Paul McCartney wrote The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band hit for Frank Sinatra

A song written by legendary performer Paul McCartney was actually intended for Frank Sinatra.

The My Way hitmaker had not requested The Beatles member to write a song for him, but McCartney did write one in the style of the legendary crooner. McCartney would explain his decision to do so was based on not wanting to be a rock and roll star, which he would eventually become after the likes of Helter Skelter and Oh, Darling!. McCartney’s start as a musician had him wanting to write for the famed crooner, and he shared as much in an interview on The Beatles’ anniversary package, Anthology. During the show, McCartney said he wasn’t “looking” to be the musician he came to be, but wanted to write pieces of music which were tailor-made for Sinatra and his ilk.

He said: “Back then, I wasn’t necessarily looking to be a rock ‘n’ roller.” McCartney would go on to say the rock and roll songs of the time, while “important”, were never quite what he had wanted to do. A hit song by The Beatles was even written for Sinatra to use, or at least in the style McCartney believed he would have wanted.

The Wings frontman recalled: “When I wrote When I’m Sixty Four I thought I was writing a song for Sinatra. I wrote [that] when I was sixteen — it was rather tongue-in-cheek — and I never forgot it.” It’s a song that frequent writing partner John Lennon says he would simply have never written.

He said: “I would never dream of writing a song like that. There’s some things I never think about, and that’s one of them.” The Beatles would not have the best relationship with Sinatra, not initially. The veteran crooner had once denounced the group, which led to one of the band’s biggest songs directly quoting the famed singer.

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.

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.”