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Fact #107331

When:

Short story:

Tom Jones records It's Not Unusual in Decca Studios, West Hampstead, London, UK. Rhythm guitarist on the session is thought to be Jimmy Page, later to find success with The Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin.

Full article:

Les Reed (songwriter/arranger) : He (Gordon Mills, manager of Tom Jones) came up with the idea of the title and the first two or three bars of It's Not Unusual, which was great, to start with. He didn't know where to go from there and so I put it into the bajon rhythm and took it out of the stilted rhythm that he put onto it, and it all came together very nicely. I said to him, 'We need a bit in the middle, an instrumental.' He said, 'I need the voice all the time.' But I said, 'No, let's just break it and put a little instrumental in the middle.' He wasn't keen on that.

I decided to do 'Unusual' in the Mary Wells style, the laid-back Tamla sound, which just involved a couple of sets of vibraphones and a rhythm section and a backing group. When I took it in to record it with Tom, it was not 'big' enough. The whole thing was too laid back. Tom's voice was streaming through and it was far too big for the backing.
(Source : not known)