The record in context

By the mid-1980s, Tom Jones’s pop-chart career looked finished. Then, in 1987, he added Prince’s “Kiss” — a skeletal, teasing funk single from 1986 — to his live show, and performed it on television. The synth-pop group the Art of Noise saw the broadcast, contacted him, and proposed a studio collaboration. The resulting single, credited to the Art of Noise featuring Tom Jones, reached number five in the UK in 1988 and gave Jones his first major hit in over a decade.

The story matters because it is a masterclass in reinvention. Jones did not chase the 1980s sound; the 1980s sound came to him, because he had done something brave on live television — taken a song by the coolest young star in music and sung it his own way. The Art of Noise heard not a nostalgia act but a voice that could anchor their electronic experiments in something human. It was the beginning of the second half of his career.

Listen closely

Start with the production, which is the opposite of everything Jones had recorded before. Prince’s original was famously minimal — guitar, drum machine, almost nothing else — and the Art of Noise keep that sparseness, wrapping it in samples, stabs of brass, and studio trickery. Listen to how much empty space there is in this record compared to the wall of sound on “Delilah.” The space is the point: it forces the voice to carry everything.

Now listen to what Jones does inside that space. He does not try to imitate Prince’s falsetto tease; he sings it like Tom Jones — full-throated, masculine, winking. Listen to the way he attacks the title word, turning Prince’s feather-light “kiss” into something closer to a command. It should clash with the icy electronics. Instead, the contrast becomes the thrill of the record: the warmest voice of the 1960s inside the coldest production of the 1980s, and both of them sounding better for it.

Finally, listen for the backing details the Art of Noise scatter around him — the sampled brass hits, the little vocal fragments, the sense of a studio being played like an instrument. This is a record about generations meeting: the old showman and the new technicians, each showing off for the other. It worked so well that Jones would spend the next decade collaborating with younger artists, a strategy that led directly to Reload. The second career started here, in the space between a Prince riff and a Welsh roar.