idea how that happened real- ly. Roger Bucknall made me a Fylde guitar which mum bought me and that’s when I really got into dad’s music. I loved his play- ing and his style. A lot of people do, don’t they? And I learned to play 10,000 Miles in a C-tuning – having a nice guitar makes it sound so much better, doesn’t it?”
Growing up, he had little connection with folk music and certainly didn’t get it
Joe Jones with Nic
from his dad’s record collection, which was mostly dominated by Queen, Little Feat, Bob Marley, Lou Reed, Neil Young and Ry Cooder. He had no idea of the reverence in which his dad was held in certain quarters until the the release of In Search Of Nic Jones and Unearthed, the compilations assembled by Julia in 1998 and 2001 respectively largely from pre-accident bootleg recordings.
“You start trawling through the tapes and realise ‘yeah, he’s pretty good’ and then people start buying it and talking about it. I saw Kate Rusby one night doing a couple of dad’s songs, then these articles started appearing from time to time. I read a piece about Fleet Foxes when they were talking about recording their latest album and saying they were listening to Penguin Eggs at the time. And when you see how many artists want to get involved with these gig tribute things, it really brings it home.”
“Dad loves hearing people doing his
stuff too, loves hearing them rip it to bits and do something else with it, because that’s what he used to do. Just because he did it one way doesn’t mean that’s the only way it should be done. There was a drum’n’bass version of Billy Don’t You Weep For Me and dad thought it was genius. People like Jim Moray aren’t afraid to experiment and do something else with the music and that’s important.”
C
learly a chip off the old block, he has a wry sense of humour appar- ent in his introductions at the QE Hall, overcoming his own reti- cence in an assured manner. “You need some banter between the songs, don’t you?” he says. “I went to see Kings Of Leon at Hyde Park and they were tech- nically brilliant but I might as well have stayed at home and listened to the CD.“
That banter tends to be driven by a family trait for affectionately ridiculing one another. “Never take yourself too seri- ously, that’s our motto,” he says. “That has certainly helped in our family. But for that dad could have gone into a massive depression but he knows he could have gone 500 yards further down the road and died. But he doesn’t, he thinks life’s alright. A lot of it is stubbornness, mind. He still plays guitar. He’s still working on a clawhammer pick. He will not give up and what a quality that is to have…”
Even before the current spate of shows it was suggested that Joe had a future as a solo performer in his own right but the weight of the family name hangs heavily on him and it seems unlikely to happen.
“For a long time I’ve had to carry the ghost of Nic Jones in my own head. In some ways I wish I had played something other than guitar. People will always draw comparisons. That’s a big issue for me and that’s why I find it hard to do something
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