It is one of the world’s most reprised songs, the signature tune of Frank Sinatra and an all-time hit in karaoke bars and at funerals. But why is French state radio devoting a day to honouring My Way?

The answer is that Sinatra’s bittersweet swansong was merely a cover of a Gallic national treasure. The ballad was a sad French pop anthem before it was recorded with new words by Ol’ Blue Eyes, 40 years ago this week.

The French have never stopped loving Comme d’habitude (As Usual), its original title, since the single reached No 1 in 1968 in the hands of Claude François. The earlier gloomy lyrics had nothing to do with Sinatra’s defiant “few regrets” version, written for him by Paul Anka. The Canadian songsmith bought the French hit from François and Jacques Revaux, its composers, after hearing it on the radio on a Riviera holiday.

François, whose final curtain came when he was electrocuted in his bath in 1978, moped in his ditty about the demise of a love affair that he was having with France Gall, a singer who is still going strong. French grandparents now shuffle into a nostalgic slow dance when they hear the immortal opening: “I get up/ I shake you/ You don’t wake up/ As usual.” The song closes: “We will make love/ As usual/ We will fake it/ As usual.”

Times Archive, 1984: Frank Sinatra at the Royal Albert Hall

During the applause for My Way, Sinatra admitted: 'I can't stand the song'

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France is happy to bask in the glory of Sinatra’s take on the tune composed with Petula Clark and Sacha Distel in mind (they declined it). It is France’s biggest-earning tune, bringing in royalties of a million euros a year, ahead of such golden grooves as Ravel’s Bolero, Edith Piaf’s La Vie en rose, and Joseph Kosma’s tune to the Jacques Prévert poem Les feuilles mortes (wider known as the standard Autumn Leaves).

On Monday, the national network played Comme d’habitude/My Way once an hour all day. The cover versions included Nina Simone, Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin but omitted the John Cleese version or the Sex Pistols’ send-up.

“The song is so successful in France because people identify with it; it’s the story of Mr and Mrs Average,” Nicolas Varenne, the head of music for Radio France Bleue, told The Times. “Then later, Sinatra and Presley taking on a French song made us proud.”

Recorded in more than 100 languages and massacred by amateurs the world over, My Way is also said to be the world’s most-requested funeral song. Sinatra came to loathe its sentimental boasting and complained that it stuck to him like an old piece of chewing gum. But Revaux and Anka are proud of the tune that some have dubbed “graveside cabaret”.

Anka says that the song stayed forgotten in a drawer until a rainy night in Las Vegas when Sinatra told him: “Kid, I'm quitting the business.”

“He said he was going to do one more album and I went home and put that song on the piano.”

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