Tom Jones, one-man Welsh sweat machine and staunch advocate of compulsory chest wigs during puberty, once considered suicide.
No, not last week. It was much earlier that we’re afraid to say.
During his early days as a philandering London club singer Tom Jones couldn’t get work if he’d paid himself to perform. He had his wife Linda and their new child to support with no hard cash coming in at all. His debut single Chills And Fever had failed like a Tory party abstinence clinic. And he couldn’t even get laid that much apparently.
All very ‘unauthorised biography‘ blues so far, but when you chuck in Linda having to go and work in a factory because son Mark couldn’t hope to get buy on a rusk and a prayer forever, then you’re gonna have one very depressed fella. Tom, we mean. Not Mark. He felt okay. As far as we know.
"For a split second I thought, ‘Oh fuck it. If I just step to the right it would be over.’ I felt so down, because I didn’t know what to do.” grunted Tom after his eighty ninth star jump of the night. “That very rarely happens to me.”
Though he did have some idea of what to do. Throw himself in front of underground train was one suggestion. That wasn’t a straw poll taken at the time but a reflection of his own self-loathing. Little did he know that this self loathing would eventually be replaced but something much more powerful, our own.
Renowned harmonica player (if there is such a thing) Gordon Mills wrote It’s Not Unusual just a few weeks after all this doom and gloominess came to pass. He got it in general circulation around the music bigwigs and soon history of the repetitive kind was made.
Tom sang the song leaving Mills to sit at home wondering why he’d bothered to learn the harmonica in the first place and then Linda chucked in her factory job to celebrate. Though that seems a bit daft to us; surely the two incomes would have made more sense?
Celebrity – it saves another life. God bless it.
Buy a bit of the sex bomb at Amazon.co.uk. You know you want more. Sigh.
[story by Chris Laverty]