Sir Tom Jones knows he’s not immortal

Sir Tom Jones won’t “push away” the idea of his own mortality.

The 81-year-old singer has accepted he won’t “live forever” and is determined to make the most of his life, however long he has left.

He said: “You have to realise, how long do I have? You can’t push it away. I’m not going to live forever.”

A decade ago, the ‘Delilah’ hitmaker began to move away from his sexy image because he began to properly consider his legacy.

He told the i newspaper: “You don’t realise what’s happened to you over the years, what image gets formed. Then all of a sudden, I’m thinking my God, what have I become?

“When I’d see someone doing an impression of me, I’d think, Jesus, I mean – is that it?

“So you do think about these things as you get older. You don’t want to leave this world just with that.”

And though Tom isn’t “ashamed” of any of his past music, the ‘Sex Bomb’ hitmaker wants to make records with more meaning now.

He said: “I’m not ashamed of anything that I’ve done recording-wise in the past. But time is getting shorter. I want to keep doing important things. And that’s for my legacy”.

The ‘Green Green Grass of Home’ singer’s beloved wife Linda died of cancer in 2016 and Tom only carried on singing after her passing because she had urged him to.

Speaking of his cover of Bernice Johnson Reagon’s ‘I Won’t Crumble With You If You Fall’, the title track on his new album ‘Surrounded By Time’, he said: “I didn’t know if I was going to carry on [singing] “But she told me that I had to. And she told me not to fall, not to crumble.

“When I heard that song, I thought, ‘Oh my God, it’s like the last two weeks that I had with my wife.’ I think she would have wanted me to do that song.”