The night Jack Jones really put his foot in it

He really put his foot in it - literally - when staying here while touring with his mother and father as a child.

"Bradford holds great memories for me because I was there with my parents when I was about ten years old," he recalled.

"They stayed in a hotel and I stayed in digs. It was my first experience of anything like that and I remember I had a po under my bed.

"My big memory was that I had to get up in the night and use it and then went back to sleep but when I got up again I stepped in it. I'll never forget that!"

His unfortunate encounter with the rogue chamberpot clearly hasn't put Jack off touring, though. He has been a regular visitor to these shores over the past 30 years.

And his latest tour of the UK sees the silver-haired crooner arrive in Bradford for a concert at St George's Hall next week.

Jack's nine-year-old daughter Nicole is accompanying him, although there are unlikely to be any guzunder-related incidents.

"I don't know if we still have those kind of things but she stays with her grandmother and her uncle anyway, not in digs!" he said.

The youngster is already showing signs that showbusiness is in her blood.

"My daughter's with me on this tour and it sounds like something that she wants to do," said Jack, now 62.

"I wouldn't push it onto her but she seems to be what she wants. We have a local theatre where I play once every year and she has been there more or less more than I have.

"She's really into singing and she's a good actress as well."

Jack himself followed in famous footsteps when he became a professional singer.

Born in Hollywood the night his movie star father Alan Jones recorded his hit Donkey Serenade, it was perhaps inevitable the bright lights would beckon. His mother too was a celebrity, the actress Irene Hervey.

The difference these days is perhaps the gulf that exists between the kind of easy listening music that Jack was brought up with and the styles that dominate the charts.

Once thing Jack is sure of, however, no matter how modern Nicole's tastes become.

"She won't be a rapper, that's for certain," he said.

"She loves her dad and she loves the way I sing. She also loves Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra because she's been exposed to them as part of her musical upbringing.

"But having said that she also likes Nsync and the Backstreet Boys. I hear that around the house all the time. And she dances terrifically too because dancing is now all part of it."

The groin-thrusting gyrations that pass for dancing in the 21st century are a far cry from the more innocent era which Jack was brought up in.

At university in Los Angeles he played down his privileged life as the son of a showbiz family, only to find later he would be financially hampered by his parents' divorce and would have to start from scratch like most of the other students.

Jack was a gifted sportsman but gave up athletics and American football to concentrate on singing.

His professional debut was a brief stint as part of his father's act at the Thunderbird Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas when he was just 19.

His break came with the song This Could Be The Start Of Something Big, which landed him a three-week booking at a club in San Francisco and set him on the road to a career which would see him record more than 50 albums and earn two Grammy awards as well as his won star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Jack has had a hugely influential career but now fears his breed of singer may be dying out.

"I'm into the American songbook and I'm kind of unique now. There's not really anyone else," he said.

"There are lots of kids who could do this but aren't interested. They're trying to emulate their peers and their contemporaries instead.

"We thought Harry Connick Jr was going to do it for a while but then he took a left turn and went off some place else."

e-mail: simon.ashberry@newsquest.co.uk

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