Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Viagra? It’s not unusual..
Sex Bomb Tom Jones admits to a little assistance.. aged 80
AFTER a lifetime of women throwing their knickers at him, you would understand if Tom Jones felt the pressure of certain... expectations.
But the 80-year-old Sex Bomb singer and coach on The Voice is refreshingly realistic.
He told American comedian Marc Maron he gives his vocal chords “the Tom Jones push” to keep him sounding young.
But when the host cheekily replied: “How is everything else working with the pushing? All right?” Welshman Tom said:
“So far so good. There is always Viagra. A little help here and there is all right.”
Marc said: “There is no shame in that at 80. You gotta do what you gotta do.”
Tom responded: “Exactly.”
But age has not affected other parts of his life. Talking about his singing voice, he told Marc’s WTF podcast: “It is strange being 80 but my voice is still about 30 and that is a big thing, as with older singers you lose control.
“All you have got to do is push it harder. Maybe some old people can’t seem to get it. I feel very sorry for them. They don’t have the Tom Jones push.”
Recalling how women used to throw underwear at him, he said: “You have to use schtick and then it caught on and I was drowning in a sea of panties after a while.
“It backfired. I was in Vegas and someone threw a room key at me. I said ‘Whose is this’. This woman said, ‘Use it and you will find out’.”
Tom, whose album Surrounded by Time is out on Friday, also told how he was too scared to dabble with drugs back in the 1960s and 70s and stuck to drinking.
He said: “A lot of people got messed up. Eric Clapton says, ‘If you remember the 60s you weren’t there,’ but I don’t believe that. A lot of us came through it.”