Written, it’s said, for Frank Sinatra – who apparently didn’t get the joke, and turned it down – “Lonely At The Top” remains one of the greatest missed opportunities in music from the last few decades. It’s one thing for the Randy Newman of the 1970s to sing “All the applause/And all the fame/And all the money/That I have made” because, well, at the time he wasn’t getting a lot of any of those, so it can be taken as sarcastic commentary on celebrity, but if it’d been Sinatra singing those words at the time… Well, that’d take things at least one stage more meta, wouldn’t it? How would his audiences have taken the line “Listen, all you fools out there/Go on and love me/I don’t care”?
(Missing in that video is the spectacular arrangement from the original version, which uses the orchestra to create something that’s both very Newman-esque and also, somehow, fit for Sinatra:
…I think, weirdly, it’s the horns that make it feel Sinatra-esque, although I can’t really think of any songs of his where the oompah thing happened often; Nelson Riddle was normally more subtle than that. But that banjo in the background feels wonderfully disrespectful, out of place and comedic, doesn’t it…?)
Of course, the song has been covered many times since its appearance; I think the Divine Comedy version gets the decadent, sad glamor of the idea best, for me:
Robbie Williams has, I’ve been told, performed the song live a couple of times, which seems particularly fitting; he has the fame, the humor and the sadness to “get” what Newman was trying to say in the first place. Maybe, one day, we’ll see a Justin Beiber version when he finally gets around to his big band album…