As an ebullient Frank Sinatra told listeners to the BBC Light Programme on October 21st 1962:
When I knew I was going to visit Britain, I thought it would be a wonderful opportunity to record a whole album of British songs. When someone came up with the title Great Songs From Great Britain, well, that clinched it.
Great Songs From Great Britain should have been great. The songs were, mostly, pretty great, and the arranger was the greatest, not just in the United Kingdom but in the entire Commonwealth - Canada's Robert Farnon. The cover would have been even greater: a portrait of Sinatra in a British setting by renowned oil painter Winston Churchill. When Sir Winston declined Frank's invitation, they made do with a picture of Big Ben and Parliament, which was still pretty good.
There was just one problem: the singer.
When he showed up at CTS Studios in Bayswater on June 12th 1962, Sinatra was coming off of an exhausting world tour - self-financed, to raise money for children's charities, and with just him and a sextet. Bob Farnon raised his baton for "If I Had You", Frank opened his mouth and, as soon as he did so, every musician in the room understood the issue. "He was finding it difficult to sing," said Farnon. "His voice was tired, and it was breaking a lot. He was very angry with himself."
What to do? Back in Los Angeles or New York, he might have paid off the band and suggested they all re-assemble in a week's time. But in a week's time he wouldn't be in London, and this was a huge orchestra, with some very great players. Forty-two musicians had turned down other gigs for their shot at making a Sinatra album, and even more of Frank's friends, and friends of friends, had shown up to fill the control room and watch the session. He didn't want to let them down. This wasn't just a recording session, it was an event: He'd arrived in a chocolate-brown Rolls-Royce loaned for the occasion by Douglas Fairbanks Jr. So on he went. Midway through "Roses Of Picardy", he stopped the band, looked ceilingwards and beseeched the Lord above to "come down here and help me!" But God, like Churchill, declined the invitation. Frank ploughed on with the voice he had, that night and for the two that followed.
At that time, Sinatra's Reprise label used as their UK distributor Pye Records, headed by Louis Benjamin. I knew Louis fairly well in later years when he ran Stoll Moss Theatres in London, and one afternoon we discussed his Pye days. He always trusted his instincts (which generally served him spectacularly well) and, when Mo Ostin had called from Reprise in California to tell him to find a producer and engineers for a British album, he thought the whole thing was "bonkers" - a singer who was off on a world tour, an arranger he'd never worked with before, likewise the producer and engineers; and, once word of the project leaked, every songwriter with a British passport pestering Benjamin and his designated producer Alan Freeman to make sure this or that song made the cut. If memory serves, Louis cited Hughie Charles, Eric Maschwitz and Noël Coward as being especially insistent. In their cases, it worked, as, respectively, "We'll Meet Again", "A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square" and "I'll Follow My Secret Heart" all made the final running order from a shortlist of over 70 songs.
The project, like most others in those days, had been Frank's idea. The world tour would end in London, so why not make an album in a town with some of the best musicians in the world? He set only two conditions: All the songs had to be British, and the arrangements had to be by Robert Farnon. Sinatra had long admired Farnon, as does almost every serious orchestrator. André Previn used to call him "the world's greatest writer for strings". When a young John Williams, with Star Wars, Jaws and Close Encounters all a long way in the future, asked for advice on string writing, Previn sent him away with a Robert Farnon album. A few hours later Williams called him up and demanded to know how exactly Farnon had produced a particular sound halfway through Side One. "I've wondered that for years," said Previn. "If you figure it out, let me know."
Born in Toronto, Robert Farnon was one of three boys who all went into the music business: his older brother played with Spike Jones, and his younger scored the "Mister Magoo" cartoons. Bob more or less taught himself how to orchestrate. During the war he crossed the Atlantic to head the Canadian Band of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, as Glenn Miller and George Melachrino headed the American and British bands. Miller died over the English Channel, Melachrino opted to stay down the Mantovani end of things, but Farnon built a reputation that traveled far and wide. Sinatra had wanted to work with him for years, and the tour was his opportunity. "As long as we're over there," Frank told his pianist Bill Miller, "let's do an album with Farnon."
Maybe if they'd been in the same town once in a while, it would have worked better. Farnon would have been aware of the vocal strain and figured out ways to obscure it and take the songs at less grueling tempi. But Frank was on stage somewhere in Europe, and, aside from setting the keys with Bill Miller, gave Farnon carte blanche. So he wrote gorgeous, harmonically rich string arrangements at crawl tempo that expose the thinness of Frank's tour-ravaged voice and give him nowhere to hide. After hearing the results, Sinatra ordered Great Sings Of Great Britain be released only in the UK - and "Roses Of Picardy" be locked up in the vault for the next three decades. When Monique Fauteux and I came to make our epic bilingual multiverse version of "Picardy" a couple of years ago, we listened carefully to the belatedly released Farnon arrangement, because we're both great admirers of his. You so want this record to be great, and Frank wants it to be great, and you can hear him trying so hard - and then, just when you want to hear that classic Sinatra legato tone extending into the ether on "There's one rose that grows not in Picardeeeeeeeeeeee!", his voice gives out and he just can't do it. That final truncated, abrupt "Picardy!", with Farnon and the orchestra playing on and wondering where the boy vocalist's gone, is an admission of defeat.
And yet there are many good things throughout the album - granted that "Now Is The Hour" (the "Maori Farewell Song") is several thousand miles from meeting the basic eligibility criterion for Great Songs From Great Britain. It would have been great for a Sinatra album called Great Songs From The British Empire, which would have been a lot more fun, what with "Moonlight By The Ganges", "On The Road To Mandalay" and Frank's first piece of exotica with the Harry James band, "On A Little Street In Singapore". But, that aside, I would put the songs on Great Songs From Great Britain into two categories: great songs Sinatra knew well, and not so great songs he didn't quite connect with. In the former category fall "The Very Thought Of You", "London By Night", "If I Had You" (with its nifty trumpet obligato by Ray Premru) and "Garden in the Rain", which by the time it reaches its lovely guitar coda has vindicated Frank's lyrical assertion that it's "a touch of color 'neath skies of grey". But much of the rest of the material you don't feel he's spent enough time with to find a way into the song that gives it meaning for him - "The Gypsy", "I'll Follow My Secret Heart" ...oh, and "We'll Meet Again", whose stiff-upper-lipped sexless stoicism Sinatra can't get his head around at all.
As the years go by, the track I return to again and again is perhaps the simplest - musically, lyrically, orchestrationally:
We'll Gather Lilacs in the spring again
And walk together down an English lane
Until our hearts have learned to sing again
When you come home once more...
Sinatra doesn't strike me as the lilac-gathering type - although, come to think of it, I'm not sure many people really "gather" lilacs, do they? Isn't that something you do with blackberries? But for a moment disbelief is suspended, and the song works its tender magic. Introducing "Lilacs" on the BBC, Frank said:
In arranging any album of British compositions, the name that keeps cropping up is Ivor Novello, whom I met some years ago before his untimely death. I didn't see any of his shows, but I understand they were really delightful shows. This song comes from Perchance To Dream, a show first staged in 1945 which starred Ivor Novello himself.
It seems weird to think of Sinatra meeting Ivor Novello: what would they have to say to each other? But apparently they did, a few months before the opening of Novello's last show, Gay's The Word (which it wasn't back then). In September 1950, Sinatra recorded one of the songs from the forthcoming West End score, "If Only She'd Looked My Way", together with the first of three eventual versions of a number he absolutely loved, "London By Night". It was released in Britain as a fund-raising single for the National Playing Fields Association complete with an introduction by the charity's president, HRH The Duke of Edinburgh. Any serious Sinatra fan can name the record he made with Duke Ellington or Pearl Bailey, but rather fewer, I'd imagine, can name the one he made with Prince Philip. But, at a tough time for Frank back in America, Britain in general stayed loyal - including the younger members of the Royal Family. Two months earlier, during a successful UK tour, Lady Baillie threw a party for Frank and Princess Margaret sat on a cushion at his feet as he sang her "If I Loved You" and "My Foolish Heart".
A few weeks after that Frank'n'Philip single was issued, Ivor Novello was dead, at the age of 58. Sinatra's right: his death was certainly "untimely". He collapsed with a coronary thrombosis on March 6th 1951, a month after the opening of Gay's The Word and, even more dramatically, only a few hours after giving a splendid performance on stage at the Palace Theatre in his long-running musical hit King's Rhapsody.
King's Rhapsody is, in a certain sense, complete drivel: Novello played Prince Nikki of Murania, who is prevailed upon by his mother Queen Elana to leave his Paris mistress and return home to whatever the capital of Murania's called (I'm going from memory here) and marry Princess Cristiane, whom he's never met. She shows up in simple peasant dress, so he thinks she's a humble serving girl and thus far more his type than some stuck-up princess. Etc. And yet the finale - a post-coronation scene, in which Prince Nikki is seen alone at the high altar holding the white rose of his lost love - had audiences in tears, eight shows a week, all the way to the last night of Ivor Novello's life.
Novello was an actor, playwright, composer, lyricist, producer, screenwriter, and the most successful writer of British musicals until Andrew Lloyd Webber. But even at the time he was old-fashioned. He liked Ruritanian plots, and operetta titles that sound like a third-rate marketing man's idea of a name for a sophisticated perfume - Glamorous Night, Careless Rapture... He was the star of Alfred Hitchcock's first hit film The Lodger, except that back in 1927 no one would have called it "a Hitchcock film", merely the latest Ivor Novello film. he had been a matinée idol since 1919 when he was hailed as "the new Valentino". He wrote his first hit play, The Rat, in 1924 and then adapted it for the screen. He starred in his own musicals even though he couldn't really sing, and so mostly semi-talked the lyric portentously and then sat back and let the soprano or contralto blow the roof off the joint. Everyone loved it. Everyone loved everything he'd done, ever since, as a Welsh lad of just 21, he'd written the big hit of the Great War, "Keep The Home Fires Burning". That was as the troops marched off in 1914. A year or so later, he met the great love of his life, a young actor called Robert ("Bobbie") Andrews, who kept Novello's home fires burning for 35 years until that coronary thrombosis intervened. They lived in an exquisite flat above the Strand Theatre where Garbo and Dietrich vied for space on the sofa with fetching young men. "Why, Ivor," said Dame Margaret Rutherford, disembarking from the poky lift, "you've made a fairyland up here!"
There were rare setbacks: In the early Thirties he was signed by RKO and set off for Hollywood, where they decided that on camera he looked a bit too sexually ambiguous for American tastes, so they gave him a Tarzan script to rewrite and he came up with "Me Tarzan, you Jane" and then sailed back to Blighty.
Other than that, he made just one mistake. During the Second World War, the government introduced petrol rationing and other strictures on non-essential motoring. Novello had been permitted the use of a car "for work of national importance". He was then discovered by the constabulary to be using it to tootle up and down between his West End flat and his country place near Maidenhead. Novello reacted to his arrest by attempting to bribe the officer, which only made things worse. Sentenced by Bow Street Magistrates Court to eight weeks in gaol, he found himself in a cell next to Mad Frankie Fraser, then a young man but already embarked on the violent criminality that would make him something of a celebrity in Britain until his death last year.
"The best thing or things that ever happened to me re prison was being released, for a start," Mad Frankie told The Independent, "and meeting Ivor Novello, the great songwriter. He was once in the cell next to me at Wormwood Scrubs. Great guy. Good to talk to. He should never have been there."
Mad Frankie, showing an unusually sensitive side for a career thug, bemoaned "the degradation heaped upon this finely tuned artistic Welshman":
I would tell him he had to stand-up to the bullying'screws, but he could not do it. At first I could not understand his inability to invoke this necessary self-preservation defence mechanism until it rudely dawned on me that no matter how much I might try I could not write wonderful music and poetic lyrics.
I have great respect for talented people, and I made it known to the other prisoners there were to be no liberties taken with Mr Ivor Novello.
And that would be Mad Frankie Fraser's only connection with popular music until George Cornell, a member of his gang, got shot in the Blind Beggar for calling Ronnie Kray "a fat poofter" and one of the bullets hit the jukebox and the needle got stuck on "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore".
Prison cost Ivor Novello a knighthood, but may, by way of compensation, have inspired one of his truest and loveliest ballads. When it came to his West End shows, he generally left the lyrics to Christopher Hassall. But this time he decided to write them himself. The melody is flowing and unforced, and the words are loving and unabashed:
We'll Gather Lilacs in the spring again
And walk together down an English lane
Until our hearts have learned to sing again
When you come home once more...
"The alluring 'We'll Gather Lilacs'," enthused Mad Frankie Fraser. "When you listen to this work of art you begin to truly understand the meaning in an aesthetic sense of the word beautiful."
Indeed. It wound up in the show Perchance To Dream where Olive Gilbert sang it in the midst of a tale of parallel love stories in the same house across the centuries. To quote from the synopsis:
In 1945, Valentine's grandson Bay wins the hand of Melody, the girl who represents the love that he had lost in earlier generations. The romance finally lays the ghosts to rest.
Be that as it may, it was the ghosts of the world outside the theatre that enlarged the song and made it a hit. Perchance To Dream opened in early 1945, after more than five years of war and absence. Novello had found a way of expressing a universal longing - for all the simple pleasures that mean nothing without the one you love:
And in the evening by the firelight's glow
You'll hold me close and never let me go
Your eyes will tell me all I want to know
When you come home once more.
It is an idealized, bucolic England - no dark Satanic mills of Blake, just a stroll down a lilac-perfumed lane before an evening in the glow of firelight and love. For the last war, a young Novello had hymned domestic contentment by the burning home fires. For this one, he kept the burning, and added real yearning.
That's all - eight lines, 32 bars, although somehow it feels less - plus a verse that doesn't really add much and that Sinatra's version wisely dispenses with and replaces with Farnon's own oddly evocative musical figure to set up Frank's reverie. The first half of the lyric relies mainly on the pairing of "again" with "lane", which no longer rhymes in America. It did once:
I'm Singin' In The Rain
Just Singin' In The Rain
What a glorious feeling
I'm happy again...
But it's a long time since Americans sang "agayne" rather than "agenn". And so Frank contemplates gathering lilacs agenn and walking down the lane and his heart singing agenn. But, unlike some of the other songs on Great Songs From Great Britain, the intimacy of the tune suits the limitations of his voice and the intimacy of the lyric strikes a chord in Sinatra the interpreter. Farnon provides a pastoral cloud on which Frank floats effortlessly: it has the ease that much of the rest of the set lacks. The second half of the chorus in particular is quite lovely:
And in the evening by the firelight's glow
You'll hold me close and never let me go
Your eyes will tell me all I want to know...
And Sinatra's tone on that big soaring "want" is what's missing on "Picardy" and other tracks. A few years back, Novello's fellow Welshman - well, Welshwoman - Cerys Matthews from the band Catatonia did a sort of semi-punk version of "We'll Gather Lilacs", among whose acts of violence is a careless rendering of the penultimate line:
Your eyes will tell me all I need to know...
"Need" simply isn't any good there. You need that big open-voweled "want" that Sinatra lets rip with. Of course, on the out-chorus Farnon wrote his chart with a big broad surge to the finish line, and Frank can't quite deliver. But nevertheless this is a beautiful, sincere rendering of a lovely ballad.
It was the final song of the final session for the album. "That's it," said Sinatra. "Thanks, everyone." And, as he shook Bob Farnon's hand, the musicians stood up and applauded. He stuck his head in the control room on the way out: "Next time we'll make a swingin' album."
Ivor Novello had been dead for 11 years by the time his sometime acquaintance Frank Sinatra recorded his most beautiful song. In March 1951 he was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium, the first such in London, within whose walls are the ashes of so many British musical figures - Lionel Bart (Oliver!), Bud Flanagan (of Flanagan & Allen), Marc Bolan (of T Rex), Eric Coates (the Dam Busters March), Kathleen Ferrier (the operatic contralto), Keith Moon (of The Who), Kit Lambert (manager of The Who), Vesta Victoria (the great music hall star), Matt Monro (the British Sinatra)... But Golders Green has rarely seen a funeral like that of Ivor Novello, dead at 58. Seven thousand mourners showed up, less than a hundred of them men, the rest adoring women who subscribed to the latter half of Noël Coward's line that "there are only two perfect things in this world - my mind and Ivor's profile".
They sang "We'll Gather Lilacs" at the service, and tears welled, as they had at that last performance of King's Rhapsody a few days earlier. His ashes were laid under a lilac bush, with a small plaque bearing the words:
Till you are home once more.
Excepting ugly witless Catatonic revivals of his best song, Novello is all but forgotten today, aside from lending his name to "the Ivors", the annual British songwriting awards ceremony named after him and whose winners include another half-dozen British Sinatra songs - Leslie Bricusse's "My Kind Of Girl" (from Sinatra-Basie), Tony Hatch's "Downtown" (from Strangers In The Night), John Lennon & Paul McCartney's "Yesterday" (from My Way), Geoff Stephens' "Winchester Cathedral" (from That's Life), John Barry & Don Black's "Born Free" (from The World We Knew), George Harrison's "Something" (from Trilogy) - all of whose recording sessions Frank found easier than those for Great Songs From Great Britain, the only album he ever recorded outside the United States.
Still, I like this record and I love this song. I think of it quite a bit these days, if I chance to find myself walking down "an English lane". It suggests, as the original musical did, that certain things are eternal, like love and Englishness. But I'm not so sure about that, and the song appeals to me now as an elegy for a lost England. And we cling together in the firelight's glow because we'll never find it again.
~For an alternative Sinatra Hot 100, the Pundette is also counting down her Frank hit parade, and is up to Number 23, Sinatra and Johnny Mandel's magnificent version - complete with two-bar intermission - of "Let's Fall In Love". Meanwhile, Bob Belvedere over at The Camp Of The Saints is bringing us his Top Ten Sinatra albums and at Number Nine he puts Nice 'n' Easy sans title track. The Evil Blogger Lady offers some songs for sodden lovers.
~You can read the stories behind more Sinatra songs in Mark Steyn's American Songbook, and Steyn's original 1998 obituary of Frank, "The Voice", can be found in the anthology Mark Steyn From Head To Toe. Personally autographed copies of both books are exclusively available from the SteynOnline bookstore.
SINATRA CENTURY
at SteynOnline
6) THE ONE I LOVE (BELONGS TO SOMEBODY ELSE)
8) STARDUST
10) WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED LOVE?
11) CHICAGO
12) THE CONTINENTAL
13) ALL OF ME
15) NIGHT AND DAY
16) I WON'T DANCE
17) I'VE GOT YOU UNDER MY SKIN
19) EAST OF THE SUN (AND WEST OF THE MOON)
21) A FOGGY DAY (IN LONDON TOWN)
24) OUR LOVE
27) FOOLS RUSH IN
32) I'LL BE AROUND
36) GUESS I'LL HANG MY TEARS OUT TO DRY
37) NANCY (WITH THE LAUGHING FACE)
38) SOMETHIN' STUPID
40) I GET ALONG WITHOUT YOU VERY WELL (EXCEPT SOMETIMES)
41) SOLILOQUY
42) THE COFFEE SONG
44) HOW ABOUT YOU?
46) LUCK BE A LADY
48) (AH, THE APPLE TREES) WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG
49) I HAVE DREAMED
51) I'VE GOT THE WORLD ON A STRING
52) YOUNG AT HEART
54) BAUBLES, BANGLES AND BEADS
55) IN THE WEE SMALL HOURS OF THE MORNING
57) THE TENDER TRAP
59) WITCHCRAFT
60) EBB TIDE
61) COME FLY WITH ME
62) ANGEL EYES
63) JUST IN TIME
65) NICE 'N' EASY
66) OL' MACDONALD
68) AUTUMN LEAVES