Tom Jones – (It Looks Like) I’ll Never Fall In Love Again

The King of Skiffle wrote it, recorded it, decided he couldn’t sing it — and handed it to a young Welshman with the words “you’d sing the pants off it.”

Lonnie Donegan knew a great song when he had one, and he knew when it wasn’t his to sing. Donegan — “the King of Skiffle,” the biggest recording star Britain produced before the Beatles — had written “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” with Jimmy Currie and cut his own version back in 1962. Years later, doing shows alongside a rising young singer named Tom Jones, he made a decision most songwriters never would. As Jones remembered it, Donegan told him he’d sing the pants off it, that he’d recorded it himself but couldn’t really do it justice. He simply gave the song away.

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Jones took it and made it enormous. Released on Decca in August 1967 and produced by Peter Sullivan, his version turned the song into a full-throated showcase for the voice that was making him a star — the dramatic build, the soaring chorus, the raw power he brought to a ballad. It climbed to No. 2 on the UK Singles Chart and stayed on the chart for twenty-five weeks. In America it stalled at first, reaching only No. 49, but its story wasn’t over. Reissued in the United States in 1969, it found a second life, hitting No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 and topping the Adult Contemporary chart. The performance on this page comes from that first flush of success — Jones singing it on The Dusty Springfield Show, broadcast on the BBC on September 5, 1967.

It’s worth clearing up one common mix-up: this is not the Burt Bacharach and Hal David song of the same name, the one Dionne Warwick took into the charts a year later. Two entirely different songs happen to share the title. Jones’s is the older lineage, built on the bones of the traditional folk song “Wanderin’,” which is where that distinctive “it looks like” phrasing in the full title comes from.

Fifty years on, the song comes home

The story found a perfect ending decades later. In 2019, a contestant named Peter Donegan auditioned for The Voice UK, and Tom Jones — a coach on the show — turned his chair for him. When Jones learned the young man was Lonnie Donegan’s son, he was visibly moved, and the two of them broke into an impromptu duet of “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” right there on the stage. More than fifty years after Lonnie handed Tom the song, Tom sang it back to Lonnie’s boy. Donegan himself had died in 2002, but the gift he’d made all those years earlier had come full circle, passed from father to son by way of the friend he’d trusted to sing it.