Tom Jones interviewed by Alan Franks

Mothers are often wrong about the next generation, but they saw Tom Jones coming. “At least he looks like a man,” mine said, “and he does have a proper voice.” This was in 1965, when the male competition on Top of the Pops was all spaniel hair and pipe-cleaner limbs. “Those poor boys need help,” she said of the Pretty Things. Jones looked and sounded timeless, a natural tenor with a power that could clear drains. His voice was so strong that it seemed to deter the promoters, who feared that they would be landed with a throwback. In an age mounting such a campaign of noncomformity, he came from a different box of soldiers. Nearly half a century later he still does.
He has allowed time the honour of turning his hair white. On the day I meet him the snow has just fallen. He is framed against the window of the Sovereign Suite in his favourite London hotel and it looks as if he has come out in sympathy with the colour of the park beyond. “Oh, you know,” he explains, “I'd had enough of being criticised for dyeing it. It always came out in interviews: 'Tom Jones with his dyed hair'. I thought, 'Oh, goodness, is that what I'm known for - my dyed hair?' This Christmas, when I took the dye off, it was whiter than before and I thought, 'That doesn't look bad'. The first gig of the year was in Vegas, so I thought I'd try it out there, see what people think. And they were shouting 'Yer look great, Tom!'”
They were right, particularly when you consider that he will be 69 this spring, tours the world endlessly and gives about 200 concerts a year. His voice is undiminished; still as big and round as a planet, smooth as cabaret when it chooses, but with the crying quality of old bluesmen. He reckons that he's lost about a tone off the top of it - C down to B flat - but has gained two at the bottom end. He's lived for most of the time in Los Angeles since the days of 98 per cent taxation under Labour in the 1970s. As a result he radiates West Coast sunshine. The singing too has the broadly transatlantic accent that he acquired under the influence of Elvis Presley, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding and the other great American entertainers who came to envy him.
The speaking voice meanwhile is as Welsh as if he'd never left Pontypridd but gone down the mines like his father before him and joined his childhood friends in the male voice choir. But the mines were out because he got tuberculosis when he was 13 and was stuck in bed for two years. And the choirs were out because a pop singer was what he was always going to be, and he could never stand the way popular songs were wrecked by formal choral delivery.
His latest album is a bit of a departure, being the first to contain songs that he has co-written. This means that you are bound to look for the autobiographical numbers. And there they are, the big pelvic anthems of manhood and partying, a dancefloor single out this week called Give a Little Love, and - if you include a blistering version of Bruce Springsteen's The Hitter - fighting. A belter indeed. But here, too, is one called The Road, which looks remarkably like the confessional of a philanderer: “Felt a weakness when I was strong, held sweetness when it was wrong . . . seen you crying tears of rage . . . left you shattered on the ground.” It's covered with fingerprints, but then goes into the redemptive pay-off about how “the road always leads back to you”.
The You is Linda, his first and, he insists, last love, one of the longest-suffering wives in showbusiness history. They married in Wales in 1957, when he was 17 and she 16, and have remained so ever since. Yet for some of that time he has indulged a fabled appetite for affairs and one-nighters. It looked like a kind of method-singing: live the life you evoke with your performance. There was a two-year affair with Mary Wilson of the Supremes. When it was over she said he had broken her heart. There were flings with the American actress Cassandra Peterson (Elvira, Mistress of the Dark), the 1973 Miss World Marjorie Wallace, and many besides. Put it to him that his pulling power was not just the box-office kind, and he gives a crooked smile with his eyes turned down. Bashful, maybe, but far from abject. It's as if contrition and pride are fighting for control of his face, and have been scrapping for a long time.
Drink and drugs have never been his problem, although he's stayed up boozing with younger musicians, and occasionally still does. But not like he used to. With drugs, he says, you're threatening your own career; look at Elvis. So, has his addiction been women? As he says, it wasn't just the knickers that got thrown at him, but what was in them too. “It's not exactly an addiction, no, but it's not something I'm proud of.” More a habit? “Yeah.”
And Linda; what has she made of it? “Oh, my wife, she has, got, you know, physical with me.” Throwing-things physical? “Yeah, that kind of physical. She's had a go at me. When she's seen things in the paper. You know, Miss World, in the bloody papers. And she said 'You ..' and I said 'No, no,' denying it. Denial, always. She said, 'You have' and started punching me.” He has the set of a labourer, and he crosses his big forearms in front of his face to show how he defended himself. “She kicked me too. But she missed and hit the wall.”
She must have been bothered by Mary Wilson, because it looked serious.
“Oh yes.” And many of the others? “Yes. But they were the ones that were publicised, and that she knew about. She said, 'You've got to stop this'. She never condoned it. She said, 'I'm not going to put up with it', and I said, 'I understand'.”
What does she think of the song, which is an atonement of sorts? “Oh, she loves it. She thinks it's great. Because the road takes me back. She doesn't want all the details of what happened along that road. I said, 'Look, it [the song] is based on our relationship'. But that line there about 'left you shattered on the ground', well, I've never left my wife shattered on the ground. I mean, it's she who's attacked me!”
 

And left him shattered on the ground? Emotionally at least? “Oh yes.”
Don Archell comes into the suite. He is a handsome, genial man of Jones's generation, and is the singer's personal assistant. He used to work for Rod Stewart and was a singer in his own right. He has the same combination of silver hair and sunned skin. Another crucial member of the team is Jones's own son, Mark, who is only 18 years younger than his father. When Sir Tom's previous manager, Gordon Mills, died suddenly in 1986, Mark took over. He'd been a good singer himself, as had his grandfather, but shared the curse of stage-fright; unlike his father, who was clambering on tables to perform from early childhood. Mark's wife, Donna, is in the team too, having once been Bill Cosby's secretary.
It's a functional arrangement, but a strange one too. It means, doesn't it, that the manager's mother has been cheated on by his client? Who is actually the boss? “Well, he can't boss me because I'm the one who's doing it [the singing].”
But has Mark never felt the need to admonish him? “He's said things in the past when I've been, you know, drinking and carrying on. And he has said, 'Look, I can put up with certain things, but I don't have to like it.' I can understand that. He has never condoned it.”
Has it never been a point of contention between them? “No. Because he knows that I love his mother and that nothing will ever happen with that. He knows it, and has never thought, 'God, could my father leave her and go away with someone?' It won't happen. It has never crossed my mind to leave my wife ... I feel grounded by her. When I've got a bit carried away with something, in front of friends, she'll turn round and say, 'Wait a minute, you don't really think you're Tom Jones, do you? I married Tommy Woodward. I didn't marry Tom Jones.'”
Thomas Jones (his mother's maiden name) Woodward. It was Gordon Mills, a fellow Welshman, who had the inspired idea of Tom Jones. It was plain, a bit rough even, but it was also a celebrity name already, thanks to the recent success of Tony Richardson's film of Henry Fielding's novel, with the tremendous young Albert Finney in the title role. And it made a virtue, not an apology, of his Welshness. Elvis Presley, for one, was intrigued by his origins, and wanted to know if there were many singers in South Wales. If so, how did their treatment of gospel compare with that of the southern states of the US?
The two became close friends. Presley saw Jones perform at the Flamingo in Las Vegas in 1968 and was re-energised by him. He'd been singing in the same town a decade earlier and been disappointed by the audience response. Jones has a self-effacing side, but he doesn't hide his certainty that Presley changed his singing as a result of his arrival. “He started putting more weight into it. He had always been quite light, almost falsetto.” He goes into an uncanny version of Presley doing Mystery Train, light and high.
They sang together, but privately. On a quiet beach in Hawaii, where Presley was renting a house, with only the staff in earshot; in hotel suites when they were in the same town. “There was a Kris Kristofferson song called Why Me, Lord and he would sing it continuously. Once he got hold of one that he liked he would never stop. I would try and get out of the suite, because sometimes he would stay on in Vegas, and I was having to do two shows a night, and I'd be singing with him and I'd say, ‘I've got to go. The sun's coming up and I've got to rest my voice because I've been singing all night with you.' He'd say OK, and I'd go, and just when I got to the door he'd start again. 'Uh-why me Lord, uh - what have I uh-ever done ...' We'd already done it 30 or 40 times.”
How did it all go so very wrong for Presley? “I think the thing is that he didn't become worldly. He was always in his own world, and enjoying it. When that worked, fine. He wanted guys around him, wanted to create his own thing, which was a simple life. He loved to play [American] football and he had his own team. But because he was Elvis Presley, no one wanted to tackle him hard.
“To begin with, he did look after himself because he knew he had to look in good shape for the movies. He always liked to eat and was always in trouble with his weight. He used to laugh at it and try to pass it off as a joke. But that's what got him on pills - diet pills to keep his weight down. And that's what got him into that bloody drug thing. Because, you know, you take a lot of uppers, not to eat, then you can't sleep so you start taking sleeping pills, and then ...”
No such vices for Sir Tom. Even the compulsions that he was talking about earlier have fallen away from him. “Even clubbing, never mind getting down to the nitty gritty.” Standing there with Don Archell, both of them bursting with winter sun, he looks as if he never wants the show to end. With the devoted wife back in Los Angeles, scared to go out since 9/11, and the son and daughter-in-law looking after his (business) affairs, there's a touch of dark comedy about the whole ménage; the partying parent and his pals, the managing, sober offspring. A male version of Edina and Saffron in Ab Fab. As lives go, this one contradicts that first big hit of his; it is unusual.
Give a Little Love has just been released as a single from 24 Hours (Parlophone); Tom Jones features on the Comic Relief single Barry Islands in the Stream, out on March 9

This interview was published first in The Times on 28 February 2009.