Elvis Costello pays tribute to Frank Sinatra
My mam tells me that one of my first words was “skin”. I was not an especially precocious child, I couldn’t say whole sentences, but I knew how to request that I’ve Got You under My Skin be played on the family record player. Then again, I might have been listening to that song since I was born, as both my parents were (and are) great admirers of Sinatra. When you listen to something so young, it obviously goes in deep.
Although, as I grew up, it was natural to be caught up and distracted by the wonderful music of the moment, Sinatra never seemed square or old-fashioned. As it says on the lapel badge I once found in a junk shop: “It’s Sinatra’s world. We just live in it.” Granted, he wanted little to do with beat music or rock’n’roll, but remember this: Sinatra may have occasionally enjoyed clams but, unlike Elvis Presley, he was never persuaded to sing their praises. When I started earning money, I invested in some old familiar Sinatra albums and found that they spoke very clearly about the adult things I was just beginning to understand.
In the last few days I’ve been thinking about those special recorded moments, the finesse that lies beyond the popular landmarks of New York, New York or My Way. Top of any list would have to be I’ve Got You under My Skin – that famous moment when Sinatra re-enters after the solo with “Don’t you know, little fool?” For me, this is the greatest single moment in recorded music.
I think the best tribute one can pay to Sinatra is to remember some of these special moments. Ask 10 people to pick 10 favourite songs, and they’ll probably all give you different answers. That is also part of the genius – there was so much to choose from. Some fantastic recordings ended up as outtakes because his standards were so high. A while ago I was looking for a really good vocal version of My One and Only Love, and someone told me there was a Sinatra version. It turned out to be an absolutely brilliant reading of the song that had been added to a compilation CD as a bonus. It had been sitting in the vaults for over 40 years because for some reason it didn’t fit into the plans at the time. This version seems to bridge the gap between the Forties and the more world-weary sound of the later years.
It is said that Sinatra went through a short period without success and in vocal crisis in the early Fifties, and recovered in the mid-Fifties. People say his voice was changed by experience, but I also wonder whether he made a conscious decision to sing lower. The lowest part of each melody at times almost became a spoken note. It gave him a great sense of tragedy and intimacy – from that moment people began to feel he was their friend, that he was singing just for them.
Yet most of this depth of feeling, this sense of tragedy, was coded, because the lyrics speak largely in romantic conventions. Some of them would be hackneyed if you read them aloud, but he transformed them into poetry. The lyrics don’t explain the complexity of life, as people now attempt to: the door closes or it fades to black before things get really sticky. In Sinatra’s versions, it is the music that expresses the unspoken details.
The best moments occur during the ballads, in the minute decisions he made. Take the Rodgers and Hart song Dancing on the Ceiling. I imagine it was written as a whimsical, clipped Thirties dance number. He added one crucial word to the lyric – “all” in “all through the night” – and he drags it out to give a sense of longing. It’s very subtle – one word transforms a polite, charming song into something so descriptive and erotic.
Only the Lonely is my favourite album. It contains a revival of an old Bing Crosby number. Early on, Sinatra must have looked up to Crosby and, when he developed his adult style, he went back and re- recorded songs like What’s New? He had respect for the past, but the confidence to give the song a complete new identity.
The albums In the Wee Small Hours, Only the Lonely and No One Cares form a mighty trilogy. Many of the songs show Sinatra’s ability to build up the drama in a restrained way and then provide a wonderful knock-out blow in the last eight or 16 bars.
A prime example is Goodbye, the Gordon Jenkins song – it starts so melancholy and restrained, and when he finally releases that tension it comes as a shock. But it’s never overwrought because he has it under control.
Many fans will prefer the swinging records, the brashness of the Sixties, the prouder man singing Come Fly with Me. It’s not my favourite period, but you can’t help falling for the charm and vitality, as he throws those words around. He’s chasing shadows away, chasing the bad stuff of life away.
On the last occasion I saw him perform, at the Albert Hall in 1983, he was being slated for the quality of his voice. But then again, you could go back to 1957’s Live in Seattle recording and hear how he learned to turn his then rare vocal frailty into an asset in When Your Lover Has Gone. With even less voice at the Albert Hall, he sang songs like Here’s that Rainy Day and Don’t You Worry about Me back-to-back – stoic, I’ll-carry-on songs. He talked his way through three or four of them; then, just as we were about to give up on him, he unleashed a knockout The Lady is a Tramp with all the energy he’d reserved.
A couple of years earlier I was fortunate enough to hear Sinatra in wonderful voice at the Festival Hall. In the middle of the concert he typically acknowledged the composers of a song. I found myself holding my breath as he mentioned Ira Gershwin followed by Van Duke. I then knew he was going to make a rare performance of I Can’t Get Started. You always hope your favourite singers will sing your favourite songs, but you resign yourself to hearing the most popular. This was unbelievable luck.
When I bought the souvenir programme, there was a huge list of every song he’d ever sung in England, and I found he’d never performed it in England before.
That’s when you go peculiar and begin to feel a weird sense of connection. Sinatra had that ability to make it feel as if a song was for you, even though you knew that two-thirds of the audience felt the same.
How to cook a python
Charlene Smith Moveable feast
An army, Napoleon told us, marches on its stomach. In practice it may also sit on its food, or even do battle with it. Which is how many an Umkhonto we Sizwe soldier came to have python for dinner during training in Angola.
There are two types of python in Angola. One is the relatively small Angolan dwarf python, endemic to Angola and Namibia and is about a 1,5m in length. It is also endangered and therefore it would be very un-PC to eat one.
The African rock python, however, which is also found in the Lowveld and northern Namibia is not endangered, but it takes a strong person to consider eating one. Or in the case of the MK soldiers in this story, a 12-person patrol fought one with the unfair advantage of AK-47s, after which all 12 heaved it on to their shoulders to carry back to the camp for supper.
But then again African rock pythons have many unfair advantages over puny humans.
The African rock python, according to Damien Egan of the Transvaal Snake Park, is about six to seven metres long and is the third-largest snake in the world.
It weighs in at between 100kg to 150kg and can sink its 100 teeth – which are all set backward so they will tear your flesh like 100 large hooks – into a wall.
Its jaw can open an astonishing 120. (Spread your middle finger and thumb and you’ll get an idea). It means that even if you’re plastered against a wall in fright it could eat you. But there are good reasons why it probably wouldn’t.
Rock pythons mostly feed on warm-blooded prey. Thermal receptors on their lips help them pick up heat generated by warm-blooded animals, which helps them hunt at night. Their preferred prey is cane rats, but they will eat domestic dogs and cats, and even small humans. The problem with humans, though, is that we don’t smell good.
In fact, the way to avoid becoming python fodder when you go into the bush is to use scented soap in the bath, splash on some eau de anti-python, spray on deodorant and you’ll have them slithering away posthaste for a breath of fresh undeodorised cane rat.
Because MK soldiers lacked supplies of toiletries from Woolies and good ablution facilities in their camps, they tended to get closer than usual to African rock pythons. Richard Valliahu, a telecommunications expert who belonged to MK, recalls a patrol through Angola where they wearily sat down on a log that angrily shook them off.
It was an African rock python resting after a meal of duiker. “We shot it and it took 12 of us to carry it back to camp.” Because they did not have a great range of cuisine choices, the duiker was cut out of the snake’s stomach and roasted, and Valliahu cut up the python and threw it into large pots of boiling water tempered with chillies, bought from a peasant in the vicinity, and an aromatic bush herb similar to bay leaves.
“It took about six hours to boil before it was tender enough to eat. It tastes a bit like a doughy chicken.”
Egan says he knows of restaurants that have snake on the menu, “but one wonders where they get them. Maybe they’re roadkill.”