One of the very best songs released by The Beatles was actually a thinly-veiled knock at legendary crooner Frank Sinatra.
Where the Fly Me to the Moon and My Way performer would warm to the group in the years following their break-up, his initial reaction to the Fab Four was less than positive. In the hopes of reigniting the flames of his career, Sinatra took aim at John, Paul, George, and Ringo in an interview where he dubbed them “kid singers”. The journalist who conducted the interview also noted Sinatra’s fondness for the word “bird”, which The Beatles would use in one of their songs as a counter to Sinatra’s comments. He told the journalist in 1966: “If you happen to be tired of kid singers wearing mops of hair thick enough to hide a crate of melons… ‘Tell me that you’ve heard every sound there is’ and your bird can swing. But you can’t hear me. You can’t hear me.”
The Beatles responded to Sinatra’s comments with a song featured on their masterclass album, Revolver. The Lennon-McCartney-penned song proved a hit at the time, though one half of the writing duo would later sour on And Your Bird Can Sing. The group even quote Sinatra directly in the song, with their lyrics lifting the “your bird can swing” line.
Lennon would later speak dismissively of the song, calling it “another of my throwaways… fancy paper around an empty box.” Further readings of the song suggest it is not about Sinatra at all, but a comment made on the relationship between Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones enjoyed a friendly, professional relationship in the 1960s, with McCartney gifting the Jagger-fronted group one of their earliest hits, I Wanna Be Your Man.
Years later, it was George Harrison who took issue with Sinatra, with the Something songwriter left unimpressed by the crooner’s cover of the Abbey Road track. During a performance given later in his career, Sinatra would begin covering The Beatles’ Something. Planting a stool in the middle of the stage and praising The Beatles’ songwriter, Sinatra went on to call Something one of the “best love songs to be written in fifty or a hundred years.”
Sinatra continued: “It never says ‘I love you’ in the song but it really is one of the finest.” Though Sinatra received rapturous applause after performing the “marvellous song,” Harrison is believed not to have cared for the performance at all.
Speaking on The Beatles’ Anthology, he revealed: “When I wrote it, in my mind I heard Ray Charles singing it, and he did do it some years later. At the time, I wasn’t particularly thrilled that Frank Sinatra did Something.”
Years later, Harrison added: “I’m more thrilled now than I was then. I wasn’t really into Frank – he was the generation before me. I was more interested when Smokey Robinson did it and when James Brown did it. But I’m very pleased now, whoever’s done it. I realise that the sign of a good song is when it has lots of cover versions.”
