Tom Jones and his dyslexia ‘Acting is harder than I thought’

Acting, however, was harder than he imagined. “I was definitely out of my   comfort zone. I learn songs – they come to me easily because songs rhyme;   but scripts don’t. With songs, you have to have a picture – and I see things   in pictures, anyway, because I’m dyslexic.

Instead, of course, Sir Tom very much did crack it. To date, he has sold more   than 100 million records, amassed an estimated £190 million fortune, and   been a fixture on the music scene ever since It’s Not Unusual, his debut   single in 1965.

King of the Teds is his first serious attempt at acting. (Arguably, Mars   Attacks!, the 1996 Tim Burton film, doesn’t count as Jones is credited as   playing “Himself”.) The half-hour television play is a three-hander with   Alison Steadman and Brenda Blethyn. Jones plays Ron, a former bottle-factory   worker who spent his teenage years as the Teddy Boy all the local girls   swooned over.

So why now? Has acting been a secret burning ambition? “I have always wanted   to try to act, but nothing ever came my way,” he admits. “And anyway,   singing has always been the most important thing, so I’ve never really gone   after a role.” Then King of the Teds – and a role that could have been made   for Sir Tom (he gets to sing, and even retains his Welsh accent) – came   along.

Acting, however, was harder than he imagined. “I was definitely out of my   comfort zone. I learn songs – they come to me easily because songs rhyme;   but scripts don’t. With songs, you have to have a picture – and I see things   in pictures, anyway, because I’m dyslexic.

We meet in a swanky suite at the Savoy Hotel. At 71, Sir Tom still looks good   for his age – his skin is lightly tanned (not the Oompa Loompa orange of   yesteryear), and his once jet-black hair is now its natural snowy white. “I   stopped dying it because you can’t have that dark hair when you’re in your   sixties and seventies; it just doesn’t work. I remember seeing myself on the   Jools Holland show and thinking, ‘Christ almighty, it does look bloody   stupid…’.”

The tan may very well be natural – he has been living in LA for more than 35   years, after all, originally moving there to avoid high taxes. But he is   back in Britain now to record The Voice, the talent show that has become   Saturday night’s must-see show. The format favours substance over style:   four coaches, of whom one is Sir Tom, initially experience the singers in   blind auditions.

Sir Tom had been asked to judge TV talent shows before but had never been   interested. “The Voice, though, that’s a great idea – it’s all about vocal   talent to begin with. And the four judges – well, you call us ‘coaches’ –   we’re all performers, we’ve all been where those people are standing.

“The blind auditions are the most fun,” he continues, “as you have no   preconceived idea of what these people look like: whether it’s a boy or a   girl, a girl with a low voice or a boy with a high voice, you can’t tell. I   was a little trigger-happy to begin with – when I hear a good voice, I don’t   want to let that person go, so I picked five on the first day! We had three   or four days to pick 10 people, so the producers said try not to. But, well,   it’s a shame – if no one else is pushing them, then that person has to walk   away.”

Tom Jones was born Thomas Woodward in Pontypridd, South Wales. His father,   also Thomas, was a coal miner. “We were working-class people but there’s a   pride in it,” he says. “I felt proud that my father was a miner – that he   went to work and brought home money in a very honest way – and that my   mother looked after the house and brought up my sister and me very well.   Most of my values have been formed from that working-class environment. They   were good people so I know I was lucky in that respect.”

At 12, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and spent two years convalescing.   The illness did have its upside, though – it meant he would never follow his   father down the mines. Being bedridden also meant he could do little else   other than listen to music (“When Rock Around the Clock came out I was,   Jesus, what is that?!”). He was performing in working men’s clubs until he   was spotted by Gordon Mills, a London-based manager. He changed his name to   Tom Jones and his career took off.

Jones spent much of the late Sixties and Seventies – the height of his   hip-gyrating, audience-knicker-throwing years – performing at Caesar’s   Palace in Las Vegas, where one of his good friends was Elvis Presley. “We   were very much in tune with one another. Frank Sinatra was great as well,   but musically he was different. He was of a different age, whereas Elvis and   myself, we felt very similar about songs.

“He picked my brains a bit. I never realised he was doing it, but he would   say, how do you deal with it, fame? And I’d say, well, I enjoy it. Then he’d   say, what drugs do you take in order to enjoy it? And I’d say, well, I don’t   – and I think that’s maybe helped me.”

Sir Tom has seen plenty of drugs in his time, “but it has never interested me.   Cocaine, for instance – going to a party and seeing there’s a bloody big   mound on the table. Christ, I don’t get anything from it. I like   restaurants, I like pubs. I like to be in the pub standing with the fellas   by the bar, a social thing that you don’t get from drugs. I still like a   good pint of British ale.”

He recalls parties in the Sixties and Seventies where “everyone was smoking   pot. I was at one with Mama Cass – she did my TV show [This is Tom Jones,   which ran from 1969 to 1971] and was staying at the Dorchester. She asked   what I’d like, and I said champagne if you’ve got some. She said sure – but   you’ll be the only one drinking it. She was right: everyone else was smoking   pot.

“I was talking to this girl on the couch, and I’m smoking a Cuban cigar and   drinking the champagne, and the next thing I know she’s slipped to the floor   giggling. Then I look around the room and I notice a lot of people have gone   to the floor. I ran out of people to talk to after an hour.”

Sir Tom’s vice has always been women. There have been rumours of countless   flings, from 21-year-old lap dancers to a two-year affair with Mary Wilson   of The Supremes. Jones himself has admitted that during his Lothario period   he slept with up to 250 women a year. On tour, he would have two dressing   rooms: one for entertaining friends, the other – nicknamed “the workbench” –   for entertaining groupies.

Throughout it all – remarkably – has been his wife, Linda. They married when   they were both 16 and she was pregnant with their only child, Mark. Linda   even stood by him when, in 1989, it was revealed that he had fathered an   illegitimate child. ”Lady Linda’’ is said to be agoraphobic – and her   condition is one of the reasons the couple still live in LA, in a heavily   secure mansion in Beverly Hills (Robbie Williams is a neighbour).

Their enduring marriage baffles many. “I still love my wife – the longer   you’re married, it changes,” he says. “The older you get, it’s no longer a   sex thing. There’s got to be more than that in order for it to last. You   have to like one another; you have to have the same values.

“We both came from a working-class background, we both came from the same   place, so we’re not like two foreign people having to explain to the   other what their childhood was like. A lot of that, I think, has to do with   the marriage lasting as long as it did. We grew up together. To walk away   from that would be terrible.”

He thinks getting married and becoming a father so young gave him his drive.   “It gave me strength. I thought, I’ve got to do this not only for myself,   but for my wife and my son. I want them to be proud of me.”

Mark is now his manager. When he first started working with his father, he   persuaded him to leave the tight trousers and medallions behind (although   the hair dye and perma-tan took a little longer, it would seem). He also   helped orchestrate Sir Tom’s musical resurgence in the late Nineties by   encouraging him to work with younger artists such as Stereophonics.

Although there are limits. “I’m not crazy about gangsta rap, because it   glorifies violence, which I don’t agree with,” he says. “It’s like a movie:   it has to be a reckoning. Most movies are made so that good overcomes evil,   and I think that’s important, rather than, ‘He got away with that’.”

Tom Jones changed musical direction again more recently – and this time it was   more of a risk. When his last album of soulful, back-to-basics songs, Praise &   Blame, came out in 2010, a leaked email emerged from David Sharpe, vice   president of Island Records, asking if it was a “sick joke”. Indeed, the   record couldn’t have been more different from the bombastic sound of, say,   Sex Bomb. Yet the album did well, both critically and commercially.

“It was stripped down so people could hear more of me without the big   arrangements,” he says. “I’ve enjoyed all of my career, but this felt like   when I was first starting out, singing songs that I really believed in, and   doing them simply.

“I remember growing up and the traditional songs that fellas would get up to   sing in a club, the purity of that. There was a fella in Wales, a rugby   player, Glen O’Gevin. We used to go to this working men’s club, men only on   a Sunday night, and fellas would get up and sing just for the love of   singing – not to attract females, just men, just for the love of it. And   Glen would get up, sing My Mother’s Eyes, and by the time he was half-way   through, everyone was touching, and by the time he’d finished, people were   crying. My God, that’s pure singing.”

His new album, Spirit in the Room, is out next month and some of the songs   have a spiritual bent. Sir Tom believes in God, “in a power, in good and   evil. I was brought up Presbyterian and I still pray every night, on my   knees – I wouldn’t feel right otherwise; I can’t go to sleep. I thank God to   keep my family safe, and to let me carry on doing what I do as long as I   possibly can. I say, please God, let me have this voice as long as I can.

“It’s God-given, a voice – after all, how come some people can sing and others   can’t?”

‘Playhouse Presents… King of the Teds’ is on Sky Arts 1, May 3, 9pm; see   sky.com/arts. ‘Spirit in the Room’ is released on May 21. ‘The Voice ‘ is on   BBC One, Saturdays, 7pm

By Charlotte Williamson
Telegraph
22 April 2012