“Old Red Eyes is Back” by The Beautiful South

"Old Red Eyes Is Back" opens 0898 Beautiful South, the band's third album, and was the first single from it on Go! Discs. Paul Heaton wrote the words and the music with Dave Rotheray, reportedly after a heavy night on the Guinness with a contractor from Hartburn in Stockton-on-Tees, and the title is a sly twist on Frank Sinatra's 1973 album Ol' Blue Eyes Is Back.

The joke stops at the title. Old Red is a drinker, and the song follows his habits and his failing health all the way to a final verse where he dies, while the chorus tallies everything he traded away for the bottle. Heaton sings lead, with Briana Corrigan and Dave Hemingway surfacing now and then behind him, and Jon Kelly produced and mixed. The video puts two Heatons in a pub: the storyteller and Old Red himself.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.