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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015
FIRST EDITION
© Sean Smith 2015
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2015
Cover photographs © johnwrightphoto.com
Sean Smith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780008104450
Ebook Edition © March 2015 ISBN: 9780008104528
Version: 2015-07-10
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To HB
Contents
Part One: Tommy Woodward
1 The Show-Off
2 The Prisoner of Laura Street
3 A Teenager in Love
4 The Making of a Man
5 The Girl with the Red Dress On
6 Senator Tom
7 The Green Fly Boys
Part Two: Tom Jones
8 The Black Hole
9 It’s Not Unusual
10 Pussycat
11 Green, Green Grass
12 A Love Supreme
13 This Is Tom Jones
14 On Top of Miss World
15 The King and I
16 The Slump
Part Three: Sir Tom
17 Kiss-Off
18 You Can Leave Your Hat On
19 My Best Friend’s Funeral
20 Reloading
21 In Search of Credibility
22 The Road
23 The Voice
1
Even as a small boy, it was always about the voice. Tom calls it his ‘God-given gift’. Freda Woodward believed her son was musical as a baby when she held him in her arms: ‘As soon as music came on the radio, he would start to move like a jelly. And if you left him in his cot, he would make musical sounds at the top of his voice. I remember thinking, “What’s eating this boy?”’
Tom’s first memory of impressing his mother was when he was a blond, curly-haired five-year-old and she heard him singing the popular wartime novelty song ‘Mairzy Doats’. She asked him to sing it again, and when he had finished, she told him, ‘You’ve got a lovely voice.’ That parental approval was all the encouragement Tom needed to believe that he would be a singer one day. ‘I had this voice and the love of it. So any chance I could get, I wanted to get up and sing.’
Tommy Woodward liked