Carlos Marin’s knicker wall is coming along nicely and he’s looking to add a pair from Halifax. The Il Divo star, reached in Switzerland last week, once casually revealed he admires Tom Jones.

“Not only because he has such an amazing voice, it was also because he was receiving all the knickers and bras on stage,” Marin explained to Metro Halifax.

Since then, it’s been a panty avalanche.

“We have a huge room with a lot of knickers everywhere!” he laughs. “We had a really huge one in Barcelona. They wrote down, ‘We love you Carlos.’”

Being handsome, wealthy, talented and recently divorced agrees with Marin.

“It was tough to get divorced because I’m a very good friend of my ex-wife,” the Spanish baritone explains.

“But when you are in this kind of band and you are single, you can enjoy the life in another way then you can do when you are married.”

He pauses. “You know what I mean with that?”

To avoid any confusion, he elaborates: “How the people see us is how we are. Obviously, my Latin lover role is not that I play the Latin lover, it’s just because I love women. It’s just me since I was a child.”

Before joining Il Divo, Marin worked in opera, with a sideline in musicals like Grease and Peter Pan.

“In the opera, you get a better career reputation, but whatever,” he says. “It’s a different way to approach the people. When you sing the kind of music we are doing, you are really close to the people.”

Fellow Divo Urs Buhler has admitted he wouldn’t listen to Il Divo if he wasn’t in the group. Marin sympathizes.

“I love Tom Jones, all the old groups like Queen, like Duran Duran, Michael Jackson. Right now, I don’t listen to too many groups. We listen to music two hours 15 minutes (each night). Enough!”