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Downtown — Petula Clark
Petula Clark’s delightfully crisp diction really stands out on her 1964 Billboard Number One record “Downtown”.
With the possible exception of Julie Andrews…and even then, it’s arguable whose vocals are the crisper…Petula Clark showed the world how to have a Number One record without mumbling and slurring her words, which has been the fashionable vocal style for most of the cool kids pretty much since the dawn of rock and roll.
“Downtown” was written by Tony Hatch, a legendary British songwriter of the 1960s and beyond. In his later years, he often wrote with his wife Jackie Trent, but back in the early 1960s, it was Tony all on his own.
He had a special relationship with Petula Clark, writing and producing many of her most popular recordings.
Petula Clark had started in the entertainment industry many years before meeting Tony Hatch, though. She was something of an old hand by the time he came along.
First coming to the attention of the British public as a child star on radio during the Second World War, by the early 1960s Petula Clark was recording in French, German and Italian, as well as English, and had a UK Number One record to her name already, with “Sailor”, in 1961.
But it was her collaboration with Tony Hatch that propelled Petula Clark to international stardom…
