Helene Fischer and Tom Jones – Sexbomb (Live – Die Helene Fischer Show)

A Welsh knight of pop in his seventies and Germany’s biggest Schlager star turned a 1999 dance hit into one of the most-shared duets German television ever produced.

On the stage of Die Helene Fischer Show in 2016, the German broadcaster ZDF captured a pairing almost no one would have predicted: Helene Fischer, the reigning queen of German Schlager pop, standing beside Tom Jones, the Welsh singer who had been a global star since before she was born. Backed by a full band and a smoky, shifting light show, the two of them tore into “Sexbomb” — his big beat hit from the turn of the century — trading the hook with an easy chemistry that sent the clip around the world. Jones, then in his seventies, showed his baritone had lost nothing; Fischer matched him beat for beat.

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The song they were reviving very nearly never existed. “Sex Bomb” was the one original track on Reload, Tom Jones’s 1999 album of duets and covers that revived his career for a new generation. It came from a collaboration with Mousse T., the German DJ and producer who wrote it with Errol Rennalls, and Jones has said it arrived at the very end of the sessions when the album was already finished. He heard the demo, knew immediately he had to record it, changed a few words, and turned what was almost an afterthought into the biggest song on the record. Released late in 1999, it became a hit across Europe, reaching No. 3 in the UK and the top of the charts in much of the continent.

That German connection runs deeper than most listeners notice. Mousse T. is a German producer; the track was partly recorded at Peppermint Park studios in Germany. So when Fischer, the best-selling German-language artist of her era, chose to perform it with Jones on her own television show, she was in a sense bringing the song home. The result was less a nostalgia spot than a genuine meeting of two stars from different worlds and different generations, and it has become one of the most-watched moments from her long-running spectacular — proof that a great song and two singers who commit to it fully can leap any gap of language, age, or genre.