Tom Jones - An Extraordinary Life. Gwen Russell
another: had the spy been real rather than fictional, he would almost certainly have bumped into Tom at a Las Vegas casino, checking out the women and deciding which ones to go for. (And Bond wouldn’t necessarily have won.) It was certainly very prestigious, too. At the time the Bond movies caused as big a sensation as Jones did himself, and anyone chosen to sing the theme tune was considered much honoured. Tom himself was delighted.
‘You know, there’s a lot of movies now with a lot of special effects and stuff,’ he said, years later, recalling how he was asked to sing the Bond theme. ‘But they are still making James Bond movies. But then it was new. Sean Connery was James Bond and all those special effects were all new then to film-making. So if we could get a Bond song to go with the film that was fantastic. Shirley Bassey did Goldfinger (1964), which was very successful for her, Matt Monroe did From Russia with Love (1963), which was very successful, and then I did Thunderball. So it was great, you know, to get a Bond. I was glad that they asked me. John Barry and Don Black wrote it. I was thrilled when they asked me to do it, and it was a huge success.’
It also was the source of an almost certainly apocryphal story. Tom ends the song on such a throbbing, drawn-out cry of ‘Thunderbaaaaaaaaaaall!’ that stories circulated that he had passed out after the recording. That is almost certainly not true, but it is an indication of the power and strength of his voice.
Tom’s next record, ‘A-Tom-ic Jones’ came out the following January and shortly afterwards, another person instrumental in forming his image and guiding his career came on to the scene: Chris Hutchins. He was to become second in importance only after Gordon Mills in Tom’s career at that point. Hutchins identified exactly what was needed to project him to the public in a way that would build on his charisma and sex appeal, something that, despite all the Rock’n’Roll and tight leather trousers of the early years, had always been played down. Indeed, Tom was very much presented as a family man. An astute PR man, Hutchins decided that from now on, Tom’s status as an attractive man should be brought to the fore, whereas his marriage and child should not be emphasised. There would be no more cosy domestic interviews. Indeed, to begin cultivating an air of mystery, there should be few interviews at all.
Hutchins, who was at that time working on the New Musical Express, was spot-on in his perception. He arranged a meeting with Gordon Mills and put forward the new strategy, after which he was taken on for the initially small sum of £25 a week. While the change in image was to work magnificently, at the same time, it had a huge effect on Tom’s marriage, for again Linda was edged out of the picture and this time she stayed in the shadows. Indeed, many people believe the reason she has become so reclusive is down to those early days when it was put to her that public knowledge of Tom’s marriage would hold him back. According to some sources, it is a message that not only has she never forgotten, but she continues to act on to this day.
Certainly, Hutchins’s strategy could not have been better for Tom’s career. The cosy home shoots became a rarity, while he adopted a far more overtly sexual image than ever before. There were several different stages to come before he finally found the niche that he was to occupy for the next four decades, but the stage had been set for the rise and rise of Sir Sex Bomb, an image he maintains to this day.
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