Songwriter whose chart-topping hits included Delilah and The Last Waltz

One day in 1964, Barry Mason was playing poker with Gordon Mills when his opponent told him he’d found a singer from the Welsh valleys and that he was going to become his manager.

‘‘Shut up and deal, Gordon!’’, Mason told him. However, Mills press-ganged Mason into accompanying him to see his protege singing in ‘‘some grotty little hall somewhere’’.

The singer was Tom Jones but although Mason was impressed by his ruggedly soulful voice, he couldn’t see the commercial potential. ‘‘He was right against the grain. At the time it was big stars with pretty voices, very delicate and smooth – and here was rough, tough

Tom,’’ he recalled.

Mason, who has died aged 85, was delighted to be proved wrong when within months Jones had topped the charts with It’s Not Unusual, written by Mills and Les Reed. Shortly after, Mason and Reed wrote Delilah for Jones, Reed providing the tune and Mason the melodramatic lyric about a man who passes his girlfriend’s window and sees her making love to another. He waits outside all night, stabs her to death and waits for police to arrest him.

The story derived some inspiration from Bizet’s opera Carmen but Mason claimed he based the song – minus the bloody denouement – on a girl named Delia he had met on holiday in Blackpool when he was 15. They had a summer fling, but at the end of the holiday she told Mason it was over. ‘‘I was shattered. I never shook it off,’’ Mason said. ‘‘I became sick with jealousy and a whole lot of pain. She had dark hair, brooding eyes and she was really feisty.’’

He changed her name for the song because ‘‘Why, why, why Delia’’ didn’t fit. ‘‘I just got more and more worked up with each line. I put my heart and soul into that song – and that’s how Delilah was born.’’

Mason’s second wife Sylvan Whittingham, the daughter of the James Bond screenwriter Jack Whittingham, subsequently claimed after their 1978 divorce that she had helped to co-write the lyric. The case, which was not disputed by the song’s credited writers, was settled out of court.

Mason and Whittingham had married in

1972, a few years after the end of his marriage to Patricia Ellis had ended After their divorce Mason married, in the early 1980s, Elizabeth Clifton, with whom he had two children but they subsequently separated. His partner Vanessa Martin survives him along with his three children.

Aside from songs for Jones, Mason and Reed’s other chart-toppers included The Last Waltz, a hit for Engelbert Humperdinck in

1967. The pair had booked a round of golf but just as Mason pulled into the driveway of Reed’s Woking home with his clubs in the boot of his car, a torrential downpour washed out any prospect of getting on the course.

Reed’s wife, June, put the kettle on and suggested they do some writing instead. ‘‘We had a cup of tea, and Les starts telling a story about how, when he was young, he always knew when the village dance was over, because he could hear the compere in the distance saying, ‘Take your partners for the last waltz’, and so he knew his mum and dad would be home soon,’’ Mason recalled.

Within 20 minutes Mason had spun the tale into a lyric while Reed sat at the piano and played a classic waltz. In the course of that afternoon they also wrote four further songs including Everybody Knows for the Dave Clark Five and I’m Coming Home for Tom Jones.

Mason and Reed scored a further UK No 1 in 1968 with Des O’Connor’s I Pretend. Their output also included the football anthem Marching On Together (aka Leeds! Leeds! Leeds!) to mark the city’s team reaching the FA Cup final, though neither was a supporter of the club. Working with other tunesmiths, Mason teamed up with Tony Macaulay to write the lyrics for Edison Lighthouse’s 1970 No 1 Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes),

again with input – credited this time – from Whittingham. Another prolific collaborator was Roger Greenaway, with whom Mason wrote hits for the Drifters and Tom Jones’ country No 1 Say You’ll Stay Until Tomorrow.

His songs eventually clocked up sales in excess of 50 million records and were covered by Rod Stewart, Petula Clark, Elvis Presley, Charles Aznavour and Barbra Streisand among others. Humperdinck, who asked Mason to be best man at his wedding, recorded no fewer than 90 of Mason’s compositions.

In later years Mason became a music publisher and developed his own one-man show, in which, accompanied by a piano player, he sang snatches of the hits he had written and chatted about the stories behind the songs.

Barry Mason was born in Wigan, north of Manchester, in 1935 and brought up in a boarding house in Blackpool. His father Cecil Mason, a newspaper reporter, died in the early days of the war and his mother remarried to an American GI stationed in Britain.

He recalled an unhappy childhood and, after doing his National Service, he headed for America, where his mother had moved with his step-father, and enrolled at Ohio State University. After a year he dropped out and hitchhiked on Route 66 to Hollywood hoping to find fame ‘‘as a singer or actor, anything but real work’’.

After three years making little headway he returned to Britain where he secured a brief appearance in the film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, singing the Adam Faith hit What Do You Want? In 1961 he was engaged as an understudy to Albert Finney in John Osborne’s play Luther

at the Royal Court and thought he was on his way. In fact, it ended his ambition to act. After watching Finney rehearse he was so struck by the gulf in their abilities that he ‘‘decided to give up in that minute’’.

His singing career also hit a brick wall but he found his niche as a songwriter after a music publisher introduced him to Reed, who was in need of a lyricist.

His biggest regret was that, despite several attempts, he never managed to write a blockbuster musical.

‘‘I’ve written so many pop songs and you hear them in lifts, you hear people singing them, and that’s wonderful,’’ he said. ‘‘But it would be so much more satisfying to be in a theatre, to see a boy and a girl fall in love, suffer with them and see them sing a goodbye song as they part. That must be the ultimate emotional experience.’’

‘‘I became sick with jealousy and a whole lot of pain.’’

Barry Mason on the end of his teenage fling with Delia, on whom the song Delilah was based.