Belligerent Ghoul sends the link:
Nancy kicks off the boots - The Telegraph, (Filed: 14/06/2004)
Excerpts:
...Next weekend, Nancy Sinatra will be performing her first ever concert in England as part of Meltdown, the influential annual music festival curated this year by Morrissey. Later this month, the first single from an upcoming album of songs (To Nancy with Love) sung by Nancy and written by musicians such as Jarvis Cocker, Elvis Costello and Bono, will be released.
"Morrissey wrote to me and said I have a song for you and if you sing it and we release it as a single, you'll be on the charts for the first time since 1972," Nancy tells me when we meet in LA. "I said, what time, where?"
It is little wonder she leapt at Morissey's offer. Although she retired from the music business in 1972 to raise a family, she has been looking for a way back for the past 10 years.
"What happens in the music business," she explains over a vodka martini in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel, "is that if you step out of your little spot to do something else, the sand falls right into where you stood and you're gone, you're history."
"And then you try to get back, you peek your head up and say 'hello, I'm here, I'm trying to fill this little place again, will you let me do it?' But people don't care, which is OK because it's their turn to have their music, but it makes it very hard.
...If it's melancholy that Nancy is after, who better for her to partner than Morrissey?
"I've had two mentors in my life," she tells me. "One is Lee, the other is Morrissey. I've told him: now he's responsible for saving my life he has to take care of me forever."
I asked Nancy why him, why now?
"I have no idea why, but my peers in your age group – and that's not a contradiction – are not only accepting of me but they appreciate what I've done and they tell me so. Morrissey wrote a really gorgeous song for me. I'm crazy for that man," she says, adding with what sounds like real excitement, "and he thinks I'm hip!"
...As she plays the recording of Let Me Kiss You, Nancy comments on the chorus and compliments the band on their skills and the songwriters on their talent and it's obvious then that she didn't do this for fame or money, but because music matters to her. Press her on a life lived among Hollywood celebrities and she tells you about the musicians in her life; about people who lived in the same world as her father.
Let Me Kiss You is obviously a Morrissey tune, but Sinatra, whose voice has mellowed beautifully, makes it her own. "It would be nice to be on the charts again," she says. "Nice to be recognised."
