Ol' Red Eyes

Frank Sinatra’s music meant absolutely zero to me. He was a relic from the forties and fifties who produced dire songs for those who knew no better. His films were fairly close to pure garbage as well. From Here to Eternity? More like two hours of cinema hell. Von Ryan’s Express? Stuck in the sidings of mediocrity. He even went on and on and on, spending the best part of thirty years trudging round in ever decreasing circles on his ‘farewell tour’ in a way that makes the Rolling Stones latest pension book extravaganza seem almost restrained. The only thing that stopped the Mafia’s favourite singing continuing from here to eternity was his body’s brave decision to pull the plug on the ageing crooner and gives us all some peace. The only song associated with blank Frank I have any time for is ‘My Way’, but not Frankie Boy’s version, give me hissing Sid Vicious any day of any week. I’m sorry, but it’s a generation thing.

Politics are another matter and although the old rogue spent the last 30 years of his life getting cosy with the Republican right, the young Frankie was, politically at least, a different kettle of fish. Like a lot of musicians and film stars in the 1930s and 40s Frankie was attracted to left wing politics and was no right wing patsy, but a left wing rebel whose politics had been made by the poverty and racism he encountered growing up poor in New Jersey. In 1943 he spoke out against race riots in Harlem. In 1946 he attacked Franco’s Fascist Spain. A year later, in 1947, he said that "as long as most white men think of a Negro as a Negro first and a man second, we’re in trouble". Unsurprisingly he was witch hunted by Senator MacCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee and named 12 times as a communist.

Frankie’s anti-racism didn’t stop there. He played benefit concerts for Martin Luther King and helped Jesse Jackson’s fight for black rights in Alabama in the 1960s. Had he been run over by a busload of Ku Klux Klan racists in about 1970 the likes of me would feel that he’d left a positive mark on America. Thing is, he wasn’t and the rest, as Jesse Jackson put it, was about a man who "sold his birthright for a pot of gold".

Frankie cosied up to the Reagan’s, played concerts in apartheid South Africa and became a rich, right wing, relic who never lost his hold over the audience he’d attracted in the 1940s and 50s, but became pretty much irrelevant to the rock ’n’ roll generation. Such a shame.

PS The rumour mill that grinds ever onwards has come up with a new one. Apparently there are number of local Labour Party politicians who reckon that this paper is not ‘on message’ where New Labour is concerned and can’t resist any opportunity to have a go at us. They reckon we are a bunch of middle class Tories with no interest in the working class or its rights. Sorry, but this column sure as hell ain’t going to get ‘on message’ if what I hear about what being ‘on message’ means in Islington. According to the Highgate and Islington Express, Islington New Labour Council PLC has just sacked 19 housing workers for walking out over a batch of compulsory redundancies. According to my spies, an ex-leader of Islington New Labour Council PLC was overheard to crow that the plan had really come together now that they’d successfully engineered things to get rid of all those trade unionists who supported such things as jobs, workers rights and the working class. I guess that I should be so ‘on message’ as to send my congratulations to Islington New Labour Council PLC, but as a ‘middle class Tory’ I won’t, I’m sending a donation to the strikers.

PPS Someone wrote in last month to complain that I’d got all kind of rational, sorry, but normal madness will be resumed next month.