Music

By Jack Valentine.

I have seen Frank Sinatra perform live three times in my life and I actually met him once in my life.

This event took place outside the stage door of the Royal Festival Hall at his Concert there in 1976. I was aged 16. I elbowed my way to the front of the queue and found ,myself standing before the great man. It was an incredible moment. Sinatra was immaculate in his Tuxedo and I stuck my hand out and said “excuse me, sir but I wanted to just shake your hand”
Instantly Sinatra turned a smile of blazing charm upon me that shook me to my core. It was like seeing an electric light suddenly switched on. His eyes were the bluest and clearest eyes I had ever seen in my life.

I said or rather blurted out “Sir, you are the greatest singer and entertainer on the planet and my ambition is to have a singing career and to be a singer like you.”

His reply was to turn a smile of such incredible charm upon me that I shall never forget it and he simply said to me “Best of luck, Kid. You’ll be great... and never forget to sing from your heart!” Then he got into the limo and he was gone.

I never forgot his advice that extraordinary warm September evening when I was sixteen and met Frank Sinatra. I sang with a busker on Hungerford bridge for a few pennies and then walked home though the London traffic. Although I never met him again in my life that moment remains with me and I feel his spirit in the shadows every time I perform, teaching me how to sing the song, how to phrase it, how to improve the timing and the tone, how to skip ahead of the beat and when to lay back. He also has taught me how to sing from my heart and how best to make it sound fresh and authentic. I owe Frank Sinatra my livelihood and my career. He is and always has been a dear friend.

In life, as professionally, he has been my mentor. In fact he is a little like a surrogate father to me, or like the older brother I never had. He protected me from the bullies and he helped me out and commiserated when I had my heart broken by a woman.

I can safely say that throughout my life, particularly in the most difficult moments of despair and set back, Frank Sinatra’s music has always been there, encouraging me and helping me to make sense of my life in what is, apart from his voice, a very slippery, very anonymous world. Who is like him? Abraham Lincoln maybe. But only maybe.

His voice too, has echoed down through the years, always encouraging me to be myself which, ironically I am fully able to be whilst I am performing his songs. It is a strange paradox that I, a middle class man from an English privately educated, but somewhat lonely background, should, by singing his songs my own way as if I really meant them, almost become him and at the same time fully myself on stage, to the extent that in some ways I see myself as his ambassador.. His words “and never forget to sing from your heart” are words that I could never forget.