Tom Jones - BBC Sessions, Volume 5: BBC Four Sessions, LSO St Luke's, London, Britain, 9-1-2012

Tom Jones has been confounding me for some time, but in a good way.  When I started this blog back in 2018, it never would have occurred to me to post any of his music. But due to my BBC project, I discovered four albums of BBC sessions, and they were better than I'd expected. Then I discovered no less than six albums of his TV show "This Is Tom Jones," and I was positively surprised again, mostly due to all the duets he had with other famous musical artists. 

Now, I've discovered another BBC concert he did from 2012. Normally, I wouldn't be interested. By this time, Jones had been in the music business for nearly 50 years. I've found that most artists that old are way past their prime, and just doing the same stuff they'd done a lot better decades earlier. But in 2010, Jones reinvented himself. He put out "Praise and Blame," a rootsy album that mostly consisted of gospel and blues covers, with a non-commercial sound significantly different from everything else he'd done in his long career. His record company was appalled, with one top executive calling his new album a "sick joke" and trying hard to prevent it from being released. However, Jones had the last laugh, because that album went all the way to Number One in the British charts. 

Jones has stuck with this new style ever since, getting the best critical reviews of his career. In 2012, he put out another album, "Spirit in the Room." This BBC concert pretty much consists entirely either of songs from "Praise and Blame" and "Spirit in the Room." There's none of his earlier hits, no "It's Not Unusual," no "Green, Green Grass of Home," none of that stuff. It's refreshing that he was taking risks in his seventies.

I don't think a musical bootleg of this concert has existed until I made it. I found a high quality video of the concert and converted it into mp3s. There were no problems needing fixing. I had to dig pretty deep the find out the date of the recording and other details though.

You might like this, even if you don't like his well-known hits. Consider that he opened the show with a lesser known Bob Dylan song and closed it with a lesser known Leonard Cohen one to show this is not the Tom Jones you'd normally expect. 

This concert is an hour and 13 minutes long.

01 What Good Am I (Tom Jones)
02 talk (Tom Jones)
03 Hit or Miss (Tom Jones)
04 talk (Tom Jones)
05 Strange Things Happening Every Day (Tom Jones)
06 Ain't No Grave (Tom Jones)
07 Dimming of the Day (Tom Jones)
08 talk (Tom Jones)
09 Fall In and Follow the Band (Tom Jones with Tom Paley)
10 talk (Tom Jones with Tom Paley)
12 Sitting on Top of the World (Tom Jones with Tom Paley)
13 Trouble Me (Tom Jones with Tom Paley)
14 Burning Hell (Tom Jones)
15 talk (Tom Jones)
16 Black, Brown and White (Tom Jones & Josh Osho)
17 talk (Tom Jones)
18 Wisely and Slow (Tom Jones with the Staves)
19 talk (Tom Jones with the Staves)
20 You Don't Knock (Tom Jones with the Staves)
21 talk (Tom Jones)
22 If I Give My Soul (Tom Jones)
23 talk (Tom Jones)
24 You Gotta Move (Tom Jones with Seasick Steve)
25 talk (Tom Jones with Seasick Steve)
26 I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry (Tom Jones with Seasick Steve)
27 talk (Tom Jones with Seasick Steve)
28 It's a Long, Long Way (Tom Jones with Seasick Steve & the Staves)
29 talk (Tom Jones)
30 Run On (Tom Jones)
31 Didn't It Rain (Tom Jones with the Staves)
32 talk (Tom Jones)
33 Tower of Song (Tom Jones)

https://www.imagenetz.de/kbjFj

The cover photo is of Jones in 2012, but I don't know the details.