'It's for an audience that's a long way from home and prepared to let the chips fall where they may. It's for people on vacation from their more respectable selves... One way or another, we've all been to Las Vegas.'

The Las Vegas Collection was a series of CDs that capture the biggest names in live performance, during that resort's golden age. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Bobby Darin all feature. This piece appeared in The Word in August 2005.

Las Vegas is back. It's back back back. Backer, in fact, than Burt Bacharach's backing band.

Why are we still talking about the Rat Pack in 2005? And why are Britons flying to Vegas in the same way they used to take a charabanc to Clacton? The hold this city has on our imaginations is uncanny. An entire area of popular culture has been cordoned off in celebration of its style, especially the style of its aesthetic zenith, circa 1960. All over London are posters that seem to be advertising a live show starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. Which is strange, since all three men are dead. (The Rat Pack Live From Las Vegas has played to bulging West End houses for three years now.) Elsewhere themed hamburger restaurants host tuxedoed swingers barkingThe Lady Is A Tramp. And cinemas show celebrity-reinforced updates of the original Ocean's 11.

Where engaged couples once dreamed of kindly deacons under medieval steeples, they now like their union sanctified by Elvis Presley impersonators in Sin City. From lad mag to gangster movie. the bourbon-soaked wise-guy with a floosie on either cuff-link is more than acceptable, he's iconic. Look up on a Tube train and you see nothing but ads for on-line gambling sites that offer the virtual Vegas high-rollin' experience.

2005 sees Las Vegas celebrate its 100th birthday. As befits the bad taste capital of America, the jamboree has already included the creation of the world's biggest birthday cake (I wonder whether 100 broads jumped out?). And there is this series of CDs, The Las Vegas Centennial Collection. Each disc comes with a sleevenote by the Mayor, Oscar B. Goodman, who speaks with a trilling tongue of 'our city's colourful history'. Mayor Goodman has quite a 'colourful history' himself. He's a former attorney known for representing organised crime figures. He actually plays himself in the movie Casino, defending Tony 'The Ant' Spillotro, as played by Joe Pesci.

In a way, Las Vegas is even younger than 100. For years it was a one-horse town somewhere along the railroad, then the Mormons started buying real estate there. Thanks to Nevada's quirky state laws on gambling and matrimony, it spawned a couple of cowpoke casinos and a reputation for quickie divorces. Nearby counties even had legalised brothels. But it really took off after World War Two, when the trickle of mobster money turned into a flood. Among the city's true founding fathers was the gangster Benny 'Buggsy' Siegel - a good friend of Frank Sinatra's, as it happens - who helped build Vegas into the Technicolor Xanadu we know today. 'Buggsy', alas, was soon rubbed out by rivals but Las Vegas proved unstoppable.

At some level or other we've all imbibed this legend through the Godfather films. Like New York City, Las Vegas is so familiar from the movies that it lives in all our minds' eyes. One way or another, we've all been to Vegas.

And what of its music? ('The unique rhythm,' as Mayor Goodman has it, 'that makes our city so fabulous.') Big star visitors were intrinsic to Las Vegas' growth. The lavish hotel-casinos seldom made a dime by hiring top-drawer attractions like Dean Martin or Elvis Presley. But they were the honey trap that drew in the punters, who played the tables and fed the slots. This made perfect sense - even if the shows were budgeted to run at a loss, the gambling operations never were. The legacy was a special style of entertaining that is distinctively Vegas. It's louche and adult. It's not for TV. It's for an audience that's a long way from home and prepared to let the chips fall where they may. It's for people on vacation from their more respectable selves.

There are some wonderful expressions of that special Las Vegas attitude in this series. Performing at the Sands Hotel in 1967, Dean Martin Live From Las Vegas plays his audience like willing conspirators. He ladles on the leering charm and acts the role of the world's happiest drunk - even if it was apple juice in that glass (Sinatra once claimed to spill more booze than Dino really drank). The warmth comes off him in great waves. Audrey Hepburn's coming on next, he beams. Topless! 'She'll be singing It's a Marshmallow World.' And then he asks: 'How d'you make a fruit cordial?'. But the room is already so tuned in that he doesn't bother with the punch line (it was probably 'Be nice to him'). He simply tracks the hilarity as it sweeps across the room. 'Oh, this is a good crowd! They don't need no answers!' And there is no way on earth that Martin's TV show could have accommodated the knowing gag about Cary 'Cathy' Grant.

In the same way, Bobby Darin Live From Las Vegas, recorded at the Flamingo in 1963, reveals a performer that only his live audiences ever got to know. Darin was a singer whose life fell awkwardly between the old school entertainment era and the rise of 1960s rock culture. On the night of this show he was preparing his exit from cabaret - he was probably the only person in the room who could see a new epoch coming in, whose icon would be Bob Dylan rather than Frank Sinatra. There's a going-through-the-motions in his medley of the big Darin hits, (Splish Splash, Beyond The Sea, Mack The Knife) but the comedy is sharp. And Darin's knack for hipping up the squarest of Tin Pan Alley standards is terrific.

Others in the series include the jazzily dramatic Nancy Wilson Live From Las Vegas, made at the Sands in 1968 andWayne Newton: Mr Las Vegas, a compilation of the weirdly high-voiced singer's US hits, plus a few Various Artist jobs: High Rollers From Las Vegas and Live From Las Vegas. But the revelation for me at least was another disc, Louis Prima And Keely Smith Live From Las Vegas, the husband-and-wife duo at the Sahara around 1956.

Louis Prima was a tubby and fading band-leader until he married a cute young singer named Keely Smith and they were hired by the Casbar Lounge of the new Sahara Hotel, a place apparently guarded by statues of huge camels. Backed by Sam Butera & The Winesses they made a big, sassy, swinging beast of a noise, laced with highly adult innuendo. They must have been a gas. Prima made a comeback some years later as the voice of Disney's Jungle Book character ('Oh boop-be-doo, I wanna be like you' etc) but here his rasping growl is set to bantering routines with Keely. 'Can't help lovin' that Italian Stallion of mine,' she sings, to whoops of laughter all around. 'Oh I wish it was like that. I'm too young for this man!' 'That's a stage joke!' Prima rushes to assure us. 'I wish it was,' she comes back. They divorced a few years later.

Frank Sinatra Live From Las Vegas comes from 1986, so the man is long past his prime. But he still sounds like he's in the place he was always meant to be. It's doubtful, indeed, whether Vegas would have become the phenomenon it did without Sinatra's involvement. As the director Billy Wilder said: 'When Sinatra is in Las Vegas there is a certain electricity permeating the air. It's like Mack The Knife is in town, and the action is starting.' Though he's plumply affable in this show from his dotage, some of the old edge is summoned by the classic Vegas text, Luck Be A Lady - that desperate hymn to the fickle goddess, the perfect summary of every gambler's superstitious core.

So Las Vegas still rules. When Elvis Presley went there to rebuild his late career, it was somehow symbolic and penitent. The King of Rock'n'Roll had to submit to Show Business after all. In Shawn Levy's book Ratpack Confidential, he describes the way that Las Vegas' appeal skipped a whole generation of Americans. For the post-War baby boomers, the spectacle of Frank and his swinging pals was not the epitome of cool, aspirational sophistication. Quite the opposite. It was, he says, 'an emblem of wretched excess and establishment boorishness, its stars a cavalcade of lackeys for the degenerate nightmare of American society, its very locale a synonym for sinful consumerist culture.' But then their own children came of age, and they loved the whole deal - the irony, the glamour, the echo of a lost age when cigarette packets came without the Surgeon General's warning.