Pop subversion, robbing cowboys and Greek mythology - Nancy Sinatra in excelsis
The Sinatra name will forever be associated with the musical mainstream, snugly tied to big-band jazz, Vegas casino shows and comfy classics. But if Frank was cosy and straight, a glass of good whisky by the fire, his daughter Nancy is one of pop’s great subversive forces, her work filled with rebellion, unease and obtuseness, a bottle of cheap bourbon spiked with basement psychedelics.
Born into musical royalty, it would have been easy for Nancy Sinatra to follow in her father’s footsteps. Instead she sang songs about drugs, taking revenge on her boyfriend, robbing cowboys and more, a turn that must have delighted her very anti-counter culture dad.
Some of Nancy’s music was inflammatory - see Sugar Town, the 1966 ode to LSD that shot to the top of the easy-listening chart; some of it was heart-breaking - Down From Dover has to be one of the saddest songs ever recorded; and a lot of it was brilliantly strange, like Some Velvet Morning, with long-time collaborator Lee Hazlewood, which was inspired by Greek mythology but still doesn’t appear to make any easy sense. Or how about Somethin’ Stupid a classic song about an unpredictable love affair that Nancy creeped up by singing with her father?
Nancy - who is very much still alive but hasn’t made a record in years - has personality in glorious excess. But it didn’t always come easy. Her first records, the likes of Cuff Links and a Tie Clip and Like I Do, released on her father’s Reprise label, were awful, an ultra-lite bubblegum that couldn’t even stick. And it wasn’t until meeting Hazlewood that Nancy started to really fly.
“It was Reprise head of A&R, Jimmy Bowen, who, in a last ditch effort to keep me from being dropped from the label, teamed me up with Lee Hazlewood 60 years ago,” Sinatra said in a Facebook post from 2025.
Hazlewood, who was then best known for his work with Duane Eddy, apparently wanted Nancy to sing “like a 16-year-old girl who screwed truck drivers” rather than in the anonymous higher register she had used previously. And Sinatra obliged, with the pair hitting musical - if not chart - gold on their first single, So Long Babe in October 1965.
Technically, I’m writing about Nancy Sinatra here not Lee Hazlewood. But it would be pointless to deny the incredible influence he had on Sinatra’s career over the following decade.
Not all of Sinatra’s great songs were recorded with Hazlewood - 1976’s admirably breezy Kinky Love, for example, was without him - but the vast majority of Nancy’s best work came between So Long Babe and 1972’s Nancy & Lee Again album, with Hazlewood writing, producing and singing on classics like Some Velvet Morning, These Boots Are Made For Walkin’, Summer Wine and more. Consider the gulf in quality between 1968’s collaborative Nancy & Lee album and 1969’s Nancy, a rather limp collection produced by Billy Strange, and you can see how vital Lee Hazlewood was to Nancy Sinatra’s music.
This is not to reduce Nancy’s contribution. Because if Sinatra’s best work was with Lee Hazlewood, then Hazlewood’s best work was definitely with Sinatra. (Great though Cowboy in Sweden undeniably is.) When I think about Nancy Sinatra’s music - and often when I talk about it here - I am thinking about the alchemical combination of Nancy and Lee, whatever the name on the record sleeve.
“We had sort of a love / hate relationship,” Sinatra told Best Classic Bands. “Maybe it was a sexual tension because we never had any kind of affair. I don’t know exactly what it was but it worked.”
Nancy didn’t write songs, produce them or play an instrument. But she sang the living hell out of her songs, with an incredible emotional range in her vocals. Down From Dover, a tale of unmarried pregnancy that ends on tragedy, is almost unbearably moving, with Nancy’s final verse so rawly emotional you can barely believe she’s singing someone else’s song (in this case Dolly Parton’s.)
These Boots Are Made For Walkin’, by contrast, is full of sass and energy; Jackson is hilarious, as Nancy side eyes Lee’s brassy philanderer; The Last of the Secret Agents? is a preposterous novelty tune; Kinky Love is ethereal and erotic; You Only Live Twice infinitely classy and bold. And so on.
Frequently, Sinatra and Lee would duet, his gravelly baritone the beast to Sinatra’s sultry beauty, although this tended to mean each singer taking turns on the microphone, rather than their voices blending in any conventional way. “He [Lee] didn’t like singing with somebody,” Sinatra told grammy.com. “He would prefer - even though they were duets, a contradiction in terms - to have us sing separately.”
Perhaps the greatest example of this is the unsettlingly beautiful Some Velvet Morning, from Nancy & Lee, in which Lee’s vocals are delivered in a menacing four / four time signature and Nancy’s come in an eerie three / four, as if unseen forces are struggling to keep the duo’s dangerous chemistry down. Nobody has ever sounded like Nancy and Lee, their relationship one of the greatest vocal partnerships in history.
“It was a very comfortable process,” Sinatra told grammy.com of recording with Lee. “The studio was familiar; we were all friends. The challenge was trying to create vocals that had power and magic to them. It wasn't easy to do but Lee’s songs were really fairy tales - and telling stories was what we did.”
Sinatra’s music with Hazlewood was extremely unusual in its rejection of 1960s pop norms and simple emotions. This is reflected in the musical beds that Hazlewood cooked up for Sinatra, employing some of the best studio musicians that money could buy.
There’s the exquisite and instantly recognisable double bass plunge on These Boots Are Made For Walkin’ or the eerily high-pitched strings on Some Velvet Morning, which operate right at the top end of tolerable; or the autoharp and backwards guitar lines of Sand; or the orchestral / fuzz guitar combination that puts the nervous electricity into Lightning’s Girl. Classics all.
You could look at Nancy Sinatra’s background, her nepo baby privilege, and say she was born into stardom. But the reality is far more complex. True, Nancy began her career on her father’s TV series The Frank Sinatra Show and, true, she was signed to his label. But, for many years, that delivered nothing tangible and Nancy Sinatra could have easily fallen into oblivion.
That she didn’t is thanks to sheer musical chemistry and the courage to take risks. What Nancy had with Lee Hazlewood was magic, a perfect creative pairing that produced some of the most unusual but moving pop music of the 1960s and beyond. “It was something different about the two of us that captured the fancy and the imagination of the public,” Sinatra explained to grammy.com. “It’s weird how those things happen, those unexplained magical pairings.”
Some listening
On 50 Bullets - and, in fact, on a lot of her forthcoming album 50 Bullets to the Heart - Zora Jones has nailed the crossover between pop and club music, by being 100% pop and 100% club at the same time. The result is that 50 Bullets has both a tune the milkman would feel empowered to whistle, and a whole bucket load of glittering, wobbling, stuttering electronic effects, like a particularly melancholy Destiny’s Child staring into the deep-space abyss.
Bless Nikki Nair, patron saint of the wobbly banger. In the intro to his new EP, The Sick Dimension, Nair says that, “In my mind, I’m making normal house music but when I get feedback, I guess it does not sound like normal house music to most people.” Which is just the kind of thing you like to hear from your producers.
And, to be fair, Default Mode, the first song released from the EP, doesn’t exactly sound like your standard house floor filler, particularly in the first half, where a stretched out vocal turn meets a syncopated beat that sounds like Junior Vasquez at his most abstract and a host of splattering electronic noises. Underpinning it all, though, is a bright melodic edge, robot harmonies rising like a rainbow staircase, that could just about pass for pop music reflected back in an oily puddle.
If I didn’t know better, I would swear Pye Corner Audio was trying to flirt with me. The influences on the new album are “Stereolab, Spacemen 3, Harmonia, Cluster, Suicide” and opening single Cycle is described as an “indie-dance banger seemingly beamed in from an episode of Snub TV in 1991”, featuring Ride / Oasis’s Andy Bell. Oh la la.
I could hardly resist, could I? Although, funnily enough, I only read all this after realising that Cycle was a towering work of electronic shoegaze that has the psychedelic brightness to burn off clouds at 100km, a giant pyramid eye broadcasting huge electronic vibes at illegal frequencies. The only problem is that there’s no Glastonbury this year, robbing Cycle of 1,000 BBC syncs and 1 million special moments.
Jah Wobble and Tian Qiyi - Tomorrow Never Knows
Is there any point in covering Tomorrow Never Knows? Perhaps not. But I love Jah Wobble - a man prone to finding the dub in the unlikeliest of situations - and his forthcoming album of Beatles reinterpretations in the company of his sons John T and Charlie Wardle is a riot of unlikley fun, splashing the Fab Four in deep dub bass and Chinese classical music.
Their version of Tomorrow Never Knows manages to pull off just the right amount of reverence, which is very little, as the trio take the song out for a Krautrock ramble, substituting a kind of bucolic warmth for the sharp focus of The Beatles original.
Things I’ve done
Line Noise podcast - With Victor Calderone
I spoke to New York DJ hero Victor Calderone about 18-hour sets, phone-free zones, Bleep, working with Joey Beltram, signing to Sire and - of course - remixing Madonna. We also chatted about his new New York residency, ma++er, at Brooklyn club Refuge, where he is to be found spinning 12-hour sets that will take you into tomorrow evening.
RPS Music - Interview with Yves
I sat down with K-pop sensation Yves backstage at Sala Apolo in Barcelona during her European tour. She discussed breaking out of the traditional K-pop box to experiment with genres like house and rock, the creative chemistry with her producer IOAH and how PinkPantheress inspired her sound.
The playlists
These playlists are made for walkin’!
(Other exercise is also allowed, if not legally recommended.)
Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026.
Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026.
Apple Music: The newest and the bestest
Spotify: The newest and the bestest.
