Tom Jones has been thinking about his legacy. He never used to, he says, but at 81, he now gives plenty of consideration to how he will be remembered.
It is why a decade ago he began a very deliberate move away from the exaggerated, cartoon version of his persona – the razzle-dazzle Vegas heartthrob, all hair dye and gyrating hips – into something of more substance.
“You don’t realise what’s happened to you over the years, what image gets formed” Jones says while stifling a hearty laugh. “Then all of a sudden, I’m thinking my God, what have I become?
“When I’d see someone doing an impression of me, I’d think, Jesus, I mean – is that it?” he says, mock-outraged. “So you do think about these things as you get older. You don’t want to leave this world just with that.”
This realisation triggered an artistic shake-up few saw coming. Jones’s latest album Surrounded By Time, released in April, was his fourth since 2010 with producer Ethan Johns. The pair’s collaboration has recast Jones as a refined interpreter of emotionally resonant, stripped-back gospel, blues and contemporary leftfield songs: think Johnny Cash’s late-life work with Rick Rubin.
It has drawn some of the best reviews of his 55-year career, and proved a hit with his audience. Surrounded By Time – re-released today as an extended “Hourglass Edition” with two new tracks and four live songs recorded at Shepherd’s Bush Empire – was his first chart-topper since 1999’s four million-selling Reload, making him the oldest male artist ever to reach the top of the album chart with a non-greatest-hits record.
“I’m realising how important it is when you put something on record – that it’s going to live for ever,” he says. “So you better make sure you don’t go taking frivolous chances with things.”
In the past, Jones never gave too much thought to any kind of
message conveyed in his songs, giving the example of his 1965 Burt Bacharach-written hit “What’s New Pussycat?”, a “novelty song” that he initially wasn’t keen on. “When I was a young man, I just wanted to get songs that I could sing,” he says – placing huge emphasis on the word “sing” – “I’m more serious now about what I record”.
It is to Jones’s credit that he refuses to rest on his laurels. He has sold more than 100 million records, powered by a phenomenal voice that was his ticket out of his home of Pontypridd, a mining town in South Wales. He has won Brit, Golden Globe and Grammy awards, had the admiration of everyone from Elvis to Otis Redding, and boasts a back catalogue of standards – “Delilah”, “It’s Not Unusual”, “Green Green Grass of Home” – that are part of the fabric of British life. Indeed, he was knighted in 2006.
Jones is on video call today from his London flat, stylishly dressed in a dark-blue jacket and cravat. He retains his star lustre, but now carries himself with a wise elder statesman gravitas (his stint as sage vocal judge on The Voice has certainly helped to forge that impression).
Despite his jovial nature today, a sense of seriousness pervades. The covers on Surrounded By Time were curated to document his current feelings. “I’ve been in the business a long time but I’ve never done that before – got together songs that reflect my life”.
It adds more gravity to Bobby Cole’s “I’m Growing Old” and, on the new deluxe edition of the album, Katell Keineg’s “One Hell of a Life”, as Jones starts to face up to advancing age. Together with the enhanced weight and feeling of his voice – “older but the same” is how Jones describes it – there is an inescapable sense of a long goodbye under way.
“You have to realise, how long do I have?” he says, sounding surprisingly chipper about it. “You can’t push it away. I’m not going to live for ever.”
The death of his wife of 59 years, Linda, from lung cancer in April 2016 has certainly put mortality into sharp focus. The album’s opening track, a skeletal version of Bernice Johnson Reagon’s “I Won’t Crumble With You If You Fall”, recalls a conversation Jones had with Linda on her deathbed.
“I didn’t know if I was going to carry on [singing],” he says. “But she told me that I had to. And she told me not to fall, not to crumble. When I heard that song, I thought, ‘Oh my God, it’s like the last two weeks that I had with my wife.’ I think she would have wanted me to do that song.”
While the mechanics of their marriage were regularly subject to tabloid scrutiny – Jones’s infidelity was an open secret, alluded to on his version of Bob Dylan’s “One More Cup of Coffee” – he credits Linda as a huge influence on his career. It was difficult when, for the first time in his life, he was unable to seek her counsel on his new songs. “She was always very honest. She’d ask, ‘What is this? Who are you aiming at with this? Why did you do this?’” He starts to laugh. “Nine times out of 10, she was right.”
After Linda died, Jones relocated from Los Angeles, where he had lived for more than 40 years, to London. It has been a period of readjustment. “When a loved one dies, it’s devastating, you feel lost,” he says. “Life’s been very different for me. But there’s got to be some redemption, something that you can learn from. Especially for the loved ones who are still alive. You’ve got to stay strong for everybody.”
Jones is not known for displaying this sort of vulnerability – he is very much of the manly working-class tradition reluctant to publicly express their feelings.
“It’s a different mindset,” he says of today’s young stars for whom oversharing and relatability are central to their brand. “I always wanted to keep my professional life separate to my private life. Do people really want to know what I have for breakfast? Apparently, they do these days.”
On his cover of “Pop Star”, Jones evokes his younger self, turning Cat Stevens’s sarcasm (“I’m going to be a pop star”) into a positive statement of intent. Does he still see himself as a one? He says the meaning has changed. “For me, a pop singer is a singer of popular songs. That could be rock or country. But if you’re a pop star now, it’s just poppy. There’s really nothing else there.”
That says a lot about where Jones sees himself at this stage of his life: an artist with purpose, and something to say. “I’m not ashamed of anything that I’ve done recording-wise in the past,” he says. “But time is getting shorter. I want to keep doing important things. And that’s for my legacy”.
Surrounded By Time (Hourglass Edition) is out now. Tom Jones tours the UK from Sunday
