Comme d'habitude

The song that became its own opposite

Here is one of the strangest twists in popular music. The song that millions of people in Britain and America request at funerals, belt out at karaoke, and associate with Frank Sinatra's swagger began life as something almost unbearably small and sad. "Comme d'habitude" translates as "As Usual," and it is not a song about a life lived boldly. It is about a couple going through the motions, a man getting up in the morning, going to work, coming home, and lying beside a partner who no longer really sees him. Nobody stands tall in this song. Nobody faces the final curtain. It is two people pretending, day after day, that nothing has changed.

Then a Canadian songwriter heard it on holiday in France, bought the rights, and rewrote it from top to bottom. The melody stayed. The meaning flipped entirely. That is why "Comme d'habitude" is such a fascinating piece of music: it is the original blueprint of one of the most famous songs ever recorded, and yet almost no English-speaking listener knows what it was actually about.

A pop star, a breakup, and a borrowed tune

To understand the song, you need to understand Claude François, or "Cloclo," as French fans adored him. Born in 1939 in Ismailia, Egypt, where his father worked for the Suez Canal Company, he grew up in comfort until the Suez Crisis of 1956 forced the family to leave everything behind and start again in Monaco with very little. He played drums in hotel orchestras, sang in nightclubs, and clawed his way into the French "yé-yé" pop scene of the early 1960s. By the middle of the decade he was a genuine superstar, famous for his blond hair, his relentless perfectionism, his dazzling stage shows with the dancers known as the Clodettes, and his habit of adapting American and British hits into French.

In 1967 his personal life was in pieces. He had been in a high-profile relationship with France Gall, the young singer who had won the Eurovision Song Contest for Luxembourg in 1965 with "Poupée de cire, poupée de son." By most accounts the relationship was turbulent, and it ended that year. It is widely said that this breakup is the emotional engine of "Comme d'habitude."

The music itself came from Jacques Revaux, a composer who had reportedly written the melody earlier with English lyrics under the title "For Me." Several French singers are said to have passed on it before it reached Claude François. He liked the tune but not the words, and, staying with Revaux and lyricist Gilles Thibaut at his country home, a converted mill in Dannemois south of Paris, he steered the lyric towards his own recent heartache. Thibaut shaped the final text, and François, as a co-writer, poured his experience into its direction. The recording was released in late 1967 and became a solid hit in France.

And here is the cultural hook for readers in the UK and US. In 1968, a young, unknown David Bowie was asked to write English words to this same melody. He produced a lyric called "Even a Fool Learns to Love," but his version was never released commercially because the rights went elsewhere. Bowie reportedly felt sore about it for years, and he later said that "Life on Mars?", released in 1971, was partly a sort of answer to the song that got away. Listen to the chord movement of "Life on Mars?" with this in mind and you can feel the family resemblance.

What the song is really saying

The genius of "Comme d'habitude" lies in its ordinariness. The lyric is built from the tiny, repetitive rituals of a shared morning and evening. The narrator wakes up, and his partner is still asleep, turned away from him. He tucks the covers around her, as he always does. He gets dressed, drinks his coffee, and heads off into the day, half expecting that she will not even notice he has gone. There is a lingering sense that he is trying to make contact, a gesture here, a caress there, but every gesture is absorbed into habit and loses its meaning.

As the day goes on, he plays a role at work, smiling and laughing as usual, hiding what he feels. The tone is not angry. It is weary. That is the heartbreak: the relationship has not exploded, it has simply worn smooth, like a stone in a river. In the evening he comes home, and the couple carry on with the same routines, the same small talk, the same silences. At night they share a bed and make love, but the song suggests it has become one more mechanical act, something done because it is always done, while both of them pretend.

The refrain, built around the title phrase, works almost like a heartbeat or a clock. Each repetition sharpens the irony. "As usual" should be comforting; here it sounds like a sentence being served. The arrangement amplifies this. The verses begin quietly and climb, with strings and brass gradually swelling, so the music builds a sense of enormous emotional pressure that the narrator never fully lets out. It is the sound of someone screaming inside while their face stays calm.

What makes it feel so personal is the narrator's vulnerability. He is not blaming her. He seems to understand that they have both drifted into a performance of love rather than love itself. If the reading of the song as a portrait of Claude François and France Gall is correct, then it is remarkably honest for a pop idol at the peak of his fame: a confession that glamour and success could not protect him from the slow fade of intimacy.

From "As Usual" to "My Way"

In 1967 Paul Anka, the Canadian singer and songwriter who had become a teen idol with "Diana" a decade earlier, was holidaying in the south of France when he heard "Comme d'habitude" on television. He was struck by the melody, flew to Paris, and secured the rights to adapt it. The story goes that he then sat down one night, thinking of his friend Frank Sinatra, who at the time was talking about retiring, and wrote an entirely new lyric in Sinatra's voice: a man looking back over his life and declaring that, whatever his mistakes, he did things on his own terms.

Sinatra recorded "My Way" at the very end of 1968, and it was released in early 1969. In Britain it became a phenomenon, reportedly spending a record-breaking stretch on the UK singles chart, longer than almost any other single of its era. Elvis Presley made it a centrepiece of his 1970s concerts, and in 1978 Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols delivered a snarling punk version that turned the song into a sneer. Countless others followed, in dozens of languages. Surveys in the UK have regularly placed "My Way" among the most requested songs at funerals.

The contrast is astonishing. One lyric is about a man who has lost himself in routine; the other is about a man who never let anyone dictate his path. One is about the death of a relationship; the other is often played at the death of a person. Yet both sit perfectly on the same melody, which says something about the music Revaux wrote: it is built to carry weight, whatever that weight happens to be.

Crucially, Claude François and his co-writers kept their songwriting credits. Royalties from "My Way" flowed back to the French writers and their estates, and it is often said that the song became one of the most lucrative compositions in French history. For Claude François, it also brought international prestige that his French-language career alone could not have achieved.

A star who lived fast and left too soon

Claude François kept working at a punishing pace through the 1970s, scoring hits such as "Le Lundi au soleil," "Alexandrie Alexandra," and "Magnolias for Ever," launching his own label and magazine, and building one of the most elaborate live shows in French pop. Then, on 11 March 1978, at just 39, he died in his Paris apartment, electrocuted while reportedly trying to fix or adjust a light fitting while standing in the bath. The shock in France was enormous. His funeral drew vast crowds, and his death became a national moment of grief.

His legend has only grown since. In 2012 the French biopic "Cloclo," starring Jérémie Renier, told his story to a new generation and was released internationally under the title "My Way," a sign of just how intertwined the two songs have become. The film takes its emotional arc from exactly this paradox: a man whose most famous melody became a global hymn to self-assurance, while his own life was full of insecurity, control, and fear of being abandoned.

Why it still resonates today

There is something very modern about "Comme d'habitude." We talk constantly now about burnout, quiet quitting, emotional disconnection, and relationships that drift while two people scroll side by side. The song captured that feeling more than half a century ago, without any drama, just through the accumulation of small daily rituals. Anyone who has stayed in a relationship slightly too long, or felt that they were performing a version of themselves at work, recognises the mood immediately.

It also rewards the curious listener in a way few songs do. Once you know that "My Way" grew out of it, you can never hear Sinatra's version quite the same way again. Under the bravado you sense the ghost of that tired man brushing his partner's hair from her face while she sleeps. The defiant anthem has a melancholy twin hiding underneath it, and that hidden layer may be part of why "My Way" feels so emotionally overwhelming at funerals: the melody was born from loss.

Finally, "Comme d'habitude" is a reminder that great songs travel. A French breakup, a Canadian holiday, an American legend, a frustrated young Englishman who turned his rejection into "Life on Mars?" The tune passed through all of them and changed with each. Few melodies have had such a rich second life, and fewer still started from such an intimate, honest place.

How to dive deeper

🎧 Immerse in the sound

• Claude François, "Comme d'habitude" (1967 original single) — Start with the original and listen for the slow build of the arrangement. The way the orchestra swells while the vocal stays restrained tells the story of a man holding back his emotions better than any translation can.
• Frank Sinatra, "My Way" (1969) — Play it straight after the French version and notice how the same melody becomes an act of defiance. It is a masterclass in how lyrics and delivery can completely redirect the meaning of a tune.
• David Bowie, "Life on Mars?" (1971) — Bowie's lost lyric for this melody never saw official release, but this song is often described as his response to missing out. Listen for the shared harmonic DNA and the bittersweet sense of a story being retold.

📚 Follow the story

• "Cloclo" (2012 film, released internationally as "My Way") — Jérémie Renier's committed performance traces Claude François from his Egyptian childhood to his shocking death. The film builds a powerful sequence around the creation of this song and its journey to Paul Anka.
• Paul Anka's memoir "My Way" (2013) — Anka recounts hearing the French song, securing the rights, and writing the new lyric for Sinatra. It offers an insider's view of how a French pop record turned into an American standard.
• Biographies of France Gall — Reading about Gall's career, from Eurovision triumph to her later work with Michel Berger, adds depth to the heartbreak behind the song. It shows the other side of a relationship that is said to have inspired the lyric.

🌍 Visit the places

• Le Moulin de Dannemois, Essonne — Claude François's beloved country retreat, a converted mill south of Paris, is where the song is said to have been shaped. The property has periodically opened to visitors, so check ahead for current access.
• Boulevard Exelmans, Paris 16th arrondissement — Claude François lived in this elegant western Paris neighbourhood, and fans still make pilgrimages to the area. It is a quiet reminder of how abruptly his story ended in 1978.
• Ismailia, Egypt — The Suez Canal city where Claude François was born and spent his early years. Walking its colonial-era streets gives you a sense of the world he lost as a teenager, which some say fed his lifelong fear of losing everything again.

🎸 Experience it yourself

• Learn the chord progression on piano or guitar — The melody's descending bass line and gradual climb are wonderful to play. Try singing the same tune twice, once softly and wearily, once boldly, to feel how interpretation transforms it.
• Read a full translation, then listen again — Find a reliable English translation of the French lyric, read it slowly, and then put the record back on. The ordinary details of the couple's day land very differently once you know what is happening.
• Host a "two versions" listening night — Gather friends, play "Comme d'habitude" without explaining anything, then play "My Way." Watching people realise they are the same song is a joy, and it always sparks conversation about love, regret, and pride.

🎵 Listen to this song