What's New Pussycat?

What's New Pussycat? — Tom Jones (1965)

Few debut singles in the history of popular music announced an artist's arrival with the same theatrical force as "What's New Pussycat?", the Burt Bacharach and Hal David composition that introduced Tom Jones to American audiences in the summer of 1965. The song was written as the title theme for the Woody Allen comedy film of the same name, and it brought together one of the most commercially instinctive songwriting partnerships in the business with a twenty-five-year-old Welsh singer who possessed a voice of almost supernatural power. The result was a record that rewrote the rules of film song production and placed Tom Jones on the map as a genuinely global star.

Burt Bacharach composed the melody while Hal David supplied the lyrics, working to a brief from the film's producers that called for something playful and extravagant. Bacharach, already established as a hitmaker through his work with Dionne Warwick and others, constructed an arrangement that was deliberately excessive, layering horns, strings, and percussion into a cascading, almost comically grandiose structure. The song required a voice capable of riding that arrangement without being swallowed by it, and producer Bacharach himself, who supervised the recording, found exactly what he needed in Jones.

Tom Jones had been signed to Decca Records in the United Kingdom and its American affiliate Parrot Records, a label that would be his commercial home through the peak years of his career. The single was released in June 1965 and entered the Billboard Hot 100 almost immediately upon its American release. It climbed to number three on the Hot 100, a remarkable performance for a debut single from a British artist who had almost no prior American exposure. In the United Kingdom, it reached number eleven on the pop charts, though Jones would subsequently score bigger domestic hits as his career developed.

The recording session itself took place in London, with Bacharach directing an orchestra in the lavish style he had become known for. The arrangement features a memorable opening horn figure that recurs throughout the song, and the dramatic dynamic shifts between the verses and the chorus were calibrated to showcase Jones's ability to move from a controlled, relatively intimate delivery to full-throated near-operatic power. The effect was immediately distinctive in a radio landscape still dominated by the British Invasion groups, and disc jockeys responded enthusiastically to a record that sounded like nothing else on the charts.

The film itself, released in the United States in June 1965 and featuring Peter Sellers, Peter O'Toole, Romy Schneider, and Capucine alongside Woody Allen in a supporting role, was a major box-office success. This gave the song sustained exposure through cinema audiences who then sought out the record, creating a promotional feedback loop that helped drive its chart performance. Film tie-in singles were a recognized commercial format by the mid-1960s, but few connected as thoroughly as this one, which managed to exist as a fully satisfying pop record independent of the movie it accompanied.

The single's success established the commercial template for Tom Jones's American career. Parrot Records quickly understood that Jones was capable of sustaining a mainstream pop audience in the United States and pushed subsequent releases aggressively into American radio. The label's strategy was validated by the trajectory of his career over the following four years, which culminated in the massive global hit "It's Not Unusual" and the television series that made him a household name across multiple continents.

Critical reception at the time was enthusiastic, with reviewers noting the combination of Bacharach's witty and sophisticated arrangement with Jones's raw vocal energy as something genuinely novel. The contrast between the song's playful subject matter and the operatic intensity Jones brought to it struck many commentators as the key to its appeal. It was simultaneously a comedy record and a demonstration of serious vocal technique, a tension that worked entirely in its favor.

In the decades since its release, the song has become one of the most recognizable titles in the Bacharach and David catalog. It has been covered by numerous artists and has appeared in films, television programs, and commercials on a regular basis, demonstrating the durability of both the melody and the arrangement. The 1965 recording by Tom Jones remains the definitive version, its combination of production excess and vocal commitment marking it as a product of a specific moment in popular music when everything seemed to demand a bigger sound.

The song's place in Tom Jones's own catalog is foundational. Without the American success of this debut single, his subsequent career trajectory in the United States might have been considerably different. It demonstrated that a Welsh singer rooted in the soul and gospel traditions of his home valleys could find a commercially viable identity in the American mainstream by pairing his extraordinary voice with material of genuine compositional sophistication.