Tom Jones - the Life

by Sean Smith

  With Tom, Stereophonics chose to sing an old Randy Newman song that had long been forgotten. ‘Mama Told Me Not to Come’ had originally been written for Eric Burdon and The Animals in the sixties, but was better known as a top three hit for an American group called Three Dog Night in 1970.

  Stereophonics’ lead singer, Kelly Jones, explained to Melody Maker why they were involved: ‘Anyone in our position would jump at the chance to work with Tom Jones. He’s a fucking legend. I don’t give a fuck if we get slagged for doing a song with Tom Jones. I couldn’t care less if in some people’s eyes it isn’t cool.’ But the album was cool.

  James Dean Bradfield joined Tom to sing an Elvis song from the fifties. Tom doesn’t do too many Elvis covers, but ‘I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone’ was transformed into a slice of Manic Street Preachers rock, complete with crashing guitar chords and exhilarating vocals from both men. The song was like an encore for a high-class pub-rock gig. It would have made a terrific single, but there were many other contenders on the album.

  Cerys Matthews had a reputation of being a larger-than-life character, a self-confessed hell-raiser, who liked a drink and embraced the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. She wasn’t too reverential where Tom was concerned, which he liked. She told the Sunday Mirror, ‘You can’t really fault a man willing to go on stage in a flamenco catsuit. But there was no Mr Big Time Las Vegas at all, apart from the tan … and the fact that he had more jewellery than me.’

  The song they chose to perform together was ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’. Their flirtatious interpretation managed to breathe fresh life into a song that was a staple of the Christmas season.

  Cerys became part of Tom’s entourage and was often seen with him on nights out around London and visited him in Las Vegas. They have kept in touch over the years and were photographed enjoying each other’s company at the after-party for the 2008 Q Awards at the Shepherds Tavern in Mayfair.

  These days the Catatonia concerts, when Cerys used to bounce around on stage swigging from a bottle of chardonnay, are long forgotten. She has become a respected and popular broadcaster and a leading light of modern Welsh culture.

  Reload is Tom’s most successful album. After the blaze of publicity, including An Audience with Tom Jones, the lead single was ‘Burning Down the House’, which reached a slightly disappointing number seven in the UK. The album, however, went straight to number one at the beginning of October 1999.

  Reviews were mostly positive. The Glasgow Sunday Herald enthused, ‘Unlike embarrassing has-beens who think they can put on a black polo neck, do a cover version and revitalise their sagging sales figures, Jones is producing music that is fresh, innovative, popular and even credible.’ Reload sold more than 1.2 million copies in the UK alone and in excess of 6 million worldwide.

  Not everyone was completely gushing. BBC Online called the version of Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust for Life’ ‘toe-curlingly bad’. The NME reviewer clearly got out of bed on the wrong side, describing Tom as ‘old leather face’ and calling the album ‘rubbish’. Arguably, the weakest song on the album was the collaboration he did with Tommy Scott. They sang ‘Sunny Afternoon’ by The Kinks, one of the great songs of the sixties. It was very hard to match the original, with the idiosyncratic vocal style of Ray Davies, but again it demonstrated that Tom was a risk-taker.

  The album revealed a man still prepared to take chances in a year when he became more of an establishment figure. It began with him finally being awarded an OBE at a time when honours for tax exiles weren’t as frowned upon as they once were. He forgot to take a hat with him when he formally received his award from the Queen. He joked with photographers, ‘I didn’t bring a hat because I thought it might mess up my hair.’

  The award was also the excuse the now defunct News of the World needed to say that OBE stood for Order of Bonking Excellence. They ran a kiss and tell from a large-breasted lap dancer, who described a thirteen-hour ‘romp’ with Tom, which sounded nothing like as exciting as the headline suggested.

  The media continued to be obsessed with Tom as a sex symbol, even though he was in his fifty-ninth year. It didn’t help that the most memorable song from Reload, and the one that has become a Tom standard, was his collaboration with Mousse T, entitled ‘Sex Bomb’. It was the natural successor to ‘Kiss’. At Donna’s wise suggestion, the lyric was changed from ‘I’m a sex bomb’ to ‘You’re a sex bomb’.

  Mousse T seemed the most unlikely partner for Tom on the entire album. The German-born DJ and producer had originally written the track for inclusion on his own album and had wanted Tom to be the featured artist. He explained, ‘I wanted to make the track a mixture between the sounds of the ’70s and those of today’s music, and so we definitely wrote it for Tom to sing.’

  He had positive feedback from Tom after sending him a demo, and flew to London to make the recording. Tom told him, ‘I’d really love to have it on my album.’ Despite being the fourth and last single from Reload, after the duets with The Cardigans, Cerys and Stereophonics, it proved to be the biggest hit, reaching number three in the charts and propelling the album back to number one.

  Mousse T enjoyed his experience of working with Tom: ‘We did all the vocals in forty-five minutes flat – Tom is just incredible like that. He makes you want to cry – he is so good at what he does. All you can say is, “Thanks.”’

  21

  In Search of Credibility

  Tom had been around longer than the Brits. When they began in 1977, as the BPI Awards, he was nominated as Best British Male, despite being in the middle of his slump. The awards that year bore no relation to the prestigious annual prize-giving of today. They were designed as music’s contribution to the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and celebrated the best of pop during her reign. They weren’t current: The Beatles won Best British Group, Shirley Bassey took the female award and Cliff Richard won Tom’s category.

  Five years later, in 1982, the Brits started properly and Tom was in the wilderness, as contemporary acts, including Adam and the Ants, Soft Cell and The Police, cleaned up. He might have won if there had been a category for Best British Vegas Entertainer, but this was a celebration of the performers who were fashionable and popular in music and he was neither. Reload changed that. While ‘Kiss’ had made it acceptable to like Tom Jones again, the album revived his commercial success. It was his first number one of original recordings since Delilah in 1968.

  Surprisingly, Reload wasn’t named in the album category in 2000, but Tom was again a contender for Best British Male, competing against David Bowie, Van Morrison, Sting and Ian Brown, the former lead singer of The Stone Roses. They must have been one of the oldest collection of artists ever nominated, with an average age of fifty. The Guardian unkindly described them as ‘rock wrinklies’. Tom, the oldest, won his first Brit at the age of fifty-nine.

  On the night at Earls Court, Tom roared through a performance of ‘Mama Told Me Not to Come’ with Stereophonics that left you wondering how on earth the bland pop act Steps won Best Live Act. Later in the evening, he received his award from the comedian and writer Ben Elton. Tom, who was dressed in sober black, thanked Mark, Donna and Gut Records and all the singers and groups on the album, before saying, ‘I have won a lot of awards in my career, but this tops them all.’

  When he celebrated his sixtieth birthday in June 2000, he qualified for a winter weather payment from the government worth £150. He didn’t bother. Not only was he celebrating in the balmy heat of a Los Angeles summer, but his wealth had also topped the £100-million barrier, a conservative estimate in the Sunday Times Rich List.

  Tom found passing sixty easier than reaching thirty. He was nervous then that he could no longer get away with pretending to be a kid in a pop world perennially obsessed with youth. He observed, ‘When you hit sixty, you stop worrying. And people tell you that you look fantastic.’

  Not for the last time Tom was asked if he was going to retire. His reply was an emphatic no. He would keep going as long as h
is voice sounded good in the shower. To prove the point, he sold out all six shows at the Cardiff International Arena and had to add an extra date. He had embarked on a huge world tour to cash in on his resurgence. It began in Washington on Millennium Night, after President Clinton asked him to appear at the celebrations in front of the Lincoln Memorial. He sang ‘It’s Not Unusual’, before taking the lead during the finale with ‘In the Midnight Hour’. In the latter, he was accompanied by the peerless rock guitarist Slash, as ticker tape rained down on an estimated crowd of 300,000.

  The set list for the tours included songs from Reload without the guest singers, which proved that, while it was a successful gimmick, Tom didn’t really need them. Mark, perhaps influenced by the success of the millennium show, decided that his father would reach a wider audience performing outdoors. If the crowds were bigger, then more people would buy the merchandise, particularly the T-shirts with ‘Sex Bomb’ or ‘What’s New Pussycat?’ written on them.

  Mark had also recognised that the demographic of a Tom Jones audience was changing. The original female fans were grannies now and they were there with husbands, sons and daughters and grandchildren. Trendy youngsters, looking as if they were ready for a night clubbing, rubbed shoulders with those dressed for an evening at the opera. It didn’t matter who you were, Reload made it OK to admit liking Tom Jones whatever your age or sex.

  By the summer of 2001, Tom was performing more open-air concerts. He played a series of gigs at the great castles of Britain, including Edinburgh, Warwick and Cardiff, which was a personal highlight. Vicky Allen in Scotland on Sunday was impressed that his voice seemed to be getting deeper and stronger with time: ‘He sings his guts up, like an old lion who has lost his bite but can still roar.’ The ‘old lion’ kept going for more than an hour and a half and sang twenty-seven songs, with the big ballads ‘A Boy from Nowhere’ and ‘I’ll Never Fall in Love Again’ retaining all their power.

  The UK was seeing so much of Tom that inevitably there were rumours that he would be moving back to the country full time and buying a house near his son’s. He had quietly sold Llwynddu House at the end of 1998, so he no longer had a permanent base. The problem with returning was that Linda was becoming more of a recluse in Los Angeles. That was soon to be an even greater worry, a week after he appeared in Cardiff, when she was badly affected by the 9/11 tragedy. Unusually, Linda was with him on a European tour at the time, and they both watched the drama unfold on television. She managed to make it home to California, but that was it for her. She hasn’t flown since.

  As a result, she spent more time in her million-dollar cocoon, where she felt safe. It was a turning point for her and, progressively as the years went by, she began to distrust people. She hates being called a recluse, but she didn’t want to socialise. When Robbie Williams, who lived in the same gated community, popped round to say hello to Tom, she stayed upstairs and had to be coaxed down for an introduction. At the time, everyone thought she was shy of meeting somebody famous again, but it wasn’t that; she had simply grown nervous of others. Tom explained, ‘It makes her very anxious and she has to take tranquillisers and that.’

  Though Tom worried about Linda, he has always been able to separate his home life and his work. His chief concern with the latter was how to follow up the success of Reload. At first there was talk of another duets album, but that was abandoned in favour of seeking more credibility through an alliance with the Haitian-born hip-hop master Wyclef Jean. He was formerly one third of The Fugees, who had achieved worldwide fame with their second album, The Score. It featured their reworking of ‘Killing Me Softly’, a song Tom knew well. ‘I loved what Wyclef did with “Killing Me Softly”. He stripped it down and turned it into something different from the original.’

  They met in the summer of 2001, at the Party in the Park in aid of the Prince’s Trust, when Wyclef told Tom he featured on his third solo album, Masquerade. He was reworking ‘What’s New Pussycat?’ into a new R&B number called ‘Pussycat’. Perhaps Tom might like the song after all these years.

  The result was quite a catchy track that used Tom as a sample, driving the rap that included the unforgettable lyric ‘Hey kitty, kitty, meet me in the city’ – a line Burt Bacharach forgot to include in the original. They enjoyed some nights out and then met again in December, when they performed a slightly surreal duet of ‘It’s Not Unusual’ at the Top of the Pops Awards in Manchester. Tom was impressed enough to suggest Wyclef and his writing and production partner Jerry Duplessis steer his new album, Mr Jones. The major difference between this and former albums was that Tom would contribute songs himself – the next step on his path to solid credibility.

  Wyclef encouraged Tom to write words that were true to his own life and experiences. Tom observed, ‘He started bringing all these lyrics out of me that I wouldn’t ordinarily have done. Every time I came up with an interesting thought, he would write it down.’ He reminisced in ‘Younger Days’ that it was good in ’65, ’66 and ’67, but it was also good now – which was true.

  Tom left Gut after only one album and joined Richard Branson’s V2 Records label, which had successfully handled the distribution for Reload. Fortunately, ‘Tom Jones on Virgin’ wasn’t a headline that saw the light of day. He posed with the tycoon for pictures in New York, where he was finishing recording the new album. Branson was enthusiastic: ‘Of all the legends out there, getting Tom Jones was the only thing equal to my signing The Rolling Stones.’ He also managed to include a plug for the first single from the album. He said ‘Tom Jones International’ was so good ‘it should be a number one worldwide.’

  The single was a radical change in direction for Tom. It began with Wyclef shouting ‘Refugee camp’ and Tom, in a quieter vocal than usual, telling everyone that he was going to ‘Blow up this party with this sex bomb’. It didn’t make number one worldwide – nowhere near, in fact. In the UK, it stalled at a disappointing thirty-one.

  The album wasn’t even that successful. Whereas reviewers loved Reload, this seemed a step too far for the majority. Dorian Lynskey in the Guardian said, ‘It’s not that Wyclef isn’t a capable pop-rap producer, nor that Jones doesn’t still have a gutsy soul voice. It’s simply that the twain should never have met.’ Beth Pearson in the Glasgow Herald scoffed, ‘Wyclef has tried to mould our troubadour into a Welsh Snoop Dog.’ The general feeling was that this collaboration wasn’t age appropriate. The critics couldn’t accept a sixty-one-year-old man calling himself TJ and asking the house to bring it down. Tom did admit to some difficulty picking up the language of hip-hop: he said, ‘Get the groove’ to pick up the rhythm in the recording studio and nobody knew what he meant; Wyclef declared, ‘Lay the beats’ and they all nodded enthusiastically.

  Commercially, the album was a flop, peaking at number thirty-six in the UK and performing equally badly in other countries. Tom said he was proud of it, even it didn’t sell a single copy. It didn’t sell many. Looking back on that failure, Tom believes one problem was that his core audience is white. If you go to a Tom Jones concert, particularly in Las Vegas, there are relatively few young black fans. His drummer, Herman Matthews, had a more concise reason for the album’s failure when he mentioned it a few years later. He said, ‘That was a pile of crap.’

  While confirmation that he was going to be acknowledged at the 2003 Brit Awards for his outstanding contribution to music was a welcome tonic, Tom was left devastated when his mother Freda died after a series of strokes in February. She was eighty-seven and had been incapacitated by cancer for several years. He told her about his award before she died and she was, he said, very pleased: ‘I could see she wasn’t going to last long, but when it happens it is still a terrible shock.’ He immediately cancelled a raft of concerts. His cousin Jean said simply, ‘Freda was everything to Tom.’ She was buried next to her husband in Los Angeles, so Tom and Sheila could spend quiet time at their parents’ graves whenever they wanted.

  He travelled to London to attend the Brits at Earls
Court after the funeral. Robbie Williams sent a gracious message by video link, in which he said, ‘I do believe that the duet with you at the Brits that year was the catalyst for my career.’ Tom, in an immaculately cut blue suit, remembered Freda and Tom senior when he collected the award from the presenter Davina McCall: ‘My mother passed away on the seventh of this month and my father passed away in 1981. They were my biggest fans and biggest supporters, and they would have been really pleased that I am getting this tonight. So this is for Mam and Dad.’

  He sang a medley of hits, including ‘What’s New Pussycat?’, ‘Kiss’, ‘Sex Bomb’, ‘It’s Not Unusual’ (during which he seemed to choke back emotion), ‘Black Betty’ (a follow-up single from Mr Jones), ‘You Can Leave Your Hat On’, ‘Delilah’ and ‘Green, Green Grass of Home’. He could have sung fifty more.

  The most striking thing was that he looked different, now sporting a goatee beard dyed to match his hair. A cosmetic operation to remove fat from his chin – a problem he needed to address occasionally throughout the years – had left a scar. The goatee, which gave him the air of a musketeer, covered it. He could have had the scar dealt with by a laser, but decided he liked the goatee.

  The Brit Award was the opportunity to produce a retrospective called The Definitive Tom Jones, a timely chance to banish the commercial failure of Mr Jones from public consciousness. Four discs spanned four decades of music, with some curios thrown in, such as a recording of him singing Otis Redding’s best-known song, ‘(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay’. The first two discs were a canter through his classics. He even included ‘Chills and Fever’, which had aged remarkably well – better than some far more successful songs. The third and fourth CDs drew more heavily from The Lead and How to Swing It and Reload.