It’s not unusual for an artist to record an ‘uncommercial’ (read: unlistenable) album as a means of trying to get out of their record contract in the hope that the record company will decide to cut their losses and drop the recalcitrant artist. Prince did it with Warners, Neil Young was sued by Geffen for making a record ‘unrepresentative of Neil Young’ and Lou Reed recorded Metal Machine Music, a double LP of virtually unlistenable noise.
However, Tom Jones, favourite of horny middle aged women worldwide has done that with his first album for new record company Island Records, and according to various media reports, the label is horrified. Rather than his usual macho ballads, the Welsh crooner has gone and recorded an album’s worth of spiritual songs. In May, David Sharpe, Vice President of his label fired off an indignant email to colleagues which is now doing the rounds, saying that Jones’ new album was a ‘sick joke’ and that “We did not invest a fortune in an established artist for him to deliver 12 tracks from the common book of prayer. Having lured him from EMI, the deal was that you would deliver a record of upbeat tracks along the lines of Sex Bomb and Mama Told Me . . . Who put him with a ‘folk’ producer?”
While the ‘leaking’ of the email as a strong whiff of a PR strategy from Island to recoup some of their investment in the album, you can hardly blame a 70 year old bloke for wanting to act his age and record some spiritual blues songs rather than indulging in yet another album pumped up with musical Viagra.
