Paul jones manfred mann biography

Born Paul Pond in 1942, Paul Jones was a grammar school boy from Portsmouth, who won a place at Oxford, but neglected his academic studies to play blues music in coffee bars, as Thunder Odin and the Big Secret. Thrown out of university, he moved to London and found fame singing and playing harmonica in the pop group Manfred Mann, who scored a string of big hits in the mid 1960s, including '5-4-3-2-1' (1964), 'Do Wah Diddy Diddy' (1964), 'Oh No, Not My Baby' (1965) and 'Pretty Flamingo' (1966).

The stress of a relentless live schedule manifested itself at a gig in South Wales. In the middle of a badly received show to a drunken audience, Jones broke down in tears when he found that a cardigan knitted for him by his wife had been stolen from the dressing room. "The roadie had to get up on stage and say, please, if anyone's stolen his cardigan he's about to have a nervous breakdown," he later recalled. "That was the moment when shrieking and going up walls was very much on the cards