Who actually wrote the classic hit ‘My Way’?
Frank Sinatra was just about to quit the business when he was handed ‘My Way’, his rendition of which spent 124 weeks on the UK singles chart, the longest out of any other song in history, yet the astounding feat and unforgettable song weren’t quite his to begin with.
The story began on the other side of the Atlantic, as songwriter Jacques Revaux composed a landmark melody in Megève, in the French Alps. He was known to spring up many melodies in one sitting, but had a hard time finishing them, which is where our own David Robert Jones comes in.
“At the time, some French composers, me included, sent their music to their sub-publisher in London, who had a team of authors who wrote and recorded the lyrics onto demos that we then offered to artists in France,” Revaux recalled.
So a young David Bowie jumped at the task of making 200 francs and wrote lyrics for Revaux’s backing track. “At the time he was just starting out, and in the end I never met him,” he said about the mysterious author of ‘For Me’, a rendition that was circulated back in France between prominent singers, none of whom decided to take it.
Claude François’s management had also heard the demo, but had initially decided it was too slow for his reputation. However, it just so happened that the French pop icon had been going through a breakup, which famously led to him writing up a song’s lyrics on a restaurant tablecloth. His despair over the sudden departure of femme fatale France Gall had meant a change of heart, leading him to accept Revaux’s melody, and sharing a writing credit as well as a number one spot on France’s charts for ‘Comme d’habitude’, a now universally recognisable song across the country.
When former Canadian teen idol turned music publisher Paul Anka heard the song, he had an idea to turn it from a heart-sinking ballad to a reflective tale of a man looking back on his life. “Gilbert Marouani, my publisher, is also sub-publisher in France of Spanka Music, Paul Anka’s publishing company. On a meeting in Paris, Anka asked to have an option on the song for six months,” said Revaux, after which, when he finished the lyrics, he had the brilliant presence of mind to pitch the song to Frank Sinatra’s producer Don Costa, for the musician who “at the time didn’t have huge record sales”.
Sinatra had recently told Anka of his plans for giving up on the music business because he was sick of it, Marouani recalled to The Telegraph in 2007, but that didn’t stop him from re-writing the original French song for the Sicilian sensation, while merely shifting the melodic structure but mostly preserving the backing instrumentation in its entirety.
“At one o’clock in the morning, I sat down at an old IBM electric typewriter and said, ‘If Frank were writing this, what would he say?’ And I started, metaphorically, ‘And now the end is near’,” Anka said, and by five in the morning, ‘My Way’ was finished, and Sinatra recorded it in one take on the last day of the year 1968.
Now his most remembered endeavour, Sinatra’s daughter Tina told the BBC in 2000 that her father “always thought that song was self-serving and self-indulgent”, yet it ended up becoming one of the most covered songs in history, with voices like Elvis and Nina Simone attaching their fame to its melancholic pride and mature pondering. The song was widely recognised, as its writer said, “everywhere apart from France”.
