When Tom Jones saw his son crying in the control room, he knew he had his new album. Ladies, put your knickers away: the Welsh sex bomb has gone back to his (grey) roots, wrties BRIAN BOYD
IN A TINY old church in Mayfair, in London, the shutters come down on the bar, doors are slammed shut to block out the late-evening sunlight and a hush descends. From a darkened stage comes a single kick-drum beat followed by a rich baritone voice singing: “What good am I if I know and don’t do, if I see and don’t say?”
Slowly Tom Jones emerges from the shadows and continues the sparsely arranged Bob Dylan song. It’s a weird juxtaposition: you’d recognise the voice anywhere, but the man on stage looks more like Leonard Cohen than a Las Vegas showman. The trousers are baggy, the orange tan is gone and the Welsh accent is accentuated during the spoken parts.
“That was a very deliberate entrance – I haven’t been in showbiz for almost 50 years without picking up a thing or two about first impressions,” Jones says afterwards. “Because what I’m doing now is at such a remove from what people expect of me, and because I’m doing an album of spirituals and old blues numbers, I wanted to go on bare. Usually there’s a big band counting me in, and then the knicker-throwing starts, but that took a lot of guts tonight. I was really nervous about it, and as you saw I forgot the lyrics halfway through because I was so stressed out by it all.”
After selling 100 million records, Jones – 70 this year – has ditched the big-band belters, the pelvic thrusts and the discarded lingerie, returning instead to his roots of south Wales weddings, funerals and birthdays. “What you saw tonight is how I used to do it in working men’s clubs and church halls. You’d have a small rhythm backing or an organ behind you, and you had to go out and hit them with your voice.”
This career left-turn was prompted in part by his 70th birthday and in part by the realisation that he had kept his record company just a bit too happy being “Tom Jones” and not Thomas Woodward, the son of a miner who learned his craft singing spirituals and gospel music.
He’s done it all, first conquering the UK in the early 1960s as an almost controversially raunchy singer, then hitting the US with a quote from Elvis Presley – “Tom Jones is the best white soul singer in the world” – plastered across his CV. Headlining Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, he knew he made it when he found not only that knickers were being thrown up on stage but also that hotel key cards were wrapped up inside them.
After his son, Mark, took over managing him in the mid-1980s, Jones went the novelty route, covering a Prince song and a Portishead song and making an album with Wyclef Jean. Things were always going well enough for him never to speak up about what he really wanted to do. Until a phone call 12 months ago.
“It was my record company, and they were on at me to do a Christmas album,” he says. “I remember thinking, No way, that’s such a cliche. But then I remembered them saying ‘religious songs’, and I thought, Well, if they want religious songs, I’ll give them the type of religious songs I used to sing back in the Valleys.”
He enrolled the producer Ethan Jones, who is more used to working with Ryan Adams and Kings Of Leon, and was so terrified of the recording process that he almost pulled out. “I had all the songs I wanted – blues, gospel, country, a Dylan cover, a John Lee Hooker cover – and we went into the studio. First shock was there was to be no overdubs on the vocals; and the rhythm section would be in the room with me playing live! I just couldn’t believe this. And then they had this big old RCA microphone – the ones they used in 1950s radio programmes, big square ones – and it all seemed very basic. “I jumped in, though, and did a few vocal takes. Suddenly I notice my son, who is outside in the control room, is crying. He’s been managing me since 1986, but he had never heard me sing like that, just my raw voice with next to nothing behind it. I knew then we had an album.”
Praise and Blameis a beautifully strange record, sincerely executed and as close to a Tom Waits moment as Jones will ever get.
“The album title is all-important here,” he says. “I have had a lot of praise for my career to date, but there is blame there, too. Yes, the pants were too tight; yes, the knicker-throwing thing became like a marketing tool. The image was becoming bigger than the talent. Stuff was getting in the way. People could see more than they could hear.” Well, they always said of Jones that people in the first few rows could tell if he was circumcised or not.
He knows the album will draw comparisons with the stripped-back Johnny Cash American albums. "There's a line in one of the songs that goes, 'If I let things stand that shouldn't be,' and that's why I did this," he says. "I've been pleasing everyone else for so long; this is something to do not to please myself, as such, but because I want people to look behind the Sex Bombimage and hear what this voice can actually do."
He would love to tour the show he did tonight. Just him and a small band, a mostly acoustic backing. "You get into this thing, though, where people expect a certain show from you. You'd have to do Delilahand all of that because that's what they've come for," he says.
"I couldn't do the Praise and Blamesongs at Wembley Stadium, but what I've been toying with is devoting a segment of the show to Praise and Blame– sort of a show within a show. The only possible way I could tour this album alone would be to print it on the ticket so people would know what they were getting. I'd love that, I really would. Just going around small theatres with this album. It would be my way of saying to people: 'This is who I am.' "
What a coincidence
And the PR Campaign of the Year Award goes to . . . Praise and Blame.
The album hit the entertainment-news headlines last week when a “leaked” e-mail from one of Jones’s record-company bosses got widespread media coverage. Apparently writing just to colleagues at the Island Records label, vice-president David Sharpe said he was horrified by Jones’s new direction and the label “should pull back from this project immediately and try to get our money back”.
Island Records signed Tom Jones for £1.5 million last October. In the e-mail, Sharpe wrote: "We did not invest a fortune in an established artist for him to deliver 12 tracks from the common book of prayer. Having lured him from EMI, the deal was that he would deliver a record of upbeat tracks along the lines of Sex Bomband Mama Told Me.
“Imagine my surprise when I walked into the office this morning to hear hymns coming from your office – it could have been Sunday morning. My initial pleasure came to an abrupt halt when I realised that Tom Jones was singing the hymns. I have just listened to the album in its entirety and want to know if this is some sick joke?”
Closer examination shows the “leaked” e-mail was written on May 19th this year. Surely it’s just a coincidence it came to the media’s attention just as the album is about to be released.
The music industry is no stranger to choreographed stunts. This is a world where gay people are told to pretend they are straight and (as has happened) straight people are told to pretend they are bisexual. It’s a world where a certain well-known singer is packed off to the Priory Clinic for no clear reason (and a press release issued to inform the world of this), just to give him an “edgier” image.
What this e-mail portrays is Jones as an artist having to battle against the “suits” at the record company to make the music he really believes in. And it also puts the album’s upcoming release in the headlines. Everyone’s a winner.
Praise and Blameis released on July 23rd. Details of a date at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin will be announced shortly
