John Jones was born in Hammersmith, London, England.
He spent his early childhood in Wales and Kingston, Jamaica, where he started school with the Livingstone sisters.
The Jones family were then two girls and two boys and after nearly four years in Jamaica they headed off to Ottawa, Canada, and a year later Toronto, where John went to Owen Blvd Public School; St. Andrews Junior High; York Mills Collegiate, and A.I.S.P. (the Alternative Independent Study Program) of North York, by which time the family had expanded to six with the addition of two more boys.

With Welsh ancestry and musical parents, John grew up surrounded by the Welsh Hymns his father and mother sang and played on the family piano, as well as the music of Sparrow, Spike Jones, Elvis, Johnny Cash, The Beatles and the great Musicals of the 50's and 60's that were always playing on the Jones family record player.

John started playing the piano at a very early age and wrote his first tune, a minuet, when he was 6. Other than briefly studying piano technique with music theory teaching legend Darwin Aitkin, most of his musical training came from playing as many instruments as possible in his school string and band classes and writing songs for the many groups he performed with during his school days in Toronto at school dances and church drop-in centers.
Some of the groups were the Tresspassers, The Baffin Island Boogie Band and Behind Saturns Window, who were the last group to play at the Bombay Bicycle Club in Toronto.
By his first year in high school, playing Bass, Guitar, keyboards, singing and writing, had become the main focus of his life.

An important influence on his teenage life was Fred Mandel, who showed John that music was a respectable career, and who went on to play with Alice Cooper, Pink Floyd, Queen and Elton John.
Other band mates included Cam Hawkins, who played in the last incarnation of Behind, which also included Toronto Saxophone greats John Johnson, Dave Worth and Gary Boigon; David Pelch, Claude Desjardin, Ken Basman, Jim Honeywell, Bob Little and others.

Always interested in recording, he found his way into the studio to record his first multi-track demo's with Terry Brown and Steve Vaughan at Toronto Sound Studios. There John could be found hanging around and learning as much as he could on sessions for Crowbar, Rush, Klaatu and Thin Lizzy, where he learned about Irish politics while perfecting the art of Tea Making!

In the mid seventies he joined the Canadian pop group "Bond" for his first professional stint "on the road".
Later, more touring was to come with the groups "Canada" and "Saturns Window".
Through Bond, John was signed to CBS Records and made a brief attempt at a solo career and later continued as a songwriter with ATV Music until the lure of "the road" led him to engagements with Gary O and his band Kid Rainbow and the bar band "FUNN" where he joined Freddy Coutts, Jon Bojicic and Terry Draper and Dee Long of Klaatu, playing keyboards, guitar and vocals.

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