Sir Tom Jones needed staff to cook for him

29 April 2021

Sir Tom Jones hired an assistant after his wife died because he "couldn't boil an egg".

Sir Tom Jones

The 'It's Not Unusual' hitmaker - whose beloved spouse Linda died of cancer in April 2016 - admitted he's helpless in the kitchen so had to bring in a new member of staff to prepare his meals once he was living alone with no one to do it for him.

He said: "I got a man that works for me - Ben. He is my butler-come-assistant and he can cook, he can cook fantastic."

The 80-year-old singer hit the bottle when Linda passed away but quickly realised alcohol wasn't the answer.

Speaking to Jessie Ware on her 'Table Manners' podcast, he said: "I started drinking a lot when she died as I thought, 'Well the only way I will get through this is be large.' It doesn't work. You can't do that, you gotta be real."

Tom was famously friends with the late Elvis Presley and he described the 'Jailhouse Rock' singer as the "most handsome fella" he'd ever met, so thought it was a "shame" he piled on the pounds later in his life.

He said: “Think of the most handsome fella you’ve ever met and then he walks in.”

But the 'Voice' coach told how he and Elvis used to eat burgers in his friend's suite while touring in Hawaii and admitted the 'Love Me Tender' singer was always prepared for an attack of the "munchies".

He recalled: “He used to keep a pizza under his bed just in case he had munchies in the night”.

Elsewhere during the interview, Tom recalled how he was bedbound between the ages of 12 and 14 after contracting tuberculosis (TB) but he views his battle with the potentially-fatal disease - which attacks the lungs and throat - as a "blessing in disguise" because it saved him from a career down the coalmines.

He said: “My father was a coal miner, you see, so that knocked that out.

“It was a blessing in disguise. I would have become a coal miner, so that stopped me. Yeah, for two years, from 1954 I was bedridden."