by Sean Smith
Tom would appear to have had at least a dozen greatest hits releases in some form or other. BBC Online said of the new collection, ‘Slap on some Brut, put some chicken in the basket and prepare to throw your best new knickers; this really is the definitive collection from a much-loved legend.’
Tom’s next original project was one dreamed up by a couple of mates over a late-night bottle of champagne. He had met the pianist and band leader Jools Holland at the latter’s annual BBC Hootenanny in 1998 and they became great friends. When they went out for dinner after recording, they discovered they shared a love of old blues music. Tom started singing at the dinner table, which Jools loved. He realised they would have the chemistry to make an album together. He enthused, ‘When Tom sings, it’s like having a nuclear reactor at the end of the piano.’
The result was an album called, uninspiringly, Tom Jones & Jools Holland. It was like one big joyous jam at the end of a party. A couple of new tracks written by them mingled with classics from Count Basie and Willie Dixon. They closed with a version of the Jerry Lee Lewis song ‘End of the Road’, which Tom played to his hero. Jerry Lee was impressed by Jools’ playing. He said it was ‘so beautiful it could make a steel bow cry’.
One of the other numbers, which was released as a single, was an old Cliff Richard hit, ‘It’ll Be Me’, although it didn’t sound anything like Cliff. At least the album didn’t include ‘The Young Ones’, still his least favourite track from the old days with The Senators. The album was an ideal stocking filler and sold well in the run-up to Christmas 2004.
For his sixty-fifth birthday the following year, Tom wanted to do something special. He decided to return to sing in Pontypridd for the first time in forty-one years. His last gig had been on 30 June 1964, at the White Hart, the night before he left for London with The Senators. This time, he came on stage in front of 20,000 people at Ynysangharad Park, known locally as Ponty Park, and a place he knew so well from swimming in the local baths there as a youngster.
It was the Saturday of the Whitsun bank holiday weekend, and the town shut down for the day. He told the cheering audience, ‘I am going to be sixty-five in a few days and I can’t believe it. I feel like I’m twenty-five again. I’ll be an OAP and here I am singing in front of all of you.’ Katherine Jenkins presented him with a birthday cake. She sang ‘Happy Birthday’ in Welsh and English. It wasn’t quite a Marilyn Monroe moment, though. Tom said, ‘There’s beautiful, and she can sing as well.’
Tom didn’t take a fee for the concert, his only one in the UK before he began a 139-date world tour. He made sure all his relatives were looked after in a separate marquee for the occasion. Margaret Sugar remembered Freda and how proud she would have been to see her son at home again. ‘It must be terribly emotional for him,’ she observed. That was clear on his face when he sang ‘A Boy from Nowhere’ and ‘Green, Green Grass of Home’, backed by images of the Valleys on enormous screens.
Tom was giving something back to his home town after such a long time away. Although he is fiercely proud to be Welsh, he left his home when he was twenty-four. Many people in Pontypridd and Treforest seem to think by some sort of divine right that he should do things for the area and the community without explaining why he should. Sentimentality? He was criticised in the papers for not supporting Treforest Primary School when it was set to close, but he couldn’t possibly know the politics involved, living thousands of miles away in Los Angeles.
Tom could be forgiven for recalling how difficult it was for him, returning home when he first hit the big time. He advised Stereophonics to be careful: ‘I’d do an American tour and we’d do six months straight, no trouble. We’d be playing these big places, going into all different nightclubs, meeting all kinds of hoodlums and nobody ever tried to take a pop. We’d go back home to Wales and some fucker would try and have a go.’
If Tom was back visiting, there would always be someone in the pub reminiscing about how they’d wiped the floor with him or telling him that they were at the first gig he ever played, even though they invariably didn’t have a clue when or where that was. If he didn’t buy everybody a drink, he was labelled mean. If he did, he was a ‘flash bastard’.
After the concert in Ponty Park, Tom made sure that he was at home in Los Angeles on his birthday, so that he could spend the day quietly with Linda and tell her all about it.
He knew his wife wouldn’t be with him when he was knighted by the Queen. Her absence from such occasions wasn’t a surprise, so it didn’t ruin the day for him. He was recognised in the New Years’ Honours List in 2006. The timing meant that his grandson Alex had to rush back from competing for Wales in the full-bore shooting at the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne. Tom had taught Alex how to shoot with an air rifle when he was boy and had stayed with Tom and Linda at the house in Welsh St Donats.
The Queen conducted the ceremony at the end of March and remembered seeing Tom perform in the sixties. She asked him how long he had been in show business. He replied proudly, ‘Forty-one years.’ She told him he had given a lot of people a lot of pleasure.
Afterwards, he revealed he had been nervous at the occasion. He was worried that they would change their minds. He only relaxed when the Queen tapped his shoulders with the sword. This time, there was no lap dancer waiting in the wings to sell her story.
22
The Road
Tom and Linda celebrated their golden wedding anniversary in March 2007. They didn’t go out. They had a quiet meal at the house in Los Angeles with Mark and the family, who had flown in from England. Linda no longer enjoyed dinners in fancy restaurants, because she hated the feeling that she was on show. She had felt that way ever since Tom had become so famous, but the digital age had increased her vulnerability – everyone had a mobile phone and could take her picture.
Occasionally, Tom persuaded her to go for a little drive with him. He recalled a conversation they had during one journey: ‘She said to me, “I’m enjoying this. It’s no big deal, is it?” And I said to her, “But I told you! People are only people.” But then, well, then she gets frightened again.’ Tom enjoys his wife’s company. He always has and he doesn’t want to give that up.
It’s become fashionable for songs to be identified as autobiographical. They can gather easy publicity for a new album that way. Adele’s timeless ‘Someone Like You’ is just one example of how the media likes to devote column inches to the who and the why in lyrics. No detective work was required to realise Tom’s song ‘The Road’ was both a tribute and an apology to his wife. Tom prefers to regard it as a thank you for being there for more than fifty years.
Tom was proud of the song and would recite the lyrics in interviews: ‘Felt the weakness when I was strong, Felt the sweetness when it was wrong.’ Tom told Simon Hattenstone in the Guardian that Linda would never try to analyse it or ask him what he meant by those lines, but she did like the sentiment in the key line of the song, ‘The road always returns to you.’
Unlike singing, which comes so naturally, Tom needs prompting and encouragement to write a song. He was discussing his marriage with one of the songwriters on the album 24 Hours, Lisa Greene, when he observed, ‘No matter where I have been or what I have done, the road always leads back to Linda’, which immediately drew the response, ‘Write it down: The Road!’ The song began to take shape immediately.
The irony is, of course, that Tom has been on the road for so much of their fifty years of marriage, they have probably spent no more than ten years in each other’s company. Their marriage is nothing like that of Freda and Tom senior, whose lives were completely intertwined. His parents were an important part of each other’s daily routine, whereas Tom and Linda were apart for long periods of time, sometimes even living in different countries. Nevertheless, Tom has always insisted that he would never leave his wife.
Tom has never been shy of talking about Linda. She hasn’t spoken of him for forty years, but he has been revealing her fears and feelings throughout that time. He i
s careful to present her as a strong and forceful woman and not a downtrodden housewife: ‘We still have the same basic feelings and values and we are both Welsh, we come from the same place, so I can’t bullshit my wife. She won’t have it, which is great. I love that.’
Much of the publicity for 24 Hours centred on ‘The Road’ and its significance, but the record itself again showed his desire to present the public with new material and not just rehash the old. In this case, Mark had enthusiastically played his father Back to Black by Amy Winehouse and told him, ‘Listen to this.’ The retro feel of that masterpiece was the sound they were hoping to achieve. They wanted to return to the brass-heavy soul sounds of the sixties, when Otis Redding ruled and you would go into a record store to buy the great singer’s latest recording on vinyl. In the sixties, Tom sought to emulate the passion or ‘soul’ that Otis found in his songs. He was astonished, therefore, when he met the singer, who told Tom that black artists were trying to copy him.
For the new album, Tom and Mark enlisted the help of the production duo Future Cut, who were as fashionable as you could find. Tunde Babalola and Darren Lewis had made a name for themselves in the mid-nineties in Manchester’s drum ’n’ bass scene, but it was the Lily Allen debut single ‘Smile’, in 2006, that provided them, and her, with their breakthrough. They recorded it in a basement studio in Manchester for just £500.
Tom played a part in writing almost all of the songs on the album, with a few notable exceptions. He had been talking to Bono at Lillie’s Bordello, the well-known Grafton Street club in Dublin, and asked him to write a song that he could record. Tom likes nothing better than sitting down and telling stories about his life. Bono listened and said he would write something that reflected that life and not his own – a Tom Jones song, not a U2 one. He came up with ‘Sugar Daddy’, probably one of the weakest tracks on the album, a dull rehash of Tom’s old image as a sex bomb. The Scotsman described as an ‘embarrassing misfire’.
Much more successful was Tom’s interpretation of ‘The Hitter’, the Bruce Springsteen tale of a travelling boxer. He was in his most dramatic voice. It could have been Otis himself countering the controlled power of the horns.
The lead single from the album, ‘If He Should Ever Leave You’, was an underrated melodic slice of swing that harked back to the days when Les Reed and Peter Sullivan were in charge of Tom’s recording career. It sounded as if it could be the next track on an album that began with ‘It’s Not Unusual’. He sang it on Strictly Come Dancing, but while the arrangement was perfect for that show and its sequinned twirls, nothing, it seemed, could make it a hit. The album itself failed to make the top thirty in the UK, although it was eventually certified gold. 24 Hours was Tom’s first US release in fifteen years. It flopped, despite tireless promotion.
The reviews were encouraging, but the sales were forgettable. It wasn’t the hoped-for return to the spotlight that Reload had been in the UK. Tom was hugely disappointed. It seemed the public wouldn’t allow him to find his own voice. They wanted him to be the Tom Jones they remembered and not the artist he wanted to be.
Tom was sixty-eight when 24 Hours was released. His hair and beard were still dyed black as coal, but it was time for a change of image. How could he claim to be a current artist when his appearance was an ill-conceived throwback to more youthful days? It was time to go grey.
His plastic surgeon in Los Angeles had warned him to stop fighting the march of time. Tom’s nose had been straightened and made smaller more than once; his teeth were capped; his hairline and scalp had been worked on to reduce the chance of him becoming as bald as his father; and the fat had been sucked out of his chin. Only recently, the inevitable heaviness had been taken out of his eyelids. He never made a secret of his surgery as some stars do, gamely maintaining that their looks are all natural when they look like something created by Frankenstein. Tom hadn’t forgotten the wise words of his personal plastic surgeon many years before: ‘He told me to be careful not to have too much done, or I’d end up looking like someone else.’
Tom didn’t go grey overnight. His appearance on the Comic Relief charity single ‘(Barry) Islands in the Stream’ was a silvery work in progress, as his colour began to grow out. The song, written by the Gibb brothers, had been a huge hit in the early eighties for Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers. Since then, it had become one of the best-loved country duets, as well as a karaoke favourite.
In the Comic Relief video, which was more like a film short, Tom played himself – as usual. The stars were Ruth Jones and Rob Brydon, portraying Nessa and Bryn, the characters they played in the popular television sitcom Gavin and Stacey. They travel to Las Vegas to take part in the world karaoke championships. In the desert, their truck breaks down and they are rescued by Tom in his limo. Tom had apparently enjoyed a one-night stand that he had never got over. Nessa, he said, was an animal in bed. Nessa and Bryn’s performance in the competition was woeful, until Tom stepped in to save the day by singing the last verse and chorus.
Tom had little to do, but it was useful being able to attach his name to the record, and it proved to be a huge success, becoming another number one hit for Comic Relief. The video was light fun, although, once again, it seemed acceptable to portray Tom Jones as a man who would casually have an adulterous fling. It was a subject guaranteed to produce knowing laughter.
Tom had gone completely grey by the time he played Glastonbury for the second time at the end of June 2009. The joke was that he finally looked as old as his son. He had slimmed down and for the first time looked distinguished – not an adjective normally associated with Tom, at least not during his medallion years.
He played a selection of old and new songs from the sixties, mixed with more recent tracks. As usual, the 100,000-strong audience responded best to the ones they could sing along with – ‘Delilah’, ‘Green, Green Grass of Home’ and ‘It’s Not Unusual’. The overall sound was very brass-heavy and funked up, reflecting the emphasis of 24 Hours. He didn’t seem to be sweating any less now that he was older and still wore black to ensure he wasn’t covered in any unsightly perspiration patches.
Tom, who normally takes everything in a relaxed manner, was uncharacteristically annoyed to discover that, for the first few numbers, the people at the front couldn’t hear properly because of a fault with the speakers. He wasn’t used to staring out at blank faces. He blasted, ‘Four songs I did like that. Four songs!’ All was forgiven by the time he sang a vintage version of ‘I’ll Never Fall in Love Again’. He closed with ‘Unbelievable’, the EMF song that he had included in his first Glastonbury set seventeen years before. The Guardian praised a belting set of pipes.
His Glastonbury set was brimming with nostalgia, but Tom hadn’t given up on finding a new musical voice. At the end of the year, he dropped his American band and replaced them with younger musicians. They were told that they wouldn’t be required on his UK tour. Their shock was very similar to Vernon Hopkins’ disbelief when The Squires were dispensed with unexpectedly. The drummer for the past seven years, Herman Matthews, thought the timing of the dismissal was poor, especially as some of the band had been with him for eighteen years. He put the blame squarely on Tom’s management: ‘They seemed to struggle in finding the right tunes for his recent record 24 Hours, like they didn’t know which way to take him, and maybe this is part of that.’ Matthews graciously called Tom one of the greatest singers he had ever had the pleasure of working with.
Tom’s quest for musical credibility continued. He signed a new £1.5 million deal with Island Records, which was a good way to start the next phase of his career, and set about recording his next album. A vice-president at Island called David Sharpe was walking through the company’s headquarters when he heard ‘hymns’ being played loudly. It was a weekday, but could have been a Sunday morning, he thought. He sent an email to colleagues, ‘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????’
The email was leaked to the Sunday Times, which ran Mr Sharpe’s comments in full. He continued, ‘We did not invest a fortune in an established artist for him to deliver twelve tracks from the common book of prayer [sic]. Having lured him from EMI, the deal was that he would deliver a record of upbeat tracks along the lines of “Sex Bomb” and “Mama Told Me” … Who put him with this “folk” producer, and who authorised that he should go off on this tangent … for God’s sake what are you thinking when he went all spiritual?’
Mr Sharpe was unrepentant when contacted by the newspaper. He commented, ‘Shall we say we’ve paid for a Mercedes and ended up with the hearse.’ Mark and Donna were taken aback when asked about the email, describing it as ‘very direct’.
Tom was equally direct in his response. ‘Who is this guy?’ he asked. ‘I don’t even know who he is. I found out that he’s some fella who signs cheques or something. I said, “What the fuck’s he on about?” You can’t go condemning a record. It’s terrible to say “maybe Tom has made a mistake if the record company don’t even like it.” They’ve been apologising to me ever since. They can’t apologise enough.’
While the controversy did provide much publicity for the album, entitled Praise and Blame, Tom pointed out that it was negative and misleading. The ‘folk producer’ was Ethan Johns, an acclaimed English record producer and musician, who had already been responsible for albums by Kings of Leon and Razorlight. The previous year he had produced Paolo Nutini’s award-winning Sunny Side Up.
The suggestion that Tom work with him had actually come from Island. They met at Apple Studios in North London and Tom told Johns he was thinking of doing some spiritual music. He had never forgotten listening to Mahalia Jackson singing ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ when he was bed-bound with TB, or the late nights with Elvis singing gospel songs. He used to sing ‘Danny Boy’, not as a plaintive Irish ballad but as a black song from the cotton fields. He wanted to record an album of songs that said something and were meaningful. He wanted to return to the old days – not those when he wore a tuxedo in Las Vegas, but when he was a boy going to the Presbyterian chapel with his parents on a Sunday morning and hearing the sombre power of the organ playing when he walked in.
