24 Hours is the sound of beardy sixty-eight year-old love god Tom Jones attempting to ride the wave of mannered, self-consciously retro blue-eyed-soul that has recently taken Duffy to the top of the charts and Amy Winehouse to the brink of extinction. Moreover, it is unashamedly an attempted call for a critical rehabilitation and elevation of the ever-uncool Jones, in the fashion of Rick Rubin’s resuscitations of the careers of Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond, and practically begs to be described in such terms as ‘dignified statement’ and ‘back to his roots’.
Yet if this really is the sound of Carlton Banks’ hero going back to his roots, it only confirms that those roots are planted firmly in an enormous block of cheese. Glittery cheese, upon which willing young ladies writhe seductively. There’s a track here called ‘The Road’ which is a sober apology for a life of infidelity and an affirmation of love for a long-suffering wife. This all sounds lovely, ennobling and redeeming, until, on the very next track, Tom’s found perving over the ‘girls by the pool’. It all seems rather disingenuous.
Jones fails because he’s trying to show that he’s both in touch with his past and still ‘with it’; in trying to reach a pair of conflicting goals, he falls embarrassingly short of both. Every upbeat track wants to be uncompromising rhythm and blues but ends up being spangly, unwieldy disco; every slow number aims for heartfelt torch song territory only to come across as a power ballad sung by a human foghorn. Cash and Diamond needed Rubin to help them ditch their excesses and rediscover their essence; Tony Christie has just been revealed to be not a cruise ship crooner but an artist of depth and significance by Richard Hawley. Even Jones himself has been at his recent best with collaborative efforts. On 24 Hours he tries to show the world that he can still perform unaided, only to find, embarrassingly, that he can’t. Get this man some musical Viagra.
2 Stars
