by Sean Smith
Tom returned for a second series of The Voice. Despite disappointing ratings, which saw the show lose more than half its viewers as the weeks progressed, there was never any question of it being axed – the financial investment was too big. Kevin O’Sullivan observes: ‘The first series could have got six viewers and they still would have made the second.’
Despite its grand ideal about being a singing contest, The Voice is primarily a television show. The problem that has yet to be solved was that the blind auditions were by far the most interesting part of the series and the ratings fell off a cliff when they were over. An additional difficulty for the programme will be if Tom decides to leave. They would have to replace him with someone of similar stature and there simply isn’t anybody.
These days, Tom likes to do the unexpected. It is part of his enduring appeal. In December 2013, he interviewed Kate Moss for Playboy magazine. It was a bizarre gimmick, but strangely cool – more like a chat between buddies. Kate told him she was wearing a blue suede mini-dress that she had designed herself, matched with Yves Saint Laurent shoes. Tom responded that his cashmere jacket was from Smedley and his blue suede shoes were Jeffery-West. He was also sporting a Cartier Santos watch. Kate said, ‘I’ve never seen one that big.’
By then, the auditions had begun for the third series of The Voice in 2014. Kylie Minogue replaced Jessie J, and Ricky Wilson of The Kaiser Chiefs took over from Danny O’Donoghue. The chemistry was much better. Tom observed, ‘It’s been fun to do it with people I know rather than ones I didn’t.’
He was more comfortable during the series and was even able to offer Ricky advice: ‘I told him to relax, go with the flow, go with his instinct and listen.’ He didn’t stop mentioning famous people he knew. In one show, he talked about Ray Charles, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Frank Sinatra, Otis Redding, Prince and Elvis. An impressed will.i.am said Tom had worked with ‘every legend ever’.
Tom nearly won again. His final contestant was Sally Barker, a fifty-four-year-old professional singer from Leicestershire, whose ethereal voice moved Tom to tears more than once. He joined some of the contestants for some impromptu – and carefully filmed – busking in Covent Garden. He sang ‘It’s Not Unusual’ and ‘Kiss’ to the tourists. In the final, he sang ‘Walking in Memphis’ with Sally, but it wasn’t enough to win her the competition.
Both Tom and will.i.am threaten to leave the show each year. It’s almost part of the pageant. Tom hinted that he was definitely going if Kylie left. She went, but he stayed. It’s a well-worn method stars use to bump up their fee. Tom is now earning close to £1 million for his annual trip to London. He doesn’t need the money. The Sunday Times Rich List estimated his fortune at £145 million in 2014, quite an achievement for someone who writes very few songs and doesn’t rely on publishing royalties for his income.
Tom has amassed much of his fortune through live performing. After the third series of The Voice finished in March 2014, he started rehearsing for a world tour. He played forty-four dates, beginning at the Ryman Theatre in Nashville at the end of April and ending six months later in Melbourne at the AFL Grand Final, the climax of the Australian rules football season. Tom’s instinct for a cool alliance is still intact. This time, he shared a stage with Ed Sheeran for a duet of ‘Kiss’ in front of 100,000 people.
Tom did manage to produce some controversy when he was interviewed by a former Australian sports star called Campbell Brown, who, in a tired old gag, handed Tom a pair of underpants to mop his brow. At the end of the interview, Tom is heard to mutter, ‘Dickhead.’ He may have said ‘take care’. It caused a big debate on Twitter. The Treforest Ted would definitely have said ‘dickhead’.
Tom had one more responsibility to fulfil in 2014 before he could put his feet up in Los Angeles. He arrived in London for the first auditions of the 2015 fourth series of The Voice. Rita Ora replaced Kylie. She is signed to Roc Nation, who have a multimillion-dollar distribution agreement with the Universal Music Group.
Tom flew home for his Christmas break with Linda before the live shows began. They scarcely leave the house these days, because Linda doesn’t want to, but Tom enjoys the quiet. Occasionally, he will go out to get fish and chips or their favourite steak and kidney pudding from a British food store in Hollywood. He reads history books by the pool. His Desert Island book is The Rise and Fall of the British Empire by Lawrence James. The books in his bookcases are all real now.
He is more careful these days about how much he drinks, mainly because he doesn’t want to put on too much weight. When asked by his doctor how much he consumed each day, he told him he had a bottle of wine with dinner. He didn’t tell him about the vodka martini aperitif, the cognac digestif or the bottle of champagne for the road.
Linda always knows when Tom is getting restless and it’s time for him to go back on stage: he starts singing in the house. Tom isn’t bothered about getting older: ‘My voice is as strong as ever. Hopefully, when it’s not, I’ll stop. It can’t be far away, but I hope it’s a long way off. If you’re making records that sell, and people want to see you on tour, there’s nothing better.’
Every year he picks up a raft of awards, testimony to his longevity. His long-standing road manager Don Archell once compared Tom to two legendary drinkers, Richard Burton and Richard Harris. Tom has never matched their level of inebriation. If he had, he would be dead.
Tom won the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2014 Silver Clef Awards at the London Hilton. He was amusing about it: ‘When you get a lifetime achievement award, you think “Is that it?”’ The best line, however, came from Rob Brydon, who introduced him. He said, ‘Tom Jones has lived the life we would all love to live.’
Last Thoughts
Stow Hill is a very steep street in Treforest. At the top is the Central Guest House, where Tom’s old secondary school used to be. He trudged up the hill with his best friends Brian and Dai every day from their houses a few hundred yards away. At the bottom is a bar, specialising in Indian food and pool nights, called The Red Lounge. This is the site of the much-missed Wood Road Non-Political Club, the venue for the first public performance of Tommy Woodward.
Tom wouldn’t recognise the old home town any more. It doesn’t look the same. At the end of Wood Road, the Cecil Cinema is now a snooker hall. In the other direction, towards Pontypridd, the Wheatsheaf pub no longer exists, replaced by a magistrates’ court and some flats. The White Hart pub in the Broadway is closed, along with the County and nearby White Palace cinemas. The Polyglove factory, where Tom found his first job, is a bustling restaurant and bar called Barinis. It offers a 10 per cent discount for students. Next door is a Tesco Metro.
Some old haunts are still the same. The house in Laura Street has changed little, with a grating on the pavement outside and the gate at the back that his father would open to announce his arrival at the end of his working day down the mine. The streets are different, though. They are full of ‘To Let’ signs, advertising accommodation for students at the nearby University of South Wales.
The pride in the community has gone. The locals I spoke to complain of the litter and messy front gardens. They understand that the student influx has given their backwater a financial boost and energised the local retail trade, but the young men and women are just passing through. It’s a movable population, far removed from the settled neighbourhood Tom knew so well. Nobody would be foolish enough to leave their back door unlocked now.
Tom Jones never lived in Treforest. He was Tommy Woodward when he walked these streets. He has returned only occasionally over the years for sad days, like the funeral of Dai Perry, or for happier ones, when he sang in front of 20,000 fans at Ponty Park in 2005. He can’t, of course, just visit without it being a big deal, accompanied by a publicity jamboree. When he went back to the old Central School in 1983, he was presented with the school bell. It was a well-meaning but ironic gift, considering that, as a pupil, he would ignore the sound of its ringing whenever he could.
Not
everybody I met in the Pontypridd area speaks highly of Tom. Some are weighed down by jealousy and the feeling that he has never given anything back to his birthplace. But others are hugely appreciative he has put the principality on the world map. He could justifiably claim to be the most famous Welshman of them all.
He is truly proud to be Welsh and can be sentimental about it, but in reality he has lived in tax exile in Los Angeles for forty years – far longer than he ever lived in Treforest. He may still sound Welsh, despite living so long in the US, but his lifestyle is decidedly Bel Air. He has spent so much of his adult life in impersonal hotel rooms that, inevitably, the people close to him have always been more important to him than places.
He has the reassurance that his beloved wife Linda is always waiting for him at their luxury home off Mulholland Drive. In April 2015, they will have been married for fifty-eight years – an amazing length of time for a pop star. I wonder if it’s a record.
Much has been written depicting Linda as some sort of downtrodden woman. The sacrifices she has made over the years because she loves her husband are not, in my opinion, those of a weak woman, but of a strong one. Her decision, all those years ago, to work in a sewing factory so Tom could pursue his dream, set the standard for the rest of their married life.
Tom has spoken candidly about his wife’s fear of public places, meeting new people and travelling by air. She didn’t make the journey across the Atlantic for his knighthood, so it doesn’t seem as though she will ever be seen in the UK again. From time to time, stories have appeared in the press suggesting that Tom will move back, but that is increasingly unlikely as the years go by.
Linda has chosen to ignore his many and well-reported infidelities, but she does not want to read about them in the pages of a tabloid newspaper. That, it seems, is her condition. All hell breaks loose if she suffers any public humiliation. One quote from her sums up this arrangement. When the Mary Wilson affair was getting too close to home, she reportedly told Tom: ‘You’d better straighten it out, because you won’t be able to do anything without your balls.’
Tom Jones the superstar has lived the champagne life of a famous man who enjoys the company of women. At home he is still Tommy Woodward, reading a favourite history book by the pool, eating fish and chips at the enormous dining table, and spending time with the love of his life.
Intriguingly, the female fans I spoke to find it easy to forgive his Don Juan tendencies. Young women in particular find it less easy to accept his failure to acknowledge his illegitimate son, Jonathan Berkery. The argument seems to be that a child cannot be held responsible for the circumstances of his birth and should not be punished for them. It is a moral dilemma.
Tom Jones will be seventy-five in June. He has more money than he needs or could ever have dreamed of having, so why does he bother? Why did he turn up to play a gig at Newmarket races on a drizzly August evening in 2014 – the last time I saw him in concert?
The simple answer is that he gets bored if he doesn’t sing. It’s the thing he’s best at, so why would he want to while away his days wasting the gift he still has? Singing defines the man. He can’t help the march of time and is looking greyer and older these days, but his voice doesn’t seem to reflect his age. He still lit up the stage with his vocal majesty.
He has never wanted to be a headline act on a sixties nostalgia tour – they are ten a penny. I saw P. J. Proby on just such a tour a few years ago. They pay the rent, but are not going to thrill the crowds at Glastonbury.
As if to prove his current credibility, Tom’s first number wasn’t one the increasingly drunken audience could sing along with. Instead, the band launched into the brooding, guitar-led song ‘Burning Hell’, from his acclaimed 2010 studio album Praise and Blame. It was a statement of intent from an artist confident enough in the quality of his music not to need to get the crowd immediately onside with an old favourite. We would have to wait for ‘It’s Not Unusual’.
The song was a perfect statement: ‘Listen to my voice, it’s still strong and rich.’ Tom may have lost his top range, but he has made up for it with greater depth to his bass notes. This is not a man performing in cruise control. The songs he chooses are too challenging for him to do that.
Much of the credit for his relevance today goes to the enterprise of his son Mark, who took over his management when Gordon Mills died in 1986. Mark has been guiding his father’s career for many more years than his famed mentor ever did.
He revitalised his father’s recordings and reversed a slump that might well have ended in a nostalgia tour, simply because there was nowhere else to go. Tom knows that his audience expects his sixties classics and he is happy to oblige them, providing he can showcase how much more he has to offer.
He is stately rather than dynamic around the stage these days, ambling about in an immaculate grey checked sports coat and a black shirt. He has never lost his love of expensive, well-tailored clothes. The familiar hand movements are still much in evidence. They haven’t changed since the days of The Senators, when he punched the rhythms of the songs at the Green Fly in Caerphilly or the YMCA in Pontypridd.
‘Are we gonna have a good time tonight?’ he enquired at the end of the song. Banter between numbers has never been his strong point, but his crowd was enthusiastic. The audience at these summer racing concerts are a mixed bunch of folk: those just out to enjoy a drink outdoors, racegoers who decide to stay on and listen to some music and, as always, the diehard Tom Jones fans. The cheeky chappie who shouted ‘Go on, Pops’ was firmly in the first category, as was the drunken man who shouted ‘We love you, Tommy’ at the top of his voice.
Tom no longer plays exclusively to adoring women. I saw just a solitary pair of knickers – if you could call them that. A woman of uncertain age wearing a purple dress waved an enormous pair of granny bloomers every time he looked in her direction – which he seemed to do less and less as the concert progressed. She soon tired of the ironic gesture, especially as she was the only one making it.
Did Tom ever need the knickers? Musically, of course not. As part of a stage act, at a moment in time, they gave him an edge. Then they became an irritation, distracting from the serious purpose of his performance. Long ago they lost any point. Waving or throwing a pair of knickers became like waving a flag at the Last Night of the Proms – it was part of the whole experience.
On tour, he often tries new things. He sang a swing version of his hit ‘Sex Bomb’, which featured an excellent brass section that had the girls in their summer dresses dancing on the lawn in front of the stage. I couldn’t see if he had a twinkle in his eye when he delivered the line ‘Turn me on, girls’.
It struck me as ironic that Tom has been playing a number of racetracks in recent summers, but never has a bet. He will gamble with his voice, but not with his wallet. He took a risk by presenting new material. We were still waiting for ‘It’s Not Unusual’ when he offered ‘Tomorrow Night’, a pleasantly old-fashioned melody that Elvis recorded in the fifties.
He followed that with ‘Raise a Ruckus Tonight’, a new version of an old favourite, which was good fun and contained the line ‘I love my biscuits dipping in gravy.’ ‘Didn’t It Rain’ was another from Praise and Blame, while ‘Evil’ was his version of a Howlin’ Wolf classic. Just when I thought that he might be losing the interest of the audience by overdoing the unfamiliar, the unmistakable first bars of ‘Delilah’ rang out. The drunks began to sing along and nostalgia filled the air.
Eventually, a piano accordion struck up the first few notes of ‘It’s Not Unusual’ – always recognisable, despite an unusual presentation. Tom gave it a Latin flavour that breathed new life into the song. March 2015 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the week his signature tune reached number one. Quite frankly, it’s so timeless, he could have sung it a cappella with the crowd. It again demonstrated that he isn’t afraid to try something new with his repertoire.
These outdoor events attract big crowds, but they don’t do justice to
the music. It’s a jolly atmosphere, but only part of the audience is there to listen to Tom. One of these days it would be good to hear Tom again in a more intimate venue like Ronnie Scott’s.
The Newmarket concert was part of a relentless summer schedule that included dates across the US and Europe before finishing in Melbourne. Tom had been touring for six months. Before Christmas, he was recording the blind auditions for The Voice and then appeared at the inaugural BBC Music Awards at Earls Court.
This was a glittering affair, which saw Tom present the premier award of British Artist of the Year to Ed Sheeran, with whom he had shared a stage in Melbourne. Tom also performed on the night in a duet with the acclaimed retro singer Paloma Faith. They appeared together on the red carpet and in a special photo booth. They were larking about when Tom slipped and grabbed the nearest thing to steady himself. That turned out to be Paloma’s left breast. She dissolved into a fit of giggles and the subsequent clip became an online hit.
It was probably better received than their duet, a version of the Beach Boys’ classic ‘God Only Knows’, which closed the show. Their two voices didn’t gel that well together, although Tom did his best to nurse them through the notoriously difficult song. The audience loved it, however. It would have been interesting to hear them sing the Paloma hit ‘Only Love Can Hurt Like This’ – the song, with its deep throaty verses, would have suited Tom. Again it proved how a duet with the great singer was a goal for any performer, however trendy they might be. Tom gives anyone artistic credibility. For a man who used to hate sharing the limelight on stage, Tom has sung more memorable duets than almost any other star I can think of.
