‘I believed the voice would overpower everything and come through no matter what’
The Western Mail is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year, so we thought it was high time to revisit the moment when reporter David Owens came face to face (bearing gifts of Brains beer and Welsh cakes) with Sir Tom Jones. From a TB-ridden 12-year-old in Pontypridd, the Voice of the Valleys has become synonymous with Welsh identity and national pride, rising up from the pub scene to become a bona fide singing legend. This frank and funny interview from our 2010 archive catches him recovering from celebrating a significant milestone of his own... his 70th birthday
THE clinking of bottles in a cooler bag elicits a curious glance from one of our greatest living Welshmen.
However, the quizzical response soon gives way to a beaming smile when Sir Tom Jones realises that contained within are six chilled bottles of his favourite Brains beer – and two packets of Welsh cakes, just for good measure.
It’s only fitting that if you’re granted an audience with rock royalty, you take presents from his loyal subjects – because let’s face it, the man born Thomas John Woodward on June 7, 1940, at 57, Kingsland Terrace, Pontypridd, is the closest thing we have to a monarch.
If Wales were ever to declare independence, we’d surely install elder statesman Sir Tom as our beloved leader, drape him in ermine and jewels and crown him – King Thomas The First. Possibly.
“Oh great,” he laughs, rolling his Rs in that inimitable deep-as-a-mineshaft Valleys lilt, as his eyes widen on spying the contents of the cooler bag. “Thank you very much, that’s very kind.”
He picks up the Welsh cakes. “And where are these from?” he asks inspecting the packet which has a regal looking emblem emblazoned upon it.
“I’m not sure”, I reply innocently, omitting to inform the singing superstar that they’re actually from the local Spar.
The superstar, who celebrated his 70th birthday last month, promises he’ll imbibe the refreshing bottled gifts later.
“I shouldn’t have one while I’m working, I’ll stick with the water for the minute,” he says, ever the professional. “But I’ll definitely have a couple tonight.”
If I’m honest I’m disappointed. It
would be a story to tell the boys that I shared a beer with Tom Jones .
As it happens I shouldn’t have worried, the interview rattles along apace as the singing legend banters with all the matey bonhomie of someone holding court with the lads in a Pontypridd pub.
There’s a liberal sprinkling of swearing and much throaty laughter that suggests that although he’s been away from Wales for an age, you can take the boy out of Ponty, but you evidently can’t take Ponty out of the boy.
Sir Tom, apart from being one of the world’s most famous and enduring stars of course, is also a self-confessed connoisseur of British beers – Cardiff-based brewery Brains produces his favourite tipples. It also appears that when it comes to gifting The Voice bottles of beer, I’m in esteemed company.
“I was taping the Jonathan Ross show last night and he left some bottles of Brains in my room,” recalls a fit, tanned and astonishingly healthy looking Sir Tom, lolling back in a comfortable armchair.
“The show takes a long time to tape and I was sitting around for a while. It was hot in there too, the bloody BBC had no air conditioning, so I had a Brains before I went on, I was very relaxed.”
Jones closed the host’s penultimate chatshow for the BBC with a barnstorming White Stripes-infused version of John Lee Hooker’s Burning Hell – from his album Praise And Blame – which demonstrated the startling howl of his otherworldly voice. It’s an instrument which is given full reign on the album, a collection of blues, gospel and country songs that is raw, in spirit, energy and intensity.
“I’d know these songs for years, but sometimes you don’t get the opportunity to do a specialised album, most record companies want radio-friendly pop material,” says Jones, sketching an outline of Praise & Blame’s conception. “That’s how it’s gone throughout my career, but the opportunity came from Island Records wanting me to do a Christmas album with hymns and carols, and I thought now maybe would be the time I could get the point across about doing some gospel music.”
So it came to pass that the stirring confessional arrived blinking into the sunlight and in doing so should finally consign for good the oft hackneyed portrayal of the singer as the crotch-thrusting, tight-trousered, libidinous lothario of yore.
It’s a musical change of pace that is as startling as it is welcome. Now Tom Jones – the 2010 model – has ironically come full circle back to the sounds that gave him his first musical awakening.
“I was first exposed to gospel and blues music when I was a kid listening to the radio in Ponty,” he remembers. “A lot of my cousins are singers who sang in choirs, but they weren’t affected by the blues, gospel and rock ’n’ roll like I was.
“I remember singing The Lord’s Prayer in school assembly. I sang it on my own, and the teacher said, ‘Why are you singing it like a negro spiritual?’
“I wasn’t aware I was. I thought that’s the way the song should sound. No matter what I sang, I was always bluesing something up – it always came out like that, with the phrasing. I can only think it must have been from the records I heard on the radio that was sticking.”
Hooking up with Kings Of Leon producer Ethan Johns, Praise & Blame was recorded at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in the tiny village of Box in Wiltshire. It coaxed the most exhilarating performances out of the man, who believes that the site of the recording location was a signal from above.
“Box is where my grandmother used to live,” the singer reveals. “She was a Baptist and she’d have really appreciated what we were doing. I felt it was an early sign, this record was meant to be.”
He waxes lyrical about Ethan Johns’ vision for the album’s recording – in a stripped bare studio setting.
“It was exactly what I wanted and needed to do,” Jones enthuses, recalling the creative experience, which you can sense has had a profound effect on him.
“We recorded it live as a band. We wanted to go back to basics, go back to the source. It was just me singing live with a rhythm section, no gimmicks, no overdubbing, no complicated horn and string arrangements, just get the song down in an entire take, capture the meaning of the song, capture the moment right there.
“Playing live in the studio with a band, singing out to everyone in the room, took me back to playing the clubs with The Senators ( Jones ’ first outfit) when I started out.
“When I was making records for Decca in the ’60s, I’d go into the studio and the songs would already have been arranged for you and you’d have to fit into those arrangements for better or worse. But here we were all playing off one another and that really comes across in the record. It was amazing.
“I think my voice has got more depth to it as I’ve got older and these songs show it off better. People know I’ve done so many things, they know I’ve done Sex Bomb, or Delilah or whatever. That part I’ve done.
“Not that I won’t do it again, there might be another Sex Bomb out there, you never know,” he grins. “I’m not ruling it out. I think with these songs, if I tried to do them at a younger age they wouldn’t have been as real. The songs are reflective. In order for them to sound right and to feel right you have to have lived awhile.”
Anyone who listens to Praise & Blame will have to concur. This album manages the incredible feat of pushing the singer’s always remarkable voice to hitherto uncharted territories.
By his side as we speak are his trusty companion – Vocalzone – the little black throat pastilles and a Welsh-created concoction that he chews throughout our conservation and which Jones credits for helping keep his steel-girdered vocal chords in pristine condition throughout a life of song.
“I’ve been using these things since the ’60s,” he says. “An old singer in the Welsh clubs told me about them.
“The company sent me a letter last year saying did I know it was invented by a 19th century Welsh ear, nose and throat doctor, William Lloyd. He had a practice in London but he came from West Wales.
“Apparently, he made them for (Enrico) Caruso (then the biggest star on the planet). When I first bought these things, they used to come in a tin and they had on there ‘made for one man – Caruso’.
“They send me free boxes anyway, so that’s always handy.”
The patriotic Welshman would have been choking on his pastilles when he learnt about the furore that blew up over Praise & Blame, courtesy of an apparently leaked email from Island Records vice-president David Sharpe, which slated the album as “a sick joke”.
Unsurprisingly, Jones was furious when he learnt of the label boss’ grievance.
“I thought to myself, people are going to read this and think the record company doesn’t like it or that I’ve made a mistake.
“It’s not coming from the creative people in the record company, because they’re backing it all the way, I mean they’re thrilled with it, so I don’t understand it.
“Hopefully, if there’s any good that comes out of it, it’s that people will wonder about (the new album). But it isn’t the way I’d handle it by going and making a stupid statement. That’s not going to help it.
“They’ve apologised, they can’t apologise enough,” he adds.
“Let’s be honest, no record company is going to let you go away and record something without hearing things that you are doing.
“I mean, the first two songs they wanted to hear. Producer Ethan Johns said, ‘OK let them hear what we’ve done so far’, and they loved it.”
As an album, Praise & Blame follows the universal journey of a man through the rites of passage, as he reflects on his life.
“The songs that we were looking for had to be real songs that I could sing with conviction,” says Jones.
“They had to deal with matters of the spirit, they had to connect right to me and hopefully to others, and they had to have a message.
“Take ‘If I Give My Soul’ (originally recorded by American country singer Billy Joe Shaver). I could have gone down that road, it’s about a man who messed up. He was singing with the devil’s band and he lost his wife and son through it.
“So I can put myself into that situation – even though it didn’t happen to me, I can understand it, because it’s about someone who is a singer or
a musician. It resonated with me.” I
wondered, then, did the album’s questioning theme prompt any fears over his own mortality. Did he ever think this could soon be over?
“No, I don’t tend to think about it,” he says. “I mean, I know my time is getting shorter because of my age, but how short it is I don’t know. Hopefully I’d like to hit 100 if I could.”
Still singing? “Oh yeah, definitely. It’s just time goes so quick. When I think about 20 years ago, it doesn’t seem that long ago to me. But 20 years from now I’ll be 90.”
Tom’s eyes widen and his voice leaps to a level just beyond incredulous at the thought. “Time races so quickly, but I certainly don’t feel my age.”
Jones is candid enough to reveal that if he never made another record, he realises that his musical legacy will live on.
“I thought that when I made It’s Not Unusual,” he admits. “I thought thank God, I’ve finally got my voice on record, because people used to tell me about singers in Wales, ‘Aww, you should have heard the way this fella sang this, he was incredible’.
“Jesus Christ, there’s no reference to it, you can’t find out, so once I got that record, I thought to myself now if somebody wants to find out what I sounded like, then there it is.
“So I don’t know how many hit records I’m going to get and for how long, but that thought of leaving something behind was there right from day one, as soon as I released my first record.”
To have such consistently enduring appeal and popularity throughout almost 50 years in music must rank him amongst the greatest musical entertainers of all time – a superstar bracket shared by the likes of The Beatles, Elvis and Michael Jackson.
“Well yeah, I suppose,” he muses modestly. “I’ve been around, I’ve had a lot of success, but it’s a great feeling to be appreciated for something that you love to do, that I would do anyway.”
He says he has few regrets. “All in all it’s been great. However, if I have one regret it’s that I didn’t concentrate enough on recording in the ’70s. I was doing a lot of live shows and I was playing arenas in the States, but I should have taken more time to search out the right songs and the right producers, not just wait until it happened.”
That ’70s impasse was overcome when his son Mark Woodward took control of management duties, keen to ditch dad’s dated Medallion Man tag, while reinventing his father as a serious artist at the onset of the ’80s, thanks to his collaboration with The Art Of Noise on a version of the Prince hit Kiss.
“He said, ‘You can’t expect people to not take you as a sex symbol if you wear pants that look like they’re
sprayed on’,” laughs Jones. “With the underwear, he said, ‘Don’t pick it up and do all that nonsense with it because people will judge you on that’, which I’d never thought about.
“I believed the voice would overpower everything and come through no matter what. Mark made me aware of these things.”
Looking forward to new challenges heading into his 71st year, celebrations for the star’s birthday last month were tainted with sadness on discovering it was the same day that former Sterephonics’ drummer Stuart Cable was found dead at his home in Cwmaman, in the Cynon Valley.
“Oh yeah, I was so shocked,” admits the singer, after I’ve asked if he was taken aback at news of Cable’s death. “When I worked with the Stereophonics on Mama Told Me Not To Come (from 1998’s multi-million selling Reload album), we all became close.
“I did Stuart’s TV show up at The Pop Factory in Porth a couple of years ago. He was a really genuine bloke – very honest and funny.
“He had that great Welsh humour which made him who he was.
“He used to take me off and he thought we looked alike you know. He was a great fella and it’s such a shame.”
As the interview winds to a close and the PR signals my time in the company of the living legend is at an end, Sir Tom kindly agrees to pose for a photo with me. If I’m being honest, I feel dwarfed in his presence. It’s akin to being stood in the shadow of a primeval sun god.
Having your picture taken next to a 70-year-old-man who is not only fitter, slimmer and more handsome than you is quite a chastening experience for a 41-year-old.
It’s why I leave the London hotel immediately wanting to head for Harley Street to book myself in for liposuction, a spray tan and new teeth. Unfortunately, as my salary wouldn’t possibly stretch to such cosmetic luxuries, it’s back to the gym for me.
And if they ask me the reasons for my newly dedicated health kick... I’ll just tell them that Sir Tom Jones sent me.