Still Rockin' - Tom Jones, A Biography

By Aubrey Malone

A short biography of Tom Jones's rags to riches story - his journey from a Welsh mining village to superstardom. The author explores his musical career, his special relationship with his wife and Wales, and also gives an insight into his phenomenal womanizing. This is a balanced and sympathetic account of Jones's personal and professional life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Y Lolfa
• Release date: Aug 9, 2012
• ISBN: 9781847715814

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Still%20Rockin%27%20-%20Tom%20Jones%20A%20Biography%20-%20Aubrey%20Malone.jpg

First impression: 2010

© Aubrey Malone & Y Lolfa Cyf., 2010

This book is subject to copyright and may not be reproduced by any means except for review purposes without the prior written consent of the publishers.

Cover photograph © Corbis by Eliseo Fernandez

(taken February 2010 in Vina Del Mar, Chile)

Cover design: Y Lolfa

ISBN: 9781847711649

E-ISBN: 978-1-84771-581-4

Printed on acid-free and partly recycled paper and published and bound in Wales by

Y Lolfa Cyf., Talybont, Ceredigion SY24 5HE

e-mail [e-mail]

website www.ylolfa.com

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fax 832 782

Chapter 1

Ponty Ted

Tommy Woodward, to give him his real name, spent two years cooped up in bed with tuberculosis from the age of twelve to fourteen. While most of his mates were out playing football or chatting up girls, he used to look out his window and fantasise about being athletic, muscular and attractive to the opposite sex.

Tommy was a war baby. Born in Treforest, a mining village within spitting distance of Pontypridd, he lived in a close-knit community with strong family ties. Music wasn’t the first sound he heard but rather German planes disgorging the last of their bombs before returning home.

His father, also Tom, was a miner. That was what you did in Treforest. It was probably what Tommy would have done if he hadn’t had that black spot on his lung – or if he hadn’t become a singer. As a young child he used to walk around the house in his father’s pit boots as if this could be his only destiny.

He craved attention almost from the womb. Unlike other children who sang behind the curtains or in the bathroom, Tommy wanted – needed – to be seen as well as heard. He loved to grandstand. The seeds of the TV show This is Tom Jones were sown in the living room of 57 Kingsland Terrace, Treforest, when he pulled a curtain aside, jumped up on an orange box and broke into a rendition of ‘Mairzy Doats and Dozy Doats’.

Young Tommy sang non-stop; he even sang before he walked. His mother said he’d sing the weather forecast if he was allowed. When he went to Women’s Guild meetings with her, he made his own beat on a table. ‘Ask me to sing,’ he’d keep nagging until she gave in. In the school choir he drowned everyone else out when they were singing ‘Men of Harlech’. A former teacher remembers him singing ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’ in front of his class when he was hardly more than five.

Music was his ticket out of the Stygian darkness of the pits. It could redeem him and literally save his life. At night he listened to Radio Luxembourg under the bedclothes when he should have been doing his homework. He performed songs for neighbours in the street for cakes and sweet money. He even rattled dustbin lids to accompany himself.

Tommy was a lively lad. He was in a gang from a young age. He robbed orchards, stole records and sneaked into cinemas without paying. But then he was struck down with his cursed illness and confined to a tiny attic when he wanted to be out gallivanting with his friends. He knew TB had been a death sentence until relatively recently and worried that it would affect his voice. Even this early he must have been contemplating a career in singing. He spent most of his time in bed listening to American music. Subconsciously he was crafting his future repertoire of songs.

They say mothers always favour the sick child. It seemed to apply to Tom’s mum. She knew he was energetic and wanted to be outside doing what lads do but she had to keep him effectively under house arrest, confined in the bedroom like a consumptive. She was also determined that he wouldn’t follow in his father’s footsteps down the pits. The dangers to his health would be too great.

The incarceration gave him time to dream and gain an appreciation of the freedom most of us take for granted. Being allowed to stay in Wales was a bonus. (A move to Scotland had been mooted and then canned.) From his window on the hill he looked out over the adjoining land and planned his future. He knew things wouldn’t always be this grim.

When Tom got better he was determined to make up for lost time. Maybe this is the root of his rapacious sexual appetite. Nearby Pontypridd was where the action was for Treforest lads. There was more action in Cardiff and more still in London, but for now Ponty would do. You could get yourself a gamey lass there on a good night and walk her home. If you were lucky you’d get a few kisses. If not it might be a slap on the cheek. Some lads boasted about getting their hands under a girl’s jumper, or even lower down. It was like a pecking order. Sex was rare but heavy petting fairly rampant. You had to try to find out how far you could get. Maybe the singing would improve his chances.

Linda, whose full name was Melinda Rose Trenchard, was the first girl Tom kissed. She grew up only a few streets away from him. When he was about eleven he was turned on by the sight of her bending down playing marbles: ‘I saw these great legs and all of a sudden I thought of her in a new light.’ After his illness he re-established his relationship with her. He had grown so big in the meantime that she hardly recognised him. He also had a large mop of hair, the precursor of his famous afro.

Tom and Linda’s mothers were friends. Their lovebird children met casually at dances without formally becoming boyfriend and girlfriend. When Tom’s sister got engaged he invited Linda to a party at his house. That was the first time she heard him sing. He did the aforementioned cowboy ballad ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’ and she was blown away.

Soon afterwards Tom and Linda started going out walking together. They were like a reconstructed Hansel and Gretel. From the first time he kissed her in the school playground, their future seemed written in the stars. He was the cool cat and she was the girl next door, but they clicked like Danny and Sandy from Grease. Tom fell into what Frank Sinatra, a hero of his, would call ‘the tender trap’. He was hooked big time.

One day they made love in a field. He was fifteen and she was fourteen; both had been virgins up till then. They continued to date and have sex. A year later Linda got pregnant. Unmarried mothers were still frowned on in 1956 and her family panicked. Since they were Catholic they wouldn’t countenance the idea of an abortion. Could she have the child adopted? Another option was to give the baby to an aunt of Linda’s who was childless.

Tom’s father was the last person who wanted to take the high moral ground because he’d been in this situation at a similar age himself – Tom’s elder sister Sheila being born six months into his parents’ marriage. He asked Tom what he himself wanted to do. Tom told him he loved Linda to bits and wanted to marry her. Everyone thought he was too young and irresponsible for such a move but he went ahead nonetheless. On 2 March 1957 they were married in Pontypridd registry office.

‘Shotgun’ weddings weren’t uncommon in south Wales at this time, particularly in working-class communities. It was customary for people to estimate the time between weddings and births by counting the months on their fingers. Quite often they didn’t get to nine. Needless to say, such practices went on just as frequently in upper-crust circles.

Tom disputed the idea that his was a shotgun marriage, telling people it would have happened with or without the pregnancy. Dammit, he adored the lass. It was just a pity they were kids when they got hitched. Maybe both of them had some living to do, but getting Linda up the duff put the kibosh on that. It limited their options and made things happen faster. Being a dad at 18? Christ. He should have been more careful; they both should have been. Now he’d have to be responsible, or at least pretend he was. Money was going to be a problem. He would be working for three people from now on, not one. That would put manners on him all right.

They moved in with Linda’s parents at No. 3 Cliff Terrace but it had no bathroom. Tom had to get up at 5am to be at the paper mill by six. His financial circumstances were so bad at this time that he couldn’t even afford to take the night off work to accompany Linda to hospital when she went into labour. As the ambulance was on its way to their house, Tom passed it on his bicycle on the way to the mill where he was on the night shift. He heard about his son’s birth from a call he made from the public phone box in Laura Street. (This was long before men held their women’s hand during the birth, let alone cut the umbilical cord.) They called their baby Mark. He was born within a month of their marriage.

Tom tried his best to adapt to life as a young husband and father but that was the problem – he was far too young for either of these roles. It could have made him feel trapped but it gave him more of a drive to succeed. After leaving school he spent two years as a glove cutter. The job bored him out of his mind. In the evenings he hung round with his friend Dai Perry, getting into fights, going dancing and stealing records. He was a Teddy boy, a teenager with attitude. He had all the gear: the buttoned-down shirt, the velvet collars, the winkle pickers, the drainpipe trousers, even the shoelace­-thin tie. (He later swapped the Mod gear for that of the Rocker, i.e. leather jackets. As Quentin Crisp mocked, ‘Young people rebel against the establishment by all dressing like each other.’)

He has never minced words about the violence of this time in his life. ‘I pulled every dirty trick in the book,’ he admitted in an interview with the Sunday Mirror. ‘You had to if you wanted to come out alive.’ He didn’t look for violence but it seemed to find him. He nose was knocked out of joint a few times when he went on the lash with Perry (who went on to become his bodyguard). He later had it surgically enhanced. ‘I had to have an operation for sinus trouble or something,’ he recalled. ‘When I came out, I noticed my nose was shorter. They must have cut something out of it.’ One could be forgiven for thinking he’d asked them to make ‘improvements’ since nose parts don’t usually disappear during routine surgery for sinus problems. Plus, he admitted he always hated his pre-surgery nose. ‘It was in a pint of beer before I’d taken a sip,’ he said once.

Tom was a poser, which made him a target. The tasty gear he wore only made him more of one. But he usually gave as good as he got. If he came home with his nose pouring blood he could well say, ‘You should see the other fella.’

He was also hitting the bottle hard in these years and fights inevitably erupted as a result. A Ponty Ted had to show his chops so there was no question of walking away from scuffles. One night he was head-butted through the window of a fish and chip shop in revenge for a previous incident where he’d beaten up another guy. Afterwards he sought revenge himself but when he tracked the head-butter down, he had his father with him. Tom hit him anyway and then his father jumped on Tom’s back, winding him. Finally the guy’s mother joined the fray. It was turning into a regular family outing. Dai Perry