Gwen Russell is the author of Beckham: The Future and Jeremy Clarkson: The Biography.

Tom Jones An Extraordinary Life

By Gwen Russell

John Blake Publishing Ltd

Copyright © 2015 Gwen Russell
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78418-817-7

Contents

Title Page,
INTRODUCTION,
1: 44 LAURA STREET, PONTYPRIDD,
2: TIGER TOM, THE TWISTING VOCALIST,
3: TOM, THE VOICE,
4: TOM JOINS THE GREATS,
5: THIS IS … TOM JONES,
6: TOM, THE TROUSERS,
7: TOM AND MISS WORLD,
8: JONES, THE WEALTH,
9: KISS,
10: TOM ROCKS,
11: TOM AND FRIENDS,
12: THE REWARDS OF A LIFE WELL SPENT,
13: A KNIGHT WITH SIR TOM,
14: TOM TAKES CENTRE STAGE,
15: NEW HORIZONS,
DISCOGRAPHY,
Plates,
Copyright,

CHAPTER 1

44 LAURA STREET, PONTYPRIDD

Can there be a more popular entertainer than the Welsh singer Tom Jones? One of the most enduring celebrities of our day, he first appeared on the scene in the early 1960s and actually started his career as a teen idol, but swiftly changed tack to become the more sophisticated singer he is today. It’s not just his sheer raw talent and voice that hold such appeal, however. Throughout his life he has also been a sex symbol, to the extent that although he was already in his sixties when he received his knighthood, clever headline writers knew his fans would love an ever-appropriate reference to one of his biggest hits, greeting him with headlines such as ‘Arise, Sir Sex Bomb’. At one stage he was almost as famous for the lingerie shop’s worth of knickers that was thrown on to his stage every night as he was for his singing, but still ‘Tom the Voice’ shone through. After more than forty years in the business, he still shows no signs of letting up, continuing to perform in concert and live the high life, something he does to great aplomb.

It’s all a very long way from his origins in Pontypridd, the pride of the Rhonda in the valleys of South Wales. While many showbusiness stars like to turn roots that are solidly middle class into something a little bit more exciting, Tom is the real deal. He comes from an achingly poor background, with a father who spent his life working down the pits — something Tom was able to rescue him from the moment he had the means — and he left school with little prospects, which led to some very dead-end jobs. No one in the family was in showbusiness so there was no way they could possibly have predicted what lay in store for young Tom. Nor was he a trained singer: early on the family realised it had a boy with a mighty fine voice on its hands, but there was no question of them being able to do anything about it with a view to Tom singing professionally. For a start, there wasn’t the money and even if there had been, it wasn’t the sort of thing his family would have dreamt of, so alien was the concept of a son in the world of showbusiness. But that’s the way it turned out, with Tom leading a life of international fame and stardom, culminating in the ultimate accolade of a knighthood.

Way back in the beginning, it was all so very different. On 7 June 1940 Thomas Jones Woodward was born to Thomas Woodward, a miner, and housewife Freda Woodward, née Jones. Until Tom was four, they lived in 57 Kingsland Terrace in Treforest, near Pontypridd, when they moved to 44 Laura Street, which was where he grew up. His parents were delighted at their new arrival and right from the start, he was a very attractive little boy, as his mother remembered: ‘Oh, he was such a pretty little boy,’ she said. ‘It used to frighten me sometimes, thinking somebody might want to take him away.’ Indeed, when Tom was two and a half and the family was on holiday on Barry Island, he did go missing for over an hour before his frantic mother finally found him. ‘I took him by the hand and was walking back when a woman we passed said, “Oh look, there’s little Tommy Woodward, 44 Laura Street, Pontypridd.” “How do you know that?” I asked her, astonished. “Well,” she said, “I caught hold of him, and he told me his name and address very plainly, but he wouldn’t stay with me.'”

They were a musical family and from very early on, Tom was exposed to performing. On Saturday nights his parents would sing at the Wood Road Non-Political Club, where his Uncle George booked the acts. Tom was encouraged to sing everywhere else, too. At chapel he sang the Lord’s Prayer and ‘Barbara Allen’ at Treforest Secondary Modern School. From a very early age he had an exceptionally powerful voice: during choir practice renditions of ‘Men of Harlech’ sometimes had to be abandoned as he out-rumbled everyone else. Of course, the musical traditions of Wales are very strong, which encouraged him greatly, something of which he was well aware. ‘In Wales there are choirs, especially male-voice choirs, which a lot of my cousins were in,’ he recalled. ‘A Welsh tenor will have a full Welsh voice, even though he’s singing high, full-blown window shattering material. Maybe speaking Welsh lends itself, the accent … maybe part of it is the cheapest way of making music is to sing. You don’t need to buy an instrument.’ Even so, he was a precocious little boy. ‘When I was four I used to stand on a box in the corner of the grocer’s while my mother was doing the shopping and sing to the customers and collect the pennies,’ he once revealed.

Right from the start his mother Freda knew she had an entertainer on her hands. From a very young age Tom’s voice was remarkable and he always knew what he wanted to do. He developed a habit of jumping up on to the windowsill, pulling the curtains across and demanding his mother joined in. Decades later, he mused: ‘She’d say, “Look, I’m busy, I’m trying to clean the house.” And I would say, “No, I want you to introduce me.” Anyway, she’d do it and I’d throw back the curtains and jump out. Even though there was nobody there but my mother.’ Sometimes, though, he had an audience of two when his sister Sheila was persuaded to watch.

But it was a tough life and the family was typical of the area and of the time. ‘When my father was down the mine, he was a hard-working, hard-drinking man,’ Tom later recalled. ‘He used to like his cards and a flutter on the horses. He used to go out on the booze on Saturdays and I looked up to him. He put my mother in her place and they used to fight, but it was a healthy upbringing.’ At an early age Tom’s view of marriage was formed: the man would go out and bring home the bacon and the woman would cook it; the man would also rule the roost. It was how his later life was to pan out. But certainly he idolised his father. ‘I always thought what a good physique he had and I wanted to be like him,’ he remembered. ‘When I was little, I yearned to be a man, to be the best I could. I have a memory of being a small boy, hearing a noise in the night and my father getting up to see what it was. I remember thinking, “When I grow up, will I be as brave as that?”‘

Just before he entered his teens, two things happened that had a profound bearing on his future. For a start, aged just eleven, he met a local Catholic girl (also eleven) when she was playing marbles close to where he lived. Her name was Melinda Trenchard, although she was more commonly known as Linda and the two hit it off immediately. ‘I went to a Protestant school so we didn’t mix that much but I always liked those Catholic girls because they wore little gold earrings,’ he recalled. ‘Very sexy. So I saw her playing marbles — and she had great legs.’

Linda was indeed an attractive girl. ‘She was a very, very pretty girl and popular,’ says Jean Thomas, one of Tom’s cousins on his mother’s side. ‘She was a catch, stunning with short, blonde hair and she had what they called a “DA” [duck’s arse], a little tuft at the back of her neck. She was also very fashion conscious and had the first of everything. I remember clutch bags; she was one of the first to have a clutch bag. They knew one another in school. I think she was just in a class lower and I think she was a bit cleverer than Tom and I. I always remember she was in the A classes. She also liked fashion and boys, as girls do.’

Shortly after they met, however, Tom was diagnosed with tuberculosis, which caused him to be bedridden for nearly two years. Never exactly an academic child — he was actually found to be dyslexic in later life — he could not have been too upset at the news that he would be off school as he recovered in bed. But no one could foresee the influence this period at home was to have on his later life. Tom spent a year listening to the radio where, for the first time, he began to listen to American music — Blues, Rhythm and Blues, Rock’n’Roll — and he loved it. ‘The exaggeration,’ he said. ‘The drama. It’s like Gospel as opposed to the Church of England.’

Nonetheless, the family was very worried. For some time Tom was extremely ill, so much so that there were concerns that he wouldn’t pull through. He was a tough little boy, though, fighting against his illness and determined to get better as soon as he could. The adult Tom never complains about those days: rather, he prefers to remember the way they opened up the musical world to him. Had he but known it, he was already learning his trade and this period was a crucial one in his development. Later, when he started to make records, many people assumed he was a black singer and the way he made his American breakthrough was by being featured on radio stations that played black music. According to him this was something that just happened: ‘I was listening to the BBC radio in the late forties, early fifties, when I was a kid and anytime a Gospel or Blues song would come on, I would think: “What is that?” It was rubbing off on me. I didn’t know why, I just liked it. In school I sang the Lord’s Prayer, and my teacher said to me, “Why are you singing this like a Negro spiritual?” I didn’t know what the term was, I was very young — seven, eight — it was very natural for me to do it.

‘What attracted me to Rock’n’Roll was the sound. I toured with Count Basie once and I asked him what he thought of it, and he said, “What they’ve done, which we used to do, is to concentrate on the rhythm section, get that rhythm section hot. When Jerry Lee Lewis pounds out and the rhythm section kicks in with him, you can balance it because you don’t have all those other instruments to worry about.” When I heard Jerry Lee’s “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”, the piano starts like this …’ [Tom started to jab an imaginary keyboard as he spoke] ‘and Sam Phillips [the owner of Sun Records] had a slap-back echo because he didn’t have an echo chamber so he created a tape delay. He’d have two tapes running, with one a little stronger than the other. It’s only a simple thing that Jerry Lee is playing but because of that slap-back things hadn’t sounded like that before.’

But this was all to come and the other effect of the months in bed was that Tom formed an exceptionally close bond with his mother Freda. A generous man, who looked after all his family once he had become rich, it was his mother to whom he felt particularly close and he never forgot how she had looked after him when he was so ill. That determination to get well again must surely have had a hand in shaping his character for he was by no means an overnight success: for years he was forced to slog before he finally made his breakthrough and despite moments of despair, he never gave up. His longevity in such a fickle business can also be attributed to a determination to keep going, for there were to be some major blips in his career when it must have seemed as if it might indeed be all over. But no matter what frustrations there must have been, he never gave up.

Tom regained his health and, aged twelve, he returned to school. But he took to academia no more than he ever had done, instead spending his time chasing girls and playing truant. His was a rough childhood and it toughened him up. Sometimes he got into trouble, although he says his mother’s impeccable house often saved him. ‘When the officials came to see my mother,’ he explained, ‘with the brass nicely polished in the front room, picture of granddad with his medals on, they went away sayin’, “No ruffian could live here!”‘ Sometimes he got into fights, which was to bring on an obsession with his nose that would last for decades. ‘That’s why I hate my horrible nose — it’s been worked over, bent sideways and patched up more than any other part of me,’ he once said. ‘And always hit by a head — we liked to keep our hands nice and smooth, like!’ In fact, his nose was one of the first things about him to change once he became famous: at the earliest possible opportunity he had it whittled down.

In later years, Tom played down this aspect of his life, although he was always perfectly honest about what had gone on. When he first became famous quite a bit was made of his wild youth, something he gradually began to edge away from. ‘People say to me from time to time, “Oh yes, you used to get involved in punch-ups years ago, didn’t you?”‘ he said in 1969. ‘I can’t disagree with that. Now I’ve grown up, I’ll be twenty-nine in June. So have all the boys I used to hang about with when we were tearaways. They’re quiet now. Married. They don’t fight any more.’ In the background, though, there was always the singing. Freda later said that she sensed her son would go far. Asked what quality it was that she considered had taken Tom to the top, she replied, ‘Determination. One day he came and said to me, “Mum, the day will come when I will prove myself.” He was about fifteen then, but I knew it had been in his mind long before; it was the one thing he wanted and he stuck at it.’

Tom left school at sixteen with no qualifications and no clear idea about what he wanted to do. As a boy, school had not been important to him although in later life he regretted not taking his studies more seriously. ‘I sometimes wish I had paid more attention in school,’ he once confessed. ‘I used to listen to Radio Luxembourg under the bedcovers at night rather than do my homework. I have made up for it since. There’s nothing like travel to finish off an education. There are very few countries I have not been to, and I am credited for being one of the first white performers to insist on singing to mixed audiences in South Africa.’

One thing was clear back then: he was going to have to marry Linda, who was also sixteen, not least because she was pregnant — in actual fact the couple had just turned seventeen when the wedding took place. But Tom assumed his responsibilities cheerfully: for some years now the two had been sweethearts and the match was regarded favourably by the family. ‘They are so easy in each other’s company, they are pals,’ said Linda’s mother, Jean. ‘There’s a spark. I think they were going with each other since about thirteen. She loves him and he loves her that’s for definite. I have seen them quite a few times together, even when they were young. They used to go drinking. I can see them now smooching; I remember them getting married. Tom was seventeen in the June, and she was seventeen the following February, just a bit younger. They got married and my Gran always said, “They were made for each other.” There’s definitely something there. I have been in their company. You can tell how much they love one another.’

A great deal has been written about the unusual nature of Tom and Linda’s marriage, in that while he turned out to have a bit of an eye for the ladies, in later years Linda became extremely reclusive. But there has never been any question of divorce. The reason is that the marriage has incredibly strong roots dating back to their friendship as children, which turned into courtship, which ultimately became a bond that goes far deeper than many other, more superficial unions. There are very few people in Tom’s life that knew him before he was famous and know exactly what his background and childhood was like, but one of them is Linda. When they met they weren’t even in their teens and all this has provided the basis of an enduring partnership.

It has been a love match for both of them, but even in the very earliest days Tom was already showing himself to be a man’s man. Chatting to his father on his way back from the Pontypridd Register Office, his father said, ‘Don’t you think you should be walking with your bride?’ But that early marriage was to be the making of Tom in that it made him accept his responsibilities. ‘It gave me more drive, more determination,’ he later said. ‘I had my own family, there was a bigger need in me now to succeed.’ But doing what? For the young Tom there was no obvious career path to follow and nothing that he clearly wanted to do above all else. And so he held down a variety of jobs that led nowhere: as a builder’s mate, a paper miller, a glove cutter and a door-to-door salesman. Money was extremely tight: the new family lived with Linda’s parents in Cliff Terrace with, at that time, not much immediate chance of getting a home of their own.

‘I had married at seventeen — Linda was my childhood sweetheart — and I was about to be a father,’ Tom recalled on a separate occasion when he had finally moved to the States permanently. ‘I had responsibilities and no money. I remember phoning the hospital to find out if Linda had had our baby yet. They told me we had a son, Mark. The phone box I called from is outside in my Bel Air garden now. I managed to acquire the old Button A, Button B four-penny phone kiosk from the end of my street in South Wales.

‘When I was eighteen, if you had dialled Pontypridd 3667, the chances were you would have got me in that box, which used to stand in Laura Street. That was my first phone, my first office. I courted girls from it, my family began in it (not literally, mind you) and it’s as much a part of my life as my first gold record. I am a sentimentalist at heart and when I heard the heartless GPO was going to tear it down and replace it with some newfangled device, I had a friend in Wales make a few calls for me. It now stands beside the pool at my home. Of course, it wasn’t my exclusive line. We lived in a mining community and in those days miners couldn’t afford phones. Sometimes there would be a long queue of people waiting to use it.’

(Continues…)Excerpted from Tom Jones An Extraordinary Life by Gwen Russell. Copyright © 2015 Gwen Russell. Excerpted by permission of John Blake Publishing Ltd.
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