Petula Clark ‘Downtown’

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Published in SOS January 2012

Technique : Classic Tracks


The single ‘Downtown’ gave Petula Clark a worldwide hit and rejuvenated her career. Presiding over the session was engineer Ray Prickett, who tells us how it happened...
Richard Buskin
Petula Clark with a gold disc for ‘Downtown’, 1965.
Petula Clark with a gold disc for ‘Downtown’, 1965.
Photo: R McPhedran/Express/Getty Images
Nowadays, orchestral pop hits are largely a thing of the past. It is no longer a common occurrence for contemporary singers to be tracked live in the studio alongside string, horn, and woodwind sections, as well as electric guitars, keyboards and drums. But it was the standard way of working back in October 1964, when Petula Clark recorded ‘Downtown’ at the Pye Studios on London’s Marble Arch.
Released the following month, it became a number two UK hit that December and a US chart-topper in January 1965. This celebration of curing life’s problems by revelling in the bright lights, neon signs and “music of the traffic in the city” was not only the perfect encapsulation of pre-psychedelic swinging ’60s optimism, but also a classic example of the brilliantly arranged, instantly infectious three-minute single that melded mod sensibilities with showbiz polish. And to think, the lyrics penned by its English composer/producer were not even inspired by the attractions of his nation’s suddenly in-vogue capital.
“‘Downtown’ was written on the occasion of my first visit to New York,” Tony Hatch would later recall. “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 song came to me very, very quickly.”
‘We Need A Hit...’
The control panel of Pye’s three-track Ampex (not the four-track used on ‘Downtown’).
The control panel of Pye’s three-track Ampex (not the four-track used on ‘Downtown’).
Photo: British Pathé
A child star of film, TV, radio and record, known in the 1940s as ‘Britain’s Shirley Temple’, Petula Clark had been signed to Pye since 1955 and enjoyed her first UK number one in 1961 with ‘Sailor’. Although Alan A Freeman had produced that track, as he had all of Clark’s recordings since 1949, his assistant on the ‘Sailor’ session was Tony Hatch, whose first song recorded by her was the 1963 flop ‘Valentino’. Thereafter, Hatch took over as her producer and capitalised on Petula’s popularity in Europe via some French-language releases.
At home, it was a different story. A string of nondescript singles meant that, by 1964, she was in dire need of an English-language hit, so Hatch visited her home in Paris to play her three or four songs he had acquired from music publishers on a trip to New York. Pet wasn’t impressed... until she heard a few bars of an incomplete soul number that Hatch intended offering to the Drifters.
“We already knew that we had to make a record,” Hatch recalled in a 2009 interview with Gary James. “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.’”
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Published in SOS January 2012

 

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In this article:
‘We Need A Hit...’
The Session
Career Engineer
Recording The Pye Way
Aftermath
Disc Cutting

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