Tom Jones

This just isn’t of much import, and probably not of reason for comment, but god help me, I can’t but notice that the 70-year-old Welsh heart-throb crooner Tom Jones (how many oxymorons in that phrase?) has decided after 40 years that women throwing underwear (“knickers” in the British vernacular) at him as he performs is somehow “just wrong.” Apparently, after all these years, he finds it insulting, despite over the decades his encouraging the lingerie barrage, beginning with his mopping his brow at the first instance. “It’s not unusual to be loved by anyone . . .” As he told the British Times Magazine: "It's just wrong. I'm laying my soul down here. And people start laughing."

But it may well be that the septuagenarian’s newfound modesty could have something to do with his recently released album, Praise & Blame, a spiritual album that a vice-president of Jones’s new record company, New Island, described as “some sick joke” and demanded that his company “pull back this project immediately or get my money back.” As Jones begins his promotional tour of the album, it certainly might be uncomfortable for women to be flinging panties at him as he’s singing “Lord Help the Poor and Needy,” “If I Give My Soul,” or “Burning Hell.” But if he’s still got the earlier “Mama Told Me" and “Sex Bomb” in his repertoire, the fuselage of undies could continue unabated.