While some artists have retired songs no longer deemed appropriate, such as the Rolling Stones laying rest to Brown Sugar, Jones leaned into Delilah and the audience adored him for it.

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Yet even when Jones went back in time, he chose numbers that he didn’t record back then but always loved, such as Michel Legrand’s Windmills of Your Mind and an early quirky Cat Stevens song Pop Star, another sign that he doesn’t want to rest on his laurels but find new musical nooks and crannies to explore.

While Jones certainly has a remarkable power in his voice for a singer who turns 84 in June – which he announced with wonderfully cheeky grin – through the early part of the show he didn’t quite have the control and cut-through we expect of one of the great pop voices of our age (Elvis’ only rival among pop vocalists in my opinion).

Then came the song that capped his resurgence in the 1990s, the dance classic Sex Bomb, which Jones and his marvellously tight band slowed down and revelled in, revealing it to be a thumping R’n’B rocker. The Voice rose to the occasion as Jones became the frontman of a blues outfit that could have challenged The Rolling Stones in the mid-60s.

With his pipes loosened and moistened, Jones ripped through the rest of the set list with power, verve and the old finesse, pushing into the outer reaches of his range and as he jumped between the golden oldies (Green, Green Grass of Home), his sassy contemporary covers (Prince’s Kiss, Joe Cocker’s Leave Your Hat On) and death-haunted melancholic numbers such as Leonard Cohen’s Tower of Song and Bernice Johnson Reagon’s I Won’t Crumble With You I You Fall, which he recorded in response to the passing of his wife of lung cancer in 2016.

The most remarkable of these elegiac numbers was Lazarus Man from the little-known Chicago-born folk-soul singer-songwriter Terry Callier, in which Jones used his still-incredible voice not as a showpiece but to tell a great story.

Indeed, the whole show revealed Jones, not as a museum piece topping up his super on yet another world tour, but a major musical artist who has thrown off the pop star trappings and working in a stripped-back mode, even giving us a version of Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode that electrified the audience (prefaced by a great story about his great friend Elvis Presley).

The audience probably wanted more of the hits — personally I was hanging out for She’s A Lady, which sadly never came — but Jones gave us so much more, an artist celebrating his glorious past but still with an eye for new musical adventures.

Tom Jones performs again tonight in King’s Park before continuing his tour on Australia’s east coast.