Tom Jones - the Life (22 page)

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 his 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
.

Tom would appear to have had at least a dozen greatest hits releases in some form or other. BBC Online said of the new collection, ‘Slap on some Brut, put some chicken in the basket and prepare to throw your best new knickers; this really is the definitive collection from a much-loved legend.’

Tom’s next original project was one dreamed up by a couple of mates over a late-night bottle of champagne. He had met the pianist and band leader Jools Holland at the latter’s annual BBC Hootenanny in 1998 and they became great friends. When they went out for dinner after recording, they discovered they shared a love of old blues music. Tom started singing at the dinner table, which Jools loved. He realised they would have the chemistry to make an album together. He enthused, ‘When Tom sings, it’s like having a nuclear reactor at the end of the piano.’

The result was an album called, uninspiringly,
Tom Jones & Jools Holland
. It was like one big joyous jam at the end of a party. A couple of new tracks written by them mingled with classics from Count Basie and Willie Dixon. They closed with a version of the Jerry Lee Lewis song ‘End of the Road’, which Tom played to his hero. Jerry Lee was impressed by Jools’ playing. He said it was ‘so beautiful it could make a steel bow cry’.