An Odd Word On Latitude; A TJ Interview; “P & B” Reviews, With The First From A Major US Newspaper; LIsten To Clips From The Entire CD; No Killers?
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010From a Latitude Festival rundown, posted onBeehivecity.com is the strange bit by Amy West but I guess it proves the old saw, “All’s well that ends well.”
Tom Jones kicked started Sunday’s schedule with a secret set to a half-empty stage. He was typically cheeky but borderline creepy when banging on about his sexy young backing singers being sisters. He then waved to his son off-stage, saying they’re often mistaken for brothers because he was only 16 when conceived, then adding “that ’s Wales for you”. Singing only from his new album out next Monday, Tom received a mixed reception and replied “yeah later” on hearing “Sex Bomb” repeatedly yelled at him. Although I knew none of the songs, I was moved to tears by the sincerity in his deep rich vibrato. Johnny Cash fans eat your heart out.
From DrownedinSound.com, is a new interview below. (Charles Bukowski, mentioned several times, was an American writer who lived in LA. Time called him the “laureate of American lowlife.” He wrote a poem called Who In the Hell Is Tom Jones? You can google it but it’s rather unpleasant.
By Kevin Perry/July 20, 2010, drownedinsound.com
‘Who in the hell is Tom Jones?’ spat Charles Bukowski. It’s a good question. The Tom Jones he wrote about in Hollywood is a slick Vegas showman, “his shirt is open and the black hairs on his chest show. The hairs are sweating.” The Tom Jones I meet is a white-haired Welshman about to release an album of blues and gospel so out of character that the vice-president of his own record label called it a “sick joke”. So just who in the hell does Tom Jones think he is?
He was billed alongside The Beatles and The Stones, partied with Elvis and Sinatra and dueted with everyone from Janis Joplin to Ray Charles, but in the popular imagination he’s festooned with knickers, his career built on sex appeal. Now, on Praise & Blame, he’s traded sex for death. There is a lot of mortality on Praise & Blame, and a lot of God. What’s happening here, Mr Jones? He looks at me and turns his palms towards me. “Time’s getting shorter,” he says.
“Now that I’m seventy, I know I haven’t got as much time left as I did when I was thirty, or forty, or fifty, or sixty. I still want to record as much as I can, but when you don’t have that much time left you think about it more.” Age has given him a sense of urgency, I suggest. “Exactly! You think, let’s knuckle down and let’s do some stuff that I want to do.”
It turns out that what Tom Jones wants to do is cover Bob Dylan and John Lee Hooker and a host of standards drawn from the deep well of the American South. “I’d heard a lot of them before, from different artists. I knew them. Run On, I knew the Elvis Presley version. We tried it in the same key as he did it in, but I sounded too much like him. I’m not going to play it if we’re not doing anything differently, so we put it in a higher key.”
For the rest of this interview, the NY Daily News review, clips from every track on P & B and a word on the alleged collaboration with The Killers, click here to (more…)



















