INTERVIEW:Tom Jones has been 50 years in the business, and though he has let his hair go grey, he shows no signs of slowing down, writes MARK HENNESSY, London Editor
FIFTY YEARS INTO his singing career, Tom Jones, now once again a regular on prime-time TV with The Voice, has been talking for nearly seven hours and is a little hoarse – but a performer must perform. “Well, it wasn’t that bad today, 12 o’clock we started,” says the Welsh-born singer, who is promoting his latest album, Spirit in the Room, which features songs written by Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, Paul McCartney, Paul Simon and others.
“You know, the thing is trying to sing as well,” he says. “I did the Jools Holland show last night. But that’s okay, I’d rather be busy than not busy.”
The opening song on the album, the Leonard Cohen-authored Tower of Song, tells of a man facing old age. “It rang true to me, more so now because my hair is grey and I have lost all my friends that I grew up with, most of them anyway.” Within seconds, he is half-singing the lyrics: “My friends are gone and my hair is grey and I ache in the places where I used to play. And I am crazy for love, but I am not coming on. But I am not trying to prove anything.”
The loss of friends is playing on his mind. “You’re Irish, so you know. Jim Aiken was a promoter over there. He was a good friend of mine and then there was another man called Jim Hand. Jim and his brother, Michael. Jim, especially, was a friend of mine.
“One of the things that I don’t like about getting old is losing friends, but at least I am still here. What is the alternative? The alternative to getting old is to be dead, and I don’t fancy that.
“It never ceases to amaze me that you can be talking to somebody . . . There’s a human being alive and well, and then all of a sudden he is not there anymore, but everything else is. Nothing else has changed.”
He shrugs. “The one thing is that I am able to do what I love to do, which is to sing. I love what I do and I dread the time when I won’t be able to do it,” he says, accepting quickly that his use of the word “dread” has not been accidental.
“No, no, I am thinking, shit, how much longer have I got left of this wonderful life? That’s what I am thinking. Maybe if I was doing something that I didn’t particularly like, it wouldn’t be the same,” says the 72-year-old singer.
His decision to abandon dyeing his hair marks a small effort at coming to terms with the passing years. “It is a thing that you have to embrace,” he says. “The older I got, the more dyed it looked. I don’t know why, because I dyed my hairs for years. It was always dark brown and it looked all right. I think it is the texture of your hair when you are young, even if you dye it, it doesn’t look dyed. When you get older, the texture changes and it doesn’t look natural anymore.”
Press coverage encouraged him to drop the habit. “People were commenting on it when I got reviewed. ‘Tom Jones came on the stage with his permed, dyed hair.’ I’d say, ‘well, it is not permed, but it is dyed’. “I thought, let’s get that out of the way. And then I saw it was getting whiter and whiter when I wouldn’t dye it and I thought it looked really good like that, so once it came out white all over I let it go,” he says, chuckling over past vanities.
“But it is not that I have accepted getting old, or older, it’s more like being more honest, not trying to be something that you are not,” says the singer, who stays in London until mid-June to finish his stint on The Voice.
He feels sympathy for the contestants. “They are thrown in at the deep end very early, before they have had a chance to build up an act. Some of these kids that come on TV shows have only ever sung in their homes, in the front room.
“All of a sudden they are on the TV and they are becoming celebrities and they are getting all this attention and then, if they don’t make it, some can be devastated,” he says. He tries to explain to them the different degrees of victory.
“The only thing that I can do is try to help them, to explain that, ‘look, only one person can win this bloody thing, so be prepared’. Early on, when I first meet them, I tell them, ‘be prepared, don’t let it shatter your life’. If it does you shouldn’t have entered this contest.”
Tom Jones’ new album, Spirit In The Room, is released on May 18th. He plays Marlay Park on August 25th with Van Morrison and Bobby Womack
