Tom Jones International

After another explosive stage show in LA, Tom Jones, the Welsh Elvis the Pelvis, appears to have lost none of his power of attraction. But after years on the road, the Voice of the Valleys tells Barry Egan about his waning sex drive, the pain he has caused his wife and those annoying knicker-throwers

Los Angeles on a sweltering night. I’m starting to see why they call it La La Land … The glamorous women of a certain age — some of them octogenarians older, much older, than my mother — dancing beside me in the Greek Theatre are all clutching underwear in their quivering, bejewelled hands.

They also know all the words to a song called Sex Bomb (as well as You Can Keep Your Hat On). I’m not being too ageist, I hope, when I say I don’t particularly want to hear 85-year-old women, complete with requisite risque actions, sing: “This bomb’s made for lovin’ and you can shoot it far/I’m your main target/Come and help me ignite.”

Suitably ignited, they sing the words as they excitedly approach the stage in double-quick time and, submitting to delirium, fling the aforementioned undergarments (of all sizes and colours) in the general direction of the ageless sex god strutting his Welsh stuff onstage.

The women of a certain age have barely finished despatching their knickers at the singer before another, equally large group of much, much younger women — they could indeed have been the granddaughters of the first posse — are rushing to the front of the stage, past security, to also throw their smalls at the main attraction.

They all hope that it will be their pair of knickers that the singer chooses to wipe his sweaty brow with. This secular ritual goes on for about 10 minutes on a tropical night in LA in front of 6,000 people at an outdoor show. The next evening in a wine bar in Beverly Hills, I am buying the recipient of all that ladies underwear, Tom Jones, a glass or two of champagne. The man responsible for whipping the ladies last night into a sexually charged frenzy doesn’t look his 70 years of age. (Thomas Jones Woodward, his real name, was born June 7, 1940.) He is wearing a tight-fitting Prada suit and black shoes that are so polished I can see my face in them — and probably the botoxed face of the waitress who is bringing the heart attack-inducingly expensive vintage bubbly too.

His voice is as deep as it is on the records. I start to feel like a squeaking Kermit The Frog next to his low baritone rumble. Sir Tom (he was knighted in 2006) isn’t too happy about the knicker-throwers.

“There was an audience of 4,000 or 5,000 people who had come to see me perform and sing my songs,” he rumbles, “‘Excuse me, girls,’ I said to them, ‘I’m here to sing.’ And in a way it f***s it up for the majority of the crowd.” He felt it breaks the narrative of the show. He’s right. When Tom Jones is on top form — singing The Green, Green Grass Of Home or Delilah — the twisting vocalist from Pontypridd, The Welsh Elvis the Pelvis, as he was known in the Sixties, has a soulful voice as good as Sam Cookes’ or Van Morrison’s. He has an extraordinary vocal ability that is sometimes wasted on the lighter songs like What’s Up Pussycat? and so forth.

I had forgotten just what an emotive puller of heart-strings Tom Jones was when he sang The Road at the show with stripped-down raw honesty. It is possibly his best song in more than a decade, primarily because it is his most brave. The ballad is a public apology of sorts to his wife, Linda, who has stood by the ladies man for over 50 years as he went from affair (a reigning Miss World, a Supreme — Mary Wilson — among many others) to affair. In December 2008, Tom finally admitted that model Katherine Berkery’s claims that she had a child by him — Jonathan — after a one-night fling on his 1987 US tour were true (he contested it legally for almost 20 years). Tom admitted his illegitimate son, who he has never met, was something he “hadn’t planned. If I had planned it, I would have done something more than just financially. But it wasn’t. I fell for it. I just fell for the seduction,” he said in 2008.

This can only have added to the years of hurt Linda had already accumulated courtesty of her husband’s inability to restrain his libido on the road.

He takes a sip of champagne and admits that he caused Linda pain. He says his wife, his childhood sweetheart from Wales (they have a grown-up son Mark, who is standing at the bar waiting for his dad, whom he manages), didn’t ask a lot of questions about who he was with on the road. She wanted to stay at home, he says.

Linda told him, he says, she’d be satisfied, “as long as you come home to me, as long as you don’t go running off with somebody”.

Confessing to his weaknesses, he sings how he: “felt the weakness, when I was strong/Held sweetness, when it was wrong,” leaving Linda “shattered on the ground” weeping “tears of rain” before promising: “The road always returns to you, and my love, it still belongs to you.”

“No matter what I’ve done or where I’ve been, the road has always led back to Linda,” he says tonight in Bel Air. “I told Linda the song was about her. I told her not to take the lines literally.”

But you have caused the woman you love huge amounts of pain over the years. “Oh yeah, oh yeah,” he says slowly, “but she just let it pass. The other night we were watching David Letterman and he was reading out his lists and then suddenly he says: ‘People get laid but no one gets laid like Tom Jones.’ And Paul Shaffer (Letterman’s bandleader and sidekick) says, ‘And that’s a fact!’ I looked at my wife and she said: ‘Maybe that’s a compliment.’”

But how did your wife feel about the affair with Mary Wilson?

“She found out … my wife knew about it … she said: ‘You have to stop this. This is bullshit.’”

She never threatened to throw you out for your obsessive philandering?

“No, but I told her I was going to straighten it out, I promise.” And what did she say to that, Tom?

The international sex symbol takes a well-needed sip of champagne before answering. “‘You better straighten it out,’ she told me, ‘because you won’t be able to do anything without your balls’. I understand, I told her. She is a strong woman, my wife. She told me once that she was married to Tom Woodward, not Tom Jones. She told me not to get carried away with this s***.”

But you didn’t learn. Is it true she beat you up when she found out about another woman?

“Yeah, she did. She saw in the paper about the affair with Miss World in the early Seventies. There was a bit of a thing going on with her, Majorie Wallace. It was a mistake. Linda saw it in the paper and started letting into me. She went bang! And then started kicking me.”

Robin Eggar, in Tom’s official biography, wrote that Linda led a “lonely, timid existence” and rarely ventured out of the couple’s Bel Air mansion. That loneliness deepened in 1999 when a 21-year-old Stringfellows lapdancer in London kissed-and-sold her story about Tom to the tabloids.

“It was encore after encore,” Christine James recalled. I ask Mr Sex Bomb where he is at 70 years of age. “I have realised that growing older has benefits,” he says, “because you are not prone to … you have less testosterone. When you are young and there are a lot of women around it is hard not to sort … you know … to dabble. But then when you are older your sexual drive is not as strong as it was when you are young. I think that, in itself, is a good thing. I am not tempted like I used to be. I still see. It is still there. But I love my wife more than anything in the world.”

Whether you believe Tom or not, it is a joy to spend two hours in his company in a bar in Hollywood. He talks about a wild night of drinking with fellow Welshman Richard Burton in Germany in 1968. (“He was a mad man with drink,” Tom recalls, “very rude.”) He remembers hanging out with his buddy Elvis and The King saying to him: “How the hell do you sing like this?” And Tom replying: “You’re partly to blame you know. Elvis said: ‘Yeah, but I grew up listening to all kinds of black singers. Are there lots of black people in Wales?’ And I said: ‘Well … I think there are a few in Cardiff’.”

“But the truth was I didn’t know why I sounded like that,” he says, finishing his champagne. (The Voice of the Valleys talks about a Las Vegas doctor telling him in 1970 that drinking champagne is good for the throat.) “And I still don’t know why or how I ended up sounding the way I do, or how I ended up being so successful and leaving Wales and coming to America…”

I float a tentative theory about the real drive for his success. It wasn’t his sex drive. It was something else, I say, playing Tom’s shrink for a minute. It was to get out of the house. When Tom was 12, he contracted tuberculosis and spent the next two years in bed. If it hadn’t been for the illness, the story goes, he would have ended up down the mines like his father. The doctors told his parents Freda and Thomas that if they put Tom in the coal mines when he grew up he would die because his lungs were too weak.

“And with weak lungs I’ve become a singer,” he says.

His illness meant that he couldn’t go out until he fully recovered. Tom remembers he would stand at the front door of the house at 57 Kingsland Terrace, Trefforest, Pontypridd, near Cardiff and see his schoolfriends playing — “going up the hills. They’d shout ‘All right, Tom’, but I was so weak I couldn’t get out the door. There was a lamp-post at the end of our street, and I’d look at it and think: ‘Once I can walk from this door to that lamp-post, I will never complain about another thing in my life.’”

And you got further than that lamp-post in Pontypridd to Los Angeles and around the world?

“Yes, I did, much further than the lamp-post,” Tom Jones smiles, clinking his champagne glass.

Tom Jones plays the O2, Dublin, October 26 and at the Odyssey arena, Belfast, October 27. Tickets for Dublin are €44.20, €54.80, €65.70 on sale from all usual Ticketmaster outlets nationwide, booking line 0818 719 300. Online at www.ticketmaster.ie

Tickets for Belfast £33.00, £44.00, £55.00 on sale from all usual Ticketmaster outlets nationwide, booking line 0818 719 300

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