FEATURE: Tom Jones Interview

He’s just turned 70, but Tom Jones isn’t about to call time on his career just yet. Instead, judging by his latest album, Praise & Blame - a spirited collection of gospel, rock, blues and soul - he could be with us a lot longer.

How would you feel if you caught your grandad in the act, shamelessly shaking his arse and strutting around, attempting to serenade countless, unknown women with a testosterone-fuelled medley of soul, blues and gospel? Chances are you’d be so shocked you’d scurry away in embarrassment, maybe disown him, or even resort to therapy. Unless of course your gramps happened to be Tom Jones, the 70 year old, self-appointed ‘Sex Bomb’ who’s still happily showing off what he’s got.

“I just love to sing, love performing, love making records and love touring - the whole thing. It’s my life, it’s my lifeblood,” shrugs Jones, smiling mischievously. “Maybe that is unusual for someone my age because, apart from Mick Jagger or Cliff Richard, I guess there aren’t many singers around, like us, still doing it?”

That’s because most septuagenarians, after a lifetime of toil, are usually putting their feet up, pottering around the garden, pampering the grandkids or playing a round of golf. Not Jones though; he’s still full of it and raring to go, carrying on like a horny teenager with an overactive thyroid, rather than a grandee retiree.

“My friends often ask, ‘How do you feel, doing what you do, now you’re getting older?’ One of them, Jimmy Tarbuck, a comedian who’s the same age as me, said the other day, ‘It’s a bastard getting old, isn’t it?’ I just replied, ‘I wouldn’t know Jim,’ because I really don’t feel old. You know what I mean? So, it’s one of those things,” he smiles.

“Really, I’m just thrilled to still be here and have the tools - the voice, which thank god is still powerful. That’s all I really think about, in terms of my age.”

Jones has always had the tools - his overt sexuality, the big, booming baritone and a colossal ego - to enliven his performances and excite the ladies, hence the tsunami of knickers and hotel keys flooding the stage when he sings. In fact, his charisma - and notoriety - was obvious from the outset, when his debut single ‘Chills And Fever’ became a hit in New Zealand and Australia, despite flopping back in Britain.

“When I did my first tour to Australia and New Zealand, in January 1966, we actually had to relearn ‘Chills And Fever’ because it hadn’t done very well in Britain, so the band had never played it live before,” recalls Jones, laughing. “But I insisted we perform it, because it had been so big down there.

Read the whole article by Des Sampson plus loads more in the August/September 2010 issue of Rip It Up Magazine.