Tom Jones had bizarre sexual ritual before sleeping with women at height of fame

Tom Jones is fairly well known for his off-stage antics, having famously bedded hundreds during his heyday despite being married at the time.

The Voice judge Tom, 84, met childhood sweetheart Linda at school in Pontypridd, getting hitched in their mid-teens before welcoming their only son, Mark Woodward, who now 67.

While Tom has only ever spoken highly of his marriage to Linda, who died in 2016 after being diagnosed with lung cancer, he has been open about being unfaithful to her on numerous occasions, having earned the nickname ‘the workbench’ for his eagerness to entertain groupies.

In 2012, he claimed in an interview with the Daily Telegraph that he’d slept with as many as 250 people while married, but that he didn’t ‘regret’ his actions as they ‘never hurt anybody’.

Tom Jones claimed to have slept with hundreds at the height of his career (Abolafia/TPLP/Getty Images)

“I still love my wife – the longer you’re married, it changes,” he said at the time.

“The older you get, it’s no longer a sex thing. There’s got to be more than that in order for it to last. You have to like one another; you have to have the same values.

“We both came from a working-class background, we both came from the same place, so we’re not like two foreign people having to explain to the other what their childhood was like. A lot of that, I think, has to do with the marriage lasting as long as it did.

"We grew up together. To walk away from that would be terrible.”

Four years later, he also said he and his wife never talked about the affairs, saying on The Jonathan Ross Show: “[They] never discussed, I was never put on the spot.

“Linda is a wonderful person and she would never put me on the spot. She loves being married to me and I love being married to her.”

Tom Jones with wife Linda in 1965 (Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

In a 2015 interview with The Big Issue, Tom revealed he’d had a slightly unorthodox way to keep himself ‘sterile’ when sleeping with women.

“I use Listerine to make sure everything down there is sterile, like a surgeon before an op,” he said.

“It's a good way to do it. I say that mouthwash is not only for gargling."

He also went on to defend his affairs, saying: “That’s all been talked about so much but that’s not the essence of me, that’s not what makes me tick.

“The media always picks on the women and how did that affect your wife? With everyone famous, not just me.

“They always bring sex into it. It’s part of life of course or we’d all die out.”

He added: “I don’t regret anything.

“All in all, no matter what happened, my marriage is still solid and my son still loves me. I haven’t done anything bad in my life.”