Still Shaking His 'Hip'

NEW YORK

Tom Jones sweats. Tiny jewels of perspiration line his brow, twinkling in the sunlight, not unlike the stones that adorn the rings choking each of his pinkie fingers. The temperature has suddenly, inexplicably shot up about 10 degrees in the 68-year-old singer's Manhattan hotel room, and Jones has excused himself from his interviewer's questions to go tinker with the thermostat. No luck. He stands on a couch to try to pry the window open. It barely budges.

Is this the fate of a sexagenarian sexpot, to be forever hot and bothered?

It's a Tuesday afternoon and Jones is in the middle of a New York media blitz -- mornings spent crooning on television sets and afternoons of endless Q&A. Yesterday was "Good Morning America"; today, only hours earlier, it was "Live With Regis and Kelly." At both appearances he sang his most recent single "I'm Alive" and one of his earliest, "It's Not Unusual" -- that 1965 hip-shaking career-launcher that still looms so large in the karaoke bar of our collective pop consciousness. (Tonight, he'll be singing on "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno," and tomorrow, he'll be on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!"

It's all to promote a new album, "24 Hours," the Welsh singer's first to be released in the United States in 15 years. The recording finds Jones vocalizing with an almost reckless exuberance, making "24 Hours" the opposite of those quiet, introspective affairs that other veteran singers seem prone to tackle at his age. Sure, there are a few ballads tucked into the mix, but even the album's somber title track couldn't suppress Jones's hallmark smolder.

"It's a song about a man at the end of his life," he explains. "I played it for some friends and said, 'Does this sound too depressing to you?' One of my friends' wife said, "It sounds sexy to me.'"

Jones shrugs, "Well, I didn't think of it like that." But behind his sunglasses' purply tint, his eyes show a glint of pride.

It's an interesting time to be a 60-something sex symbol. America's popular image of virility in men older than 50 seems limited to cartoonish television commercials hawking meds for erectile dysfunction. Jones has a distaste for such advertisements. "These guys singing 'Viva Viagra' seems a little strange to me. I don't know if Elvis would have liked that," he says, referring to how Presley's "Viva Las Vegas" has been transposed into a pharmaceutical jingle.

"Some people think of older people as not being sexy, but it all depends on who you are and what you do," Jones says. "I don't think there's an age limit on it."

Before Jones was a sexy old man, he was a sexy young man who made his pop debut in the mid-'60s with a pinata-burst of hits, including "It's Not Unusual," the eponymous theme to "What's New Pussycat?," "Delilah" and "Green, Green Grass of Home." By the end of the decade, he had his own variety show on American television and a foothold in the Las Vegas club circuit. The world soon became very well acquainted with that bellowing voice and that billowing tuft of chest hair -- not to mention the panties of his most eager fans, which were famously flung onstage at many a Jones performance.

In 1988, he hit the career-refresh button with a splashy cover of Prince's "Kiss." It brought Jones to the attention of a younger audience, but the singer swears it wasn't a gimmick. Covers had always been a part of his live act, and in the '80s concertgoers could expect to hear such chestnuts as "Unusual" alongside Jones's rendition of the latest George Michael hit.

"People were noticing it and liking it," Jones says of his covers. "So it was suggested to do an entire album like that." It finally came to fruition in 1999 with the release of "Reload," a collection of covers, many duets. Jones sang the Talking Heads' "Burning Down the House" alongside the Cardigans, Lenny Kravitz's "Are You Gonna Go My Way" with Robbie Williams and the traditional "Motherless Child" with Portishead. "Reload" became Jones's highest selling album, moving more than 5 million copies -- no thanks to the singer's U.S. fans.

"It was never released in America," says Jones of his unlikely success. "It was beyond my control, but I was [ticked] off that it didn't come out."

That's because until recently, Jones didn't have a record deal in the States, explaining his absence from American record stores and radio (something he compensated for with his omnipresence on the stages of Las Vegas). Now, with "24 Hours," he has not only his first stateside release since Clinton was in office, but also the first album in which he co-wrote half the songs. There's also a plaintive Bruce Springsteen cover and a bombastic romp called "Sugar Daddy," written especially for Jones by Bono and the Edge of U2. "I like all kinds of songs," Jones explains. "I like ballads as well as up-tempo songs, I love rock tunes, I love rhythm and blues, I like soul. I wanted this thing to be a mixture of stuff, not just in one vein."

Fans will have a chance to toss their panties in Jones's direction when he tours behind "24 Hours" early next year, with a Washington area stop in the works.

"All roads lead to the stage," he says, echoing the mantra he recited on "Good Morning America" the day before.

And with that, Jones dabs his brow and jumps up to take another crack at the thermostat.