Cheat on the wife? A nice boyo like me? Tom Jones has a remarkable life story to reveal - but he doesn't always tell it

Tom Jones has written his first and only autobiography about his life story
But despite having a remarkable tale to tell there appear to be many gaps
Welsh singer glosses over many of the less salubrious aspects of his life
But he comes across as humorous and reviewer Jan Moir enjoyed the read

By Jan Moir for the Daily Mail

Published: 17:28 EST, 15 October 2015 | Updated: 00:58 EST, 16 October 2015

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Book of the week

OVER THE TOP AND BACK: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

by Tom Jones

(Michael Joseph, £20)

Hang on to your giddy knickers, because Tom Jones sure has a remarkable life story to tell. The problem is, he hasn't told it in this book.

For over 500 pages of his first and only autobiography, complete with moody cover shot and stockades of showbiz photographs (captions include: my Rolls-Royce, belt buckle competition with Elvis, poolside tea in Bel Air), we get chapter and verse on Jones The Voice, Jones In Vegas, Jones The Born Again Bluesman and Jones The Sir.

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Love interest: Tom Jones and former Miss World Marjorie Wallace are pictured in Barbados in 1976

Most of all, we get Jones The Perfect Husband, the caring troubadour who fretted about leaving his young wife Linda alone in Pontypridd when he first went to seek fame in London in the Fifties.

We also get plenty of the respected rock statesman now paying handsome tribute to the woman he has been married to, somehow, for 58 years. Of the more scandalous side of his life, there is no mention. Not a whisper.

At the height of his fame in the Sixties and Seventies, Jones notoriously slept with hundreds of women - and carried on his marathon shagathon into the next few decades for good measure.

It is no secret that he had a string of romances, including one with Mary Wilson of the Supremes, at a time when interracial relationships were still frowned upon in much of America.

You don't have to be prurient to wonder how such a high-profile couple managed their affair, or what they felt about the risks they ran.

Yet chicken Tom despatches the Supreme in a fleeting paragraph about visiting New York's Copacabana club in 1968, 'when I was getting to know Mary Wilson, who was a good friend in this period'.

Half-a-dozen years later, Jones was caught out in Barbados kissing Miss World Marjorie Wallace, who reportedly took an overdose when their affair became public and she lost her title. There is one single mention of extra-marital relationships, in which he denies that he ever had an affair with Raquel Welch. 'That stuff was always flying around,' he writes.

He also has a son from another relationship, now aged 27, whom he does not acknowledge. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

The mighty hose of whitewash has been blasted upon Jones's past, which gives the book a slightly lopsided, ghostly atmosphere, freighted with misplaced portent. Readers are left waiting for the important guest who never arrives, mourning the spectre at the feast.

The mighty hose of whitewash has been blasted upon Jones's past, which gives the book a slightly lopsided, ghostly atmosphere. The Welsh singer is pictured wearing a robe as he poses next to his swimming pool

He knows that we know, we know that he knows we know and, to this end, he at least makes one attempt to address the issue.

'There was sex in the shows, and there was sex around the shows. The air seemed to crackle with it . . . the atmosphere was alive with the possibility of sex.

'I was going over as some kind of love god, and I was going over so strongly that occasionally I was even persuaded of it myself.

'The road will set temptations in front of you that are hard to resist.'

Well, quite. Perhaps he has very good reasons for the exclusion - late, blooming respect for his wife, a wish to protect the women involved, a keen sense of his own, hard-won dignity in old age - but to be honest, the bland steamroller of his discretion almost capsizes the whole project.

But not completely. Not entirely. For Tom Jones really has had the most astonishing life, one which he recounts here with verve, energy and a vivid eye for detail - when it suits.

A coal miner's son, a boy from nowhere, he had a completely untutored golden voice, a lusty baritone that took him from being a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman to fame, friendship with Elvis Presley and a £190 million fortune.

Like Paul O'Grady's 2008 autobiography, At My Mother's Knee, Jones captures the joys, the quiet deprivations and the stunted ambition of his sooty, post-war working-class family life, right down to the tea leaves his father smoked in a clay pipe and his grandmother's habit of sitting down when she cooked because her legs were so bad.

He grew up in an oppressively tidy house without books, where his father toiled down the mines and his mother got the cloth on the table before he came home. Or else.

Jones escaped coal mining himself as he had TB as a child, something he felt already marked him out as special. People were talking about him, and he liked it.

Then and now: A coal miner's son, a boy from nowhere, he had a completely untutored golden voice, a lusty baritone that took him from being a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman to fame, friendship with Elvis Presley and a £190 million fortune. Pictured, Tom Jones at a performance of 'Close to You: Bacharach Reimagined' on the West End, London on Thursday

He and Linda married when only 16, in a registry office that smelled of 'polish and floor cleaner'. When he signed the register, dyslexic Tom couldn't recall how to write the letter J and had to get his brother-in-law to show him.

He remembers everything. 'I wear my best suit and Linda is in a navy-blue dress. She is eight months pregnant, and no photographs are taken.'

In 1964, Tom is singing in local pubs when he is spotted by an agent called Gordon Mills. He brings his model wife Jo to see Jones perform at Top Hat Club in a small mining village called Cwmtillery.

After the show, she said: 'I've never seen anything so male in all my life.' And in one way or another, women have been saying that about Tom Jones ever since.

Over The Top And Back goes on to chart his amazing rise and fall - and rise again across the six decades of his astonishing, mould-breaking career.

I like his early Sixties recollection of being taken out by his record company for dinner in a fancy New York restaurant, where he has steak and tastes Thousand Island dressing for the first time. 'It was like an elixir!'

He comes across as a man of compassion and humour, perhaps easily stung at times and somewhat embarrassed by the knicker-chucking excesses of his life, both on and off the stage.

He takes the opportunity to settle a few scores, including one with his mortal enemy Engelbert Humperdinck.

'Once a pest, always a pest,' is how Tom Jones puts it, although he doesn't use quite such a polite word.

After all these years, his sap is still rising, his rip remains roaring. Even without the girls, this is a hugely enjoyable read.