Ode to the Chairman

By Tony Parsons

For most men, Ol' Blue Eyes' tunes are the first we know. Then decades turn and so do his records, stories spun from greatness and grief, lessons on life and loss. And even now, a century since Sinatra's birth, we've all still got him under our skin

The soundtrack of your youth and young manhood will slip away with passing time, like some half-remembered ex-girlfriend. You wake up one day and wonder what you ever saw in Oasis or Tupac Shakur, Springsteen or Frankie Knuckles, Britpop or hip-hop, acid house or punk. The music you loved will in the end make you cringe. But Sinatra will still be there. Sinatra will always remain.

Because, after Elvis, popular music concerned itself almost totally with the agony and ecstasy of being young: and this is true if you took your drugs in Ibiza or Soho; and it is true if you frolicked in a festival yurt or derelict warehouse; and it is true whether you were a kid in the Sixties or the Nineties. Young music gets old. Young music gets very old. But Frank Sinatra is timeless.

This year is Frank Sinatra's centenary and, as we approach the 100th anniversary of his birth on 12 December, we will hear a lot about his life - Ava Gardner and the Rat Pack, Lauren Bacall and nightclub brawls, Marilyn Monroe and his connections to presidents and wise guys. None of it will come even close to explaining why we still listen to Sinatra. Nor why we still care.

Sinatra does more than predate rock'n'roll - he comes from a different culture. Born just 20 years before Elvis, Sinatra was untouched by the culture that dominated the second half of the 20th century. "I don't usually hang with men who wear earrings," he told U2's Bono. Frank Sinatra and men in earrings - you can see why they wouldn't mix. Sinatra is the head boy of the old school.

It is Bono who has come closest to defining the appeal of Sinatra to the generations who did not buy his music the first time round but who might possibly have been conceived to it.

Bono and Sinatra recorded a version of "I've Got You Under My Skin" on Frank's 1993 Duets album - a huge commercial success that teamed Sinatra with a string of contemporary vocalists. A year later, when Bono presented Sinatra with a lifetime achievement award at the Grammys, he tried to explain why even men in earrings and leather trousers love Sinatra.

"Rock'n'roll people love Frank Sinatra because Frank has got what we want," said Bono. "Swagger and attitude. He's big on attitude. Serious attitude, bad attitude. The big bang of pop. The champ who would rather show you his scars than his medals."

It was a wise, loving speech, but it also showed how impossible it is to separate the singer and the song. The cover of that Duets album depicts Sinatra in his prime - a painting of a young man in a snap-brim fedora and sharp suit swinging at the mic, the Sinatra of his great artistic flowering of the Fifties. But by the early Nineties the reality was different. Sinatra was in his late seventies by the time Bono was hanging in his house in Palm Springs, Bono gazing out at the endless desert and Sinatra looking askance at Bono's earring, their talk of Miles Davis' music and Sinatra's painting. I saw Sinatra on stage around this time and he was singing from an autocue. It was a shocking moment. Because words mattered to Sinatra. Before every song I ever saw him sing live, Sinatra namechecked the writers - Sammy Cahn, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer and the rest. And now he needed an autocue to remember the lyrics.

Or maybe he didn't, I thought, refusing to accept the ravages of time on this man I loved. Perhaps he still remembered every word of "One For My Baby (And One For The Road)" and "Come Fly With Me" and "Night And Day" and "The Way You Look Tonight" and "The Lady Is A Tramp", perhaps the words were still carved into his soul and the autocue was just there as a form of insurance. The truth is I don't know how badly Sinatra needed that autocue. I did not know then and I don't know now. But he was still great. Even that late in the 20th century, he was still Frank Sinatra and nobody else came close. He sang of love in all its forms. Winning and losing, joy and sorrow, anticipation and fulfilment, and the way she looked that night. And here was what separated Sinatra from Elvis and Eminem, Bill Haley and Biggie Smalls, from the music at Max Yasgur's farm at Woodstock and the Café del Mar in Ibiza.

Popular music marks what it means to be young. Sinatra sang about what it means to be alive.

Sinatra knew. To him, the secrets of your soul were an open book. He knew because he had been there himself. He sang songs from experience. Writing of Sinatra in the New York Times, more than ten years after his death, Bono said, "Singers, more than other musicians, depend on what they know - as opposed to what they don't want to know about the world. While there is a danger in this - the loss of naivety, for instance - interpretive skills generally gain in the course of a life well abused."

Bono wrote about hearing "My Way" sung in a Dublin bar. Hard-core Sinatra fans - those of us who grew up listening to our parents play him, and who saw him live, and who still play his music far more than whatever it was we were listening to as young men - invariably sneer at "My Way", the cornball national anthem of half-cut karaoke singers, grandiose and self-pitying and overblown. But its lyrics contain some great central truths about Sinatra. Although the drunken banter with Sammy and Dino on stage at the Sands in Las Vegas give the illusion that the life of Francis Albert Sinatra was one long party - the greatest party, the last party - the man had once sunk as low as you can possibly go without being dead and buried.

Like all the great stories - from Steve Jobs to Narnia's Aslan the lion, from Lazarus to Muhammad Ali to Jesus Christ - the legend of Sinatra is built on a man who came back from the dead.

At the start of the Fifties, the decade that comprised Sinatra's golden years, it was clear that he had already peaked. Sinatra had single-handedly invented the screaming teen audience in the Forties, but now the bobbysoxers were young mothers, married to Second World War veterans, and they had forgotten him. Sinatra's voice was shot, his vocal cords haemorrhaging. In 1952 he lost both his TV show and his recording contract. Sinatra was almost universally considered to be finished. But in 1953 he landed the role of Private Maggio in From Here To Eternity and won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor the year later. Also in 1953, he signed a record deal with Capitol and began the glorious string of albums that are the essence of his genius. His career was not over. It had only just begun.

But he brought it all with him - the memory of being forgotten by his fanbase, the knowledge of what it was like to have his body betray him, and the scars inflicted by Ava Gardner, the love of his life, scars he would carry to the grave.

Sinatra's losses are the subtext to every song he ever sang. As Bono noted, there is a glorious swagger to Sinatra, but there is also vulnerability and real, raw emotions behind that smooth, intimate voice. Sinatra came back from the dead with the knowledge that, in the end, it all slips away. Your health, your career, your money, your family - he had left his wife and three children for Ava Gardner's faithless arms - and your love. Sinatra came back from the abyss and - as with Steve Jobs returning to Apple, Muhammad Ali returning from the years of exile, Christ rolling back the stone - it transformed him into what he was always meant to be.

Most of modern music exists in Sinatra's shadow. The first screaming teenagers were Frank Sinatra's bobbysoxers in the Forties. The first concept albums were his great Capitol recordings of 1954 to 1962 - In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning and Come Fly With Me and Songs For Swinging Lovers - sustaining a mood over two sides of vinyl. And while the world was dropping acid and growing its hair, Sinatra was inventing world music - his 1967 album with Antônio Carlos Jobim is possibly his last work of pure genius, Latin jazz for the American heartland. It was the master of American song singing bossa nova classics like "The Girl From Ipanema" and "Quiet Night Of Quiet Stars" in a voice that is as soft as a prayer, steeped in the gentle rhythms of Brazil. He would have huge hits for most of his life - the great showboating singles like "My Way" (1969), "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" (1974) and "New York, New York"(1980) - but that record with Jobim belies the notion that it was all downhill after he left Capitol to start his own record label, Reprise. Sinatra was an artist, but an artist who always knew when he needed another hit.

Sinatra was savagely dismissive of rock'n'roll. "[Elvis Presley's] kind of music is deplorable, a rancid smelling aphrodisiac. It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people." But Sinatra was not above having Elvis as a guest on his TV show, or of covering the songs of whatever long-haired hitmaker was currently knocking around. Sinatra was a survivor - a true child of the Depression. He saw them come and he saw them go. Even Elvis.

My all-time favourite Sinatra song is "No One Ever Tells You", tucked away on one of the lesser-known Capitol recordings, A Swingin' Affair! "No one ever tells you how it feels to waken and have breakfast with the blues," Frank croons, the bruised romantic at the height of his powers. "No one ever tells you that it's just another fling."

But Sinatra told me. He schooled me about women in the way that nobody ever would. He consoled me, he encouraged me, taught me that a man must be true to his code. He was too hard on the music we grew up with, but he was from an older world and we must forgive him for that. Sinatra was the first music I ever heard and, I suspect, it will be what I am playing at the end. And that's what counts - not the one you love first, but the one you love last.

"The talent is in the choices," said a wise man. In a career that spanned a large chunk of the 20th century, Sinatra did not always make wise choices. The Rat Pack banter can seem like drunks who are not as funny as they think they are, and Sinatra's covers of Beatles and Paul Simon songs are best avoided.

But what is remarkable is that so much of his work still speaks to us today. Sinatra danced with Gene Kelly. He acted with Marlon Brando. And he sang like nobody before or since. There is sentiment, much emotion, but it is never forced, never fake. Beyond the technical perfection of that voice in its shining prime, there was always an authenticity to Sinatra.

Although he was performing until 1994, the last few years of his life were plagued by ill-health. Heart problems. Breathing problems. Hypertension. Bladder cancer. Pneumonia. His last words were, "I'm losing." In the end, it all slips away.

But I remember watching him live on the night that England played West Germany in the semifinal of the World Cup in Italia 90. I had to choose between watching the football or watching Sinatra and I chose Sinatra. Regrets? I've had a few.

But missing Paul Gascoigne cry to watch Sinatra sing wasn't one of them.