Sir Tom and a faux pas over whether gays are ‘normal’
Sienna’s revealing slip on lost film role
ACCUSED of being sexist after claiming recently that his longsuffering wife Linda had ‘lost her spark’, Sir Tom Jones has now dug himself into another hole — this time over homosexuality.
The Delilah singer, 75, admits he used to be prejudiced against gays and suggests they are not ‘normal’.
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 bizarre conjecture, with an online poll finding that 30 per cent of respondents thought he was gay, and 30 per cent thought he was bisexual.
But it seems Meek may have scarred him for life. 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****!” ’
Mixed fortunes for sienna Miller, who has been busy promoting new film Burnt, in which she stars as a sous chef who falls for her boss, played by Bradley Cooper.
The 33-year- old actress, who was photographed at the Manhattan premiere on Tuesday (left), is still coming to terms with having been dropped from Johnny Depp’s latest movie. Miller filmed scenes as one of Depp’s lovers in the gangster flick Black Mass — about Boston crime boss Whitey Bulger — but they ended up on the cutting room floor. ‘ Thanks to the wonderfully hyperbolic media coverage, it’s been totally blown out of proportion,’ Miller tells the Daily Beast website about the screen snub. ‘i shot four days and it was a cameo.’ sienna must have succumbed to hyperbole herself when she talked about the same role last year. ‘i shot for two weeks,’ she boasted to Boston.com, adding: ‘i read as much as i could about Whitey . . . [and] spoke to some people here who knew him and knew her.’