Petula Clark: "Downtown"

February 1, 1965 (1 week)

By the early part of December 1988 I had watched around a dozen episodes of Top of the Pops. No great total, I know, but I had only been in the UK since that August and I wasn't to know about Britain's favourite music show until starting school the following month. Though the late eighties had become awash in teen pop, TOTP in that era had its share of veteran performers. Phil Collins appeared on the first episode I recall watching, miming at a piano to "A Groovy Kind of Love" which also happened to be occupying the number one spot. It was followed by The Hollies and a reissue of their classic "He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother". By December, the Christmas Number One race was supposed to be on but it sort of stalled when Cliff Richard's yuletide fave "Mistletoe and Wine" rather annoyingly took first place and refused to cede its position. Not only were the elderly appearing on TOTP but they were doing so while at number one.

Though not a chart topper, one of the other hits I can recall being performed by a pop music vet was "Downtown '88" by Petula Clark. Even alongside the likes of Collins and Richard she looked ancient. She looked like my grandmothers back home. She looked like Mrs. Vine, my geography teacher who chain smoked and who we nicknamed 'Chimney Pot'. She looked like those British women who hosted dating and light entertainment shows back then (with catchphrases like "Press your buttons now!") only that much older. My mum knew "Downtown" and informed that it had been popular when she was in school. What she neglected to mention was that Petula Clark was getting up there even back in her day.

I just turned forty-eight this past week so I suppose I'm one to talk but being thirty-two years old in the midst of mid-sixties' pop might as well have been the grandmotherly figure Clark cut nearly a half-century later on TOTP. But not only did she look like she was more than ten years older than Paul McCartney but she also sounded like a throwback. It was as if she had been Julie Andrews' less talented, less charismatic older sister who had finally caught a break. This perception wasn't entirely accurate since she had been a well known figure in the UK and most of western Europe. She had even reached number one back in Britain in 1961 with her English language version of "Salior", a CHUM chart topper for Austrian singer Lolita. Her fortunes had been rather up and down over the years but success in North America proved elusive until the British Invasion took off and she became one of its unlikeliest stars.

"Downtown" was the work of British songwriter Tony Hatch who would go on to co-compose such memorable TV theme songs as Crossroads and Neighbours (though not, much to my surprise, the wonderful tune to Eastenders). Prior to finding his real calling, however, he made a living at pop and had forged a thriving producer-singer relationship with Petula Clark going all the way back to "Sailor". By 1964 they must have felt that having a hit on Billboard's Hot 100 was simply not in the cards. Cliff Richard had only barely managed to crack the US charts and he was considerably younger than Clark. The arrival of The Beatles only managed to expose how out-of-date their predecessors were, the cheery, multilingual Petula Clark being among them.

Yet, few seemed to care that "Downtown" was such a throwback. The vast majority of people probably didn't even notice. In fact, its very nature as an old fashioned pop song works in its favour. It could easily be from one of the "movie shows" or from a Broadway musical that are implicitly being celebrated. "Ah, but Broadway is in Midtown," some of you more knowledgeable types may be saying but that's not remotely the point. New Yorkers may know about Downtown and Uptown and the area in between but the rest of us can only speculate. It is the thrill of possibly one day visiting the Big Apple that "Downtown" celebrates. The seedy part of Manhattan? It's nowhere to be found. (Prefab Sprout's "Hey Manhattan", off their great 1988 album From Langley Park to Memphis, does a far better job mixing the city's glamour with its sleaziness)

While I like the idea of romanticizing NYC, "Downtown" isn't an entirely successful attempt at doing so. Perhaps my knowledge of Clark's "advancing" age ruins it as I can't get passed wishing it had been sung by someone far younger. Tony Hatch's future career in UK and Aussie soap theme tunes creeps in as the chorus has the ring of the opening music to an American sit com about a newly independent — and, possibly, divorced — youngish woman arriving in the Big City to make it on her own, like if The Mary Tyler Moore Show had been set in a more glamorous town than Minneapolis. (Like Denver, perhaps?) Not to mention, who actually finds the downtown area of a major city to be a place where you go to avoid loneliness? I tend to gravitate towards big cities but I am under no apprehension just how alienating and soul-sucking they can be. The song itself may be harmless fun but it does little alleviate the shittiness of being alone in a giant megalopolis.

Score: 5