Sir Tom Jones did not need a contestant to steal the show. During the blind auditions of The Voice UK that aired on August 29, 2026, the Welsh legend took the spotlight himself and sang Leonard Cohen’s “Tower of Song,” a quiet, unhurried song about an aging singer looking back on a life in music. By the end, will.i.am, who has coached alongside him since the show’s first season in 2012, had broken down in tears. Kelly Rowland was crying too.
It turned out to be Tom Jones’s final season in the red chair. Less than two weeks after that episode aired, he told fans he had been fired.
A song he said could have been written about him
“Tower of Song” was not a new choice for Tom Jones. Leonard Cohen wrote it for his 1988 album I’m Your Man, and Tom made it the opening track of Spirit in the Room, the stripped-down covers album he released in 2012 with producer Ethan Johns. It reached the UK top 10.
Back then, he explained why he picked it. He had considered Cohen’s “I’m Your Man,” but worried it might be too much of a cliché, and he had sung plenty of macho songs already. “Tower of Song,” he told The Line of Best Fit, was “about as real as I can get.” In another interview, he said the song could have been written about him: the singer in it has lost his friends, his hair has gone gray, and his body aches, yet he is still at work in that tower, writing and singing.
Country fans will recognize one name in it. Cohen places Hank Williams in the same tower, on a floor high above him, still awake through the lonely nights.
“I just love the fact that I can still sing”
The episode was part of the show’s 14th series, whose blind auditions were filmed in the summer of 2025, when Tom Jones was 85. The series skipped its usual autumn slot in 2025 and finally reached ITV1 on August 22, 2026.
At another point in the episode, Kelly Rowland, new to the panel that season, called him “85 years young.” She told him he had seen and heard so much. “A lot,” Tom Jones agreed, then added: “I just love the fact that I can still sing.”
He shared the clip on Instagram, where his former fellow coach Olly Murs wrote that he was crying. Within days, the performance had gone viral.
In another clip from the series, reported by Nation.Cymru, Tom Jones asked will.i.am when the two of them had joined the show. “2012,” will.i.am answered. Tom replied, “We’re gonna stay ’til the end.” will.i.am joked, “We come with the seats.” It is not clear from the report exactly when that exchange was filmed.
Fired less than two weeks later
On September 7, The Sun reported that Tom Jones would not return for the next series. The following day, he posted his own statement. “I did not want to leave The Voice,” he wrote. He said ITV had made the decision a while ago and that he had only been told recently, and that the reason he was given was “financial difficulty with insurance.”
He said the network had offered him a much smaller role, appearing on the show without being involved from the start, and that he was not thrilled about it. He ended with a line that was quoted around the world: there is never a good time to fire an 86-year-old “who’s still pretty good at his job.”
ITV thanked “the irreplaceable Sir Tom Jones” for his years on the show. Reports said the new panel would bring in Cheryl and Aitch alongside will.i.am and Kelly Rowland. Fans started a petition asking ITV to bring him back, and will.i.am, the coach who had cried at his performance, answered it publicly.
“I’m soo broken by this… I LOVE TOM SOOO MUCH!!!” — will.i.am
How his last season ended
Tom Jones finished the series anyway. On October 31, 2026, his artist Cate McHugh, a singer from Llantwit Major in Wales who started out busking on the streets of Cardiff, won The Voice UK. It was his fourth win as a coach, making him the only coach in the show’s history to win four times. In the final, he joined her for John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
Not his final song
Some videos online now call the “Tower of Song” moment Tom Jones’s “final song on stage.” It was not. He spent the fall on a North American tour, and after a week in a Los Angeles hospital in late October with what he first called a bad case of the flu, he returned to the stage at the Greek Theatre on November 4. He told the crowd he had said to the medical staff that he had to get back on stage.
“This is where I belong,” he said.