Sinatra in London in 1962: "The Voice" records "We'll Meet Again" On a previous British tour in 1953, with his career in a serious but happily temporary decline, Sinatra had fulfilled such less than exotic bookings as the Tooting Granada and Green's Playhouse in Ayr. During his show at the Blackpool Opera House, he even did a bizarre Churchill impersonation in between songs. When the two men met, as Sinatra was in Monte Carlo to film Kings Go Forth in 1958, he shook Churchill's hand and said: "I've wanted to do that for 20 years." The programme contains new interviews with several witnesses of those Bayswater sessions, as well as excerpts from a broadcast that "The Voice" made for the BBC's Light Programme, unheard on air since the record's release. "When I knew I was going to visit Britain," Sinatra says, "I thought it would be a wonderful opportunity to record a whole album of British songs. When someone came up with the title Great Songs from Great Britain, well, that clinched it. That spring, Sinatra had set out on an ambitious international tour, which he funded himself, to raise money for children's charities. He had reasons not to be in America. His Rat Pack associations had begun to attract negative publicity, and he had been snubbed by President JFK himself. Frank's good friend "Jack" had, on the advice of his disapproving brother Robert, decided not to stay overnight as planned at the singer's home in Palm Springs, compounding the insult by spending the time with Bing Crosby instead. "Part of [the reason for the tour] was staying out of America," confirms Nancy Sinatra. After two months of exhausting touring, however, from Tokyo to Tel Aviv and Milan to Madrid, Sinatra's voice was not in its best shape, nor had he prepared as meticulously as usual. There was no chance to practise the songs over a period of days as he normally would. Indeed, a late-night charity show at the Royal Festival Hall a few days before the Great Songs sessions did not finish until around 2.30am, after which he repaired to the Savoy for what we now call an "aftershow." Princess Margaret, who had been at the concert, declined that invitation as she was doing the Trooping the Colour the next day. Little could Sinatra know that the sessions were taking place almost at the exact moment that the British beat boom was preparing to storm the barricades of the traditional crooners. Six days before he started taping in Bayswater, The Beatles were two miles up the road demoing for George Martin at Abbey Road. An unconfirmed yarn has it that Frank arrived for the sessions in a Rolls-Royce borrowed from his friend Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Either way, a bottle of Jack Daniels at his side in the booth, his studio audience was spellbound. These are far from the swingin'est recordings of Sinatra's career, but they are masterfully suave. His reading of I'll Follow My Secret Heart is refinement itself. Most improbable was a reliable if conservative take on We'll Meet Again, which was perhaps too closely associated with another singer. Sinatra was well aware of its wartime history. "They tell me Vera Lynn had a lot of success with this way back in 1939," he said on the Light Programme. Sinatra's love affair would endure, with British concert dates into the 1990s, until a few years before his death in 1998. "Whatever the faults in his voice are, it's an incredibly evocative album," says Sinatra biographer Richard Havers. He did love to trawl the Great American Songbook, and here he was trawling the Great British Songbook. Ol' Blue Eyes of Bayswater is on BBC Radio 2 on Monday 23 January at 10.00pm