The song Bono wrote for Tom Jones
You never know who you’ll encounter in an Irish pub. Most of the time, it’ll be rowdies and countrymen, but every once in a while, it might be Bono. That’s what Tom Jones learned when he stumbled into a pub in Dublin during the early 2000s.
Although it might seem ludicrous to imagine the U2 frontman working together with the ‘What’s New Pussycat’ crooner, that’s exactly what happened after the duo shared a few drinks. They even had a slightly vague bit of connective tissue: they both worked on James Bond theme songs. Jones belted out the title song to 1965’s Thunderball, hitting the deck immediately after producing the climactic final note, while Bono co-wrote the theme to GoldenEye 30 years later with his U2 bandmate The Edge.
It didn’t take long for the two men to start devising a new song. Bono was an especially keen songwriter for other artists, writing and producing tracks for singers like Willie Nelson and Roy Orbison. When he came across Jones in that pub, he had found his most recent assignment and took to it with a passionate fervour.
“It was almost like he was interviewing me,” Jones later told Music Week of the encounter.” He said, ‘Tell me about yourself. What was it like growing up in Wales? What interested you?’ We sat down for a couple of hours, and next thing you know, I saw him a few months later in London, and he had the song written. Bono told me, ‘There is a lot of you in the song.’ I said, ‘Do I get a writer’s credit?’ He said ‘no.'”
“There’s a lyric in that song that says: ‘You gotta get your hands dirty/When you’re digging a ditch.’ But it still comes back to the shirt and the shoes, Bono even said that,” Jones added. “I said when I started off, I’ve gotta look the part. I got the shirt, I got the shoes, I got what it takes. I got all this shit, and he’s put all that in there.”
The end result was ‘Sugar Daddy’, which Jones recorded for his 2008 album 24 Hours. “Bono tries to sound like me on it. He told me, ‘I was trying to do my best Tom Jones impression’. I said, ‘It’s great’. When I recorded it with Future Cut (producers who have also produced for Lily Allen, Kate Nash and Estelle), we’d send it back and forth to Bono and let him have a listen,” Jones later told The Sun. “He loves it and is very complimentary. It was great working with him.”
As for the song’s peculiar title, Jones wasn’t very taken with it at first. “I told Bono, ‘I’m not a sugar daddy!’ He told me it was a cheeky, ballsy thing and not to be taken literally,” Jones added in his interview with The Sun. It’s hard to argue against Bono’s insights: ‘Sugar Daddy’ fits right within Jones’ established wheelhouse of crooning classics.
