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There aren’t many singers who are selling almost as much in the Noughties as they did in the 1960s, but Tom Jones’s voice and charisma are ageing well – as a Dublin audience will get to experience next month

UNLIKELY AS it may seem – or, indeed, sound – 69-year-old lad Tom Jones is still on top of his game. It’s unlikely because Jones has been for so long on the outskirts of credibility. Here is a man, a bloke’s bloke from Pontypridd in Wales, who once revelled in a racy reputation with the ladies, selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door in order to make enough money not to work, who made his name with a series of ballads and mid-tempo songs in the 1960s, and who then based his career in the west coast of the US, from where he carved out a highly lucrative career as a consummate supper-club performer and entertainer.