Tom Jones bringing the best of both worlds for Hong Kong show
The veteran entertainer has found a critically acclaimed new direction in the past six years, but promises he won’t be neglecting that big back catalogue when he visits next month
What’s new pussycat? Well, quite a lot actually. Welsh singer and heartthrob Tom Jones has released three albums since he last played Hong Kong in 2010, which means his upcoming gig here next month will feature plenty of new material. And even some of his old hits have been given a new twist.
“I’ve done new arrangements on quite a few of the older hits like Delilah, which I did at the Queen’s diamond jubilee. I start off as a ballad and then got into tempo about halfway through. So it’ll be a good mixture of songs that people know me for and some of the newer things as well,” Jones says by phone from Australia, where he is on tour.
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The new albums are the result of a very successful collaboration with English producer Ethan Johns. The way Jones tells the story, when Johns heard that he’d just signed with Island Records, he asked the record label to set up a meeting.
“Ethan said he felt there were things in my voice that he felt hadn’t been explored yet, because most of the hits that I’ve had from the 1960s have always had pretty big arrangements on them. He said, ‘I would like to just get back to how it was when you started in Wales,’” says the 75-year-old.
In the late 1950s, Jones was in his late teens and had recently married his childhood sweetheart, Linda, who is a year younger than him, and they had a young son, Mark. He was playing Welsh dance halls, pubs and clubs and doing a lot of blues, rhythm and blues, gospel, country and 1950s rock ’n’ roll.
That all changed when he left for London aged 24. He made it big fast and within a year had a No 1 hit with It’s Not Unusual. Two years later came his next monster hit, What’s New Pussycat?, the theme song for a Woody Allen film.