London - Accused of being sexist after claiming recently that his long-suffering wife Linda had “lost her spark”, Sir Tom Jones has now dug himself into another hole - this time over homosexuality.
The singer, 75, admits he used to be prejudiced against gays.
He says he struggled to accept his first-ever music producer, the late Joe Meek, because of his sexuality.
“I was ready for most aspects of the music industry but, when I met [him], that threw me off a bit, because he was a homosexual,” says Jones. “I thought: ‘Wait a minute, is the London scene - the people who run British showbusiness - are there a lot of homosexuals involved here? Because, if so, I’m going back to Cardiff.’
“When I signed with Decca, and Peter Sullivan became my manager... I said: ‘You’re not one of these queer fellows, are you?’ And he said: ‘What are you on about?’ I became paranoid, you see. I wondered, was that required to make a hit record?”
Jones goes on to express his relief at discovering that most men in the music business were “normal”.
Tying himself in knots, in an interview with The Big Issue, he adds: “Well, I shouldn’t put it like that. Homosexuals are normal, it’s not that they’re not normal. It’s just that they are what they are.”
His comments are unlikely to go down well with Boy George, the gay singer who has replaced him as a coach on BBC1’s The Voice.
While Sir Tom is renowned as a ladies’ man, his sexuality has sometimes been a matter of conjecture, with an online poll finding that 30 percent of respondents thought he was gay, and 30 percent thought he was bisexual.
Sir Tom’s former bass player, Vernon Hopkins, revealed six years ago that the singer was actually once groped by Meek.
“I remember loading the equipment in the van outside Joe’s and Tom running down the stairs shouting: ‘He just touched my b*******! That b****** grabbed my b****!’ “
Daily Mail