It's ironic that Tom Jones' career should have begun with an appearance on British television's Ready Steady Go!, for he was the anthesis of everything the program represented to most of its viewers.

By 1965 Ready Stady Go! was at its speak, and for countless kids the weeken really did start there. School and work were over, and while the dried their hair, pressed their clothes, and checked out their new shoes ont latest dance steps, they'd keep on eye on the TV screen to make sure the wren't shaping their hair into last week's style, wearing last week's colour, or tracing out last week's dance in the wrong shoes. Ready Steady Go! Belonged to the Mods.

So what was Tom Jones doing up there on a tiny stage surrounded by these snappy kids who wanted to see Georgie Fame or the Who? Mods were neat, mostly tiny it seemed, and very cool. Jones was a hefty brune who threw himself about and worked up a sweat that stained his shirt. He must've disliked the kids just about as much as they loathed him: a great voice it entered the charts, "It's Not Unusual" was at no.1.

Tom Jones' success with that song at that time is indicative of two things: the decline of the record buying public's interest in groups, and his manager's sharpness in spotting this trend. In 1964 only three solo performers had made no.1 in the British charts: Cilla Black (twice), Roy Orbison (three times) and Sandie Shaw (once). The top 20 was dominated by groups, 13 of which topped the charts at least once. 1965, though, was different. In April, Cliff Richard returned to the top for the first tin over two years, to be followed by singers such as Roger Miller, Jackie Trent, Sandie Shaw, Elvis Presley, Ken Dodd, Sonny and Cher, the Seekers, and even the Walker Brothers . . . all emphasising the enormous changes from only the year before.

The Beatles, and the group boom of the early '60s, had wrecked the careers - or at least broken the chart success - of most of Britain's male the Top 20 three times after 1962, Mark Wynter twice, Eden Kane once, and Marty Wilde, Craig Douglas, Lonnie donegan, Jimmy Justice, John Leyton had no further hits. Only Cliff Richard survived and, for another three years, Billy Fury. So once the public's overwhelming infatuation with groups had sybsided, there wasn't much is where Gordon Mills comes in, Tom Jones.

Jones had been around for a long time - in Wales, that is. Born in Treforest, Glamorganshire, in 1940, he was still hanging out in pubs drinking under age when rock & roll hit the valleys in 1956. His "career" started with bar-room singing - and enough brawling to break his nose a few times - and he'd give everything that was popular frim the big throat - first for beer, then pound notes. Since Welshmen, especially in groups, probably make up the greatest nation of amateur fingers in the world, Jones must have had something powerful going for him to get the rest of the boozers to shut up enough to join in at the right places, if not just listen.

Tommy Woodward

At that time he was calling himself Tommy Scott. Tommy was real enough, but Scott was just what he figured to be a good name for a rock & roller. Not that his real name was Jones - like half the families in his street it was Woodward. The Jones bit came later, an invention of Gordon Mills (who subsequently transformed Gerry Dorsey into Englebert Humperdinck), and it wasn't chosen to go down well with the folks back home, but to exploit the enormous success of the film of the same name.

Scott, however, was stuck in Pontipridd bars and working mens' clubs until long after rock & roll died. He sang on through the early '60s - switching from the Top 10 to old rockers, and then to even older songs. In those days though, neither his repertoire, his voice, nor the extravagant movements he began to jerk and bump together, were enough to make him a living - especially with the wife and kid he'd had with him since he was 16. So he worked as a casual labourer during the day, and later when he was a star and people said he looked more like a hod-carrier than anything else, that was the reason why...hewas a hod-carrier.

When the groups broke out of Liverpool in 1963, and every town with more than three strummers and fourth inhabitant who could keep, time threw up its own pop group, it didn't make a whole lot of different to Tom's music. All he did was pull a few locals together to back him, and carry right on singing the way he always had done. He knew it made one difference, though: it made it harder to sell himsel outside his home town - and that was the only way he was ever going to make it.

Gordons Mills, meanwhile, had been playing with a couple of groups. First, the Morton Frazer Harmonica Gang - Larry Adler with laughs - and later the Viscounts, Who had had two small hits in 1960 and '61 with 'Shortnin' Bread' and cover of 'Who Put The Bomp?'. By 1964, though, he'd given up performing to try his hand at songwriting, and during this phase he went to see Mandy Rice-Davies' act at a However at a club in Pontipridd, but she didn't show. However, Tommy Scott did, knocked Mills out, and believed enough of what Mills told him after the show to move up to London with him. He'd been there before the big break, and had even made some tapes for Joe Meek, with his group the Senators, in 1963. But afterwards Meek hadn't called.

At first, the A&R men that saw Jones didn't display the same foresight as Mills had done. The wanted groups, and Tom Jones and the Squires didn't count. Besides this his image was all wrong size and shape: 'It's not that Idon't like his voice, it's just that . . . Next please.' Eventually, however, Mills managed to get him a contract with Decca. Jones recroded 'Chills and Fever', it was released as his first single, and it bombed.

During this period Jones stayed by running up Mills' overdraft and making demos. Naturally he made demos of Mills' own songs, so when Mills wrote 'It's Not Unusual' with Les Reed - hoping to place it with an already established female singer and thus stand a good chance of making it a hit - Tom sang it for the demo. His instant liking for the song was clear in the way he performed it. All a demo requires is competence, and after that it's the song that's being sold - not the singer - but Tom wanted 'It's Not Unusual' for himself, wanted it bad, and got it.

The first no. 1 by a new singer is often described as a surprise hit, especially when the singer has no form at all. The term, though, is often a cover-up for the promotors who neglected to plug it, the journalists who didn't review it, and the DJs who didn't get around to playing it. In fact, 'It's Not Unusual' wasn't any kind of a surprise hit. It had a strong melody, a neat catch-phrase, and an exhilarating tempo; it was arranged brilliantly, and sung with more muscle than anyone had heard in ages. Knock the Seekers of the top? Easy. It was, quite simply, a natural.

Classic Pop Song

Here, maybe, is the only time Gordon Mill played Tom Jones wrong. The kids who saw Tom on Ready , Steady Go!, or heard the record on the radio and went out and bought it, weren't buying Tom Jones, they were buying 'It's Not Unusual'. They didn't buy because they were attached to the way he looked, but because they were suckers for a classic pop song. What happened next was a failure to follow it. His next release, 'Once Upon A Time', which was supposed to push up through the charts when 'It's Not Unusual' dropped out in April, did nothing. It was a weak follow-up, but Tom's chances with it were killed stone dead when Joe Meek looked out those old 1963 Tommy Scott tapes and cut 'Little Lonely One'. Tom made statements in the pressdisassociating himself from it 'dated' sound, but Joe Meek insisted it was a good record and Tom should be proud of it. Whatever its merits though, it split the buyers and smothered what small life there was in 'Once Upon A Time'.

In July, an old Billy Eckstine number, 'With These Hands', reached no. 13 and showed they were still plugging the voice. Then, in September, 'What's New Pussycat', a bizarre film title-song written by Burt Bacharach and performed in monstro bravura style by Jones did slightly better and reached no. 11. On the strenght of these songs Jones was voted fifth in the British Male Singer category of Melody Maker's 1965 popularity poll, but after that . . . nothing. 'This And That', 'Stop Breaking My Heart','Thunderball', all got nowhere. Apart from 'Not Responsible', which scraped in to the Top 20 at no. 18, he didn't have a hit in Britain between September 1965 and November 1966. What he did have was a car smash and his tonsils out.

But the message had got through to Mills. Tom wasn't for the kids. That was if the kids didn't like him, another generation would. So he quit one-nighters that the pop stars and the groups did, put on a tuxedo, moved into the cabaret circuit. There he cleaned up.

The cabaret audiences weren't all middle-aged, many were in their 20s, but they weren't young at heart. They were steady company men who wore suits and short hair and drove company cars. Maybe they'd been a bit wild in their teens - pulling girls, getting drunk, punching heads - but the they'd got married and settled down. If you were a junior company man you couldn't have long hair even if you wanted it and anyway, when you got married you had to smarten up a bit. Stands to reason. So they probabley didn't like the long-haired groups - disapproved or envied the way they carried on - and their wives didn't like them either.

A real Man

Now, Tom Jones was different: he was clean, he was smart, he didn't have long hair. More than that, he was a real man. You could tell the difference between him and a girl without any trouble, and what's more he sang loud and clear and didn't mumble beneath the clangour of loud guitars. Here was a man's man - and a woman's man.

Tom really played up to them. He didn't find it difficult because he felt exactly the same way. After all, he'd cut loose as a kid, then settled down in marriage, and in Pontypridd people had strong and traditional ideas about what was what. In interviews he invariably said all the right things: How, when he was a teenager, if he tried to tell his old man what to do he'd feel the backside of a hand across his face; how he hated the protest movement; how anyone could take drugs, but it took a man to hold his drink; and even sometimes felt like crying when he sang 'My Yiddisha Momma' or 'My Mother's Eyes'; how he loved his mother; and how he phoned his wife every day he was away. Naturally he was the champion of male chauvinism. He once said: "I think a woman's job is to serve her man," and pronounced, " a woman may like to think she's equal, but she's not." His fans loved it. The men respected the way he handled himself and the women wished he was their breadwinner. Tom had it made from there on in. When he sand the manfully maudlin 'Green Green Grass Of Home' late in 1966, it went straight to no. 1 and stayed there for seven weeks.

During this period he also conquered the States, where the rift between the over-25s and pop music was even greater - They didn't just have the longhairs, there they had the Monkees as well. Also, they didn't really have Elvis any more since he'd become a recluse in Memphis, unseen in years apart from his movies. So Tom moved in and took over his live audience. On stage, in fact, Tom resembled the early Presley in the uninhibited movements of his body. Off stage his views were pretty popular as well, especially when he said he thought you should fight for your country. He became the hard hats' hero, and the fantasy of the blue-rinsed matrons.

Eventually he took the Copacabana in New York, the Flamingo and Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. Elvis Presley went to watch his act, and Frank Sinatra said was Tom's number one fan. His British-made TV series showed weekly to enormous ratings, and the stars queued up to be hi special guests. These days, as a result, he spend six months of every year in the States. Not bad going for a hold-carrier from the valleys.

Taken from the book

The Stars and Super Stars of Rock - Story of Pop

published in 1974 -By Octopus Books Ltd