The one in a million making of Frank Sinatra’s classic ‘My Way’
We might scoff at Eurovision now, but in the swinging 1960s, it was a chance to showcase the smorgasbord of hip music across Europe to the world. In many ways, it represented the very dawn of eclecticism.
In an era where the Vietnam War was waging, Presidents were being assassinated, and race riots were rampant, an international broadcast embodying the best of progressive technology alongside the art of the counterculture movement was a liberating enterprise. This is why it attracted names like Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, and even Serge Gainsbourg and France Gall.
The latter duo collaborated on France’s 1965 effort, ‘Poupée de Cire, Poupée de Son’. The track was a triumph. Gall was only 17 years old, but her performance of the Gainsbourg-written pop track enamoured the judges and public alike with its ever-so-slightly off-kilter baroque vibrancy. She astounded. And she was soon robbed of her flowers.
In a misogynistic tale as old as time, the adulation that she received as a result greatly peeved her boyfriend, Claude Antoine Marie François. You could’ve guessed he was a prick with a name like that. Alas, this scorned prick was about to write his jealousy into the history books.
François struggled to see his young sweetheart succeed, so he broke it off with her and sat down behind a piano to plot his revenge. In a world where karma is real, this would not have gone well for him. However, fuelled by bitterness, he simply smashed it out of the park and came up with ‘Comme d’Habitude’. This is one of the most successful tracks in French history.
So, for a while, it seemed François had duly usurped his old sweetheart. But thankfully, Gall’s stunning Eurovision performance was soon followed by further pop hits as she established herself as every Francophile’s favourite star in the swinging sixties. She did not become the one-hit wonder he had hoped for and still remains an icon of avant-garde pop to this day.
What does any of this have to do with Frank Sinatra?
Well, Frank Sinatra heard this new ‘Comme d’Habitude’ hit in France and quickly set out to create an English version. So, he hired a young songwriter, who played about with the tune and laid down some lyrics, but their efforts were rejected. Still, despite the rejection, Sinatra and his team saw enough potential in the plodding demos to seek further guidance.
So, in stepped a greased-up Paul Anka. He picked up the rough cuts and set about honing them, capturing the sentimentality that Sinatra had in mind. He, of course, also succeeded, and the resultant ‘My Way’ became, well, whatever it is you want to call ‘My Way’… a cultural oddity, I suppose.
Meanwhile, the songwriter whom Sinatra had fired was lost, penniless, and looking for inspiration when they heard the song that they had been working on blast out of the radio. “I was really pissed off,” the young David Bowie would recall, “That should’ve been my song”. Indeed, it had been The Starman before he was The Starman working on the French hit for Sinatra, to some extent, laying the groundwork for the hit the world now drunkenly weeps to.
With his tail between his legs, having been trumped by Anka, the Starman in waiting declared: “OK, I’ll write my own version,” leaning into the same avant-garde flourish that saw the rather more straight Frank rejected it, “so it was ‘My Way on Mars’.” Or as we know it, ‘Life on Mars‘.
While harmonically, the two songs share strong chordal similarities, it’s no easy feat transforming ‘My Way’ into something stratospheric. So, a sour Bowie struggled over it for some time, all the while being bombarded by the old crooner’s new hit on the radio. Seemingly, however, the universe would send some divine inspiration in the direction of the man who fell to Earth one velvet morning in London.
In 2008, Bowie explained to the Mail on Sunday how he took the chords of ‘My Way’ and made them extra-terrestrial: “This song was so easy,” he began. “Being young was easy. A really beautiful day in the park, sitting on the steps of the bandstand. ‘Sailors bap-bap-bap-bap-baaa-bap.’ An anomic (not a ‘gnomic’) heroine,” he said.
Adding, “Middle-class ecstasy. I took a walk to Beckenham High Street to catch a bus to Lewisham to buy shoes and shirts but couldn’t get the riff out of my head.”
With his grand retort to rejection falling into place, as though some interventionist other was giving the world two songs for the price of one on the French exchange rate, Bowie hastily headed home. As he continued to explain: “I jumped off two stops into the ride and more or less loped back to the house up on Southend Road.”
Feverishly inspired, he continued, “Workspace was a big empty room with a chaise lounge, a bargain-price art nouveau screen (‘William Morris,’ so I told anyone who asked); a huge overflowing freestanding ashtray and a grand piano. Little else. I started working it out on the piano and had the whole lyric and melody finished by late afternoon. Nice.”
So, to sum it all up, a humble three minute France Gall and Serge Gainsbourg collaboration inadvertently spawned the following: a hit that transcended Eurovision, two scorned songwriters scribbling masterpieces in a showcase of the power of envy, and a Sinatra hit so big there’s even an urban myth that ‘My Way’ is banned in the Philippines because it prompted a series of fatal disputes. And the world has been reeling from these interwoven cultural fixtures ever since they fortuitously befell us. Now that really is… one in a million!
