Today we send birthday wishes to an icon, a titan even, of British pop. Petula Clark, who turns ninety-four today.
Clark started her singing career as a child, entertaining the forces during World War II, and released her first records in 1949, before a British singles chart even existed.
Her first chart hit came in 1954, when ‘The Little Shoemaker’ made #7. It was probably a banger by the standards of the day, upbeat and peppy, but still very old-fashioned to our modern ears. Who’d have thought that of all the pre-rock stars seen off by rock ‘n’ roll and the beat groups, Petula Clark would be one of the few to make it through the following two decades?
Her first of two UK #1s came in 1961, with ‘Sailor’, an English re-write of a German schlager tune. Read my original post on it here. And here she is singing it, introduced by a fresh-faced Cliff Richard.
The mid-sixties was Clark’s most successful period, not just in Britain, and the US, but in Europe. She was arguably most famous in France, where she had an entirely separate chart career, as well as recording records in German and Spanish. Here’s her first French hit, ‘Prends mon Coeur’, which you might recognise as a French re-write of a song Elvis had taken to number one in 1959.
Of course, we couldn’t do this birthday post without including Clark’s signature hit, perhaps the defining hit of the ‘swinging sixties’: ‘Downtown’ – a UK #2 and a US #1. But have you ever heard it in German, where it was also a chart-topper? And did you know that the German for ‘downtown’ is… ‘downtown’?
In 1966, right in the middle of this prolific spell, with Clark in partnership with writer and producer Tony Hatch, and his wife Jackie Trent, she released what I would list in my Top 5 pop songs of all time. Just absolutely perfect pop. Pop perfection. I may be biased, as ‘I Couldn’t Live Without Your Love’ was on a sixties compilation cassette that my parents would listen to in the car when I was wee, and therefore it is just about the first pop song I can remember hearing. And thirty-five years on it still sounds amazing.
Her partnership with Hatch and Trent also brought about another US number one in ‘My Love’, and the #4 hit ‘Don’t Sleep in the Subway’. Her second British chart-topper – the delightfully cheesy ‘This Is My Song’ – wasn’t written by Hatch and Trent. Instead it was composed by one Charlie Chaplin. Clark supposedly never liked it, but it would prove to be her final British Top 10 hit for twenty-one years, until a remix of ‘Downtown’ made #10 in 1988.
After a chart career spanning pre-rock, rock ‘n’ roll and the swinging sixties, Clark’s fortunes finally gave out as the seventies arrived. But she continued to record and perform, and act – she’s been in at least twenty-five films, as well as starring in ‘Mary Poppins’ in the West End at the ripe age of eighty-seven.
Her most recent release was this gem from 2013, in which she gave Lana del Rey a run for her money…
And here she is in the same year, covering our most recent #1 – ‘Crazy’ – for Jools Holland’s Hootenanny, and delivering us all a lesson in how to make a song your own.
Many happy returns, Ms Clark!
