Friday was St David's Day, but Mark was on the The Mark Steyn Caribbean Cruise sailing north from Costa Maya and thus more preoccupied with Mexicans and British West Indians and suchlike than with the Welsh. Last St David's Day fell on the midweek all-stars' edition of The Mark Steyn Show, and so Mark began with some appropriate Welsh observances:
Happy St David's Day to all our Welsh viewers. Will you please rise for the Welsh national anthem?
["Delilah" plays]
Oh no, wait, sorry, that's no longer the Welsh national anthem. They banned it from the rugby. The cancel crowd felt the knife in their hand and Delilah laughs no more. The United Kingdom is a land where everything is policed except crime, so naturally the Chief Constable of Dyfed and Powys ... Dr Richard Lewis is happy to play prosecutor, judge and jukebox jury. Quote:
'There's been a lot of misplaced criticism of this decision to stop singing Delilah. The song depicts the murder of a woman by a jealous partner. For context, approximately two women a week are murdered by a partner or ex partner. It's time to sing something else.'
Uh huh. Richard Lewis, Chief Constable of Dyfed and Powys, in a land where violence against women, like every other crime, goes almost entirely unpunished. In England and Wales in the year to December 2021, a record 67,125 rapes were recorded by police. Only 1.3 per cent of them resulted in a charge - or even a summons to court. So, if you're into violence against women, you've got a better than 98.7 per cent chance of getting away with it, thanks to the crapness of chief constables, like this bloke in Dyfed and Powys...
Oh, and just as the coup de grâce, if they ever do convict anyone of violence against women, the bloke promptly identifies as a woman and is allowed into the women's prison to shower with his next three victims. But Chief Constable Dr Richard Lewis can butch up and urge the banning of a poor blameless pop song that hasn't attacked anybody. It's time to sing something else, he orders. Okay, how about this just for you, Chief Constable?
At which point Mark serenaded Chief Constable Lewis not only with "Who's the wanker in the big blue hat?" but also accorded him the rare honour of the Police Service of Northern Ireland giving him the full Wankerena. See our opening segment here.
As Mark has insisted since he ran into difficulties with Canada's "human rights" commissions over a decade-and-a-half ago: when the state says you can't say that, you have an obligation to say it again, even louder. And that goes double when the state says you can't sing something - because it's not enough that our popular culture is totally exhausted and clapped out and can't produce anything new, it also has to go back and destroy all the old stuff from the days when it wasn't totally exhausted. So at SteynOnline we salute a great song. What follows is adapted from Mark's book A Song For The Season:
I saw the light on the night that I passed by her window
I saw the flickering shadows of love on her blind...
To those of the non-Welsh persuasion, there are two distinctive musical traditions indelibly associated with the principality – on the one hand, the mournful elegaic sound of a Welsh male voice choir echoing through the valleys, and, on the other, Tom Jones in Vegas in spray-on trousers bellowing out his hits from behind a blizzard of ladies' knickers. On balance, we incline to the latter.
Say what you like about Sir Tom, but he looks fantastic for a guy of 104. What's that? He's only 83? Well, he still looks fantastic in a weird kind of way. The unfeasibly hairy chest, the year-round orange leathery permatan one associates with sun-drenched Wales. Millions of women around the world still want to get into his pants, which, given that he can barely get into his pants (they'd be a tad tight on Kate Moss), seems absurdly ambitious. The only time I met him was a long time ago back in my disc-jockey days. His manager had signed a deal with Polygram for five country-music albums without checking first whether Tom liked country music. It wasn't a good time for him.
Now he's hotter than ever. In recent years, there've been hit songs about Tom Jones fans, and films, and novels - one with a heroine called Delilah. And, speaking of "Delilah", what Welsh rugby fan doesn't feel a flutter in his breast when the band strikes up? This is Wales vs South Africa two years ago:
That's the Band of the Royal Welsh Regiment playing it, and thousands of beery rugger boyos bawling the all-time great anthem of male violence: "I felt the knife in my hand," they roared in unison, "and she laughed no more."
Ah, but you gotta laugh. No matter how many times Delilah meets her gloomy end, there's always someone who wants to have another stab at her. In Devon, it was the Budleigh Salterton Male Voice Choir, who devoted their charity concert at the United Reformed Church to the Tom Jones songbook – "Delilah", "Green Green Grass Of Home", all his deathless classics about death. And, if it's not Budleigh Salterton, it's Buckingham Palace, for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, with Sir Tom and his guitarist doing a rather nice colla voce intro:
That's princes William, Harry and Edward singing and swaying - although not Prince Andrew, who appears to be checking his phone for a text from Jeffrey.
Tom Jones is a man for jubilees. At midnight on December 31st 1999, how did the world's only superpower celebrate the passing of the soi-disant millennium and a thousand years of cultural inheritance? No Shakespeare, no Mozart, but Bill Clinton, the Lounge-Lizard-In-Chief, turned up at the Lincoln Memorial to listen to Tom crank out well-loved favorites like "It's Not Unusual" (which, by happy coincidence, was also the President's defense to the Paula Jones "distinguishing characteristics" charge). Millennia come and go, but Sir Tom's on stage 250 nights a year still driving women wild with "It's Not Unusual" at an age when, sadly, for many men it's all too unusual. Let me reprise, as is my wont, the all-time greatest Tom Jones joke:
Patient: "Give it to me straight, Doctor."
Doctor: "Well, I'm afraid you've got Tom Jones Disease."
Patient: "Tom Jones Disease? What's that? I've never heard of it. Is it common?"
Doctor: "Well, it's not unusual."
"Delilah" has been a pillar of the act since 1968. It was written by two colossi of the British pop scene, Les Reed, composer of "It's Not Unusual", and his then lyric-writing partner Barry Mason. Reed, who played piano for the John Barry Seven on their hit recording of the James Bond theme and arranged other Jones hits like "The Green, Green Grass Of Home", is a terrific orchestrator, and the great melodramatic thunderstorm he provides for the intro of "Delilah" is truly spectacular. You know you're in for not just the usual boy-meets-girl but something near operatic in its stakes. And then Barry Mason leaps in with an overripe lyric whose emphatic internal rhymes and lurid imagery match the music perfectly:
I saw the light on the night that I passed by her window
I saw the flickering shadows of love on her blind...
What a killer image! Barry Mason wrote "The Last Waltz" for Engelbert Humperdinck and "Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)" for some cobbled together group of session singers, but truly that is the all-time greatest line in his catalogue. It's blazingly vivid, and it gets everything in – not just what he's looking at, but what he's feeling. It's a crime passionel set to music:
She was my woman
As she deceived me I watched and went out of my mindMy, my, my Delilah
Why, why, why, Delilah?
I could see that girl was no good for me
But I was lost like a slave that no man could free...
I went round to Barry Mason's house in North London one morning a few years ago to interview him for the BBC, and found a great bouncing Tigger of a chap full of enthusiasm for all kinds of things that seemed to me to have certain obvious flaws: As I recall, he was working on a musical about surfing, which sounded problematic to me, because there didn't seem to be any kind of way to recreate California surfing in a West End theatre that wouldn't look stilted and clunky. But he was irrepressible about that, and everything else, too. Hard to believe a man so deliriously upbeat and perky could write:
At break of day when that man drove away I was waiting
I crossed the street to her house and she opened the door
She stood there laughing
I felt the knife in my hand and she laughed no more...
But he did. So where did it come from?
Well, in 1958, a decade before he wrote the song, Barry was a teenager on holiday in Blackpool and fell in love. "I was fifteen and it was a heavy affair of the heart," he said years later. The girl's name was ...Delilah? No, Delia. And she didn't want to know. "I've got a boyfriend," she told Barry. But it was his first broken heart and evidently, ten years later, the memory still rankled. "Delia really didn't fit the song, and then we thought of Delilah ...a classic femme fatale." Indeed. "Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)" would work with Josephine or Ermintrude or Cindy-Lou, but you couldn't really get all het up over the flickering shadows of love on the blind of Delia or Pam or Doris or Lynn. It's Delilah or bust.
I was told years ago that originally Mason and Les Reed had in mind for the song PJ Proby, briefly the celebrated trouser-splitter of British pop. But Proby turned it down, and never had another hit, and the boys took their ballad of revenge to Tom Jones:
At one level it sounds made for him:
Maaaaah, maaaaaah, maaaaaaah Delilah
Whaaaaah, whaaaaaah, whaaaaaaah, Delilah?
But at another level, it's a very unlikely situation. Tom's not the kind of guy who finds himself alone of an evening watching the flickering shadows of love on his woman's blind. If anything, it's quite the opposite. His role for over five decades has been the boyo who warms up every other bloke's bird. Of one appreciative fan who rushed the stage, he recalled: "A woman grabbed me round the neck and cried and moaned and jumped all over me. Her husband just looked up at me and said, 'Don't worry - you pump the tires, I'll ride the bike.'"
Tom, of course, quite likes to ride the bike himself. Indeed, he's the all-time Tour de France champion in that respect. But, if you're not as lucky as the two Australian fans who claimed a couple of years back to have enjoyed a three-way jungle-sex romp with him, you can still leave your calling card. I've attended only one Tom Jones gig, but the famous knicker-throwing had as elaborate a protocol as a Royal wedding. During up-tempo numbers, you're allowed to career down the aisle waving your panties like a lasso: Tom will graciously receive them, use them to mop his brow, and observe, if the pattern is somewhat striking, "I think I know this woman" or, if the smalls are a little on the large side, "Bloody hell, me Auntie Alice is here."
However, during ballads, you're only permitted to toss the knickers on stage and return quietly to your seat. Tom is a serious artist and he doesn't like anyone fooling with his ballads.
This is the paradox of Jones the Voice: On the one hand, the guy who takes his music so seriously that he believes there are songs so profound it would be inappropriate to sing them with your head in a stranger's gusset. On the other hand, the cheesy Vegas lounge act sloughing off tat pop and dodging what looks like the London Blitz re-enacted in lingerie. If he seems too old for that stuff, the point about Tom Jones is that he's always been too old. In 1964, he was Tommy Scott, "the twisting vocalist from Pontypridd", and one night in walked Gordon Mills, a canny music-biz hotshot. Mills figured that, at 24, Tommy was too old to be a rock'n'roll star, but he was in the market for a British Sinatra. In the Sixties, Tom Jones was irredeemably (as they say in Britain) naff. The Velvet Underground were cool. In the Seventies, he was still naff, but now the Stranglers were cool. In the Eighties, likewise, only now Spandau Ballet were cool. But somewhere along the way, the massed ranks of intellectual rock critics decided to go all gooey and start metaphorically lobbing their Y-fronts at Tom. They all agreed he'd "reinvented" himself in 1988 by singing "Kiss", a song by Prince, or maybe it was "Prince", a song by Kiss. In fact, the striking thing about Tom Jones is how un-reinvented he is: He still sings all the kitsch but he mixes it with newer things, and he sings them all the same - loud. He could never have been a British Sinatra, but he was a belated British answer to Frankie Laine and the other booming balladeers of the early Fifties rather than the white soul boy he'd like to be taken for. That's why what works best for Tom is big open-voweled bombast:
What's New, Pussycat? Whoa-o-o-o-o-oah!
Why can't this crazy love be miiiine? Whoa-o-o-oh-oh-oah!
She's A Lady
Whoa, whoa, whoa
She's A Lady
Talkin' about mah little lady...
And of course:
Maaaaah, maaaaaah, maaaaaaah Delilah
Whaaaaah, whaaaaaah, whaaaaaaah, Delilah?
In which, for once, the great Welsh wail is merited by the situation.
The song was an instant classic for Tom. Not one of those things like "The Young New Mexican Puppeteer", but part of his luster. Rockers, who on the whole disdained Reed & Mason and the old Denmark Street pop writers, had a sneaking admiration for "Delilah". After all, there was no other song like it. But they couldn't quite express their admiration for it until the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, a bunch of Glaswegian hard men, covered it in 1975:
According to taste, that's either an over-the-top parody or something far more raw and powerful than Mister Leather Pants playing Atlantic City. I don't know about that. The guitar thrashing doesn't do as much for the song as Reed's arrangement, and Alex Harvey's vocal makes it sound less of a crime passionel than a Saturday-night post-pub "domestic incident" (as the British coppers say). Still, if you don't care for Harvey, there's Jimmy Fontana's Europop treatment, a goth version by Inkubus Sukkubus, and a reggae stab at it by Horace Andy:
And, if you don't care for those, you'll be able to hear it on the terraces most Saturday afternoons (if the coppers don't criminalize it) as Stoke City footie fans adopted it as the club anthem back in the Nineties. That was Les Reed and Barry Mason's second soccer song, as they're also the writers of "Marching On Together (Leeds! Leeds! Leeds!)" for Leeds United.
Reed & Mason had a good run in the mid-Sixties. On just one wet Sunday afternoon with nothing else to do, they composed seven songs, five of which made the Top Ten – "I'm Coming Home", "The Last Waltz", "I Pretend", "Love Is All", and my personal favorite "Les Bicyclettes de Belsize". The only single of theirs not to make the charts was a song they wrote for Doctor Who sidekick Frazer Hines called "Who's Doctor Who?"
But in the annals of British pop they'll always have a place. A couple of decades back, at the Tristan Bates Theatre in Covent Garden, Barry Mason toddled off to the men's room and found the chap next to him whistling "Delilah". "I wrote that song," said Barry, proudly.
"I thought Les Reed wrote 'Delilah'," the other fellow said.
"Les wrote the music but I wrote the words," explained Barry.
"Well, I'm not whistling the words, am I?" said the smartarse, and zipped up and left. Still, I don't think there's anyone on the planet who, upon hearing that music, doesn't instantly hear also:
My, my, my Delilah
Why, why, why Delilah?
So before they come to break down the door
Forgive me, Delilah, I just couldn't take any more...
A few years ago, following the revelation of the ill-starred teen romance in Blackpool that inspired the song, there was a short-lived campaign to track down "the real Delilah" – ie, Delia. But Barry's ex-wife, Sylvan, killed it stone dead, by insisting the girl didn't exist and adding just for good measure that she'd co-written the song. Which I find hard to believe as she would have been about fourteen in 1968.
Barry saw no reason to get into a public ding-dong with his ex-. "I have no comment on the opinions of my former wife," he said. Which is certainly a more relaxed attitude to these things than "I felt the knife in my hand and she laughed no more."
As for Tom Jones, he's no better or worse than he's ever been. But, having seen all the seminal rockers they've hailed over the last half-centurys go belly up, the critics mysteriously reached a consensus that Tom is a man who cares passionately about music and, after years of being forced to peddle MOR schlock, is now free to give full range to his cutting-edge influences, etc. This doesn't entirely explain why he's up on stage every night singing "She's A Lady".
But it hardly matters. The Stereophonics, the Cardigans, and the other hip young things he warbles with on his inevitable celebrity-duets album have already faded and there's Tom still bellowing "What's New, Pussycat?" It's like his philandering. The one-night stands, the three-way romps, the paternity suits came and went, but Tom's marriage somehow endured for just shy of six decades until Linda's death in 2016. "At least, it's natural," he said of his wandering ways. "I mean, the sex... Nobody's suggesting that I had sex with kids or anything. Or sheep."
No, indeed. And it's the same with his music. Tom's happy to fool around with the kids (duet partners like Natalie Imbruglia and Cerys from Catatonia) to impress the sheep (the critics). But he always comes home to Delilah. The latterday critical adulation is as ridiculous as the knicker tsunamis, but it's his now and forever, till they lay him 'neath the green, green grass of home. And, let's face it, 'neath the green, green grass of home is about the only place he hasn't been laid.
~adapted from Mark's book A Song For The Season. Order your personally autographed copy exclusively from the SteynOnline bookstore - and, if you're a Mark Steyn Club member, please remember to enter your promo code at checkout to enjoy special member pricing on that and over forty other Steyn store products.
If you enjoy our Sunday Song of the Week, we now have an audio companion, every Sunday on Serenade Radio in the UK. You can listen to the show from anywhere on the planet by clicking the button in the top right corner here. It airs thrice a week:
5.30pm London Sunday (12.30pm New York)
5.30am London Monday (2.30pm Sydney)
9pm London Thursday (1pm Vancouver)
Our Netflix-style tile-format archives for Tales for Our Time and Steyn's Sunday Poems have proved so popular with listeners and viewers that we've done the same for our musical features merely to provide some mellifluous diversions in the Land of Lockdown. Just click here, and you'll find easy-to-access live performances by everyone from Liza Minnelli to Loudon Wainwright III; Mark's interviews with Chuck Berry, Leonard Bernstein and Bananarama (just to riffle through the Bs); and audio documentaries on P G Wodehouse's lyrics, John Barry's Bond themes, sunshine songs from the Sunshine State, and much more. We'll be adding to the archive in the months ahead, but, even as it is, we hope you'll find the new SteynOnline music home page a welcome respite from the woes of the world.
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