Tom Jones - the Life Read online

  Elvis asked him if all people sang like that in Wales. Tom replied, ‘Well, not exactly, but Welsh people have strong voices; that is where I get my strength from. My volume is where I come from.’

  Chris Hutchins explained Tom’s gift and why Elvis loved his voice: ‘If you listen to “With These Hands”, the passion he put into that song. He wasn’t long out of Wales and you realised that this man really felt it. That’s the secret of his success, in my opinion – a genuine passion for the words he was singing. That was what got him the admiration of Sinatra and Presley. He poured this passion in, but he had it to pour in the first place.’

  That was the drawback of ‘Pussycat’ – not even Tom could inject passion into such a fanciful lyric. Chris recalls, ‘He thought it was ridiculous. That was a stupid song, but it was a monster hit for him.’

  While in America, Tom was determined to watch a performance by Chuck Jackson, one of his favourite black singers, who was headlining a show at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, but he had no idea how to get there. By chance, the silky-voiced Dionne Warwick came to his rescue. They had met earlier in the year, when they had both appeared on Ready Steady Go! in Manchester and become instant friends, although nothing more.

  On this cold evening, she had just been to a recording session and was driving from Midtown, down Broadway, when she saw Tom shivering on a corner. He was hopelessly lost and told her he was on his way to the Apollo to see Chuck. Dionne told him to hop in and she would take him over to Harlem.

  They arrived backstage just before Chuck was due to go on. Everybody knew and liked the elegant Dionne, so Chuck was happy to chat to Tom. He decided to give the audience a surprise and so, during his act, he invited Tom on stage to take a bow, and announced that he was the man who sang ‘It’s Not Unusual’. You could have heard a pin drop. None of the exclusively black audience could believe that this white man, with, to their ears, a funny English accent, was the voice on that track. Chuck invited Tom to sing a few bars, whereupon he launched into ‘What’d I Say’ and brought the house down. ‘To my amazement, they loved it,’ he said. ‘I was very relieved.’

  At least when his American schedule allowed Tom to come back to London, he knew that Linda and Mark were waiting for him. One of the first consequences of the success of ‘It’s Not Unusual’ was Tom moved into Gordon’s flat in Notting Hill. It was only temporary, but set the precedent that he was the star and The Squires were employees.

  Over time, the bitterness felt by some of the group’s members would grow. Vernon Hopkins felt betrayed by someone he considered to be a good friend. They did have a raise, but it was peanuts, considering how much money Tom was earning. They were still driving an old van, when Tom sped up in a new white Volvo sports car, having only just passed his driving test.

  Gordon was a big part of The Squires’ growing disillusionment. He was quite obviously a control freak and liked to get his own way. He micro-managed Tom and had a fearsome temper. Tom, on the other hand, as Chris Hutchins points out, ‘hated confrontation’, and didn’t want to say no to Gordon. He left it to Gordon to deal with his old bandmates, which is probably why they were treated unkindly. Chris observes, ‘Tom was always going to be a solo star long before he got into The Squires – or The Senators as they were originally called – and I don’t think they understood that. They thought they were like The Beatles and they weren’t.’

  Living in decent accommodation made it easier for Tom to give interviews. Having Linda around painted a cosy domestic scene. Rave magazine called her a ‘lovely girl’, as she made tea for everyone. Gordon’s three Siamese cats – Winnie, Mu and Elvis – added to the impression of domestic bliss, although the one named after Presley would jump on Tom’s shoulders and tear his sweaters to ribbons.

  Tom and Linda needed to find another place to live, if only to escape from the cats. Gordon had told Tom right at the start that he should put his money into ‘bricks and mortar’, and it was advice he meant to follow. He paid £8,000 for a house called Rose Bank in Manygate Lane, Shepperton – the first home his family could call their own. Many friends believe Linda would have had a happier life if she had stayed in Pontypridd, but that opinion is delivered with the benefit of hindsight. For now, she was entirely happy to be with her husband.

  Linda, as would always be the case, was in charge of decorating. Many of the rooms were full of the souvenirs Tom had brought back from overseas, including a growing collection of weaponry he had started in Spain, when he played some dates there as part of a European tour. His son’s bedroom was covered with sporting pennants that Tom had found for him. Linda was keen to have an open-plan living space and plenty of glass to maximise the views towards the river – perhaps the effect of spending too many years in a basement with little natural light. Tom’s contribution was to keep an eye on the builders who carried out the improvements. When he went over to see how work was progressing, he was quick to point out a mistake with the stairs, which didn’t endear him to them.

  While they were excited about the move, it soon became apparent that the three-bedroom house was too small. Open plan was all very well, but it led to domestic conflict when Mark and Linda were watching TV and Tom wanted to put Jerry Lee Lewis on the record player in another corner of the same room. The garage wasn’t big enough to harbour his new silver-grey Rolls-Royce and he fretted about it getting dirty stuck outside all day.

  Generally speaking, they were on friendly terms with the neighbours, although relations were a little strained when Tom would stumble in at 4 a.m. and decide that would be the perfect time to play loud music. He would sleep most of the day.

  Mark started at a local school and, mostly, they weren’t bothered by people, even if they went for a drink in the local pub. It was a different story if Tom went out for a beer in the West End, where there was usually some joker drunkenly insisting that he give them a song. Tom, who was under strict instructions not to overuse his voice, would politely decline, which would inevitably lead to a chorus of ‘He can’t sing. He just mimes.’

  Tom would be ‘spitting mad’ at the comments: ‘When the insults get really nasty, I often want to belt someone across the room. I know I must not do that. No matter how justified you are, it is nearly always the celebrity who comes out as the villain.’

  That was one of the few drawbacks of becoming a star. Another was trying to work out who was and who was not a friend: ‘People are nice to you, but you don’t know if they are your friend. When you are not famous, you know who your friends are because they are your friends. But now you can’t tell.’

  Perhaps that explains why Tom was so keen to have his immediate family near him, despite spending so much time away. Even at this early stage of his success, he had learned to keep his professional and home lives entirely separate.

  11

  Green, Green Grass

  Tom’s career was almost terminated in June 1966, when he smashed his swanky new red Jaguar into the central barrier while speeding down Park Lane. He had spent the evening in the Cromwellian Club, a favourite haunt, with Tony Cartwright, a new member of Gordon’s team, Vernon Hopkins and Chris Ellis, who had now moved from Wales to be Tom’s full-time driver and general factotum.

  It was, Vernon recalls, a great place for pulling girls, and Tony and Tom managed to latch on to two air hostesses. Tom decided to drive Tony and the girls to the Bag o’ Nails pub in the West End. As he whizzed down Park Lane in the sports car, one of the young ladies told him to make a hard right turn and take a slip road across the central reservation. He couldn’t make it at 50 miles an hour and crashed into a wall.

  Vernon, who was following in his Ford, remembered that there was blood everywhere – most of it coming from Tom’s head. According to Vernon, the two men decided to run off after making sure the girls were all right. They didn’t get very far, as both police and ambulance raced up, blue lights flashing. They took one look at Tom’s bleeding head and bundled him off to hospital, where he needed fourteen stitc
hes for a gash above his left eye and was kept in overnight in case he was suffering from concussion.

  The incident could have been much worse. Breathalyser tests for anyone involved in a road accident hadn’t been introduced, so, provided you could walk in a reasonably straight line, there was no problem. In those pre-paparazzi days, the incident went unphotographed and unreported.

  Tom didn’t get away totally scot-free, however. He awoke the next day, with a head full of hammers, to find his mother Freda looming over him, demanding to know what he thought he was playing at. She wasn’t impressed when he complained that his head was killing him.

  He told the Radio Times, ‘She said, “You better watch yourself. You’re drinking too much – get hold of yourself. This stops right now.” She stopped me right there and then. I was getting out of hand and I knew it.’

  His parents had finally been persuaded to move from Treforest. They wanted to be closer to their son and his family. When he moved into a bigger property in Sunbury-on-Thames, he had told them he was giving them the house in Manygate Lane, which was at least twice the size of their former terrace in Laura Street.

  His father observed, ‘When he handed over his old house to us, it was all done without any kind of show. He just said to us how he knew we’d always liked the place and so it was ours to keep.’

  As soon as he started making good money, Tom was determined to persuade Tom senior to retire. He hated that his father was ‘flogging his insides out’ in a pit while he was enjoying himself. As Chris Hutchins observes, ‘He was always good to his family and they loved him for it.’

  Tom senior still had eight years to go before retirement, but Tom told him to work out what he would earn in that time and promised to match it. He had been a miner for more than forty years, so he deserved his comfortable retirement and, finally, was happy to leave the pit. Tom bought his father a large and stately white Ford Granada, so his parents could travel home to Treforest whenever they wished. Tom senior needed to learn to drive to take advantage of the gift, but, unlike his son, decided to pass his test before he got behind the wheel of a car. In a rare interview, he said, ‘The mining life, with all the comradeship, was fine for me, but I was much happier that Tom made up his own mind what to do with his life.’

  Despite his mother’s rebuke about his lifestyle, Tom didn’t stop going to the Cromwellian Club; he just made sure that Chris Ellis or another of the team was driving him. One night, he was struggling with a cold, when he was passed an inhaler that he thought was Vicks Sinex. One sniff blew his head off: ‘The bloody thing was full of amyl nitrate. Bloody hell! It was like being on a roller-coaster.’

  His enjoyment of the high life in London was concealing the fact that he badly needed another big hit in the UK. Six successive singles had barely caused a ripple, while other leading acts of the day seemed to top the charts at will. His power-packed version of ‘Thunderball’ for the James Bond movie of that name was particularly disappointing, managing only number thirty-five. Tom had put so much into the recording. He almost passed out when he hit the sustained last note, and had to hold on to the studio wall to stop himself from falling over.

  He still loved listening to a wide range of music and eventually found inspiration in his vinyl collection at home. He had brought an album back from New York called Country Songs for City Folk, released the previous year by his old favourite, Jerry Lee Lewis, who was moving away from rock ’n’ roll. On it was a deceptively simple track called ‘Green, Green Grass of Home’.

  The song was written in 1964 by the gloriously named Nashville songwriter Claude ‘Curly’ Putnam, Jr, and told of a man on death row dreaming of his home town. The story was one that moved Tom: ‘Some numbers are so personal that they can hardly fail. Immediately there is a bond between the singer, the lyrics and the audience.’

  The drama of the song lay in the words, which revealed the singer’s true circumstance only at the end. Some people never realised that it was the reminiscence of a man who was about to be hanged. Tom admitted that he thought of the song each time he went back to Pontypridd.

  Gordon usually chose Tom’s songs, but on this occasion he agreed that it had possibilities. Neither of them was prepared for Les Reed’s magical touch, however. He explained, ‘Tom desperately wanted me to copy note by note the country arrangement that the Jerry Lee recording contained. But I managed to convince him that there was only one Jerry Lee Lewis and we needed to come up with a different version of the song.

  ‘I did add my country piano to the big strings and choir, but I don’t think Tom was wholly convinced we had it right until it went to number one!’

  For once the NME was exactly right. Under the headline ‘Tom Jones Is Superb’, the review said, ‘A gently swaying country-flavoured rockaballad with an easily hummable melody – a splendid and subdued performance by Tom – whose personality and individuality shine like a beacon.’ After the exuberance of ‘What’s New Pussycat?’ and ‘Thunderball’, Tom was displaying the benefit of restraint, reining in his obvious power to give his performance more light and shade.

  The music press weren’t the only ones predicting success. Jerry Lee Lewis himself was in the UK on tour and told Tom that he would love to hear what he had done with the song.Tom played it for him in his hotel room in London and recalled, ‘He was knocked out with it and said, “You’ve done something different here. The arrangement is great. It sounds like a number one to me.”’

  The song’s release came as the nation was stunned by the Aberfan disaster on 21 October 1966, when a giant slag heap, which threateningly overlooked the small mining village, collapsed and slid down the mountainside and flattened the local school. The death toll reached 144. Of that number, 116 were children. The tragedy cast a melancholy mood, perfectly captured by ‘Green, Green Grass of Home’, sung by a Welshman brought up just six miles away. The song topped the charts for seven weeks and became his only Christmas number one. With sales of more than 1.2 million, it was his biggest-ever single in the UK.

  Elvis loved it. He felt, as fans did, the raw emotion of a man dreaming of his home and his mama and papa while on death row. He was driving his customised tour bus home to Memphis with his ‘Mafia’, when a well-known local disc jockey, George Klein, played the track. Elvis was so moved, he immediately stopped so he could listen properly. One of his bodyguards, Sonny West, recalled, ‘I never saw him so emotionally into a song before, and when it ended he wiped his eyes and shouted, “Call George and tell him to play it again.”’

  He stopped at the next payphone and insisted one of his entourage call the radio station. He stopped again and again to request the song, until he had driven the 40 miles home to Graceland, his famous house. He even offered to buy the station just so he could hear it once more. Marty Lacker said, ‘Elvis wanted to hear it because he was just wallowing in how blue it made him feel. He was crying a little.’

  Ironically, his most famous bodyguard, Red West, had heard the track on the Jerry Lee Lewis album, just as Tom had done, and recommended it to his boss. Elvis told him it was pretty good, but nothing came of it. He was astonished to learn that Tom Jones had turned it into this classic record.

  The song touched a sentimental nerve in older audiences. Tom had never reached young teenagers in the way The Beatles or The Rolling Stones had. The Beatles took their loyal fans with them when they moved on from ‘She Loves You’ and their Cavern Club roots to embrace the philosophies of the Maharishi Yogi and an expanding drug culture. Their millions of devotees weren’t suddenly going to change allegiance to Tom. Like Elvis had done, he needed to attract more mature women.

  Every night needed to be hen-party night. Tom wasn’t going to get that with the current coverage he was receiving in the newspapers. Since the initial debacle over his age and marital status, his publicity had been all over the place. Chris Hutchins was an ambitious writer on the NME when he glanced through a leading woman’s magazine one day and saw a picture of Tom and Linda in the k
itchen at their Shepperton home: ‘Tom was wearing an apron and doing the washing up. And I thought, “Would Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’s manager, let his man do that?”’

  Chris had a point. The NME had carried a feature on Tom, in which he was pictured bringing in the milk, doing the laundry, shaving, watching television and fast asleep in bed. Fans wanted to escape with a star – they didn’t want to be reminded of the drudgery at home. The article observed that Tom was a ‘quietly amiable person’, which, while accurate, wasn’t the description of a sex god.

  Chris had studied Elvis and his manager during the previous few years and believed that Tom was Britain’s answer to The King. He didn’t realise at this stage how closely that mirrored the opinion of Tom’s manager. He called Gordon and they met at the Ivy restaurant in the West End. Gordon brought Tom and listened to the pitch.

  ‘I told him that I wanted to go into PR and that I would like to work on Tom because there is plenty to be done, to be frank. “Right, you’ve got it,” said Gordon. Tom was tired, probably after a late night at the Cromwellian, and looked like he didn’t want to be there. He nodded meekly and I realised this was a man I could work with. There was no arrogance.’

  The lunch was the first meeting in a ten-year association between Tom and the man he called Chrissie. The next day Chris cancelled all the interviews in Tom’s diary. He wanted to control the publicity.

  The next time Chris saw Tom was on Boxing Day in South Wales, when he had the idea that Tom should receive a silver disc down a mine. Neither Chris nor Tom had been down a mine before, but the photographers watched as they gingerly followed Tom’s father below the surface. This was more like it. Only real men went down a mine – there were no aprons at the coalface. Tom senior was never quite sure how to take his son’s PR, and was unable to work out why he needed someone to speak for him.