The track opens with that saxophone — and what a saxophone it is. Producer Keith James has the good sense to let it breathe, to let it swagger, to let it do what saxophones do when handled by musicians who actually understand jazz rather than merely gesturing at it. This is not the Kenny G school of inoffensive woodwind decoration. This is the real article: intricate, warm, and impossibly confident, nodding respectfully toward Coltrane while never losing sight of the fact that it's anchoring a pop single intended to make people feel genuinely, recklessly good about being alive.
Lead singer Martin Montague drew his inspiration from a holiday romance on the White Isle, and the song carries that sun-bleached, slightly reckless optimism throughout every bar. Ibiza, of course, has been the backdrop for a thousand pieces of dreary electronic nonsense over the years, but Montague finds the human story beneath the clichéd setting — the giddiness, the disbelief, the sheer absurdity of falling for someone when you're supposed to be on holiday. Gini Hogarth's keyboards sit underneath the melody with quiet sophistication, and Damian de la Hunty's backing vocals add warmth without ever threatening to crowd out the central performance.
The DNA here is impeccable and worn lightly, which is the only acceptable way to wear it. The Beautiful South's gift for narrative — their ability to make you feel as though you've just been told a very good story at the bar — runs through the bones of the track. The Smiths' jangly irreverence lurks at the edges. The Kinks' cheeky working-class wit informs Montague's vocal delivery, which manages the difficult trick of sounding simultaneously knowing and genuinely carefree. These influences don't announce themselves with the desperate, look-what-I've-read energy of lesser bands. They've simply been digested, metabolised, and turned into music that belongs entirely to Don't Look Now.
Recorded at The Dream of Ozwald Studios in Warren Row — a location that sounds like it was invented by a particularly imaginative geography teacher — the production is clean without being clinical. Keith James understands that the song's job is to make you feel something, not to demonstrate anyone's technical prowess.
What's perhaps most remarkable is how thoroughly the single resists the gravitational pull of its moment. Pop records from January 2003 have largely aged about as gracefully as a rhinestone cowboy at a funeral. "Second Time Around" sounds, by contrast, as though it was made outside of time entirely — beholden to no particular trend, no particular scene, no particular demographic calculation. It simply exists as a piece of intelligent, joyful, adult pop music made by people who cared more about the song than about the market.
The fact that it remains Don't Look Now's most-streamed track years on tells you everything and nothing simultaneously. Everything, because public taste occasionally gets it right. Nothing, because a band this wilfully eccentric — who elsewhere concern themselves lyrically with stamp collecting, bank robbery, and the precise geometry of John Lennon's spectacles — deserves to be judged across the full, glorious breadth of their catalogue rather than reduced to a single highlight.
But as highlights go? This one shines rather brilliantly. Put it on. Turn it up. Let the saxophone do its magnificent work.
*Released 6th January 2003 on independent release. Album: "Like They Do It in the Films."*