Bloody good blokes: Watch Tom Jones and Burt Bacharach duet ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head’
(Credit: Alamy)
Mon 13 October 2025 0:00, UK
It’s a song we all have an emotional connection with, one way or another. ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head’ was originally written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, but it may well have been written by all of us, so familiar is the radical optimism in the song.
In 1969, Bacharach and David hit gold while writing a single for the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It took a second for such a happy-go-lucky song to situate itself on a Western soundtrack, but once it clicked, it really clicked. The song went on to win an Academy Award for Best Original Song and reached number one on the charts. This made it the first number-one hit of the 1970s.
But forget all that for a second. What makes the song so special is its storytale simplicity, like a child’s poem or a limerick. It doesn’t shy from the fact that sadness is a feeling that will plague us all, but instead it posits hope and happiness as an inevitability. Choosing to believe in happiness is just as important as being happy. I can just see the kistch live-laugh-love sign hanging in a spotless kitchen now: “Without the rain there would be no rainbow.”
“Raindrops are fallin’ on my head / And just like the guy whose feet are too big for his bed / Nothin’ seems to fit / Those raindrops are fallin’ on my head / They keep fallin’,” the delightful first verse soars. A tale of defeating pessimism. A tale that makes moving the earth to make everything seem a little brighter suspiciously and believably easy.
If I had to pick the human equivalent of such a joyful song, I might land on Sir Tom Jones. Before becoming a world-renowned singer, he held various jobs, including in construction and a glove factory. He could’ve been the guy next door, who you wave to on your bi-monthly one-mile jog around the block. He could’ve brought the milk to your door in the morning, with a whistle and a skip.
Hearing Jones’ smooth vocals take on the first half of the beloved tune will always feel nostalgic, not least because he’s almost unrecognisable in the video for folks like me, who first came across him on the hit television show The Voice. The Welsh-born singer can quiet any anxieties.
Joining him in the duet is none other than the tune’s founding father, Bacharachm, clad in a dusty orange get-up and walking in dramatically after two verses. He sits, softly and smug, next to Jones in the historic clip. His vocals aren’t as strong as Jones’ (let’s be serious, he never stood a chance), but when the two voices intermingle, there is harmony on earth for one brief moment.
Originally, musicians like Ray Stevens and even the great Bob Dylan turned down the chance to sing the hit. While we can always wonder just what that would have sounded like, or where abouts in the tune Dylan would rush in with his harmonica, we can count our blessings that this beautiful duet was captured on film. Thank you, Bacharach.
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