Bye, ‘Delilah’: The Welsh Rugby Union’s Tom Jones Ban

This July, Sir Tom Jones, whose puddingish, toad-in-the-hole baritone still bellows ‘one part threat, one part music hall,’ will sing ‘Delilah’ at Cardiff Castle and this is somehow political news in our own universe, not a parallel one. Let’s have Sir Tom in Loki next season, running through the nonsense ‘multiverse’ from Kang the Schoolmaster. Perhaps, in one alternate universe, George Orwell’s priggish, prescient dictum is right and ‘all issues are political issues.’ Perhaps in another, it’s as David Bromwich suggests, and ‘the successful artist shares with the politician a recurrent temptation to engage in emotional claptrap.’ In ours, though, bureaucrats, corporations, and risk managers seem to have grasped that engaging in critical claptrap about popular culture – Marx’s ‘ruthless criticism of all that exists’ – asks easier gestures of them than the work of real administration.

Take sport. This year, the Six Nations Championship risks being overshadowed by serious allegations about the Welsh Rugby Union’s ‘toxic culture.’ In the wake of a recent BBC Wales Investigates expose, the WRU’s Nigel Walker told the Senedd that ‘warning signs’ had been evident for ‘quite some time.’ Labour MP, Tonia Antoniazzi, for example, reminded the Senedd’s sports committee that she had first raised ‘concerns over sexism and misogyny at the WRU in a St. David’s Day debate in the House of Commons last March.’ That same month same, the Daily Mail reported a former WRU employee’s allegations of loathsome behavior.

Now, BBC Wales Investigates has ‘Welsh Rugby under the Spotlight.’ This coincides with the start of Six Nations, and the WRU’s public acts of contrition coincide with BBC Wales coverage. ‘If we are not prepared to change,’ Walker declares, ‘the future of Welsh rugby and the Welsh Rugby Union is in danger,’ so the WRU is taking steps. These steps consist of statements. One statement ‘condemn[s] domestic violence of any kind,’ which is a step the Union’s taken before. Another bans the performance of Tom Jones’s 1968 chart-topper, ‘Delilah,’ a favorite at Principality Stadium. It’s an unpopular move, but it helps the WRU make a statement about taking steps.

‘Delilah’ is the apex of a series of power ballads that defined Jones’s persona – part tongue-in-cheek Thunderball, part club-sport Rat Pack, part bareknuckle Pavarotti – in the late 1960’s. It’s a murder ballad of sorts, something like Nick Cave’s ‘Where the Wild Roses Grow’ without Pitchfork accolades. There are conflicting accounts of the song’s inspiration, but Barry Mason’s lyrics echo Georges Bizet’s Carmen, Frankie Lane’s 1951 hit, ‘Jezebel,’ and the Old Testament tale of Samson and Delilah. ‘It ended up being more of a Carmen Jones theme,’ Mason’s wife later reflected. Sung in the voice of lovestruck, cuckolded killer, ‘Delilah’ careens between desire, repulsion, violence, contrition, love, and hate.

It was a perfect fit for Jones, whose 1960’s persona expressed a palpable, operatic friction between dominance and woundedness. For as many times as Jones was the cocksure lothario of ‘Help Yourself,’ a coalmining Alfie dancing on the balls of his feet, he was also the defeated working-class lover of ‘(It Looks Like) I’ll Never Fall In Love Again’ or ‘It’s Not Unusual.’ Other men limn the edges of his songs because Jones’s oeuvre is late-pub opera, smothered in onion gravy and tears.

Nothing about ‘Delilah’ suits it to sport per se but there it is, sort of like John Lydon and Country Life butter. Stoke City F.C., which shares the tune with Welsh rugby, adopted it in 1987 after police asked fans to stop singing obscene songs and a roofing contractor began belting out ‘I saw the light on the night that I passed by her window.’ Even the proud Welshman, Jones, who ‘love[s] to hear [‘Delilah’] being sung at Welsh games,’ admits that he doesn’t ‘think [singers] are really thinking about it.’ The ‘great thing about the song,’ he explains, is its chorus. ‘If it’s going to be taken literally,’ he concludes, ‘I think it takes the fun out of it.’ In fact, the recent insistence on the part of rugby fans that the song does have something to do with Welshness seems to be a collective nose-thumbing at a scandal-bogged WRU and, more broadly, the political class. ‘Try stopping 50,000 people,’ one Cardiff fan remarked.

The obvious arbitrariness of ‘Delilah’ – which lets its use inflect different meanings, experiences, and fandoms – highlights the odd, professorial turn in the WRU’s public relations scuffle. ‘We have previously sought advice from subject matter experts,’ the WRU explained, ‘and we are respectfully aware that [‘Delilah’] is problematic […] because of its subject matter.’

The term, ‘problematic,’ which the WRU uses like part of a ritualistic formulae, is postgraduate humanities burble, the hocus-pocus gesture of a shallow, paraprofessional idiom that avoids candor. In most cases, ‘problematic’ simply means either aesthetically ‘ambiguous’ or thematically ‘immoral.’ Calling Jones’s song ‘bad’ art, for example, can be a formal judgment or a moral one. But when both meanings are implied simultaneously, and with some sense of causation, uncovering the ‘problematic’ is just Victorian moral criticism gussied up as progressive critique.

There is a fine line between critiquing art’s expression of cultural values and wanting it to be a form of therapeutic values clarification, mere propaganda that can be tweaked to influence the Great Unwashed. When this happens in academia, particularly in the humanities, treating everything as a ‘sinister ploy disguising the working of power’ is often about projecting ‘self-image (and career prospects) as a professional truth-teller’ for other academics. It has little real impact on what students actually do with their undergraduate educations.

The similar ‘educative’ turn in the WRU scandal – which is a turn from real, needed governance – is deft public relations because there are no institutional consequences to performing literature-class high jinks on a ‘problematic’ song from Top of the Pops. There are, however, professional stakes – social capital to be gained or retained – in projecting an image of the WRU as reformed ‘subject matter expert’ and reformist ‘truth-teller.’

One important feature of this is the reduction of art to simple thematic readings. When Jones told the Digital Spy that ‘Delilah’ was ‘not a sort of political statement’ but ‘just something that happens in life,’ he implied that art renders moral situations, not moral lessons. In this sense, ‘Delilah’ is genuinely ‘problematic’ in the sense that it is problem-posing. ‘This woman,’ Jones continues, ‘was unfaithful to [the man in the song] and he just loses it.’ Art is not transformative in the sense of teaching us what to do. Instead, art alters the scale we use to measure the often-inconsistent, often-shocking range of situations that ‘happen in life.’

At the very least, it is questionable whether or not art is suited to being a form of moral instruction past its use in holding up a mirror to the human condition. In 1968, Ed Sullivan had no issue with the song’s depiction of murder but requested that Jones change the lyrics to avoid depicting sexual infidelities. Both affronts to the audience’s sensibilities, however, contribute to the final production of the song’s rhetorical situation. ‘Bad’ art or not, its tragic catharsis does not dissolve into its own constituent parts.

It’s also worth noting in this regard that we tend to exempt ‘high’ culture from the ‘Delilah’ standard. No one, for example, thinks that staging Othello normalizes mariticide. This is because ‘riffraff rugby fans, having belted out Delilah at a game, and who probably drink pints of lukewarm beer with their rarebits,’ are not reciting Captain Fluellen’s lines ‘upon St. Davy’s Day’ from Henry IV, Part 1. Though we must not say so, where there are self-appointed ‘truth-tellers’ and ‘subject matter experts,’ there is often the classist spectre of the Great Unwashed, prone to be stupid and villainous, who need moral instruction through ‘good’ art, and who risk becoming monsters if they take too much pleasure in unapproved texts.

On the other hand, when we decide a priori that something is ‘good’ art for the better sort of people it becomes ‘anti-problematic.’ The magic of circular logic lets it safely float in an empyrean of sacrosanct ‘deep’ meanings. ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’ are good, aspirational themes (and they’re en français), so no one imagines that rugby fans will revive The Terror after hearing the line about watering fields ‘with impure blood’ in ‘La Marseillaise.’ Even when the theme isn’t noble, a strange sense of noblesse oblige, of privileged people privileging people with culture, redeems it. The Royal Shakespeare Company and The Public Theater stage bedlam Titus Andronicus from time to time, but we don’t worry about theatregoers baking their neighbor’s children into pies.

The sort of simplistic, thematic, literalist reading model that the WRU’s ‘subject matter experts’ seem to believe in has much to do with a sense of control. Orwell, who found all issues political, ‘loathed’ sport, particularly football, in part because he could ‘see no pleasure or usefulness in it’ – ay, there’s the moral rub again – and in part because his own ‘lower-upper-middle-class’ sensibilities tended toward condescension. This comes through in 1984’s description of the ‘Proles’ who ‘work and breed’ like cattle. ‘Heavy physical work,’ Orwell writes, ‘the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and above all gambling filled up the horizons of their minds.’

But just as ‘heavy physical work’ and ‘the care of home and children’ require sophisticated intelligence – and, to those unfamiliar with either, the educator, Mike Rose, is excellent on the topic – the regular appreciation of popular sport and entertainment does, too. For numerous fans, being part of the ‘Delilah’-belting audience for Six Nations entails a refined calculus of stats, predictive gambits, professional arcana, formal judgments, imagined investments and disinvestments, and shifting, often paradoxical, sympathies. In short, it requires those habits of mind that critical readers of art, music, and literature use.

Perhaps the idea that ‘songs like Delilah have been reclaimed by the masses and reified beyond their surface-level meaning’ – or that the masses are capable of this – has not occurred to the WRU’s ‘subject matter experts.’ Perhaps there is an alternate timeline in which Mirror Universe We assume that sophisticated critique and common sense both begin with distinctions between art and audience. Perhaps in ours, we might extend to Welsh rugby-goers the assumption that they know how to distinguish between tragic situations in make-believe and the ethical dispositions of their own lives. ‘I wasn’t thinking that I was the man that was killing the girl when I was singing the song,’ Jones explains, ‘I was acting out the part and that’s what the song is.’