Page 17How did Frank
Sinatra (with help
from Paul Anka) turn
a French dirge about
a loveless marriage
into the world’s
favourite song
50 years ago?
Simple...
His
way
He did it
Daily Mail, Friday, September 6, 2019
by Ray
Connolly
- British and American music
publishers have always kept an
eye on songs popular in Europe
and elsewhere, in the hope that
one might, with English lyrics,
have a wider appeal.
Comme d’Habitude was too big
to overlook.
a
ttrACtEd to the
tune, a London music
publisher asked a
young jobbing song-
writer called david Jones to see
what he could do with it.
As it turned out, not much. He
renamed the song Even A Fool
Learns to Love, gave it some odd
lyrics about sad clowns and hoped
to record it himself. Unfortunately,
his work was rejected.
He was disappointed, but not
deterred. taking the stage name
of david Bowie, he concentrated
instead on a new song of his own
called Space Oddity.
Others had also seen the potency
of Comme d’Habitude — most
importantly Paul Anka, who had
been a teen singing star a decade
earlier with his record diana.
He had first heard Comme
d’Habitude while on holiday on
the riviera and was so taken with
it, he flew to Paris to negotiate the
English-language rights.
He got them for a dollar, provided
the original writers kept their
share of the royalties, with a cut
for himself, too. His decision toapproach Frank Sinatra came
after a dinner with the star, who
said he was thinking of retiring
and wanted Anka to write a song
for his final album. (It wasn’t,
of course. Comebacks became
Sinatra’s forte.)
Having won Sinatra’s interest,
the first task for Paul Anka was
to determine the style of the song.
He chose to write it as Sinatra in
the first person. Years later, he
would remember sitting down at
a typewriter in New York at one
o’clock one morning and asking
himself: ‘If Frank was writing
this, what would he say?’
In an interview, Anka admitted:
‘I used words I would never use
myself, like “I ate it up and spit it
out”... that’s the way Sinatra
talked... like the Mob guys.’
It took him just four hours to
write, he reckoned — which, one
suspects, might well have been
because he’d spent a lot of time
thinking about it beforehand.
But, at five in the morning, he
called Sinatra, who was appearing
at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas,and told him he had something
really special for him.
Legend has it that Sinatra was
never that keen on the song, and
later grew actively to dislike it
because he was asked to sing it
so often. But he knew a hit when
he heard one.
Paul Anka, for his part, found
that his own record company was
infuriated that he had given such
a commercial song to Sinatra,
wondering why he hadn’t recorded
it himself.
His reply was: ‘Hey, I can write it,
but I’m not the guy to sing it.’ He
was, he felt, at 27, too young.
He was right. It’s an older man’s
song. He was right, too, when he
said it didn’t suit Elvis Presley.
It is a song to be sung at the end
of a life, not in the middle, although,
as fate would have it, Elvis would
die, aged just 42, not long after he
added it to his repertoire.
Not that Anka’s opinion counted
for much by this time. the song as
rewritten had a life of its own.
the Sinatra version, while only
a minor hit initially in America,
reached the top five in the UK and
would remain in the UK top 40 for
a record 75 weeks.
Elvis had an even bigger hit
when a version recorded in con-
cert in Hawaii just before his death
was, with what some might see as
unseemly haste, rushed out after
his demise from a heart attack.
In the record industry, death isdeath and business is business.
More than a hundred other artists
have recorded My Way since then,
including Celine dion, Michael
Buble and robbie Williams, but it
will always be thought of as Frank
Sinatra’s signature song.
And it no surprise that it became
a classic. Even with Paul Anka’s
slight changes to the melody, it
remains French music hall in style,
a song that starts quietly and then
builds and builds in emotion to a
huge climax sung at the top of
most singers’ range.L
IKE I Will Survive or
You’ll Never Walk Alone,
it is almost anthemic.
the French lyrics
were morbidly interesting in their
despair, but they would never have
made the song a worldwide hit.
they were too singular. Anka’s
decision to write about a man’s
conversation with himself worked
because it was so universal.
From the start, the lyrics grab
our attention with: ‘And now the
end is near, and so I face the
final curtain.’ It could have been
Sinatra singing about doing his
last show before retiring, but,
viewed more widely, it fits all of
us as we begin considering our
own mortality.
And then off the song goes,
almost every line triumphant,rewriting the singer’s life in the
way he wants to be remembered,
always insisting that, no matter
whatever befell him, he was
always the master of his own
actions, and ‘did it my way’.
As Anka would admit, it’s a ‘me’
song. Yes, the singer wants you to
know that he’s ‘had his share of
losing’. But it seems he got over
that all right and now he finds ‘it
all so amusing’.
For me, My Way is the boast of a
man who sees himself as a tough
guy. In the real world, only dicta-
tors get to do everything their way
— it was Serbian War criminal Slo-
bodan Milošević’s favourite — with
the rest of us doing the best we can
as we get battered by events.
But Paul Anka struck gold.
Comme d’Habitude was an honest
song about a man in despair at
the dullness of a life over which he
seemed to have no control. Anka’s
version puts the man in control,
remembering things the way he
wants to remember them, which is
why it tops the charts at funerals,
and is the second most picked
song on desert Island discs.
there are lessons for us all here.
All the world loves a winner, so, if
you’re a songwriter and want a
hit, don’t write about a loser — not
unless you’re French, anyway.
O Ray Connolly’s novella
sorry, Boys, you Failed The
audition is now on sale.F
Or half a century, it’s
never been far from
our ears. It’s on the
radio, it’s a karaoke
favourite, it’s crooned
(in the plural) on football
terraces, and it’s increasingly
heard at funerals for those of
a certain generation.
It is, of course, My Way, the
English-language version of which
was recorded by Frank Sinatra in
1969 in a performance that has since
led to forests of newspaper headlines,
billions of conversational cliches,
untold millions of dollars for those
involved with it, and the titles of many
self-aggrandising autobiographies.
Personally, I’ve never much cared for
it. But, in pop music terms, I can see
that it’s brilliant.
‘regrets, I’ve had a few, but then
again, too few to mention.. .’ Sinatra
sang all those years ago, in what
sounds like a musical last will and
testament for the common man.
Which is, of course, the strength
of My Way, the reason it has hung
around long after Sinatra moved on,
and why it became a posthumous hit
for Elvis Presley, too, when his version
was released as a single shortly after
his death in 1977.
Growing in popularity through the
decades, not even the late Sex Pistol
Sid Vicious could diminish its appeal
— although, to give him his due, he
did his best a year later.
Next month, a 50th anniversary
edition of Sinatra’s classic album,
My Way, which featured the song,
will be released and, no doubt, win a
generation of new fans.
But was My Way inevitably destined
to become one of the most popular
songs of our time? Absolutely not. Not
even when david Bowie got involved.
In its original French version, by
Jacques revaux and Claude Francois,
it was called Comme d’Habitude —
which translates into ‘As Usual’ — and
its theme was far from reminiscences
about overcoming life’s travails.
Instead, it told the story of a day in
the life of a bored man in a boring job
with an arid relationship.
the French could have invented the
word ‘ennui’ especially for this song
and its depiction of marital despair, as
a couple fake affection for each other
while getting undressed ‘as usual’, go
to bed and kiss ‘as usual’ and make
love ‘as usual’.
this paean to conjugal misery
became a huge Gallic hit back inNot in a shy
way: Sinatra
and, above,
Paul AnkaPictures:
GETTY