CHAPTER 30

 

 

#71: TOM JONES

"Talking Reality Television Blues"

from the album Surrounded By Time

Released: April 2021

 

The Bush radiogram looked, felt and sounded like the deepest of canyons. One could drop a pile of singles through the eye of its needle - in total you could pile ten of them on autochange. What came out of its speakers did not sound like the war, but like the spatula needles of tomorrow.

The deep blue of those Decca records, a name suggesting indefinite antiquity. The depth which you couldn't obtain from a transistor radio. Listening to them was like swimming in authority. Even at four or five, one could feel grown up. But what would I know? When I was ten, wandering down Spindlehowe Road towards Muiredge Primary School, I already felt about seventy.

They felt like products of a different and superior planet, the Decca records. The singers you heard on them were grown up for real. Nothing to appease the young because Mrs Marley didn't have those records. Easy to travel in a line straight from Sinatra through Presley to people in 1967 or 8 who weren't those people but resembled the older ones.

Mrs Marley was expatriate Italian and a close friend of my mother's. We'd go over to her house in Kylepark midweek to hang out and, for me, to listen to those records spinning in the welcoming abyss of her Bush radiogram. How many records were in there? Probably no more than a dozen but to me it seemed like a thousand. Singles, anyway. Some LPs, too, but not many, and unless they were Disney children's LPs (which they weren't) I wasn't too interested in those.

But you would listen to Engelbert Humperdinck and Tom Jones and was there anybody else or was it just a lot of things by them? Nevertheless you would listen and be thunderstruck (a.k.a. impressed) by their absolute adult authority. These were not kids. They'd lived lives, at that time it would seem to me for several centuries. They sang of things, emotions, that real people felt and cared about. Not of the trendy floss with which the listeners' children waxed their Bazooka Joe ears. Country music was bigger than pop in west Central Scotland for 100% of the time I grew up there. Why shouldn't it have been? We Scots took the music, or the roots of it, over to the Appalachians in the first place.

Sometimes I'd listen to Tom Jones' records and be scared. "Delilah," that still gives me the creeps. Les Reed and Barry Mason wrote it as a deliberately camp exercise for P. J. Proby but Jones grabbed and hystericised it, with those Psycho staccato strings. He goes away but he is waiting. He barges through her door. She laughs at him. Flick. She laughs no more. Not at him. Not at anyone. Like that man with the trim beard who barged into my parents' house in mid-1968 while my father was at work and terrified my mother. I fucking remember that. I even remember where he lived, which was literally at the opposite end of the street to Muiredge Primary, because my mother would keep pointing it out to me on my way to the latter.

I remember the older man with the beard who reappeared in my mother's life in the early eighties, after my father had died. Don't get me started.

"She Wears My Ring" by Solomon King. That was another cackling bellow. The horrible experiences witnessed by me in what was overall an unprettily horrible year.

But Tom Jones somehow remained a constant in my story, even after the Marley family relocated to  Corby in the early seventies - the steelworks (Mrs Marley herself, as I understand things, died of cancer sometime towards the end of the seventies). He remained...there, even after the woodchip cabaret of the mid-seventies or the lost decade of country records which nobody really remembers.

And yet, when he rematerialised on television in the late first half of 1987, as though he'd only gone across the road five minutes for a pie and peas, singing Prince and amiably sending himself up, it looked as though he'd cracked the barrier between cabaret and nowness and broken through. His big comeback single was a song from a musical about bullfighting which he could have done at any time since about 1965, but after that you couldn't stop him, and he has since never wanted to stop or be stopped.

Then it is the spring of 2021, nearly two years after my mother passed away, and just over a year after the human species was supposed to be symptomatically dwindling into extinction. We are still grasping for anything resembling resumption of life. That voice reappears, in shaded mists of abstract electronics...but it is now speaking to us, and possibly for us.

The voice tells us about humanity, the world, and how television could destroy both as rapidly and unsparingly as it could amuse them. But, as with the replicants in Blade Runner, the memories expressed here are implanted ones. Nobody in fifties Britain knew Milton Berle, the "father of television." They knew Arthur Askey, Leslie Mitchell and Conrad Phillips, and maybe Lucille Ball and Phil Silvers. But he rhymes slightly with "world." Walking on the moon, moonwalking, the combover satisfied to terminate our existence.

The music becomes steathily louder, yet is most sinister when at its quietest, particularly in the piece's final verse, where the Doomsday Clock ticks down to as close as zero as the ear can bear. Then the voice vanishes, the music reinforces its intensity and doubles its tempo as drums begin to dislodge the Doric columns of understood shared culture and the entire piece sounds like it is being shaken to pieces by great balls of fire (a.k.a. itself) before it is cut off, like the most undeserving of deaths.

And he, The Voice, realises - yes, we were only dreaming.

"Talking Reality Television Blues" was written by Todd Snider, who performed it in a characteristically deadpan (and therefore, by extension, perhaps a more sinister) way on his 2019 album Cash Cabin Sessions, Volume 3. The Tom Jones arrangement, overseen by co-producer Ethan Jones and also involving the keyboardist Neil Cowley, rotates around a circular saw of a guitar and percussion riff which rhythmically owes something to the Radiohead song "I Might Be Wrong" but structurally rather more to Thom Yorke's solo "Black Swan," with its leitmotif of "'Cause this is fucked up, fucked up." Then again, never look back, not to 1968 or anywhere. What dare you not find?