Sir Tom Jones has just said goodbye to “The Voice UK.” His last series ended on Oct. 31, and the winner was one of his own singers, Cate McHugh from Wales. He’d been a coach on the show on and off since 2012. Long before the red chairs, Tom lived in Los Angeles, and one of the best stories he tells from those years starts in his kitchen.
“Here I am, and the bell goes,” he said on ITV’s “The Jonathan Ross Show” in May 2021. “I’m in the kitchen, and you can see Michael Jackson’s face.” The face was on the camera at the door.
The house had a famous past of its own. Tom bought it from Dean Martin in June 1976 for $500,000, according to Wales Online, and kept it until he sold it to Nicolas Cage in 1998. It sat on Copa De Oro Road in Bel Air. Tom’s biographer Lucy Ellis wrote that he put in electric gates “adorned with Welsh dragons.”
The neighbors were famous too. “Quincy Jones used to live around the corner from me,” Tom told Ross. “I bought Dean Martin’s house.”
That corner explains the visitor. Michael was making records with Quincy, and he got into the habit of dropping by. “He used to come round to my house in Bel Air, because he was recording with Quincy Jones at the time,” Tom told the music site musicOMH in April 2021. The two went way back. “I knew Michael when he was a kid, all the way up from The Jackson Five,” he said.
The house was full of Tom’s own history, too. From 1969 he hosted his own TV variety show, “This Is Tom Jones,” and sang duets with just about everyone who came on. Watch Tom and Stevie Wonder share the stage in this one, and keep that show in mind, because it comes back into the story.
Tom Jones and Stevie Wonder sing a medley on “This Is Tom Jones” in 1969
This clip is from Tom’s official YouTube channel, and the title dates it to 1969. It doesn’t include the Michael story. It shows the kind of TV duet that ended up in Tom’s photos at home.
Back to the doorbell. Tom knew exactly who was standing outside. “I could see it was him, of course,” he said.
He asked anyway. “Who is it?” “It’s Michael,” came the answer. “Michael who?” Tom said. “Jackson.”
“As if I didn’t know, he’s looking right at me,” he told Ross.
He let Michael in, and the visit went well. “He was great though,” Tom said. Michael drifted over to the pool table, where Tom kept pictures from his career. He told musicOMH they were photos “of my TV show when I was doing duets with everybody.”
So what did Michael make of them?
“He was looking at some pictures around the pool table, and he said ‘Wow, Tom, you’ve had a great career haven’t you?'” Tom remembered. He changed one word. “I said, ‘having,'” he told Ross. He told it a little fuller to musicOMH: “And I said, ‘No, I’m having a great career!'”
Michael didn’t take it badly. “He thought it was wonderful to see the pictures,” Tom said.
The Ross interview isn’t on YouTube as far as we could find, so here is Tom this autumn instead. Watch Tom and Cate sing John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” together at about 2:40, and listen for his goodbye to her at about 5:05.
Tom Jones’s last series of “The Voice UK” ends with his own singer winning
This 5:43 roundup comes from the Best of The Voice channel. It covers the end of Tom’s final series in 2026, when his singer Cate McHugh was crowned the winner. It’s here for Tom’s farewell, not for the Michael story.
When Tom told Ross about the doorbell, he was 80 and promoting a new album, “Surrounded By Time.” It had just gone to No. 1, and Smooth Radio reported that it made him the oldest singer ever to have a No. 1 album in the UK.