LITMIR.BIZ

      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

      DISCOGRAPHY

      Copyright

       INTRODUCTION

      The date was 9 February 1998, and the crowd was going wild. Robbie Williams, the man the Sun called the biggest pop phenomenon in Britain since The Beatles, had taken to the stage at the annual Brit awards, where he had the audience in the palm of his hand. The crowd, especially the girls, adored him, and as he launched into a rendition of ‘You Can Keep Your Hat On’, the screaming reached a crescendo. Suddenly the audience’s attention turned elsewhere. Another voice had started to sing, one of the most powerful voices to be heard in pop music over the last 40 years. It was that of Tom Jones.

      Tom had, quite simply, done it again. Thirty-five years older than Robbie, he had quite effortlessly upstaged him by the sheer impact of his singing. Not that Robbie was going down without a fight, of course: he pushed his own singing to the limits, bound himself into contortions, and engaged with the audience as never before. It was a bravura performance – and one that was tempted out of him by Tom. And it is a testament to Tom’s charm and charisma that, after the Brits, the two men, far from acting as rivals, became firm friends.

       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?”’

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