Tom Jones - the Life

by Sean Smith

  Mark eventually came across a new ballad called ‘A Boy from Nowhere’, which had been written by songwriters Mike Leander and Edward Seago as part of a concept album called Matador. Rather like Les Reed, Leander was a much-respected figure in the music business and had worked with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Some of his best-known songs are never played these days because they were recorded by the notorious Gary Glitter in the seventies. ‘I’m the Leader of the Gang (I Am!)’ and ‘I Love You Love Me Love’ were just two of the biggest-selling songs of the glam-rock period of the early seventies – a fashion that thankfully passed Tom by while he was in his Las Vegas bubble.

  ‘A Boy from Nowhere’ was a song that Tom was born to sing. It was a passionate ballad that stretched every vocal chord. It may have lacked the rousing anthemic chorus of ‘Delilah’, but it matched its intensity.

  Rather like ‘Green, Green Grass of Home’, audiences mistakenly thought the song was Tom’s tribute to his own humble origins. Matador was based on the inspiring story of the famous bullfighter El Cordobés. He had been born into poverty, but had risen above a life of petty crime and manual labour to become rich and revered doing the one thing he did best. Perhaps the story did resonate with Tom a little after all.

  Tom recorded six songs for the concept album, but only ‘A Boy from Nowhere’ was released in the UK, where it reached number two in April 1987. Its success enabled Mark and Donna to book Tom into a round of interviews and performances in Britain, including Top of the Pops for the first time in fifteen years. By far the most significant was an appearance on the cult chat show The Last Resort with Jonathan Ross, then an up-and-coming television host.

  Ross clearly admired Tom. In a world where talk-show hosts have to put up with many prima donna celebrities, he liked the easygoing naturalness of Tom. Jonathan loves the story of Mark and Tom flying into Los Angeles and, instead of posing for photographs, heading straight to the bar to sink a few pints before breakfast. It may or may not be true, but it gave the impression of a man who knew what his priorities in life should be.

  On The Last Resort, guests would sing a number that they weren’t usually associated with. Jonathan, who looked about twelve next to Tom, during a rather strained piece of banter, asked him what new material he was putting in his act. Tom told him he liked Prince and was singing ‘Kiss’, which the studio band just happened to know. This was unexpectedly contemporary for Tom, but Mark had encouraged him to try it.

  Tom gave an inspired performance of the hit, with just the right amount of restraint and suggestiveness when he sang the line ‘Women not girls rule my world.’ The audience were cheering and whistling at the end, proving to the British public that he still had it. Jonathan couldn’t resist interrupting to mop Tom’s brow with a pair of knickers.

  One particular viewer liked what she saw. Anne Dudley, one half of the synth-pop duo The Art of Noise, observed, ‘He came out, as cool as you like, in black leather and he seemed to have a fantastic confidence about him, but he didn’t take himself so seriously. Tom Jones had fallen off my radar … I really thought the days when he would make great records were probably in the past.’

  The Art of Noise were one of the most fashionable acts around and won a 1986 Grammy Award for their version of ‘Peter Gunn’, featuring Duane Eddy. They were innovative users of digital sampling technology and not the sort of group you might associate with Tom Jones, but the collaboration worked. These days, sampling has become hackneyed, but not in 1988, when ‘Kiss’ was released as The Art of Noise, featuring Tom Jones. The single reached number five in the UK and number thirty-one in the US Billboard chart. More importantly, it provided a blueprint for keeping Tom at the top for many years to come: put him next to a fashionable act and he appeared current, and he made the other artists look good. It paid off time and time again. ‘Kiss’ was The Art of Noise’s biggest mainstream hit, so the alliance benefited them as much as it did Tom.

  He went back to his arduous touring schedule in the US with a new repertoire. His greatest hits were reduced to a medley and his new material, including ‘Kiss’ and songs from Matador, jostled for attention with others from Paul Simon, Billy Idol and Wang Chung.

  Touring wasn’t the breeze it was in his younger days. Now approaching fifty, Tom needed to take care of himself more. He spent two hours each morning in the gym and made sure he drank a gallon of water a day and not eight pints of champagne. He travelled with humidifiers to prevent his hotel rooms from becoming too dry and harming his voice. He also liked to suck a menthol lozenge and keep it tucked into his cheek for lubrication while he sang.

  One of the best lines in Tom’s version of ‘Kiss’ is ‘I think I’d better dance now’ – he did just that across America. One reviewer noted, ‘Ninety per cent of the time Jones rock ’n’ rolled like the hottest of male strippers. Ten per cent of the time he looked as if he were leading a geriatric aerobics class.’ Patricia Smith, who wrote of his show at the Chicago Theatre, observed, ‘When he soared into my personal favourite, the heart-wrenching “I (Who Have Nothing)”, I figured the least I could do was show the man my appreciation. It was then I discovered, the hard way, that there’s absolutely no way to remove one’s underwear in a crowded theatre.’ Patricia obviously didn’t realise that the panties were newly bought and just out of the wrapping when they were tossed on stage.

  ‘Kiss’ didn’t lead to a consistent upswing in Tom’s recording fortunes. Not every decision was a good one. In April 1989, he released ‘Move Closer’, an unsubtle sex track that had been a number one hit for Phyllis Nelson four years earlier. The song was released on the hugely successful Jive label. Melody Maker thought the version was a ‘delight’ and ‘wicked’, oozing lust. It only just sneaked into the top fifty, perhaps because it was overly blatant.

  Tom had already moved too close to a young woman in New York called Katherine Berkery, with whom he had a four-day fling in 1987. Katherine was twenty-four, a part-time model and an exotic blend of Korean and American. She had been brought up by adoptive parents in New York. A regular in the fashionable nightclubs of the time, including Studio 54, she had met other celebrities, including Robert De Niro and Kurt Russell, before she got to know Tom in Regine’s, on Park Avenue, in October. At the end of the night, she agreed to go back to Tom’s luxury suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel next to Central Park.

  According to Katherine, he kept a tape recorder in a silver briefcase and would get in the mood for their lovemaking by playing his own songs. More importantly, he didn’t wear a condom, which apparently was his usual practice. Katherine explained bitterly in the Mail on Sunday that she didn’t know he was married and thought he was genuinely fond of her.

  Six weeks after Tom moved on, Katherine discovered she was pregnant and phoned the offices of Tom Jones Enterprises in Los Angeles, only to be given the brush-off by staff quite used to this sort of mischievous call. She wanted to speak to Tom, but he probably never received any message.

  When her son Jonathan was born in Florida in June 1988, she registered the father as Tom Jones. Her baby was younger than Tom’s two grandchildren – Mark and Donna had celebrated the birth of their second child, a daughter Emma, the previous September.

  Distressed at getting nowhere in obtaining any sort of acknowledgement from Tom, Katherine engaged the services of a top New York divorce attorney called Raoul Felder. He had represented Robin Givens in her divorce from Mike Tyson and had a fearsome reputation.

  Tom didn’t attend when the paternity case first came before the family court in New York in July 1989. Donna Woodward provided a robust statement for the press on Tom’s behalf: ‘Mr Jones is disgusted and depressed by these lies. He is the victim of an irresponsible and scurrilous allegation.’ Linda reportedly leaned out of the window of their mansion and shouted, ‘My husband has completely denied any involvement with this girl. I love him just as much as I ever did and he loves me.’

  Tom was ordered by the court to take a blood test, which prov
ed 99.7 per cent certain that Tom was Jonathan’s father. A further DNA test increased the probability to 99.9 per cent. During acrimonious proceedings, Tom’s lawyers suggested that Katherine was a prostitute – an allegation she vigorously denied. With the paternity tests firmly on her side, Tom lost the case and, in a confidential settlement, was reported to have agreed to pay her £2,000 a month plus other expenses, including school fees. After the case was concluded, Katherine said, ‘I’m so glad it’s over.’

  Tom wouldn’t acknowledge his son, however. He refused to speak about it for nearly twenty years. Then, in a radio interview in 2008, he revealed that he felt he had been used: ‘It wasn’t something I had planned. If I had planned it, I would have done something more than just financially. But it wasn’t. I was tricked really. I just fell for it.’

  Katherine, who now lives in North Carolina, no longer talks about Tom, although she took further court action in 1996, asking for more money, and reportedly accepted a further $50,000. Jonathan Berkery launched a singing career as Jon Jones and has given several interviews blaming his father for his teenage years, when he became involved in drugs. He told the Sun, ‘I was one angry kid crying out for a father.’

  The media decided it signalled an imminent divorce when Tom bought Linda a house in South Wales. She had been spending more time there, wanting to be with her family after her mother, Vi, died in the summer of 1987. She had forgotten how much she missed her sister Roslyn. Her brother-in-law, Tony Thorne, would look after her new home, Llwynddu House, on the outskirts of Welsh St Donats, a village twelve miles south of Treforest.

  Linda, publicly at least, has always been unswerving in her support for Tom over the Berkery affair. She was quoted in the newspapers as saying, ‘Tom has told me he was never with her and I believe him absolutely. It is ludicrous to suggest I want a divorce. There will be no divorce. That is for the record. I don’t know about any tests. I prefer to take the word of my husband.’

  18

  You Can Leave Your Hat On

  Making Tom Jones cool didn’t happen overnight. ‘Kiss’ had been a positive and unexpected start, but ‘Move Closer’ was bordering on cheesy. A musical based on Matador finally made it to the West End stage in 1991, but initial discussions about Tom playing the lead came to nothing and the title role was taken by John Barrowman. The production closed after three months. Tom, meanwhile, still had to contend with knickers on stage, despite a plea to fans asking them not to continue the practice. He started to ignore those that were thrown, letting the panties stay on the floor instead of picking them up and wiping the sweat off his face.

  His credibility was improved, however, by his association with Van Morrison, who had been a contemporary of Tom’s in the sixties, but had managed the leap from pop star to cool, critically acclaimed artist. He had long ago achieved what Tom was now looking to do. They had remained friends from the time, twenty-five years before, when Van was the singer with the Irish band Them and had toured the country with Tom.

  Van had called him when they were both in London to talk about a track called ‘Carrying a Torch’, which he specifically wanted Tom to hear. Van told him, ‘I’ve recorded it myself, but when I listen to it back, it sounds like a Tom Jones record to me.’ Tom loved the song, as well as three others that Van had recently written. ‘He said if I wanted to record them to go ahead, but I wanted him to be part of it, because he is a very personal songwriter. I wanted him to like them.’

  Tom decided to call his new album Carrying a Torch. It was his first major recording since he had undergone an operation to remove nodules on his vocal chords. He hadn’t been following the advice of Frank Sinatra, all those years ago, to treat his voice more kindly, as closely as he should have done. He had been very worried about the procedure: ‘My doctor told me I was doing too many shows back to back – I was doing two a night. I had to have them removed and I was worried that I would lose my voice. I didn’t know if I would sing again. And I didn’t know if it would change my voice. Thank God, my voice was OK. In fact, I think it took years off it.’

  Carrying a Torch featured all four of Van’s songs, but wasn’t the break-out record it perhaps deserved to be, despite some airplay on VH1. Rolling Stone magazine thought the title track had the makings of a classic, with a ‘stately chorus and shining verses’. Mark, in a rare interview, praised their collaboration: ‘The words that Van Morrison writes and the way that Tom Jones can portray them and sing them is a perfect marriage.’ Tom was pleased with the songs, but felt that the distribution left something to be desired. Disappointingly, it failed to secure a proper release in the US.

  The album did enhance Tom’s profile when the BBC’s flagship arts programme, Omnibus, devoted a programme to him. He explained that he wanted to feel he was still competing and wasn’t just an ‘oldie but goody’. He wanted the public to view Carrying a Torch as a contemporary album.

  Despite disappointing sales, Mark’s long-term plan to make Tom cooler was gradually coming into play. Tom never took himself too seriously, and his ability to have a sense of humour about his image became an asset as he tried to become more relevant to a younger audience. He started accepting fashionable charity work, which ensured maximum coverage for artists while associating them with good causes.

  For many, the highlight of the 1991 Comic Relief special was ‘The Battle of the Sex Gods’ between Tom and Theophilus P. Wildebeeste, the outrageous character created by the comedian Lenny Henry. He was loosely based on the singer Teddy Pendergrass, but had elements of Tom and Barry White thrown into the mix. Tom and Lenny both wore open shirts, revealing hairy chests with huge silver ‘T’ medallions. Instead of the familiar red nose, they wore a large fluorescent scarlet codpiece. The sing-off was ‘Can’t Get Enough’, the 1974 debut hit for the supergroup Bad Company. Tom rocked the love machine off the stage and Theophilus needed to lie down after doing his back in. Tom still made a pelvic thrust appear easy, although he was looking a bit chunky in his leather trousers.

  Comic Relief was popular, but Glastonbury was much cooler. The organisers of the festival were in touch to suggest an appearance at the 1992 event. Tom observed, ‘All I need is an invitation.’ Nowadays, the Glastonbury Festival is famous for the reinvention of iconic performers. Dolly Parton, for instance, was the star turn for many at the 2014 event. For once, the weather was glorious in 1992, with none of the traditional Glasto mud. Tom was simply billed as a surprise guest on the Pyramid Stage, but everyone knew it was going to be him. He recalled, ‘Van Morrison was on before me and he was complaining that the crowd was falling asleep. When I went on, kids seemed to arrive from everywhere and there was a banner that read “Tom Fucking Jones”. That was really something.’

  The crowd of 70,000 probably were little more than curious to see a man they perceived as a relic from a bygone age, but he effortlessly got them singing along to ‘Kiss’, ‘It’s Not Unusual’, and his other famous songs – the hallmark of a successful Festival set. He even managed to send himself up with his old ‘time to take my jacket off, because it’s so hot’ routine. Afterwards, he told off a BBC reporter who suggested he brought middle-aged respectability to the event. He said, ‘Middle aged but not respectable. I have never thought of myself as respectable.’

  Tom’s performance proved such a success, he featured in the Daily Telegraph’s 2014 list of the 100 best Glastonbury performances ever: ‘Tom Jones’s first appearance instituted the tradition of a Sunday slot for glitzier old school entertainers and proved in the process that Vegas had taught him to work any crowd with impeccable, likeable charm.’

  Comic Relief and Glastonbury were also part of a conscious attempt to reconnect with British audiences, which had been practically ignored by Tom for more than ten years after he moved to the US. It was a good moment to return to TV. Tom Jones: The Right Time was a clever idea. It was a six-part series, made by Central Television, which showed off Tom’s versatility across every musical genre. It was a brief cruise around the wo
rld of music, with Tom steering the ship.

  In the first show, entitled pop music, his guests were the alternative rock band EMF, Shakespears Sister and Erasure – all big chart acts that year. This was a million miles from This Is Tom Jones. That show may have been pivotal in making his career in the US, but easygoing entertainment with Bob Hope and company was not the direction he wanted to take now. The Right Time made its way onto the VH1 channel, something his original series was never likely to do.

  When Tom performed EMF’s biggest hit ‘Unbelievable’, one of the band jumped onto his back. He told the Boston Globe, ‘The first time he did it, I almost threw him into the audience. You’re on stage and somebody’s on you – the first thing to do is to get him off. I wanted to strangle him. But then I realised it was a good bit of fun. The next take, I was ready for it.’

  EMF took an almost childlike delight in appearing with Tom and told him that it was the ‘apex’ of their career when they heard he had sung their hit in Las Vegas. Their performance together was dynamic and slightly mad, but proved that Tom could sing with the ‘kids’, as he called them. Crucially, he didn’t have an old voice.

  Joe Cocker, a guest on his original TV series, joined him on the rhythm and blues episode, but the highlight for many was an entire show devoted to Stevie Wonder – also a memorable guest from more than twenty years ago. Tom called him a ‘genius’ and Stevie responded by singing snatches from ‘What’s New Pussycat?’, ‘It’s Not Unusual’ and a melancholy verse or two of ‘My Mother’s Eyes’, an old favourite of Tom’s. Their duet on ‘Superstition’ was good, but Tom’s rendition of ‘Heaven Help Us All’ – a Stevie song that perfectly suited Tom’s affinity with gospel music – was even better.

  Tom probably reached a wider audience with a guest ‘appearance’ on the hugely popular American cartoon series The Simpsons. In the episode entitled ‘Marge Gets a Job’, Marge takes a job at the power plant, and Mr Burns kidnaps Tom in an evil plot to seduce her. Burns has a change of heart when Homer stands up for his wife. The final scene features a chained-up Tom serenading the couple with ‘It’s Not Unusual’. The cast thought Tom was fun to work with; he responded good-naturedly that he found the experience ‘incredible’.