The days when women threw their knickers at Tom Jones are thankfully past. It would have been a most inappropriate accolade when the brass-lunged miner’s son from Pontypridd stepped forward to be knighted by the Queen at Buckingham Palace yesterday.

Thomas Woodward, as he was once known, was admitted in the New Year’s Honours List to the pantheon of rock knights to join Sir Paul, Sir Mick and Sir Elton, for services to music in a career spanning more than 40 years, from his first hit It’s Not Unusual in 1964 to his more recent Sex Bomb, an unexpected success on the US club circuit.

Honours are bestowed for many talents; this may be the first to recognise the art of the pelvic thrust. Sir Tom, who is already an OBE, appointed in 1999, now lives in California, although the green green grass of home drew him back to the valleys of South Wales last year to sing to an audience of 25,000 in a park in his home town.

Yesterday he should really have been in Melbourne, where his grandson, Alex, had been shooting for Wales in the Commonwealth Games. But the pull of the Palace proved the stronger attraction; he arrived in full tails and goatee beard accompanied by his son, daughter and granddaughter.

Once regarded as a bit of a hooligan in the mining community that spawned him, Sir Tom, 65, has moved effortlessly into high society, having met the Queen, by his calculation, six or seven times, beginning with a royal charity performance in 1966, which the Queen remembered. Whatever you may think of the monarch, she has excellent briefing notes.

“It is fantastic; it was lovely to see the Queen again,” Sir Tom enthused after the formal ritual in the Palace ballroom when he was tapped on the shoulder with a sword. “I love seeing the Queen and I have always been a royalist. She is lovely and she is still lovely; she has got a great smile and her whole face lights up when she smiles.”

Asked if he thought his knighthood was rather a long time in coming, given the long unrecognised years he spent enduring blizzards of underwear, Sir Tom said: “I just hoped for it. All you can do is hope; you can never know.”

He said that the Queen had asked him how long he had been in showbusiness. “I told her 41 years, and she said to me that I had given a lot of people a lot of pleasure.” No mention of knickers, of course.

“I come from a coalmining, working-class background. My father was a coalminer. Today is just tremendous. When you first come into showbusiness and you get a hit record, it is the start of something. As time goes on, it just gets better. This is the best thing that I have had. It is a wonderful feeling, a heady feeling. Sometimes you just can’t believe it, you think you have been dreaming.”

Despite being entitled to a free bus pass, Sir Tom has no intention of putting on the slippers. He has a dance CD out next month and will be touring Britain from October.

Other recipients at the investiture included the Beverley Sisters who collected MBE insignia, Lord Ashdown, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats, who was appointed KCMG for his work in the Balkans, and Mike Ruddock, the former Welsh rugby coach who resigned in February but still collected his OBE insignia. That resignation shocked the rugby world. Say what you like about Sir Tom, the pelvis has staying power.

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