Tom Jones: ‘I was paranoid about music industry homosexuals’

Tom Jones has revealed he was ‘paranoid’ about working with gay men in the music industry during the early days of his career in a faux-pas-filled interview with The Big Issue.

The 75-year-old – who was recently dropped from coaching line-up of BBC One’s The Voice – explained how struggled to accept his first-ever music producer, the late Joe Meek, because of his sexuality, before suggesting that gay people are not “normal”.

“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,” said 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?’

He went on to say that his fears were allayed when he realised that most other people in the industry were “normal”.

“It just so happened that the first guy to record with me was a homosexual producer. Once I’d got over the shock of that, and realised that most people were normal…”

Quickly backtracking, the singer added: “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.”

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