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Tom Jones - An Extraordinary Life. Gwen Russell
Читать онлайн.Название Tom Jones - An Extraordinary Life
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isbn 9781857827750
Автор произведения Gwen Russell
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
‘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.’
The Tom of those days was a very different person from the man of today. Not only was he a small town boy who knew nothing of the wider world, but he was a creature very much of that particular time. It was the late 1950s, a world that now seems so far removed from our own that it could have been hundreds of years ago rather than mere decades. ‘When I was eighteen, I suppose I was a Teddy Boy – that was my era, only a few years before National Service was abolished in 1960,’ he said. ‘It was all Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Little Richard, Fats Domino, our own Tommy Steele, Marty Wilde, even Terry Dene. I wish I’d known I was going to join their ranks because I worried a lot.’
Tom spent his spare time and money in the pubs and clubs of Pontypridd absorbing the new types of music that were coming over from the States. While this was something he did purely for pleasure, it was to have a huge effect on his career. ‘We didn’t have rock bands then because it was a new music,’ he said. ‘So I didn’t particularly like going to those big dance halls with those live dance bands because they were not playing Rock’n’Roll music. So we would have to wait until the interval when the band took a break, then they would play Rock’n’Roll records, and that was the best part of the night for me, which was only like a fifteen-minute thing, you know, while the band had a break. So then you would hear these American rock records. But then we had our own dance halls in Pontypridd. There was one called The Ranch, which used to be these old buildings that were built there during the War to house American troops, and they were still standing in the fifties. So there was one up in Ponty called The Ranch, and there was one in Rhydfelin called The Legion, which I think was the British Legion.
‘Those dance halls, they would only play records, which was perfect. I loved that because you were getting American Rock’n’Roll music first hand. You know the real deal as opposed to some old dance band trying to play it. I mean, it wasn’t working, you know, just not for us it wasn’t anyway.’ What this came to mean was that when the right time came, Tom would be able to sing Rock’n’Roll. It was not the style that was going to make him famous, but it did make an impression on the locals who heard him, which helped to build up his reputation before he made it big.
His love of music was growing. Linda constantly encouraged him to work in the clubs. He might have been getting nowhere in the day job, but by night he was doing what he loved best: singing. There was some experimentation with guitar playing and on the drums, but over and again he returned to the instrument for which he had the most talent: his voice. For the first time, he began to think that that was where the future might lie: as a professional singer. ‘I went to a singing teacher in Wales, thinking that if I was going to become a professional singer I should do the job properly,’ he related. ‘She advised me not to attempt to have my voice trained. She said, “You sing naturally, which is right for pop music, because pop music is an informal type of expression. Training would take away your spontaneity. Musically speaking, some of your notes are wrong but they are part of your individual style.” She was pleased with the way I “opened up” [projected his voice instead of keeping a lot of notes in his head, which is the fault of many untrained singers]. However, I needed to have my breathing put right, which she did for me.’
The teacher in question could not have been more right. While there are other powerful and good-looking singers around, Tom’s inimitable style, set him apart from the competition. It was, and is unique, and it’s easy to see how formal training might have spoiled that. But it’s equally clear that Tom, untrained or not, was massively talented musically, something that became apparent when he talked about his art. Music was to be his life. ‘Although I do not read music, I do have a good ear and memory,’ he once said. ‘All I need is for somebody to play the melody of a new song once, then by reading the words I can go straight into a recording session. Incidentally, my voice never broke as a boy. It just got steadily deeper. My range is to top C, which I can read in the keys I sing, but I do not know my bottom note.’
When his son Mark was a toddler, Tom decided to throw in his day job and, once and for all, go for a singing career. But it was a very big risk. For a start, Linda had to go out to work, something Tom hated. As a traditional Welshman, he felt that it should be the man who provides. But if he was to get anywhere, he had to accept it. If he carried on working during the day, it was not going to be possible to put in the hours needed to build a singing career and so, with a certain amount of bravery, he took the decision that his life lay elsewhere. At first he performed alone in working men’s clubs, where his act was hugely popular, while his first actual paid performance was at the Wood Road Non-Political Club in Treforest in 1958. He earned £1 for playing two sets of three songs each.
It was a hard slog, and one that was ultimately going to take six years to achieve, although there was the odd hint that bigger things were to come. On one occasion, Tom inadvertently managed to upstage a singer called Danny Williams: ‘One night after I’d been working the clubs in South Wales, I ended up having a few drinks at a Cardiff nightclub,’ he recalled. ‘Danny wasn’t going too well. He had a quiet voice, and people kept drinking and talking, so he was annoyed. When he got to his last number, he said, “Gentlemen, you can join in and sing this one if you want to.” I’d had a few drinks, so I started to sing. Everybody in the audience stopped, including Danny Williams. I had taken over. I left the bar and we teamed up for “Moon River” – and brought the house down.’
Tom was also learning his trade. While his voice may not have needed training, the rest of him certainly did, and it was in these rough pubs and clubs that he began to discover exactly how to deal with an audience. Of course there was a certain amount of banter involved, just as there is today, but he had to learn how to handle aggressive punters and deal with heckling. He also needed to know how to charm his listeners and win them over with song. This was the musical equivalent of a stand-up comedian touring the rough crowds in the provinces before coming out with a smooth patter on TV to more sophisticated audiences. It gave him a chance to learn the tricks of the trade before the public spotlight fell on him and it was a training that was to stand him in very good stead.
Tom was, of course, also in the right place at the right time, in terms of this being the late fifties and early sixties, something he himself was only too happy to agree with. The seismic changes in society that were beginning to happen were hugely beneficial to people like him and in the 1960s there was nothing more fashionable than a working-class boy made good. Opportunities were opening up that wouldn’t have