Tom Jones: Kiss and tell

Brief encounter: Most hit songs are still about love and sex and heartache, says Tom Jones, who is hitting our shores in February.

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THE DAY before our interview, an email arrives from his record company: "Apparently, he doesn't like being asked about women's underwear." Oh, OK. Better ditch my usual "G-String or bikini brief?" line of questioning, then.

Still, we should find something to talk about. This man has sung alongside Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, Johnny Cash and The Who. He used to get on the turps with Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. Mary Wilson of The Supremes has written about his prowess in the sack. Otis Redding once told him he was the world's greatest white soul singer. So why on Earth would Tom Jones want to talk about knickers?

"You're right," says Jones in a booming baritone. "Sometimes all that stuff gets in the way of the music. People are more interested in women throwing their underwear at me on stage than they are in my songs, which gets a bit tiresome. I never meant for my showmanship to overshadow my talent. I always wanted to be known for my voice, not my image."

Let's be clear: Tom Jones is one of the greatest soul singers who ever drew breath. And he is without doubt the greatest soul singer who ever grew up in Pontypridd, Wales, with a coal miner for a father and a less-than-rosy early career digging ditches and selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door.

Admittedly, Jones has squandered his marvellous voice on some extremely dodgy songs over the years, but the charitable among us prefer to remember the knockouts: the swaggering sex-machine soul of "It's Not Unusual" and "She's A Lady", the soaring pop-opera murder ballad "Delilah", and that pinnacle of homesick reverie, "The Green, Green Grass of Home". Jones will be singing them all, he tells me, when he tours New Zealand in February.

He was here just last year for a headline show at Mission Estate in Napier, but this will be his first tour of our major centres in a decade.

Are the police marshalling extra officers? Is our army on standby? No, probably not, but there was a time the libidinous gyrations of Mr Tom Jones caused consternation in agencies dedicated to public order. Jones vividly remembers his first tour down this way, 43 years ago, when his open-necked pirate shirt, tight pants and hyperactive hips led the authorities to consider him a public menace.

"I came to Australia and New Zealand in January of 1966 with Herman's Hermits, and when we got to Sydney, they were gonna stop the tour for being too sexy. They said – you can't do stuff like that on stage in our country! The police filmed the bloody show! They took it away so they could watch it back and decide whether the rest of the tour needed to be cancelled. In the end, they let us carry on. We did our Australian dates, then made it to New Zealand and there were no more problems."

I last interviewed Jones 10 years ago, and talking to him today, I'm reminded of something I noticed the last time: the man they call Jones The Voice is, as they say in California, "conflicted". On the one hand, he wants to be taken seriously as a singer, and not just a cheesy Vegas crooner, either, but a singer's singer, a consummate vocalist other great singers admire and respect. On the other hand, he also wants you to know that he was one bad-ass horndog back in the day.

Now 69, Jones clearly gets substantial pleasure from his reputation as a former sex symbol, a man whose very presence once caused respectable middle class women to publicly divest themselves of their undergarments and scream like hormonal teenage girls afflicted with Beatlemania. He's not keen to dwell on those crazy breakthrough Vegas shows in the late 60s when, according to legend, the stage gradually disappeared under little lacy snowdrifts of lingerie and Jones had to dodge hotel room keys thrown by women who wanted to invite him into their beds as well as their record collections.

But while Jones doesn't want to focus too much on these quite probably overstated stories of rampant Tom-lust, he seems quietly chuffed that I know about them, all the same.

"They were strange times, I can tell you. BBC TV refused to broadcast anything I did in those early days because I sounded black and my performance style was too sexual. I got complaints when I first did songs like `It's Not Unusual' on Blue Peter, which was like a kids show but also had bands like The Beatles and the Stones.

"So I went on there and they got all these letters from mothers saying – this man should not be allowed to be on TV so early in the evening. I think, to be honest, the mothers were getting more shook up than the kids were. And when I went to New York to do my first Ed Sullivan Show, they said – if you move like that, we'll just cut away to close-ups. And this was eight years after they told Elvis the same thing. Nothing had changed."

THESE DAYS, of course, intensely sexualised performances are an integral part of pop music. White singers who emulate black vocal styles are also a dime a dozen: the UK alone has recently seen a heavily nostalgic retro-soul onslaught led by Amy Winehouse, Duffy and Joss Stone. Makes you wonder, would a singer like Tom Jones still succeed today, if he emerged from some wind-swept Welsh valley, washed off the coal dust, squeezed into a tight suit and tried to scramble up the charts? I like to think he would. Because if you strip away all the panty-magnet mythology, Jones's appeal boils down to two qualities that are as much in demand today as they ever were: palpable on-stage charisma and a miraculous voice.

Jones honed and polished both of these assets during the early 60s in the rough pubs and workingmen's clubs of South Wales, places where you had to be loud enough to be heard over arguing punters, sexy enough to get the women dancing, and tough enough to defend yourself if the menfolk didn't like the cut of your jib.

By the time he hit the recording studio, he was a seasoned pro, and when he finally broke through with his second single "It's Not Unusual" in 1965, his bold, brassy sound cut through the charts like a warm knife through butter.

"To me, `It's Not Unusual' was a pop song, but in America it got played on black radio. They thought I was a black American soul singer, right up until I went there and they actually saw me. I had that tone, and I still do. Other singers heard that tone and loved it, too. Elvis wanted to know how I'd learned to sing the way I do. He'd grown up around Mississippi, so he'd heard a lot of black R'n'B singers first hand, but he wanted to know where I'd heard them. I told him, on the radio, in Wales, and he laughed. Otis Redding didn't know what to make of my voice, either. I went to see him in a club in the mid 60s, a few years before he died, and he said he loved my first album, and that a lot of soul singers struggle to make a record as good as that one. I said – `Christ! I've spent years copying the sound of you guys!"'

These days Jones sports the suspiciously taut skin, slightly over-inflated face and leathery perma-tan one associates with rich elderly Californians, and no wonder. America is his adopted home. In 1974, he moved to Los Angeles, buying a mansion formerly belonging to Dean Martin in Bel Air. He lives there still, with Linda, his wife of more than 50 years, who has stuck by him despite a string of high-profile infidelities, one of which resulted in the birth of an illegitimate son, and another of which resulted in the eye-watering revelation in a British newspaper that Jones liked to dip his sexual equipment in minty fresh Listerine before making love "so that everything down there is sterile, like a surgeon before an op".

Knighted by the Queen in 2006, Sir Tom has now been making music for five decades. After some sustained chart success in the 1960s, his melodramatic style fell from favour in the 70s, when the hits slowed to a trickle. Jones's comeback came in 1988 with a successful cover of Prince's "Kiss", and the 90s saw him churning out unlikely covers of everything from Talking Heads' "Burning Down the House" to Iggy Pop's immortal "Lust For Life".

Jones has always spent a chunk of every year performing cabaret-style in Las Vegas, which has seen him through the lean times and helped him amass a fortune estimated at around $401 million (175m). He's also sold a whopping 100 million records to date, and shows no signs of slowing down.

His unexpectedly reflective recent album, 24 Hours, is being hailed as the best of his career.

"The new album is more personal because I co-wrote some of the songs rather than just sing them. The record was inspired by a conversation I had with Bono in Dublin a few years ago. I asked him to write me something, and he said he would, so I told him about my life for a couple of hours and he wrote me a great song called `Sugar Daddy'. There's also a song on there called `The Road', which is about the fact that no matter where I go or what I do in my life, the road always leads back to my wife, Linda. When I played it to Linda, she didn't know it was about her. She said, that sounds great, like, then I told her it was about our relationship, and she said – hang on, what's that bit about me being left shattered on the ground? I don't remember that part. And I said, no, love, it's only based on our relationship. That bit there is what they call poetic licence."

Jones says he's a huge fan of modern pop music – Kings of Leon, The Killers and Kaiser Chiefs are current favourites – and is always on the lookout for new songs that might benefit from a Tom Jones overhaul.

"Really, I listen to songs and imagine them done in my own way. I had a big hit with `Kiss' because I used to play the Prince record and always longed to put a bigger arrangement to it. I like trying new things. Same with `Sex Bomb'. With that one, people worried the sex stuff might have been too blatant, but it did all right, like. Really, most hit songs are still about love and sex and heartache, and that's always been the case, since Adam and Eve. If a song has some soul, some guts, some power, and you sing it with conviction, it will work.

"That's why I still go on stage every night trying to sing each song as well as I ever did. My voice is deeper now, but just as powerful as it ever was, and no matter what I sing, I still consider myself a soul singer. That's the basis of everything I do, and always have been."

A lesser journalist might use the last few minutes of interview time to slip in a gratuitous knicker-related query. Such as: do women still throw underwear, now that Jones is pushing 70? If so, isn't this somewhat dangerous, given the substantial bloomers often worn by grannies? But that would be churlish. Perhaps I'll just thank him, instead, for wrapping that big, burly, coal-black voice of his around a decent song every now and then, and for coming down this way to sing them for us in person.

"Well, New Zealand makes me feel at home, actually, particularly down south. The last time I was in Dunedin, I told people it reminded me of Wales, with the green hills around it and all the sheep and so on. People were mortified! No, they said, it's like Scotland! OK, I said, whatever you say. It's like Scotland. People can be very precious about where they're from, can't they? I mean, I'll always think Wales is the most beautiful place on Earth, but a lot of people wouldn't dream of going into the Rhondda Valley where I grew up because they'd be too bloody scared. If the people there don't like you, you might get lynched!"

Tom Jones's album 24 Hours is released this week on Liberation Records.

Tom Jones tour dates, with support from Hello Sailor and The Lady Killers:

Sunday, February 21, Auckland – A Day on the Green, Villa Maria Estate, Ticketmaster 0800 111 999 or www.ticketmaster.co.nz

Monday, February 22, Wellington – Michael Fowler Centre, Ticketek 0800 842 538 or www.ticketek.co.nz

Wednesday, February 24, Dunedin – Dunedin Town Hall Ticket Direct 0800 4 TICKET or www.ticketdirect.co.nz

Thursday, February 25, Christchurch – Westpac Arena, Ticketek 0800 842 538 or www.ticketek.co.nz

Tickets on sale from tomorrow.