You wanna turn your back on your soulless days

Continuing my trip back in time through the album charts

30/04/21 : Surrounded By Time - Tom Jones


I'm not entirely sure what I think of Tom Jones - I find him quite annoying, but I do appreciate that he has an amazing voice (for any age, let alone for someone at the tender age of 81), he has a musical interest and curiosity that has to be admired and he never makes any effort to hide his accent.  So I wasn't sure what I was going to make of this.

And, having listened to it, I'm still not entirely sure.  It's an album of cover versions but you certainly couldn't accuse him of picking the obvious options - I only knew a couple of them (and I'm not sure I'd have recognised "This Is The Sea" if I hadn't been paying attention).  There's not really an over-riding theme to the songs - you get the impression that he's just recorded stuff he fancies.  Which would make it easy to describe it as a vanity project, but there's remarkably little vanity on display.  I can't say I loved any of the tracks, but it was a much more interesting listen than I was expecting - there's a certain gravitas to it all and it feels in places like he accepts he ain't gonna do this many more times.  And I like the album cover as well - it manages to feel both contemporary and retro at the same time.

As usual, we're at #1 with a new entry - he managed 4 weeks before disappearing from view.  Unusually, we don't have any other new entries in the top 10 - somewhat bizarrely the next highest new entry was this from John Lennon (which I garlanded with the high praise "not as terrible as I feared it would be").  I assume some kind of re-release or anniversary is involved.

Wikipedia has more on the album than I was expecting (123 milliPeppers) - the main body covering that this was his first album since his wife died.  The critics were very keen on it and, although the rest of the world didn't go mad on it, it was top 20 in some odd places which don't seem obvious fans of Tom - Belgium, Austria, Switzerland and The Netherlands.  The fact that it got to #1 in the UK made him the oldest male to ever get there and the oldest artist to get there with newly recorded material (which, of course, made me wonder which older woman got to #1 - Dame Vera Lynn, which was obvious when I saw the answer).

"Customers also listened to" Burt Bacharach, Engelbert Humperdinck, James Last and Shirley Bassey - a few miles on the clock there (and I was amazed that James is the only one no longer with us).  I wouldn't go out of my way to search out Tom's stuff but this album was considerably more enjoyable than I was expecting and worth checking out imho

23/04/21 - Not a lot to say about this
07/05/21 - An album I totally fail to describe


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