Over the Top and Back: The Autobiography by Sir Tom Jones

Author:Sir Tom Jones
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Autobiography
ISBN: 9781592409617
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Published: 2015-11-23T11:00:00+00:00

Moving into Springfield House in Sunbury-on-Thames.

22

The Copacabana Hit

In 1968, I have another huge hit: “Delilah,” a Les Reed song with lyrics by Barry Mason and Sylvan Whittingham. Big, loud, orchestral setting, triple-time, traces of flamenco . . . what is this music? It doesn’t seem possible to fit it to a category, squeeze it into the usual boxes. It’s clearly a great story-song: the ballad of the spurned and vengeful lover, a melodrama with some real emotion at the core of it. When I get to the line about the knife in my hand, I’m really seeing it and feeling it. In some ways, it’s also a nut-busting rock number waiting to happen; a piece of stadium rock before stadium rock had been invented. (The Sensational Alex Harvey Band will get to that aspect of the number in 1975.) But then it’s also a pub song, a folk song, a drinking song—or, at any rate, a song for people who have partaken of drink; that massive, sing-along, sway-along chorus. Again, though, as with “What’s New Pussycat,” at the back of my mind there’s the question: whatever else this is, is it a novelty record? Where does singing this take me? Where does this land me up?

And, of course, where it lands me up is the charts. Number 2 in the UK, number 15 in the US. Top 5 in Canada and Austria and Norway. Number 1 in Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, Finland . . . A truly international hit.

There’s no shortage of money, so we move house. Good-bye Manygate Lane, hello Springfield House on Springfield Grove in Sunbury, just a couple of miles north. Fairly congested suburban area. Construction work underway on the new M3 motorway. But our house is the big one at the top of a quiet cul-de-sac. Trees around it. An acre of land. Belonged to Eddie Jarrett, the manager of the Seekers, who’s moving on. The owner before that, funnily enough: Dickie Valentine. Other houses stand fairly close on each side, but the twin gates and the driveway sell it to me almost as soon as we get there. Big gates, big drive. It feels like another step.

Inside: a huge living room, for which I buy a baby grand piano. Records brought back from America, from my raids on the Colony record store, stacked deep on the floor by the record player. A separate dining room with a dining table for twelve. Upstairs, not just a sink in the master bedroom now, but an actual en-suite bathroom. Plus three other bedrooms and what they call a “family bathroom,” though we know now that our family will grow no bigger than the three of us. We have tried for another child, but Linda has miscarried and, although it was very early in the term, the doctors say there’s damage, which means she won’t conceive again. Which is sad. But we have our son and we know we are lucky in that.

Meals out for the three of us now, at the Indian restaurant in the High Street in Lower Sunbury.

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