(Credits: Far Out / Alamy / Capitol Records)

Sat 3 January 2026 16:47, UK

Ever since Paul McCartney was a child, he’s been an admirer of Frank Sinatra. Who hasn’t been? He’s the king of cool. In fact, he’s pretty much the inventor of it.

His swagger enamoured Macca when he was growing up in Liverpool. One of the first songs he ever wrote as a teenager was a tribute to the legendary New Jersey singer. Years later, McCartney tried to pass it on to Sinatra, but sadly, he wasn’t interested. Simply put, it wasn’t ever really suitable.

The crooner always had mixed thoughts on The Beatles. He famously gave the band his seal of approval when he covered the George Harrison creation, ‘Something’, but he also mocked them as ‘mop top’ kids, and seemed to think that rock ‘n’ roll, as a genre, wasn’t really to be taken seriously.

Interestingly, Sinatra wasn’t always sold on the group being a success in the States, either. In the book George Harrison on George Harrison, a brutally honest quote from Sinatra reads: “I thought the Beatles would die in New York. I was very surprised by the reception they got. I guess I was wrong.”

Sinatra’s cover of ‘Something’ is as close as he got to crossing paths with The Beatles. However, at one point, McCartney was asked to write a track for the vocalist, and bizarrely, he decided to gift Sinatra with the oldest song in his back catalogue. After all, it had been written with him in mind in the first place. But maybe he should have known better by this stage?

So, what song did McCartney offer to the king of swing?

McCartney had yet to find a home for the song despite writing it decades ago when he was 14 and in the midst of a Frank Sinatra phase. When he first penned ‘Suicide’, McCartney believed the only songwriting blueprint to follow was the one crafted by the swinging Sinatra. It was jazzy, performative, and primed to be paired with the chinking of fine crystal glasses.

McCartney later told the McCartney Archive Collection about Sinatra’s early influence on his songwriting. “I had my Dad’s old piano at home, that I used to tinker about on when there was no one in the house. And my feelings were, then, that if you were ever going to be a songwriter, the height of it all was Sinatra,” he said.

Enthusiastically adding, “That would be the greatest stuff that you could do, really a little bit before rock ‘n’ roll, so you were thinking of standards and things. So around that time I wrote ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ and this other thing. I thought it would be a bit of a Rat Pack, smoochy, with words like ‘When she tries to, run away, uh-huh…’ Boom! And stabs from the band, you know.”

The former Beatle then spoke about the time Sinatra came calling, and he decided to offer up “this other thing”, which was not to the American singer’s taste. McCartney added, “It was a real early song of mine, and I used to do it as a joke, really. I actually once got a request from Sinatra for a song”.

Adding, “And I spoke to him on the phone and told him about it, ‘Great, Paul, send it along’. ‘Thank you, Frank’. And I sent it him, and he thought I was taking the piss. ‘Is this guy kidding?’ You know, sending Sinatra a song called ‘Suicide’. He did not get it! But I did think, ‘Oh God, maybe I should have changed it a bit to send it to him’.”

Although Sinatra never recorded a take of the track, McCartney’s version of ‘Suicide‘ was eventually released as part of his ongoing project, Paul McCartney Archive Collection, and the song is now available for public consumption. But no doubt the Beatle still blushes a little when he stumbles across it.

It’s not the only song he ever wrote specifically for him, either. As McCartney would later add in a more exacting manner, “When I wrote ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ I thought I was writing for Sinatra.” Though he was probably well-advised not to send that track to the star 26 years his senior.

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