Classic crooner Jack Jones, 75, is not planning on retiring anytime soon – despite the title of his current retrospective tour, as he tells Steve Pratt

DOUBLE Grammy winner Jack Jones has embarked on his farewell tour. But the American singer promises this is not goodbye.

“I’ve been saying that yes, this is a farewell tour because I wouldn’t want to get to the point where I can’t perform any more or I die – and I wouldn’t want to die wishing I’d done a farewell tour.

“What I’ll probably do is come back. Like Tony Bennett, who does few concerts and everyone is glad to see him and it’s not a grinding schedule.”

This may not be the end, but the tour’s subtitle, Through The Years, shows there is a reflective feel, including a film featuring highlights of his career.

“That was the enjoyable part, preparing some video and documentary footage that I put together. That starts off with the year I was born and shows my parents,” he says.

He was born – in Hollywood – into show business.

His birth came the same night that his singer and movie star father Allan Jones recorded his hit Donkey Serenade. His mother was 1930s actress Irene Hervey.

At high school, young Jack gave up his track and football team sports to study the arts. He was already having singing and drama lessons with private teachers chosen by his father.

The story goes that one of his most memorable high school experiences came when a friend, Nancy Sinatra, invited her father to sing in the school auditorium. That appearance helped Jack to make his career choice.

At 75, Jones can look back over a singing career that’s seen him perform all over the world in sellout tours as well as recording 50-plus albums and earning accolades from fellow performers (Sinatra called him “one of the major singers of our time”) and composers.

He still gets the same enjoyment from performing although goes into grumpy old man mode when the subject of travel comes up. “It’s not the easy bit of touring,” he says. “But I have my wife with me and we love to travel together.

She’s very wonderful and helpful.

“We have so many wonderful friends here who have followed us all these years and that’s the fun of it. The only negative is getting on those damn airplanes and putting up with the indignity of security.”

The pleasure of performing outweighs the difficulty of travel. “I still get the same enjoyment.

If it’s my audience and they are there to hear me, I go to work and love it. It’s different when it’s a charity thing, you have to win them over and it’s a little more difficult.”

His career in this country followed his success in the US. A song called If launched his assault on audiences here. He found out how vocal the British public can be, at a concert at Brighton Dome when he received a tremendous ovation that went on and on. “It was wonderful.

Then the applause died down and I heard a man in the audience say, ‘you’re not as good as Tom’.”

This American Jones boy finds British audiences no different to anywhere else these days. “If they’re there to hear you it’s all good,”

he says. “Years ago, I played Jakarta and back then they had a culture where they didn’t applaud until the end. Between songs there was nothing.”

His whole style of performance has changed.

He’s just a man with a voice, a microphone and a band. He keeps up with contemporary music and is featuring an 18-year-old musician and multi-instrumentalist, Jacob Collier, he discovered on YouTube, in his London concert on the current tour.

“I saw his performance on You Tube, looked him up and it turned out his grandfather is a string player and has been on a couple of my albums. There’s great talent coming along,” he says.

The Palladium is his favourite theatre. He’s always said so in interviews. “There’s something about it. It’s so perfectly designed for what we need to perform,” he says, “I was there when my father appeared there. I was backstage doing the voice of a donkey.”

He recalls seeing variety acts such as Wilson, Keppel and Betty on stage there as well as Hackford and Doyle, and ventriloquist Jimmy Tattersall .

Jones became a singer rather than an actorsinger like his father, although he has made a few film appearances. He starred in the British horror movie, The Comeback, for film-maker Peter Walker, whose work has just been released on Blu-ray, he tells me.

Jones himself has just filmed a role in the new film from writer-director David O Russell, who made Silver Linings Playbook.

“He asked me to be in this movie, but I’m not allowed to say what I do because I signed a piece of paper.”

  • Jack Jones Through The Years: York Grand Opera House, May 21. Box office 0844-8713024 and online atgtickets.com/york