and I sang the Lord’s Prayer. It’s save it’s saving my life. Music is is more important even to me now than it was before because it’s um it’s it’s just and she would she would want me to. Of course you would. Tom Jones is now cancelling concerts and all his management would say was upper respiratory infection.
But is it? He was 85 years old and for the first time in six decades of performing he was not performing. He has said publicly he does not know how many shows he has left. I thought what what do I have to do? He has said he does not know what he would do without the stage. What he has not said is everything else that brought him here.
There is a son he has never once met. Last photographed in 2018 in Hoboken, New Jersey outside a shelter holding a sign reading I need money and singing his father’s songs to strangers. But is there really all there is to it? It’s strange thing. I didn’t know whether I would be able to carry on. There is a wife who stood beside him for 59 years of marriage, who never appeared on television, who never gave an interview, who kept something from the world in the final months of her life that almost no one outside their closest circle ever knew.
When when she passed, you know, it was so sudden. Yeah. In April, she found out she had lung cancer and it was too late. You know, it was terminal. There is a television network that ended four years of working together by leaving a message with his agent one day before the press release went out during the same month that his world was quietly falling apart.
And there is the voice itself, the one that came from a sick bed in Wales when he was 12 years old that turned a coal miner’s son into one of the most famous performers of the 20th century and that in 2025 is doing something no one has heard it do before. and and mocked my son.
He said, “Look, if you don’t sing, you’ll d.i.e.” Yeah. To understand why Tom Jones is here at 85, you have to go back to where it all began. The voice did not arrive the way most voices do. Thomas John Woodward was born in 1940 in Treeforest, South Wales, the son of a coal miner. And for the first 12 years of his life, his voice was ordinary.
He could carry a tune and he sang at school and at family gatherings in the way that boys from musical Welsh families sing at family gatherings. Nothing about it suggested what was coming or what the next two years would do to the instrument inside him. At 12 years old he contracted tuberculosis and for 2 years he was confined to bed in the family home while his father went to the mines and the world continued without him.
When he finally recovered, something fundamental had changed inside the instrument he had been born with. The tenor voice of a 12-year-old Welsh boy had become a baritone that nobody in Ponty Pritrid had a frame of reference for, and the sick bed had reshaped him from the inside out. I remember when when I was a kid in school and I sang the Lord’s Prayer, and the teacher said to me, “Why are you singing this like a negro spiritual?” And I didn’t know what she was talking about. I said, “I don’t know, miss.
I’m just singing it the way I feel.” So, I I was thinking maybe I’d heard Mahalia Jackson sing it, you know, on the radio, maybe. But I was always influenced by um gospel music and the blues. Tom Woodward was 16 years old when he married Linda Trenchard. She was also 16 and she was pregnant and there was no courtship story to tell.
They had grown up together the way children grow up in small Welsh towns where everyone knows everyone and then circumstances arrived faster than plans could be made. They married quickly and without ceremony, and their son Mark was born that same year. Tom was 16 years old, a father and a husband, living in the same terrace house in the same town his father had always lived in, with a voice that everyone who heard it said did not belong in Pontiprid.
The voice was the only door out of that town and out of that life. The question was whether he would walk through it and whether Linda would follow him when he did. And he did walk through it. In 1963, a manager named Gordon Mills found Tom Woodward singing in a working men’s club in Wales and decided the boy from Pontiprid needed a different name.
He chose Tom Jones after the popular film of the same year and set about turning a Welsh club singer into something the entertainment industry had never quite seen before. Within months, Tom Jones had recorded that hit we all know about in only two takes and watched it climb to number one in the United Kingdom and the top 10 in the United States.
He was 24 years old and his name was suddenly everywhere. A year later, he recorded the title song for the James Bond film Thunderball, and the scale of what was happening to his career shifted from remarkable to almost absurd. By 1966, he had won a Grammy for best new artist and had appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, an invitation he would accept 36 times over the years that followed.
My my my He met Elvis Presley at a party at Paramount Studios during the filming of Paradise Hawaiian Style, and the two recognized in each other, something that most of the people around them could not fully understand. They became close in the way that only two men who know what it is to walk into a room and stop every conversation can become close.
Las Vegas came next, a residency at Caesar’s Palace that would stretch across decades and become as synonymous with his name as any song he ever recorded. Within 3 years of leaving Pontiprid, Tom Jones was one of the most famous performers alive. Linda was not there for any of it, and she never would be. While Tom was collecting Grammy nominations and filling arenas and learning the choreography that made women in Las Vegas throw their hotel room keys at the stage, Linda was at home.
First in Pontiprid, then in London, then eventually in a mansion in Los Angeles that Tom bought from Dean Martin, but never in front of a camera and never once on stage beside him. The career was his, and she wanted no part of it. While her husband was performing 200 shows a year and constructing one of the most visible public lives of the 20th century, Linda was raising their son Mark and building a private existence that ran parallel to his fame without ever intersecting with it.
She could have been a fixture on red carpets, at awards ceremonies, on magazine covers, but she chose none of it. And anyone who assumed she had been left behind by the life Tom was building did not understand what they were looking at. Tom Jones has said in multiple interviews with a blunt honesty that borders on recklessness that at the height of his fame he was sleeping with approximately 250 women a year.
He has never denied this and has never shown any particular discomfort in discussing it. He named specific women publicly and acknowledged affairs that lasted years running alongside his marriage in an era when such admissions were treated as part of the spectacle rather than the careerending scandal they would become today.
And through all of it, Linda knew because she had always known. And the question that hung over their marriage for decades was one that no interviewer ever managed to answer and that Tom himself has never fully explained. Why did she stay? 59 years of marriage and not a single public appearance. In an era when being a celebrity spouse had become its own industry, when women like Priscilla Presley and Nancy Sinatra had built entire identities around the famous men in their lives, Linda Woodward chose something that most people in her
position would have found unthinkable. She chose to disappear completely and permanently from public view. Not because Tom kept her away and not because she lacked the confidence or the personality to handle that world, but because she found the entire machinery of celebrity genuinely uninteresting. The people who knew Linda have described someone who was sharp, funny, and private in a way that had nothing to do with shyness.
She had her own friends, her own social life, her own circle in London that operated on its own terms and required no spotlight from anyone else’s career to make it feel complete. She was not a woman who had been left behind by fame, but a woman who had examined fame closely and decided she wanted no part of it. What that kind of loyalty looks like from the inside is something that only two people ever truly understood.
And one of them is gone. Tom’s affairs were not secrets that Linda one day discovered, but facts she absorbed over decades. Tabloid stories on doorsteps, interviews where her husband discussed other women with casual openness. And through all of it, she maintained a position she had taken early in their marriage and never moved from.
This was not martyrdom, and it was not the passive silence of a woman who did not know what to do. She had decided what the marriage was and what it was not, and she held to that decision through decades of coverage that would have ended most relationships before their 10th anniversary. Tom described her in interviews as the only person who had ever made him feel safe, which is an extraordinary thing for a man surrounded by millions of fans to say about the one person who never once stood in front of a crowd on his behalf. In 1987, during a stay in
Las Vegas, Tom had an affair with a model named Catherine Burkery. A son was born the following year, and Tom denied paternity until a court ordered a DNA test in 1989, which confirmed the child was his. He was ordered to pay approximately $2,500 a month in child support, which he did until the boy, Jonathan, turned 18.
After the payments stopped, so did everything else. No phone calls, no visits, no relationship of any kind. Tom acknowledged Jonathan’s existence publicly in 2008, but stated plainly that he wanted nothing to do with him. And by 2018, Jonathan had ended up on the streets. Linda never spoke about him, not once, not in any context, not to any reporter who ever asked.
And whatever she thought about the existence of a son her husband had fathered with another woman and then walked away from, she took it with her. The Voice UK launched in 2012 with Tom Jones as one of the original coaches and for four consecutive series he had been one of the defining presences on the panel.
He was 72 when the show started and 75 when it ended for him. And in those four years he had helped shape the program into something that felt distinctly British in a way the American version never quite achieved. The aud.i.ence trusted him because he had earned that trust across six decades of stages and studios and living rooms.
The other coaches treated him with the kind of respect that comes not from politeness, but from genuine recognition of what the man sitting next to them had accomplished over the course of his career. For Tom, the voice represented a different kind of relevance than anything he had experienced before. Not the roar of a Las Vegas crowd or the adrenaline of a soldout concert tour, but the quieter authority of being in people’s homes every Saturday evening, week after week, a familiar and welcome presence rather than a spectacle. In
August 2015, a message arrived through his representation that would end his run on the show. The BBC had decided to replace him on the panel and boy George and Paloma Faith would be sitting in his chair starting the following series. There was no phone call from anyone at the network, no meeting, no face-to-face conversation, and no opportunity to hear the reasoning or respond before the rest of the world found out.
The decision was relayed to him secondhand, a day before the public announcement went out, which meant that Tom Jones learned about his own firing approximately 24 hours before his aud.i.ence did, and through the exact same impersonal channel. he told reporters afterward with the kind of carefully measured anger that only comes from a man who has spent five decades learning when to speak and when to remain silent.
Sometimes you wonder whether it’s run by humans or a machine sitting in a basement. He was 75 years old and he had just been informed through a chain of intermediaries that he was no longer needed. That was August 2015. And the same month, Linda received a set of test results that confirmed what she had been afraid of. She had fought cancer once before and won and she had fought it a second time and won again.
The third time the results were different and the doctors told her it was terminal. This was not a dramatic coincidence or a narrative connection that someone constructed after the fact. It was simply what happened in the space of a few weeks in August 2015. Tom Jones lost the biggest television platform he had built in more than a decade.
And the woman who had been the fixed point of his entire existence was told she would not survive. He continued performing through the autumn and into the winter because that is what he had always done and because Linda told him to keep going. But something behind the performances had changed in a way that the aud.i.ences could not see.
There was a clock now and both of them knew it was running. From August 2015 through the spring of 2016, Tom Jones lived two lives simultaneously. There was the public version, the one the aud.i.ences saw, the concert tours continuing on schedule, the press appearances handled with professionalism, the interviews given as though nothing in the world had shifted beneath him.
And there was the private version, the one happening behind closed doors, where Linda was declining week by week, and the reality of what was approaching could not be softened or delayed or negotiated with. She was the one who set the terms of how they would handle it. Keep performing and keep touring and do not cancel a single show on my account, she told him.
The woman who had spent nearly six decades choosing to remain invisible from the public record of her husband’s career was now choosing to be invisible in the most devastating way she could manage by refusing to let her illness become the thing that ended his ability to do the only work he had ever known.
During this same period, something happened that would later seem almost surreal. Tom’s autobiography was published. The book was called Over the Top and Back and it covered the full sweep of his career from Pontiprid to Las Vegas to The Voice and everything between. It was the official account of who Tom Jones had been and what his life had meant, written, and released into the world at the exact moment that the person most central to every page of that story was in the process of leaving it. There is something almost
unbearable about that convergence. a man sitting down to document his entire life while the woman who made that life possible was dying in the next room. The book became a bestseller and was received as an honest and reflective account of a remarkable career and almost nobody who read it at the time had any idea what was happening to the woman whose presence ran quietly through it from beginning to end.
On April 10th, 2016, Linda d.i.ed at the age of 75. Tom sold the mansion in Los Angeles, the house that had been constructed around a celebrity lifestyle that Linda had never wanted and never participated in, and moved into a small apartment in London. He entered grief therapy, something he has spoken about publicly with more honesty than most men of his generation would ever consider.
He has described sitting in a room with a therapist and asking the question that had clearly been taking shape inside him for months, perhaps for much longer. Did I do enough? Was I on the case? It is the kind of question a man asks when he genuinely does not know the answer. When he has spent 60 years being the most visible person in every room he entered, married to a woman who spent 60 years ensuring she was the least visible and now finds himself alone and unable to determine whether the balance between those two lives had
ever been fair. That question did not leave him after the therapy sessions ended. It followed him into every performance, every interview, every public appearance, carried like something he could not put down and did not know how to explain to anyone who had not lived through it. For 6 years after Linda d.i.ed, Tom Jones held together in public with the discipline of a man who had been performing since he was a teenager and had long ago learned that the show does not stop for personal reasons. He returned to The
Voice UK in 2017, invited back after the BBC reversed its earlier decision, and he occupied the same chair as though the intervening years had not contained the worst experiences of his life. He released new music, toured extensively and gave interviews in which he discussed Linda with warmth and precision, offering the public exactly as much of his grief as he had decided they were permitted to see, and not one word more.
He described missing her and he described the adjustment and he described what it was like to come home to an empty apartment after six decades of someone being there. But he did it all within lines he had drawn for himself and never crossed. His album surrounded by time came out in 2021 and was treated by critics and aud.i.ences as proof that Tom Jones had survived the worst chapter of his life and come through the other side with his dignity and his talent intact.
The story the public had constructed about him was simple and complete. Tom Jones carries on. He endures. He is the monument to his own resilience and there is nothing left to learn about him that they do not already know. In 6 years, no one had seen the wall come down. On September 3rd, 2022, Tom Jones appeared on The Voice UK to perform a song called I won’t crumble with you if you fall.
A track he had written and recorded in the years after Linda’s d.e.a.t.h . stretch my night dreams into my day. He stood on the stage and he sang the entire song through to the end with the control and steadiness of a man who has been performing for 60 years and knows how to hold a room together even when the material is pulling him apart.
The song ended and the studio fell into a silence that nobody had been expecting. And then something happened that nobody in the building or watching from home was prepared for. Tom stopped performing, which is not something Tom Jones does. And he turned to the other coaches and to the aud.i.ence and to the millions of people watching across the country, and he said something he had never said on television in the six years since his wife had d.i.ed.
He told them what Linda had said to him in the last days of her life. The words, as he spoke them that night on live television, were these, “You can’t crumble with me. Don’t fall with me now. You’ve done everything you can. Six years of private grief, six years of composure, maintained with the focus of a man who learned as a teenager that the show continues no matter what, came apart in one moment on national television in front of millions of viewers.
The song went to number one on UK iTunes within 24 hours. Not because the melody was extraordinary or the production was exceptional, but because of what the aud.i.ence had just witnessed. A man who had spent six years keeping the most painful moment of his life sealed behind a wall he had built for himself chose live and in front of the entire country to let them see what was on the other side.
It is 2025 and the concerts have stopped. Tom Jones is 85 years old and the official statements say upper respiratory infection and the medical advice says rest. But the man himself has said something more honest than any press release. He has admitted to having less control over his voice. And he has admitted that there are mornings now when the instrument simply does not come when he calls for it.
The voice that emerged from a bedridden boy in Pontiprid. The voice that was never supposed to sound the way it did. The voice that carried him to Caesar’s palace and the Grammy stage and into the homes of millions of people across six decades. Is doing what every instrument eventually does.
He has honored the last instruction Linda ever gave him for 9 years now. She told him to carry on and he carried on through therapy and through new albums and through a night on television that cracked open everything he had been holding together. And he did what she asked for as long as his body would let him. The question is not whether Tom Jones will stop performing because he does not use that word and nothing suggests he ever will.
The question is whether the voice that built everything will give him a say in when it ends or whether it will simply end on its own terms. There is a son he has never once been in the same room with, carrying a surname that opens conversations his father refused to have. There is a marriage that lasted nearly six decades on terms that no one outside of it will ever fully comprehend between a man who lived at the highest possible volume and a woman who chose total silence.
There is a month in 2015 when two of the worst things that can happen to a person arrived within weeks of each other and the man who absorbed them both went back on stage because the woman who was dying told him not to stop. There is a night in 2022 when the wall finally came down and there is a voice now that is quieter than it has ever been.
Tom Jones was asked in an interview years after Linda d.i.ed how he remembers her now. His answer was not about the illness or the decades of marriage or the question he asked his therapist about whether he had been enough. His answer was four words. I think of her laughing. Not ill, not diminished, not absent, but laughing. The woman who disappeared from every camera and every stage and every public record of her husband’s life, remembered not for what she endured or what she kept to herself, but for the sound she made when she was happy. If
this story meant something to you, consider liking and subscribing for more content like this. Tom Jones is still here and the voice is quieter than it has ever been.
