The late-career melancholic mode is something we expect from artists with a reflective bent such as Frank Sinatra,Leonard Cohen,David Bowie,Johnny Cash,Bob Dylan or Willie Nelson – not a man still belting outSex Bomb in his 80s and a famed underwear magnet.
Tom Jones took Kings Park audiences on a surprisingly melancholic turn on Wednesday night.Duncan Barnes
Yet this is exactly what Tom Jones gave us on the first concert of his Australian tour,an odd but ultimately exhilarating mix of the old-school hip-swivelling Las Vegas-ready power pop and a deep dive into ageing,loss,despair and death that revealed a whole other side to the musical personality of the Welsh coal miner’s son.
Indeed,these songs,most of which came from his celebrated recent albumSurrounded By Time,were not hidden in the set list as is so often done by legacy artists who like to change things up by slipping in recent material between the hits.
They were the beating heart of Jones’ new show (if anything the cherished classics felt as though they were slipped into the line-up to prevent a riot),and appropriate for an artist and a man looking back on a grand life nearing the final curtain.
Instead of kicking off withHelp Yourself,Thunderball orMamma Told Me Not to Come or one of his lesser hits,Jones gave us Bobby Cole’s deeply sadI’m Growing Old and then moved onto Bob Dylan’s gloomyNot Dark Yet (“There’s not even room enough to be anywhere/It’s not dark yet,but it’s getting there”).
After those two bleak little numbers you could hear the rustle of knickers being slipped back into bags and the sea of disappointed Boomer women elbowing their partners to pour them another wine.
So it was not surprising that when Jones announced he would now take us back to the beginning of his career,there was an audible sigh of relief followed by cheers with the familiar opening bars of his first hitIt’s Not Unusual,albeit done in a stripped-back Caribbean style befitting of Jones’ lean-and-mean brassless current band.
This was followed up byWhat’s New Pussycat?,which was written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David for the 1965 Woody Allen movie of the same name. It had the audience happily singing along,as did.
While some artists have retired songs no longer deemed appropriate,such as the Rolling Stones laying rest toBrown Sugar,Jones leaned intoDelilah and the audience adored him for it.
Yet even when Jones went back in time,he chose numbers that he didn’t record back then but always loved,such as Michel Legrand’sWindmills of Your Mind and an early quirky Cat Stevens songPop Star,another sign that he doesn’t want to rest on his laurels but find new musical nooks and crannies to explore.
While Jones certainly has a remarkable power in his voice for a singer who turns 84 in June – which he announced with wonderfully cheeky grin – through the early part of the show he didn’t quite have the control and cut-through we expect of one of the great pop voices of our age (Elvis’ only rival among pop vocalists in my opinion).
Then came the song that capped his resurgence in the 1990s,the dance classicSex Bomb,which Jones and his marvellously tight band slowed down and revelled in,revealing it to be a thumping R’n’B rocker. The Voice rose to the occasion as Jones became the frontman of a blues outfit that could have challenged The Rolling Stones in the mid-60s.
With his pipes loosened and moistened,Jones ripped through the rest of the set list with power,verve and the old finesse,pushing into the outer reaches of his range and as he jumped between the golden oldies (Green,Green Grass of Home),his sassy contemporary covers (Prince’s Kiss,Joe Cocker’sLeave Your Hat On) and death-haunted melancholic numbers such as Leonard Cohen’sTower of Song and Bernice Johnson Reagon’sI Won’t Crumble With You If You Fall,which he recorded in response to the passing of his wife of lung cancer in 2016.
The most remarkable of these elegiac numbers wasLazarus Man from the little-known Chicago-born folk-soul singer-songwriter Terry Callier,in which Jones used his still-incredible voice not as a showpiece but to tell a great story.
Indeed,the whole show revealed Jones,not as a museum piece topping up his super on yet another world tour,but a major musical artist who has thrown off the pop star trappings and working in a stripped-back mode,even giving us a version of Chuck Berry’sJohnny B. Goode that electrified the audience (prefaced by a great story about his great friend Elvis Presley).
The audience probably wanted more of the hits — personally I was hanging out forShe’s A Lady,which sadly never came — but Jones gave us so much more,an artist celebrating his glorious past but still with an eye for new musical adventures.
Tom Jones performs again tonight in King’s Park before continuing his tour on Australia’s east coast.