14 minute read
31 Feature
from Cove magazine
YES, SIR
He may be 80, but Sir Tom Jones has still ‘got it’, as can be attested by his remarkable new album Surrounded by Time.
LEX MARTIN / THE INTERVIEW PEOPLE
AT THE BEGINNING of the interview, legendary singer Sir Tom Jones may seem overly calm, but this is not due to a lack of energy.
On the contrary, during our conversation the 80-year-old unfolds an intense look into his personal life and presents himself as a highly reflective thinker.
You seem quite brimming with energy.
Definitely. I can’t wait to get back on the road to sing some live shows … that’s the biggest drive for me.
I am escaping Covid, that’s the first thing, but secondly, I would love to go and sing to the people.
Without the people, what’s the point.
Your new album is titled Surrounded by Time. What is your attitude to time?
When you’re a child especially, you don’t think about time. Old age is a long way away as far as you are concerned.
The early part of my life went slower. I wanted to be an adult, I wanted to go drinking in the pub with my uncles and my father, I wanted to become a man. That seemed like a long time when I was in Wales.
Then when I got my first hit record, all of a sudden time started to speed up and I was having such a great time.
I figured out now that I am 80, how much time do I have left? How many more albums can I make?
Because I love to make new albums, and to go out and sing to the people.
But thank God, my voice is still there. Without that, it would not work.
Is there anything you still want to explore in life?
Not really. Nothing important because what I wanted to do was make music.
I wanted to sing to people, and I have been doing that.
Travelling has come into it because I have always been interested in geography, history. I like to travel to different countries to see and hear what the people are like.
I think the best way to do that is to go and sing. You are getting a feeling, I do anyway, of the people you are singing to.
God could not have given me a better gift than he did in order to sing and travel and see different people all over the world. >>
Aren’t you scared of singing songs like I’m Growing Old?
No … and I can tell you why.
I got that song in the 70s when I was in my 30s.
The man who wrote it was in Vegas at the same time and he came into my dressing room and said, ‘I got this song and I can hear you singing it in my mind’.
I loved the song, but I thought I can’t sing it yet, I’ll keep it because one day I’ll be old enough to sing it and now is the time.
So I have held onto it for a long time.
There is one line, one thing which I should have reversed.
‘Although I saved a lock of hair, I no longer dream about my wife’, which is completely wrong, because I dream about her every night but I don’t have a lock of her hair.
I should have changed those lyrics. I wished I had.
That one line is not true of me, because I always take on songs as if it is me.
Do you think we are just this one life and there is nothing beyond?
I was thinking about this last night.
Before I go to sleep, I think a lot as most people do, and I looked over my life and I thought: A lot of things that have happened to me cannot be coincidental.
I touched death. I had a stroke.
It was not quite that, but I started to feel a little strange.
I was close to a hospital in LA so they took me in and tested me out. If I had been anywhere else, who knows.
The same thing happened when I was in London. I had a clot in my arm.
I was wondering: What is wrong with my hand? It started to go numb.
We called emergency and they took me in right away.
They said, ‘there is a clot off your heart and it’s stuck right there and unless we release it, we may have to cut your arm off’.
But I was right there. If I had been on an airplane or something, going somewhere else – the timing.
All these things – why do these things happen to me at a certain time in my life?
My manager Gordon Mills. He was the one who saw me in a club and got my first hit record.
As he got older, he got ill but I kept him as a manager.
When he passed away, my son and my daughter-in-law took over, and all of a sudden, they injected some new life into me.
That’s why I recorded Kiss with the Art of Noise.
These things that have happened to me in my life, even though they were bad at the time, they turned into something good.
Are these coincidences or is there a master plan?
We’ve got to do the best we can with what God gives us, but I feel there is definitely a power that is keeping things together.
He smiled on me and first of all gave me a voice and then the ability to see it through.
There are a lot of people that can sing, but they don’t have that desire that I did.
And my wife, God bless her – we got married very young, teenagers – she was always very understanding.
She loved music as much as I do and she loved the fact that I was doing what I really wanted to do.
All these things, that have happened to me, they have made me a better person.
– Sir Tom Jones
Do you think love is the reason why you are here?
I think so. It was not just by accident that my wife was born around the corner from me. We went to school at the same time. We grew up together.
I don’t think there is a time on love – it just happens – but it should take you and hit you hard. That’s what I believe.
Some people don’t meet the right person, but with me, we got married when it hit us hard.
Was that the reason why you stayed together for so long?
Yes. She said: ‘Look, I know what you are going to do and you will have a lot of temptations. I don’t want to know but if somebody starts coming up to me or I read about things in the paper that you are not considering me first as number one, we can’t be together’. And I said: ‘You will always be number one’.
And that’s true. I was devastated when she passed away.
There’s another song on the album: I Won’t Crumble. – ‘I will do anything for you, everything possible, but I can’t fall with you.’ That resonated with me.
I did everything I could, but she had lung cancer. >>
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She was strong. I was falling apart, and she said ‘You can’t. You have to sing’.
And I said: ‘I don’t know if I will be able to. The words will stick in my throat’.
Honestly, I really thought that and she said: ‘Think of me and think of the good times. Let me put a smile on your face, not sadness in your heart. Look at the life we have had’.
She was the one.
If it was not for her, I don’t know what would have happened.
What keeps you from crumbling? Music?
Oh yes, and family. My son and my daughter-in- law and my two grandchildren.
That’s why I moved back to England from Los Angeles, because they live here.
My son especially gives me strength, because he was in the room when my wife was dying and she said ‘You two, you’ve got to mentor one another’.
I never heard her say that word before. ‘You’ve got to be together even more than before’.
He helped get me to sing again. He got these musicians around me and we quietly and slowly came to it.
We played Hampton Court, which is an outdoor venue just outside of London, and the audience all knew I was under pressure.
And again, people, they lifted me up.
You get these trials and tribulations. You get hurdles that you have to get over. But hopefully it will make you stronger rather than destroy you.
And so far, thank God, it has with me.
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Isn’t it a bit ironic that the public may have a different idea of you?
Well, yeah.
When you perform on stage, you are portraying yourself in a certain way, not really knowing sometimes what effect it has on people.
They see you in a way, and sometimes it goes against what you are trying to do vocally because of the way you are presenting yourself on stage.
So people go: ‘Oh yeah, Tom Jones, tight pants, open neck shirt, people throw things at him – that’s him’.
But wait a minute – why was I there to begin with? What got me out on the stage? My voice.
Another thing with age, you are taken more seriously.
People now listen to these songs and they resonate. They are more believable when you are older.
And I am not on stage jumping all over the place. I concentrate more now on the way I sing as opposed to the way I move.
These songs that I am doing on this album now, people are listening.
This is why I did the spoken songs, Oh Mother Earth, and Talking TV Blues.
When you speak the words, they have more meaning and people listen – sometimes. There must still be a lot of women that lust after you. Are they still throwing panties?
Thank God, no. That went with my time.
Now that I am older, hopefully, that sexy interpretation is levelled up.
– Sir Tom Jones
You can’t be up there saying ‘I am Mr. Macho’. I am not … some young fellow can wipe the bloody floor with me.
You’ve got to understand different parts of your life and live accordingly.
I am certainly enjoying myself now. I am feeling different than when I was young, but I am enjoying it, and thank God I am still alive.
I want to live as long as I possibly can. Immortality would be a wonderful thing but you can’t live forever so you accept it.
I am getting as much out of my life as possible and hopefully I have done what God intended.
What has been one of the most exciting experiences that springs to mind?
The thing that I never counted on at all was being knighted by the Queen.
When I was a child, I thought: ‘I want to be a professional singer, I want to sell records. I want to sing to loads of people. I want to be able to get my talent across so I don’t have to go and do a job in order to survive. If I can make a living out of singing, I will be the happiest person in the world’ – which I am.
But you don’t think about being knighted.
I still look at my grandfather who died in WWI. He was a Company Sergeant Major, so we have his medals and a picture of him in a frame.
I always thought: ‘I have never been in the military – I won’t be able to have medals like him’.
But my knighthood, it comes with a medal, and I look at my grandfather’s pictures now and I go ‘Grandpa, I wish you could see me now. That your grandson is a knight of the realm’.
I never saw it coming. When I was a kid, they were not knighting entertainers. It’s a wonderful thing.
That is the thing I am most proud of that I didn’t foresee at all.
Again, it’s because of showbusiness that I got that medal.
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