How Frank Sinatra Pissed Off David Bowie

David Bowie had fucked up, and now he was kicking himself. It was 1968, near the start of his career. To make ends meet, he was working for a music publisher writing English lyrics to foreign language songs. He’d been given a French song to work on called Comme d’Habitude. He banged out some lyrics and created a version called Even a Fool Learns to Love.

The lyrics were (according to Bowie himself) “really terrible.”

Sometime later, he was listening to the radio, and the English version of the song came on, but it didn’t have his lyrics. He called up his publishing company to ask why. They told him it was because the lyrics were rubbish, and so they’d hired Paul Anka to write some new lyrics.

This wasn’t strictly true. Anka had heard the French version of the song while on holiday in France, bought the rights from the publisher for $1, and agreed that the publisher would get a share of any future royalties.

He wasn’t sure exactly what he would do with the song until he happened to be out to dinner with Frank Sinatra one night, and Frank confided in him that he was thinking of quitting the business.

Anka didn’t want this to happen. If Frank left show biz, there might be no more parties with the rat pack. So he dusted off Comme d’Habitude and wrote My Way in one night. It was a perfect song for Frank. He recorded it 30 minutes, and it became his signature song.

Good news for Frank and good news for Paul Anka. But not great news for Bowie. Why hadn’t he done a better job with his own version of the lyrics? Why hadn’t he tinkered with the song a little bit? Surely he could have come up with something even better than My Way if he actually put his mind to it. He stewed about it for about a year. He couldn’t leave it alone.

Eventually, he sat down at his piano and wrote a song that was intended to be a parody of My Way but became something so much more — the song Life On Mars.

Comme d’Habitude is an introspective song about a relationship sliding into mundanity. My Way is an egotistical boast of a song. But Life on Mars is a surrealist film masquerading as a glam-rock anthem. On first listening, you may think the lyrics make no sense.

Sailors fighting in the dance hall

Oh man!

Look at those cavemen go

It’s the freakiest show

But when you realise the song is about a young girl who goes to the cinema to escape her humdrum life, and much of the song describes what she sees on the screen, it all makes sense.

It’s a God-awful small affair

To the girl with the mousy hair

But her mummy is yelling, “No!”

And her daddy has told her to go

But her friend is nowhere to be seen

Now she walks through her sunken dream

To the seat with the clearest view

And she’s hooked to the silver screen

If you think about it in this context — random images being flung onto the silver screen in front of the girl with the mousy hair, suddenly the “sailors fighting in the dance hall” and the “cavemen” and “the mice in their million hordes” all start to make sense.

Plus, musically, it’s brilliant. If you listen carefully, the intro has traces of My Way and Comme d’habitude, but then it becomes much more complex. It starts with just piano and vocals, but then the bass, guitar, and strings all start coming in, and the song develops an almost orchestral feel.

Life on Mars was released on the album Hunky Dory, and on the back of the album, there is a nod to how Sinatra’s My Way was the song's genesis. Next to the track listing is a note that reads, “inspired by Frankie.”

Oh! And one other cool thing about the song — the same piano that was used to record the Hunky Dory version of Life on Mars was also used to record the Beatles’ Hey Jude and numerous songs by Queen.

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This post was previously published on Medium.com.