This was Petula Clark’s first hit in the US, which was slow to discover her talents. In the UK, she was a star as a singer and as a television performer, where she was a regular on the BBC. In the early ’60s, she also caught on in France when she started recording her songs in French. Oddly, she didn’t get an American record deal until late in 1964 when a Warner Bros. executive named Joe Smith, who was vacationing in England, heard the song and signed her to a deal. Remarkably, she didn’t even promote the song before it hit the top spot, as she was touring French-speaking countries at the time. “The Ed Sullivan Show had been calling every day while I was on tour in Canada saying, ‘You’ve got to get here,'” Petula told us. “I couldn’t get there. Eventually I got there, and the record was #1.”
When “Downtown” was released in the US, it shot to #1, making Petula the first female singer from the UK to hit #1 in the US during the rock era (after 1955). Petula Clark was sometimes called “the first lady of the British Invasion”, due more to the timing of this release, as Clark wasn’t a rock ‘n’ roller. She didn’t really have anything to do with the explosion of teenage excitement that was coming out of her country at the same time that she scored her biggest hit. Instead, she was an old-school orchestral-pop belter, a part of a lineage that would come to include singers like Dusty Springfield, Barbra Streisand, Dionne Warwick.
Petula Clark came to record this song at a time when she had carved a successful career in French, Italian and German-speaking territories. She recalled to The Guardian that Tony Hatch, who composed this song, suggested she should be recording again in English. She admitted:
My head wasn’t in it at the time. I was totally into French, Italian, German, whatever. I said: ‘Well, you know, if I could find the right song’ and he said he had an unfinished song he wanted to play me, and he played ‘Downtown’ on the piano. I said: ‘Woah, I like that.’ So I asked him to write a lyric up to the standard of the tune, and two weeks later we did it.
Tony Hatch had first worked with Petula Clark when he assisted her regular producer Alan A. Freeman on her 1961 UK #1 hit “Sailor”. In the autumn of 1964 Hatch had made his first visit to New York City, spending three days there in search of material from music publishers for the artists he was producing. He recalled:
I was staying at a hotel on Central Park and I wandered down to Broadway and to Times Square and, naively, I thought I was downtown. Forgetting that in New York especially, downtown is a lot further downtown getting on towards Battery Park. I loved the whole atmosphere there and the [music] came to me very, very quickly”. He was standing on the corner of 48th Street waiting for the traffic lights to change, looking towards Times Square when “the melody first came to me, just as the neon signs went on.
Hatch envisioned his embryonic composition “as a sort of doo wop R&B song” which he thought to eventually pitch to The Drifters. Within a few days of his New York City junket Hatch visited Paris to present Clark with three or four songs he’d acquired from New York publishers for Clark to consider recording at a London recording session scheduled for 16 October 1964, which was roughly two weeks away. According to Clark, besides the title lyric, Hatch had only written “one or two lines.” Hatch recalled:
We already knew that we had to make a record. I had a studio booked with an orchestra, ready to do a new recording session with her. And she said, ‘Aren’t you working on anything yourself?’ Reluctantly, I played her the idea of ‘Downtown’, because I’m always reluctant to play half-finished songs. She immediately saw tremendous potential in it. She was the one who said, ‘Get that finished. Get a good lyric in it. Get a great arrangement and I think we’ll at least have a song we’re proud to record even if it isn’t a hit.’
Clark recorded the song with a massive 40-piece orchestra behind her, and Hatch, producing the song, has said that the challenge was to get this orchestra to play like a rock ‘n’ roll band. It didn’t really work. Hatch said of his arrangement:
I had to connect with young record buyers… but not alienate Pet[ula]’s older core audience… The trick was to make a giant orchestra sound like a rock band.
A young Jimmy Page was one of the 40 musicians on the song, though you can’t really hear him. Thirty minutes before it commenced, Tony Hatch was still fiddling with the lyrics in the studio’s lavatory. This was because when he took charge of a production he insisted on everyone recording together at the same time, be they members of a four-piece group or, as in this case, a large ensemble. The musicians assembled included eight violinists, two viola players and two cellists, four trumpeters and four trombonists, five woodwind players with flutes and oboes, percussionists, a bass player and a pianist.
When you listened to any of the mics, there wasn’t full 100 percent separation. Not by a long way, because that wasn’t what we were aiming for. The way I saw it, and Tony agreed with this, was that the sound wasn’t as good when we recorded different sections separately. When the whole orchestra plays together, something happens — all of the air is being moved by those instruments and that’s what gives you a big, ambient sound. This is why there was minimal screening even around the vocalists; maximum separation would have defeated the object of having all those people playing in that room.
Tony Hatch would recall playing the completed “Downtown” track for Pye Records executives saying:
Nobody knew what to make of it and no release date was set. Then Pye’s general manager called and said Joe Smith – Warner Bros.’ head of A&R – was in London looking for British material. When Joe heard Pet[ula]’s record, he loved it and scheduled the single for urgent release in the [United] States.
When Hatch, surprised by Smith’s enthusiasm for releasing “Downtown” in the US, asked if Smith didn’t consider “Downtown” to be a “very English record” Smith replied: “It’s perfect. It’s just an observation from outside of America and it’s just beautiful and just perfect.”
From a chance beginning at age 9, Clark would appear on radio, film, print, television and recordings by the time she turned 17. In October 1942, the 9-year-old Clark made her radio debut while attending a BBC broadcast with her father. She was there trying to send a message to an uncle stationed overseas, but the broadcast was delayed by an air raid. During the bombing, the producer requested that someone perform to settle the jittery theatre audience, and she volunteered a rendering of “Mighty Lak’ a Rose” to an enthusiastic response. She then repeated her performance for the broadcast audience, launching a series of some 500 appearances in programmes designed to entertain the troops. In addition to radio work, Clark frequently toured the United Kingdom with fellow child performer Julie Andrews. Nicknamed the “Singing Sweetheart”, she performed for George VI, Winston Churchill and Bernard Montgomery. Clark also became known as “Britain’s Shirley Temple” and was considered a mascot by the British Army, whose troops plastered her photos on their tanks for good luck as they advanced into battle.
In 1960, she embarked on a concert tour of France and Belgium with Sacha Distel, who remained a close friend until his death in 2004. Gradually she moved further into the continent, recording in German, French, Italian and Spanish, and establishing herself as a multi-lingual performer.
By 1964, Clark’s British recording career was foundering. But with the recording of “Downtown, her fortunes changed rather drastically. “Downtown” was the first of 15 consecutive Top 40 hits Clark achieved in the United States, including “I Know a Place,” “My Love” (her second U.S. No. 1 hit), “A Sign of the Times,” “I Couldn’t Live Without Your Love,” “This Is My Song” and “Don’t Sleep in the Subway.”
“Downtown” would go on to win the Ivor Novello Award for “Outstanding Song of the Year” 1964, Grammy Award for “Best Rock and Roll Song” in 1965, as well as certified Gold in the US and UK. It has been covered by over 50 artists. Petula Clark would be entered into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2003.
After more than 50 years, she has been a persistent artist appearing on television, radio, films, and theater. Petula embarked on a tour of the United States in November 2017 on her first US tour in five decades. On April 20, 2018, a French-Canadian album was released, “Vu d’ici”.
On Christmas day 2020, The “Nashville Bomber” used this song in the recorded warning message:
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