Tom
TJ: Well, I knew of Glyn – I never met him,
funnily enough. Peter Sullivan was my
recording man, so I always worked with
on record yet.”
IE: Where did you find the songs on Long
Lost Suitcase?
TJ: That’s why we called it Long Lost
Suitcase. A lot of that stuff I’ve been saving. Any time I heard a song I liked, I
would stick it away in a suitcase – cassettes and all kinds of stuff, even pictures,
That’s why the book and the album came
out at the same time. When we were
recording them, Ethan said, “These songs
are like an autobiography.” And I said,
“Well, funnily enough, I’m writing one!”
And he said it would be great if we could
get them out at the same time. So that’s
Tom Jones (center) And The Squires , circa 1964
10•2016
one guy. So I knew a lot of other producers, but never got a chance to work with
them. So I knew Ethan because I knew the
family name, and then from his work with
Kings of Leon and Ray Lamontagne,
whose record I loved. So I had signed to
Island in England, and we were trying to
figure out what to do. So a guy at the
record company had been talking to
Ethan Johns, trying to get him to record
some rock bands that he had. But every
time he would mention a name, Ethan
would say No, I don’t fancy that. And
then the guy said, “Well, I just signed Tom
Jones.” And Ethan said, “Yes!” So they
called Mark, my son, and said, “Ethan
Johns wants to record Tom.” So I had a
meeting with him, and he said, “I hear
things in your voice that I haven’t heard
what we did – they came out together last
year, the book and the album. And we
used a lot of the song titles for chapters in
the book.
IE: In retrospect, it must seem hilarious –
the controversy that erupted when a
leaked E-mail from an Island executive
questioned the validity of the then-new
“Praise & Blame,” calling it “a sick joke.”
Because it put that great record on everybody’s radar, overnight.
TJ: It’s a thing that I couldn’t get an
answer to. I said, ‘What the fuck is that all
about?” I was on a plane, coming from
L.A. to London, and it was in the newspaper that I had! So when I got to the airport,
my son was there, and he said, “We’ll get
to the bottom of it. But I don’t know exact-
12 illinoisentertainer.com october 2016
ly what it means – we don’t know who the
fellow is, or why it was said.” And it’s still
a mystery to me. But who knows? Maybe
they did that for publicity. But they never
admitted to it, like, “Don’t worry about
that – it’s just to get people’s attention.”
Nobody admitted to that, so I don’t know.
But, as you say, it worked anyway!
Tom Jones appears House Of Blues, Chicago
Monday, October 3rd.
Tom Lanham