TOM JONES: THE DECCA YEARS AND BEYOND | FEATURE
Off the back of a newly released boxset containing a decade of the priapic Pontypriddian’s golden-era works, David Nobakht offers an overview of Tom Jones’ rollercoaster career.
Picture the scene: somewhere in the middle of America during the early 1980s, in the dressing room of a suburban “drive-up dinner theatre” where at shows the seated audience eat their chicken and tap their feet, sits Tom Jones, wearing what he describes as a “spangled bolero jacket” and belt buckle the size of a “manhole cover”. Tom Jones, who can sing soul, gospel and blues from the heart, but can’t quite shake off that Vegas-conquering Delilah-singing sex-god perception that stalks him at every corner.
Waiting in a windowless room for showtime, surrounded by Formica surfaces with bland food wrapped in clingfilm, Jones senses a feeling of déjà vu: this is one of the hundred-and-something sold-out shows he will do this year alone, similar settings night after night. He looks down at his Cuban-heeled boots and wonders how the hell he ended up in this scenario – and will he ever be allowed to just be the artist he just wants to be?
If It’s Not Unusual had been handed over to Sandie Shaw to sing, as originally intended, in the early 1960s, the Tom Jones story might be a different one. The young man who would later go by Sir Thomas Woodward OBE struck a deal with Decca in 1964: four 45s initially, to see how things go. While debut single Chills And Fever was popular overseas, it received a lukewarm response in the UK. Subsequently, Jones’ manager Gordon Mills and his songwriting partner Les Reed, a member of the John Barry Seven, got the Welshman to demo It’s Not Unusual for the already-established Shaw. After hearing how powerful his version of the song was, Jones stood his ground, and it became his second single and transatlantic hit.
The wheels were now fully in motion for this coal miner’s son, who avoided having to follow in his father’s footsteps through childhood illness and honed his pipes and hips performing in Pontypridd working men’s clubs: crowds who could spot chancers a mile off, venues where you needed to be able to sing to gain approval.
Decca Records have just released a boxset of Jones’ output for them, The Complete Decca Albums 1965-1975. Fifteen of them, to be precise, with two further CDs comprising non-LP singles, it retails at £60. One selling point in its favour is that, much like the Beatles and Rolling Stones, there’s a case to be made for Jones having many album tracks superior to their attendant singles.
First out of the Decca box is 1965’s debut album, Along Came Jones: soul with a bold, capitalised S from opening number I’ve Got A Heart onwards. What’s New Pussycat? followed in the same year; its title track is one of his best known, of course, but by no means as good as With These Hands from the same album. A-Tom-ic Jones, from 1966, offers further proof of the vocalist’s soul credentials with the mighty I’ll Never Let You Go and In A Woman’s Eyes. He could nail other people’s material, too: 1967 album 13 Smash Hits includes Jones’ version of Beatles hit Yesterday, Wilson Pickett’s Don’t Fight It and Lonnie Donegan’s I’ll Never Fall In Love Again, all fine interpretations.
On his late 1960s and early 70s TV series This Is Tom Jones, Pickett, Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder were invited onto his show by Jones himself to sing with him, while Otis Redding was a fan of his debut album – telling the Ponty boy “You are the best soul singer in the world!” according to a recent interview Jones gave to Record Collector’s Chris Roberts. The Body And Soul Of Tom Jones, an album from 1973, is a real treat in this vein, including a killer version of (If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want To Be Right by the Stax songwriting team of Homer Banks, Carl Hampton and Raymond Jackson.
Ex-Motown singer and producer Johnny Bristol produced Jones’ final Decca album, Memories Don’t Leave Like People Do: released in 1975, and a more than welcome inclusion in this set. It tops off an overall picture confirming Tom Jones as a significantly more serious artist than he’s sometimes given credit for: as elevated beyond Delilah as Stevie Wonder’s catalogue is in relation to Happy Birthday.
Throughout the 1980s, Jones was marketed as a kind of country music singer. He could still pull a crowd in America, but this was becoming confusing to both his audience and himself. In his autobiography Over The Top And Back (Penguin), Jones recalls a punter ringing a box office. “This Tom Jones show you’re advertising: is that Tom Jones the pop singer or is it that other guy, the country act?”
By the close of the decade, though, he took hold of the reins and recorded A Boy From Nowhere, which was soon followed by his Art Of Noise collaboration, a cover of Prince’s Kiss. Though a hit in multiple territories, Jones’ reaction to the proposed video is instructive: initially shown in a tuxedo against a Vegas backdrop, he insisted on some visual changes, commenting in his autobiography, “I’m still getting Caesars Palace hung round my neck like a giant glittering albatross.” Efforts to leave that albatross for dust were equally evident in his performance at 1992’s Glastonbury – the introduction of the now-established ‘oldies’ slot on the Sunday of the festival. Instead of a mere family-friendly run-through of Delilah, Green, Green Grass Of Home et al, revellers got a blistering set of soul numbers including a tremendous version of Otis Redding’s I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.
Come early 1996, Jones is in a New York studio with renowned Cardiffian session bassist Pino Palladino, who had approached him about making a soul/R&B album. There are more heavyweights on board: Mavis Staples, Bernie Worrell from Parliament on keyboards, guitarists Cornell Dupree and Waddy Wachtel, and The Memphis Horns. None of which impress the singer’s record company enough to actually release it, the sessions dismissed as “too authentic”, and the album remains in a vault somewhere. Instead, we got the Reload album, a massive late-90s hit with guest spots from Van Morrison, Robbie Williams, Portishead, James Dean Bradfield and Stereophonics to name a few, and 2002’s Wyclef Jean collab Mr Jones.
Seven years later, producer Ethan Johns – son of Glyn Johns, who had recorded the Beatles, The Who and the Rolling Stones – approached Jones about “working up” some blues and gospel songs. As when Rick Rubin approached Johnny Cash for the initial American Recordings album, Johns was keen to emphasise the soul and emotion in this particular voice, rather than trying to mould Jones into a momentary trend or chase a commercial quick fix.
Praise & Blame, emerging from these sessions and released in 2010, was Tom Jones’ most comprehensive slaying of his glittering albatross. Tellingly, it doesn’t feature his face on the cover, but in the inside booklet instead: designers Studio Fury fusing together photographs of desolate Welsh and American landscapes to create the artwork. A thrilling suite of gospel and blues belters, Jones’ version of John Lee Hooker’s Burning Hell, Bob Dylan’s What Good Am I? and Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s Strange Things are all outstanding, as are the four songs that Jones and Johns wrote together. The most acclaimed album of Jones’ career, one fans of Soulsavers or Nick Cave could like, Praise & Blame is hailed as life-changing by Jones in his autobiography. “The reaction was beyond anyone’s hope or expectations. I was finally freed up to do the stuff I was born to do.”
Jones and Johns reconvened for 2012’s Spirit In The Room and 2015’s Long Lost Suitcase, while re-workings of Frankie Lane’s Jezebel and Howlin’ Wolf’s Evil, recorded with Jack White, were released as a 7” on White’s Third Man label, again in 2012. And the singer Third Man call “Sir Tom” has recently been back working with Ethan Johns: Surrounded By Time, Jones’ forthcoming album, is due to drop in April, with Talking Reality Television Blues its stunning first taste.
“If you’re lucky enough and you stick around long enough, you eventually get the chance to sound like yourself,” wrote Tom Jones in Over The Top And Back. He’s proof of that statement.
Tom Jones’ The Complete Decca Albums 1965-1975 can be purchased here.
words DAVID NOBAKHT