"Slower in the way you walk, more careless in the way you dress, wiser and older", this is how Tom Jones presented himself last night to the tune of I'm growing old, taciturn words that contrasted with the energy that the Welshman unleashed on the stage of the Jardins de Terramar festival. The stands were full to the brim to attend a greatest hits concert marked by the themes that the Welshman presented in 2021 under the title of Surrounded by time, his 41st album, showing that everything is tiger until the tail .
With a 60-year career behind him, Jones has plenty of hits to satisfy the fans he has accumulated over more than six decades of career. All of them were represented last night, with many gray hairs in solidarity with the 83-year-old artist, who rose to fame thanks to his powerful baritone voice with which he performed It's not unusual, the start of a career in which he has reinvented himself several times with tracks such as Prince's Kiss in 1988 or Sexbomb, which returned him to the dance floors in 1999, about to turn 60.
Without forgetting, of course, the cape thrown to him by the Prince of Bel Air, discovering a new generation a Tom Jones installed in Las Vegas or his presence in the film Mars Attacks! His last appearance in the media has not been so pleasant, after the Welsh rugby union banned the song Delilah from matches to "whitewash" a crime of passion. Despite everything, it continues to play at concerts, as it was last night, cheered on by fans who had fun with the famous refrain.
All these topics were played in an evening of almost two hours that became intimate due to the work and grace of Jones' latest production, a disc of covers where the voice is contained leaving space for the tunes of Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens or Leonard Cohen. Introspective themes that he performed accompanied by a band of five musicians and, above all, with the voice that made him famous, neat, clean and powerful, even if he is no longer able to raise it as he did years ago. To compensate for the passage of time, he proposed – apart from minimizing his movements and using a stool – a performance with more instrumental presence in which the rhythm and syncopation push where he used to do only with his vocal cords.
Dressed in a smart red shirt with studs and backed by a huge, well-used screen, Jones mixed the measured themes of his new work with hits that he presented with detail and sympathy, telling anecdotes about almost all of them. After performing Not dark yet, Dylan's look at the end of the road, he played It's not unusual in the first bars of the concert in a more interrupted, Caribbean version, accompanied by congas and an accordion that also beat What's new pussycat? , Buet Bacharach's theme that, as he recalled, he recorded in 1965 for Woody Allen's film of the same name. After getting the crowd singing along, he took the beats down with the dark melody of The windmills of your mind, which made him the biggest UK No. 1 artist of 2021, and raised again- between applauses with Sexbomb, declaiming the first verses to give way to a growing bluesy rhythm accompanied by the electric guitar and a burst of voice that took the audience by surprise.
The syncopated Popstar with cheerful keyboards gave way to the western music of One more cup of coffee before intoning a melodic Green, Green Grass of home with a lot of soul that gave rise to a new phase of the concert starring the new reflective version of Jones, in the style of the last Johnny Cash or Dylan himself, who draws in Surrounded by time. It was time for Talking reality television blues, I won't crumble with you if you fall and Tower of song, by Leonard Cohen.
A modernized Delilah woke the audience up again preparing them for the final stretch of the concert, with a version of You can leave your hat on to the applause of a dedicated audience before closing with If I only knew and the sensual and funky kiss. After the break they waited for One hell of a life to close the concert by downloading pure rock with Strange things, Johnny B. Goode and Great balls of fire, immortal theme of a Jerry Lee Lewis who was born only five years before a Tom Jones who, as it seemed last night, threatens to transcend the boundaries of time.
