Tom Jones - the Life

by Sean Smith

  Johnny made a point of telling the boys that this was the Gordon Mills down from London and he was coming specially to see them. The more accurate representation of the event was that Gordon was a minor figure on the London recording scene desperate to find an act that could provide his breakthrough into management.

  Gordon was brought up in the Valleys, but had been born in Madras (Chennai), India, where his father, Bill, was stationed as an army sergeant. His father worked as a carpenter when he left the service and returned to South Wales. Gordon inherited his dark, brooding good looks from his Anglo-Indian mother, Lorna. He was approaching his twenty-ninth birthday, five years older than Tom, when they met for the first time.

  While he would achieve fame as one of the great pop managers, Gordon was first a talented musician and songwriter. He didn’t have a good enough voice to offer him an escape from Tonypandy, a mining town just seven miles from where Tom was brought up in Treforest. Gordon was, however, a superb player of the harmonica – a musical instrument that could be enjoyed when there was little money for expensive keyboards and guitars. His friend and fellow musician from those days, Albert Blinkhorn, who taught him ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’, observed that his talent was matched by the strength of his character and his powers of persuasion: ‘He could tell you a thing was black and, even if you knew damn well it was white, Gordon would convince you it was black.’

  Gordon did his two years of national service when he was seventeen and found Tonypandy even more claustrophobic on his return. He got a job as a bus conductor, but, more important, came runner-up in the British Harmonica Championship, staged at the Royal Albert Hall. He pawned his radio to afford his fare to London, but it was worth it, because that success fuelled his dreams of becoming a wealthy man.

  Gordon had to face exactly the same dilemma that he would later present to Tom – give up the life he knew and move to London or stay in Wales and always wonder what might have been. His friend Albert encouraged him to ‘take a gamble’, which was something Gordon, a keen poker player, was always prepared to do.

  He landed a job playing variety shows with Morton Fraser’s Harmonica Gang, before striking out with two other members of the troupe and forming a pop act called The Viscounts. They had some minor chart success over the next few years, including their version of ‘Who Put the Bomp (In the Bomp, Bomp, Bomp)’, which was an anaemic doo-wop song and not one that Tom would have enjoyed performing. Gordon took the lead vocal, despite never having done more than sing in the bath. The Viscounts were much in demand as part of the all-star tours that were fashionable then, and appeared on the same bill as The Beatles and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas.

  At a gig in Leicester, Gordon met a struggling singer called Gerry Dorsey, who was at the bottom of the bill. The two became firm friends, discovering in the process that they were both originally from Madras and had Anglo-Indian mothers. A few years later, when Gordon had become Gerry’s manager and renamed him Engelbert Humperdinck, his career path would inevitably become entwined with Tom’s. By a strange quirk of fate, after appearing at a charity concert in Manchester, Gerry felt ill and a subsequent X-ray revealed he had TB. He was in a sanatorium for six months and needed a further six to convalesce.

  Back in London, Gordon and Gerry decided to share a grotty flat together in West Kensington, eventually moving into a place in Cleveland Square known affectionately as the Rock ’n’ Roll House, because it was full of musicians hoping for a break. They had turned up to a party there to celebrate the twenty-first birthday of the singer Terry Dene, when Gordon met another resident, the elegant Jo Waring, for the first time. She was Rhodesian, had been a Bluebell Girl in Paris and was working as a fashion model in the capital. For a while, she was almost as influential in Tom’s career as Gordon was.

  Jo was instantly attracted to the tall, softly spoken harmonica player, and they soon moved into their own place together in Campden Hill Towers, a flat Tom would come to know well. Jo recalled: ‘Gordon had something about him. You felt sure that he was sure about his life. He was a positive man and I loved him completely.’

  As a token of that love, she saved enough from her modelling work to buy Gordon a piano. He was delighted, because it meant he could start composing songs. He couldn’t read music, but he could pick out catchy melodies, and Jo would chip in with possible lyrics. One composition ‘I’ll Never Get Over You’ became a top ten hit for Johnny Kidd and the Pirates and found its way onto The Senators’ set list. A couple of months before he met Tom, he had success with another, called ‘I’m the Lonely One’, which was a hit for Cliff Richard and The Shadows. Tom may not have liked Cliff’s recording, but it made Gordon current, and therefore more impressive. Ironically, Tom recorded the song as ‘The Lonely One’ and it became a B-side of one of his hits, ‘I’m Coming Home’, in 1967. He made sure it didn’t sound anything like Cliff’s version.

  When Gordon and Jo married, Gerry Dorsey was best man. Gordon returned the favour at Gerry’s wedding to his long-standing girlfriend, a secretary called Pat Healy, in April 1964. Pat, whom Gerry called Popea, was already pregnant with their first daughter. Two other important figures in the Tom Jones story acted as ushers. They were the songwriters Barry Mason and Les Reed. As a wedding present, Gordon and Jo paid for the new Mr and Mrs Dorsey’s honeymoon in Paris.

  A month later, Jo Mills was a big hit when she travelled with her husband to South Wales. ‘She was very nice and sociable,’ remembers Keith Davies. The couple gave him a lift in their flashy Ford Zephyr to the Top Hat, because there wasn’t enough room in the van. ‘I went to get in the back and she said, “Come and sit in the front, love. I’m Jo and this is Gordon.” I didn’t have a clue who they were.’

  The Top Hat wasn’t a big club and the place was packed. Everyone had forgotten that it was a members-only working men’s club and, at first, the doorman refused to let Gordon and Jo in, which was embarrassing. Tom had to leave the dressing room, seek out a committee member and ask permission, pleading that Gordon had come from London specifically to listen to him.

  Eventually, with Gordon and a pregnant Jo uncomfortably crowded in by the bar, the gig began with Tom singing ‘I’ll Never Get Over You’ in a rather blatant attempt to please Mills. He continued with the normal set, starting with a powerful rendition of ‘Spanish Harlem’. At the interval, Keith was getting the usual tray of drinks for the boys, when Gordon started chatting to him: ‘He said, “I would love to have that boy under my belt. Love to have him.”’

  Keith couldn’t wait to tell Tom what Gordon had said, but he recalls that Tom was rather cool and said that he would have to speak to Myron and Byron about it. Gordon was also careful not to reveal his hand that night, especially as both Myron and Byron were in the audience. Vernon Hopkins remembers that he pretended he was more interested in Bryn the Fish’s voice than Tom’s.

  In fact, Gordon was hooked halfway through the opening number: ‘I realised I had never seen anything like him before. He was an uncut diamond and needed a lot of polishing. From that moment on, I decided I wanted to manage him.’

  Tom was more agitated about that night than he let on. He had been so close to a breakthrough with Joe Meek, then the meetings with Jimmy Savile and Peter Sullivan. His ambition was like a slumbering bear waking up. He didn’t want another opportunity to slip through his fingers and was therefore very keen to impress Gordon. Linda had put in a rare appearance at the gig, but apparently had one drink too many and wasn’t helping.

  Gordon revealed his true feelings to his wife when they were driving back to London. Jo never forgot the journey: ‘Suddenly Gordon pulled the car over. I wondered what the matter was and he said, “I have got to do something with him”, and I just said, “How wonderful.” The rest of the journey was just us excitedly making plans. It was a wonderful journey.’ Tom explained it succinctly: ‘He said he saw something in me that he didn’t have – that he would like to have had.’

  Gordon made several trips to Wales to
try to persuade Tom and the band that they needed to sign with him and move to London. One worry Tom had, especially after his experience with Joe Meek, surfaced when the two of them went to a coffee bar in Pontypridd. He told the story on The Merv Griffin Show in 1979: ‘Gordon said, “Now if I become your manager, you know I will be in control and you must listen to me” and he put his hand on my leg. So I said, “Before you go any further, you’re not one of these queer fellows, are you?”’

  Tom had a robust attitude to homosexuality. You shared a pint with a man and a bed with a woman. Later, when he was established as one of the world’s leading entertainers, he said, ‘I don’t mind being treated as a sex object as long as it’s by females.’

  Eventually, like a persistent double-glazing salesman, Gordon wore Tom and the band down and they agreed a harsh contract that promised him 50 per cent of their future earnings. He also managed to dispense with Myron and Byron by offering what would prove to be a very sweet deal of 5 per cent of future earnings. That was not his best bit of business.

  Vernon Hopkins was enthusiastic for the move and told Tom he thought he should give it a shot. Chris Slade and Dai Cooper, who had replaced Keith Davies on guitar, were happy to move, but Mike Roberts didn’t want to leave his job with the BBC, so they had to recruit a new guitarist, Mickey Gee, who worked for a local brewery.

  Tom, unlike the others, wasn’t a single man and couldn’t make the decision on his own. One can only speculate what would have happened to the career of Tom Jones if he and Linda had added to their family – he might never have made it to London at all. But they had discovered that Linda was unable to have another child. Margaret observes, ‘I think she would have loved more children. Tom would have loved a daughter, I think.’

  Linda, as always, gave her husband her blessing, which, in effect, made his mind up for him. Her decision to let him go was immensely brave. She couldn’t just pop to London for an afternoon when she felt like it – there was no Severn Bridge or M4 motorway in June 1964.

  Just after his twenty-fourth birthday, Tommy Woodward enjoyed a beer or two with his best mates in the White Hart, before kissing his wife and child goodbye. He joined the other four Senators in their old Morris van and bid Treforest farewell.

  Tom took one look at the basement flat at 6 Clydesdale Road, in Notting Hill, and declared, ‘This place is like the Black Hole of Calcutta.’ They certainly hadn’t signed a contract with Disney that would guarantee a cushy life and the best of everything. This was a grade-A dump – dark, damp and smelling of mice. Naked light bulbs hung from the ceiling, two small gas fires provided token heating and the five lads shared two bedrooms – three in one, two in the other. Tom shared with Vernon and Dai Cooper. The well-kept miners’ cottages he’d left behind were like palaces compared to his new living quarters.

  Spin doctors might have called the area ‘bohemian’, but the reality was that it was poor and underprivileged. When the sun went down, the drug-pushers and prostitutes gathered on the street outside. The hookers would pop in for a cup of tea and a cigarette when they needed a break from shivering in the cold night air. Today you need £1 million to live in the neighbourhood, but The Senators were surviving on the £1 a day that Gordon paid them as an allowance. Vernon still remembers cleaning his teeth with salt because they couldn’t afford toothpaste – and they were always hungry.

  The highlight during these tough times was when Linda clambered into the passenger seat of Chris Ellis’s Mini and they drove up to London for the weekend, surrounded by tins of baked beans, so the boys would have something to eat in the week ahead. On these occasions, Jo insisted that Linda and Tom stay at their flat at 97 Campden Hill Towers. She couldn’t bear the thought of Linda slumming it in the Black Hole.

  Every so often, half starving, they would target a restaurant, usually an Indian one, eat enough for days ahead and then, at the appropriate time, make a bolt for the door – usually with Tom leading the way. There was no mention of their dire circumstances when a cheerful piece appeared in the Pontypridd Observer at the end of July 1964. The enthusiastic article, written by Gerry Greenberg, featured Tom lying, ‘We are having a great time.’

  The week before the newspaper appeared, the group had made their professional debut in London as the supporting act for The Rolling Stones at the Beat City Club in Oxford Street. The Stones were already arguably the biggest band in the country after The Beatles. Their latest single, ‘It’s All Over Now’, had become their first UK number one earlier in the month, so it wasn’t a surprise hundreds of fans were queuing round the block to get in.

  Six hundred people, mainly girls, were herded into the club. Sixty, all girls, were overcome by the heat and the excitement and had to be carried out. Bill Wyman remembered the night in his autobiography Stone Alone: ‘It was that hot, you felt you were melting.’ Stewards tried to cool the bands down by throwing buckets of water over them, which had the unexpected effect of turning Tom’s white cotton trousers completely see-through, revealing more than expected. They were the same pair of tight trousers that had first caught the attention of Joe Meek, and left nothing to the imagination.

  After they had performed a forty-five-minute set, the band went to collapse in the dressing room they were sharing with the Stones. Mick Jagger, a middle-class grammar school boy, took one look at the wet-through Tom and cheekily declared, ‘Christ, it must be hot out there. Look at him, and he’s only the compère.’ Tom ignored him. By all accounts, he was unimpressed by the Stones’ sulky pouting and didn’t think they would last two minutes down the Bucket of Blood.

  After the gig, Gordon learned that there was already a singer in London called Tommy Scott, so finding a new name was now a priority. He always took the credit for thinking of Tom Jones, but the idea originally came from one of the agents he was using to try to find work for the band. He did realise, however, that the name could cash in on the popularity of the bawdy, Oscar-winning film Tom Jones, starring Albert Finney. He didn’t know at the time that Tom’s mother’s maiden name was Jones and it should have been an obvious choice.

  Tom Jones and The Senators sounded unexciting, so Gordon changed the group’s name to The Playboys in time for the release of their first single. He had revived the interest of Peter Sullivan at Decca, convincing Peter that he was smoothing out some of the rough edges to make Tom more acceptable to a mainstream audience.

  One of the problems Gordon had was that Tom came across as a singing bricklayer in a pop world seemingly overrun by pretty boys with soppy smiles. Number one in the charts soon after Tom’s debut single ‘Chills and Fever’ was released in late August 1964 was the anaemic ‘I’m into Something Good’ by Herman’s Hermits. Their lead singer was sixteen-year-old Peter Noone, who had a patent on toothy grins. Tom Jones, aged twenty-four, singing his brand of tight, funky blues, was his polar opposite.

  Depressingly, ‘Chills and Fever’ was a complete flop, which it didn’t deserve. Tom did his best to turn it into a hit, giving a sensational live performance on the BBC2 show The Beat Room, the station’s first pop programme. He moved, he thrust, he growled, but the studio audience clearly thought they were attending a tea dance at the vicarage. They were arguably the dullest bunch of pullover-wearing youngsters ever assembled in a television studio. Tom loved the song, though, and revived it nearly fifty years later for one of his tours.

  Despite everyone’s best efforts, ‘Chills and Fever’ was met with such indifference that it only made number five in the Pontypridd chart compiled by Freddie Feys’ record shop. Gerry Greenberg wasn’t surprised: ‘I never thought it would be a big hit, because it wasn’t different enough.’ It was back to the drawing board for Tom and Gordon. For the former, that also meant an extended stay in the Black Hole.

  The failure was also a blow to Linda, who was struggling to cope in Treforest. There was so little money. Her friend Vimy Pitman says, ‘She was worried about the future. It was very hard for her.’

  Tom asked Gordon if he could s
pare a couple of extra pounds for him to send home to Linda, but Gordon, too, was struggling to survive now that motherhood had forced Jo to give up her modelling work. He’d even sold his wristwatch and his beloved car to keep afloat. He had to tell Tom that there was nothing he could do. Tom felt that he had failed miserably as a provider for his family. It was his role as the man of the house. He had grown up watching his weary father proudly put down his wage packet on the kitchen table. He desperately needed to do the same.

  Deflated and humiliated, Tom walked round to Notting Hill Gate Tube station and stood on the platform. What was the point of carrying on? He was so down that he seriously thought of suicide. He could end it all in front of the train that was due any minute. He recalled, ‘I thought “I’ll jump.”’ He told Melody Maker he ‘felt at the lowest point of despair’.

  He dragged himself back to the Black Hole, where Vernon found him trembling. Tom told him he had nearly topped himself and needed a sympathetic pep talk to reassure him that now was not the time to give up. He still had a wife and son who needed him. It was out of character for a man normally so easygoing, but illustrates how low he was feeling. It was, he confessed, ‘the only time in my life I have thought about ending it all’. He was a more sensitive man than people realised.

  Tom pulled himself together, sold his leather jacket and bought a train ticket home to ask his wife if he should give up the dream. Linda said no – she would get a job.

  Tom popped in to see his cousin Margaret and asked if she could help Linda obtain a job at the sewing factory on the industrial estate, where she worked evening shifts. Margaret had married and had two young sons, so she would stay at home, while her husband, Graham Sugar, worked during the day. She recalls, ‘Tom said, “Can you ask for Linda?” and I said I would do my best. I had only just started there myself, but I went into the office and said that my cousin was away trying to make a name for himself and his wife really needed a job. They said there wasn’t a position for her. But I kept going in and I could have lost my job, but eventually they took her on.’