"I left the house in 1965 and I haven’t been back much since.”
Tom Jones is reflecting on a fifty-year career that has taken him from a small town in Wales to international fame and fortune, not to mention adulation from several generations of females. He still can’t believe his luck: “When I started out, my manager Gordon Mills said to my wife, ‘now Linda, Tom is doing all these shows because the demand is there. But one day soon it’ll all slow down’. She keeps asking me, ‘when is this slowing down thing happening?’ To be honest, it’s not going to happen anytime soon.”
Best known for those huge 1960s hits ‘It’s Not Unusual’, ‘Delilah’, ‘What’s New Pussycat’ and ‘Green Green Grass of Home’, Jones later enjoyed a Vegas and a TV career that took him into the 1970s. Following a slight dip in popularity in the late ‘70s, he saw a career reboot in the ‘80s and ‘90s with hits such as his version of Prince’s ‘Kiss’, a couple of Randy Newman tunes, ‘You Can Leave Your Hat On’ and ‘Mama Told Me Not To Come’ and the clubby ‘Sex Bomb’. But latterly, Jones has explored his roostier side to wide critical and commercial acclaim. Beginning with 2010’s Praise & Blame, recent albums have offered a rawer version of Jones – his still powerful voice underpinned by stripped-down, organic backing. Guided once again by producer Ethan Johns, his latest, Long Lost Suitcase (released in conjunction with his autobiography) finds him looking to his pre-fame days.
“When I started recording with Ethan he said ‘I’d like to take you back to the music you loved before ‘It’s Not Unusual’ when you had your own band’. I said, ‘yeah sure’ because I did have a band in those days, or a rhythm section, as they were called back then, in Wales when I started out. We were doing 1950s rock ‘n’ roll, blues, gospel and country - that’s the stuff I still love today.”
Covering songs such as Gillian Welch’s ‘Elvis Presley Blues’, The Stones’ ‘Factory Girl’ and chestnuts like as Hank Williams’ ‘Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used To Do’, Jones comes across more like a Muddy Waters or a John Lee Hooker figure than the slick entertainer of yore. “We try to get a flow with some up-tempo songs and some ballads, some newer songs and some older ones,” he says. A song like ‘Bring It On Home’ by Sonny Boy Williamson is one I’ve done for years and I’ve always loved Hank Williams.
“Ethan played ‘Elvis Presley Blues’ for me a couple of years ago and we tried to do it then but it just didn’t come off right. So earlier this year he called and said do you want to have another crack at it? I said sure. He said he had an idea for it. So we went down to Real World Studios and we did the song along with, ‘He Was A Friend Of Mine’. We used just a guitar with a wah-wah pedal and I sang it in a lower key which was more haunting. I played it for Priscilla [Presley] about a month ago and she said Elvis would have loved it.”
There’s a strong Irish presence on a couple of songs on the album, as he explains:
“Oh yeah, we had done a version of ‘Factory Girl’ [originally on the Stones’ Beggar’s Banquet album] “but Ethan said, ‘I think it needs more of a Celtic feel to it’. He had heard this Irish band, Rackhouse Pilfer, so he gave me their album which I loved and we got them over to do it. And then he said, ‘Imelda May is interested in doing ‘Honey Honey’ with you’, so that’s what we did. We did them both as free- spirited pub songs – like you’d do them in a Welsh pub or an Irish Pub.”
He stills performs live constantly - is there any conflict between what audiences expect, given his hit-making past and his current incarnation? “Oh no, I’ve never had trouble with audiences when I do new stuff,” he insists. “You see my style of singing hasn’t really changed at all, just the instrumentation. But they all fit – and I still do ‘Delilah’, though more as a ballad these days and I do ‘It’s Not Unusual’ more as a bossa nova number.”
Part of his live current live show involves a public interview – based on his autobiography, Over The Top And Back. “I’ve been asked to do a book before but I always said I’m not old enough yet, I haven’t lived long enough. When I was doing The Voice, Jesse J said she’d written an autobiography and I said how many pages are in it. It’s a joke – people writing autobiographies when they’ve been two or three years in the business. I talk about my background and the people I met over the years and who I have stories to tell about.”
Jones’ plain speaking and no-nonsense manner has recently landed him in a spot of bother, the latest storm arising out of a comment he supposedly made about homosexuals being rife in the music industry when he was starting out.
“They called me homophobic,” he says, clearly angry about the controversy. “It was something I said about Joe Meek, who was a producer I worked with and they took it out of context. All of a sudden – I’m fucking homophobic. It’s bullshit. Gay friends of mine have said, ‘what the fuck’s all this about?’ I’ve got a lad working for me, a stylist Peter Hawker and he’s gay. He’s been with me for seventeen years and when he read that stuff online he went on Twitter right away and said, ‘it’s completely wrong to call Tom Jones homophobic – he’s far from it.”
“We joke about it but you see when I talk in an interview, like I am now, it’s like having a conversation with someone. I don’t think of it any other way. People say, well, you are talking to a journalist and you have to understand that. But I’d say no, if someone asks me the same question in a pub I’d give the same answer. But then I get misquoted out of context.
“And that’s what’s been happening to me lately. They don’t seem to understand that when I’ve said things it’s about the past. It’s about the time and the place. It’s not necessarily about now – it was then. And I always explain that when I talk about it but they still misquote me.”