Tom Jones: Singing saved my life

Sir Tom Jones mixed it with Elvis before selling more than 100 million records and recording such hits as It’s Not Unusual, What’s New Pussycat, Delilah, Green Green Grass of Home, She’s A Lady, Kiss and Sex Bomb.

The multiple award winner, who was knighted in 2006 for his services to music, has been recording pop, rock, R&B, show tunes, country, dance, soul and gospel hits since 1963. And having lit up Las Vegas with his idol, Elvis Presely, in 1965, he’ll light up Cannock Chase when he headlines Forest Live on Sunday.

He’s enjoyed a career resurgence in recent years, since the release of his exceptional Praise & Blame record in 2010. It comprised gospel and blues tunes, including covers of songs by by Bob Dylan, John Lee Hooker and Billy Joe Shaver, while featuring such guest musicians as Booker T. It was followed in 2012 by Spirit In The Room, which included covers of songs by Paul McCartney, Paul Simon, Leonard Cohen and Richard and Linda Thompson, Blind Willie Johnson, Tom Waits and the Low Anthem. And soon after, Sir Tom raised the roof at V Festival, in Weston Park, when he played a 50-minute set to a rapturous crowd.

Long Lost Suitcase completed his trilogy of records in 2015 and its track titles were interwoven into the chapters of his autobiography Over the Top and Back. It included songs from Gillian Welch, the Rolling Stones, Hank Williams and the Milk Carton Kids.

Tom enjoyed a remarkable marriage to Lady Linda Jones, from 1957 until her death, in 2016, despite his well-publicised philandering. He once admitted having sex with up to 250 groupies per year at the height of his fame and Lady Linda physically assaulted him because of his unfaithful ways.

Tom says things have changed a lot since he began. “It’s different. I don’t know exactly what I felt like then. I was full of fire when I was young. I wanted to attack anything. But I think when you’ve lived a bit, you read more into the songs. I do, anyway. And you’re sort of living the songs rather than performing them. . . I think when you’ve been around a long time, it’s even more satisfying to think that people are listening to me now, and I’ve been in the business for a long time.”

Sir Tom’s autobiography, Over The Top and Back, told the story of a life well-lived, of growing up in Wales before moving on. “What I wanted to show was how much I loved my wife. You know, my wife passed away last April. Her passing hit me very hard. It’s still hitting me hard. Because we were kids together. We grew up together. So when I wrote the book, she’s featured in it a lot. She passed away from lung cancer and it was very quick. . . By the time they found it, she only had less than two weeks. I didn’t know whether I would be able to sing after that. But now I realise that singing is saving my life, once I started again.”

Sir Tom says Lady Linda was his rock who was involved with every stage of his career. “She used to listen to everything I recorded, and she would be very honest.”

Lady Linda also pulled Sir Tom back on the occasions when he was getting too big for his boots. On one occasion, she pulled him up in his snooker room at their house in Weybridge when they were in their 30s.

He says: “She was in there with friends and I might have been getting a bit ‘too large’. I had a glass of Champagne, a cigar, and I was like what do you think of my house, and my snooker room? And she said ‘Hey! Hey what are you doing?! You don’t really think you’re Tom Jones do you? I married Tommy Woodward [his birth name], that’s who I married.’”

There were super stars that were pivotal figures in his life including Elvis and Frank Sinatra. He met The King back in 1965. “I was in Los Angeles at the Paramount studios for a movie and the music. It was 1965, my first year, and they told me ‘Elvis is here and he would like to say hello’. I didn’t know that he knew anything about me.”

He saw Sinatra at Caesar’s Palace and cherishes the memory. “Elvis said to me ‘we don’t record songs with [jazz] standards, we leave that to Frank Sinatra’. Then with Sinatra, he’d say ‘forget the rock ’n’ roll’. Elvis was trying to pull me one way, Sinatra was trying to pull me another.”