A Cellar Full of Noise: The Battles Behind Petula Clark’s ‘I Know a Place’

Every No. 1 record carries a curse disguised as a gift: the follow-up. In January 1965, Petula Clark — a 32-year-old Paris-based former child star who had only just been introduced to America — topped the Billboard Hot 100 with “Downtown” and became the first British woman to reach No. 1 in the United States in the rock-and-roll era. It was the kind of breakthrough that can ruin a career as easily as make one. If the next single flopped, she would be filed forever as a novelty: the English lady who got lucky once, in the middle of a British Invasion staged almost entirely by teenage boys with guitars. Pye Records in London and Warner Bros. in America needed a second single, and they needed it while “Downtown” was still ringing in the public ear.

Writer-producer Tony Hatch answered the emergency by doing the bravest and most dangerous thing available to him: he wrote the same song again, only different. “I Know a Place”, released in March 1965, kept the piano-led build, the brass, the big chorus and the invitation to escape into the city — and was promptly accused of being a near-carbon copy of its predecessor. Yet the copy fought its own battles and won most of them: No. 3 in America, No. 1 in Canada and South Africa, a second consecutive Grammy Award for Clark, and a career converted from phenomenon into permanence. This is the story of the sequel that had to prove the original was no accident.

The Impossible Second Act

To understand the pressure on “I Know a Place”, consider how unlikely the first act had been. Clark was not a discovery in any normal sense. She had been famous in Britain since childhood, a wartime radio and film star; she had already topped the UK chart in 1961 with “Sailor”, a record on which a young Pye trainee named Tony Hatch had assisted producer Alan A. Freeman. Since a triumphant 1957 appearance at the Olympia in Paris she had built a second, entirely separate career as a French chanteuse, recording for Vogue, marrying her publicist Claude Wolff in 1961 and settling in Paris. When Hatch finally coaxed her back into an English-language studio with “Downtown”, she was, in American terms, a complete unknown of a most unfashionable kind: a grown woman, a wife, a veteran, in a market being remade by teenagers.

“Downtown” detonated anyway. It reached No. 2 in Britain and, in January 1965, No. 1 in America, and at the 7th Annual Grammy Awards it won Best Rock & Roll Recording while Clark was simultaneously nominated as Best New Artist — an absurd and telling double identity for a woman with two decades of fame behind her. Warner Bros. executive Joe Smith had heard the record in Hatch’s London office and, by Hatch’s own account, “just flipped. He said ‘This is fantastic. I’ve got to have this.’” That enthusiasm committed both labels to a proposition that had to be tested immediately: was Petula Clark an artist, or an accident?

The follow-up single is where accidents are exposed. The machinery of 1965 pop allowed no pause for reflection: a hit had a commercial half-life measured in weeks, a rival cover version or a cooler new act was always waiting, and Clark’s base of operations was an ocean away from the market that now mattered most. She could not tour America relentlessly or haunt its television studios at will; the record itself had to do the travelling. Hatch therefore had to write, arrange and produce a single that would sound instantly familiar to the millions who had bought “Downtown”, yet strong enough to stand examination as a song in its own right. Get it wrong in either direction — too strange, and radio would balk; too similar, and critics would sneer — and the whole American experiment could collapse back into a Paris career and a footnote.

Lightning in a Bottle, Again

Hatch’s solution was conceptual as much as musical. “Downtown” had sold the entire city as the cure for loneliness: when you’re alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go downtown. “I Know a Place” narrows the lens from the city to a single room inside it. The singer is no longer pointing at a district; she is confiding a secret address. “Just get away where your worries won’t find you”, she urges, to a place “where the music is fine and the lights are always low” — a club with a man at the door, stairs going down, tables and chairs, and a band that will soon have you tapping your feet. It is the same promise as “Downtown”, but privatised: not urban wonder in general, but membership. You are not a tourist any more. You are one of the people who know.

Musically, Hatch made the copy argument easy for his critics. The record opens, like “Downtown”, with solo piano before the arrangement swells around it; AllMusic would later describe the formula as a piano introduction building into a “quasi-wall-of-sound” production set to a rollicking beat. But there are deliberate differences hiding inside the resemblance. “I Know a Place” has, as its chroniclers note, much more of a rock and roll beat than its predecessor — it pushes where “Downtown” sways — and its vocal arrangement is denser and more jubilant, a singer leading a congregation rather than strolling ahead of one. If it was the same trick, it was the trick performed faster and louder, by people who now knew exactly whom they were performing it for.

There is a further irony in who was doing the writing. Hatch had spent his early years at Pye composing under false names — Mark Anthony, and once Fred Nightingale — because the label worried that outside songwriters and publishers would suspect the staff producer of favouring his own material over theirs. Only by the middle of 1964 was he regularly putting his own name on his songs at all. Which is to say: the man assigned to manufacture the most scrutinised follow-up in British pop had, a matter of months earlier, not been permitted to sign his own work. AllMusic’s album review would describe “I Know a Place” as something Hatch and Clark “quickly concocted” on the heels of “Downtown”’s success, and the speed was real — but so was the accumulation behind it. The concoction took weeks. The partnership that made it possible had been four years in the building, ever since the trainee Hatch had assisted on “Sailor”.

Then there is the joke buried in the lyric, twice repeated: the band makes “a cellar full of noise”. The phrase was a deliberate reference to A Cellarful of Noise, the 1964 autobiography of Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, whose title evoked the below-street Cavern Club in Liverpool where he had first heard his group. Hatch — a Beatles admirer who had discovered the Searchers playing in a Liverpool club and signed them to Pye — was saluting, inside a Petula Clark record, the cellar that had launched the entire British Invasion. It was a sly piece of scene-setting: the “place” of the song is every basement club where the new British music had incubated, and Clark, the Invasion’s most unlikely recruit, was singing her way down its stairs.

Marble Arch

The record was cut in 1965 at Pye Studios in Marble Arch, London — the Great Cumberland Place rooms where the Clark–Hatch hits were made — with Hatch producing and arranging, as he did on all of them. The speed and economy of British studio practice in 1965 meant that a record like this was essentially a live performance captured by professionals: a full orchestra, a rhythm section of first-call session men, backing singers, and a vocalist who had been performing since before most of them were born. The polish on a Petula Clark record was never an accident of technology; it was the sound of a room full of people who did this every day, doing it superbly.

On drums sat Bobby Graham, one of the anonymous architects of the British Invasion. Graham is credited with playing on some 15,000 recordings, including 13 UK No. 1 singles, for everyone from the Kinks and Dusty Springfield to Tom Jones and the Dave Clark Five; producer Shel Talmy called him “the greatest drummer the UK has ever produced”. He had also played on “Downtown”, and it is his drive that gives “I Know a Place” its extra rock-and-roll muscle — the backbeat is the biggest single difference between the two records, and it belongs largely to him. Men like Graham were the record industry’s open secret: the stars changed with the seasons, but the beat was supplied, year after year, by the same half-dozen pairs of hands.

Graham’s career also illustrates the peculiar invisibility of the men and women who actually made the British Invasion swing. It was suspected for decades, and formally acknowledged only in 2004, that Graham had played drums on most of the Dave Clark Five’s hits in place of Dave Clark himself — meaning that one of the era’s flagship groups had its sound supplied, uncredited, by a session man. Graham even maintained that Brian Epstein had once sounded him out about the drummer’s chair in the Beatles after Pete Best’s dismissal, the job that went to Ringo Starr. None of this was known to the teenagers buying “I Know a Place” in 1965, and none of it needed to be. But it is part of the record’s hidden architecture: behind the most famous female voice of the British Invasion stood an entire regiment of the uncredited, and the follow-up’s famous energy was theirs as much as hers.

The female voices soaring behind Clark belonged to the Breakaways, the Liverpool girl group Hatch kept on retainer at Pye. “I had a girls vocal backing group called The Breakaways that I used a tremendous amount”, Hatch recalled. “They came from Liverpool.” The Liverpool thread in this record is remarkable once you notice it: a Liverpool backing group, a lyric tipping its hat to Brian Epstein’s Liverpool cellar, a producer who had scouted the Searchers in a Liverpool club — all of it in service of a singer from Epsom by way of Paris. The single ran just 2 minutes 39 seconds, was backed with another Hatch song, “Jack and John”, and was issued as Pye 7N 15772 in Britain and Warner Bros. 5612 in the United States.

Forty-Five Minutes

The single arrived in March 1965, on the heels of a predecessor that was still a current hit, and the trade press received it warmly: Billboard‘s singles review of 13 March 1965 called it “another winning performance” from Clark and praised Hatch’s production. But the true launchpad was television. On 14 March 1965, Clark made her first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, then the most powerful shop window in American entertainment — and she very nearly missed it. As Sullivan himself later explained during his “Best of the 1960s” retrospective, her plane landed and, 45 minutes later, she performed live, without any rehearsal. That night she sang “Downtown” and, hot off the presses, its follow-up, “I Know a Place”.

Consider the risk compressed into that anecdote. An unrehearsed live performance, on America’s biggest variety stage, by an artist defending a brand-new single on which her whole American future depended, minutes after stepping off a transatlantic flight. It worked because live performance was the one arena in which Clark could never be mistaken for a novelty: she had been commanding stages since childhood, and her ease under those conditions was itself a refutation of the one-hit-wonder theory. Sullivan’s audience did not see a lucky amateur. It saw a professional of terrifying completeness, singing a new song as if she had been singing it for years.

The exposure was then repeated until it became familiarity. Clark returned to the Sullivan show on 16 May 1965 to sing “I Know a Place” again — the performance preserved in the video above — sharing that edition with Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn, in the Sullivan manner of placing a pop singer in the middle of high culture and letting the audience sort it out. In October 1965 she hosted NBC’s Hullabaloo, the era’s flagship pop programme, and opened with a medley of “Downtown” and “I Know a Place”, the hit and its sequel formally stitched together as a double act. The strategy was unmistakable: never let America encounter the second song without remembering the first, until the second no longer needed the introduction.

Nor was this mere spring-of-1965 promotion, quickly discarded. The song stayed in her American television act for years: she performed it on The Lloyd Thaxton Show in 1966, and when Sullivan took his programme to Montreal to tape at Expo 67 in May 1967, “I Know a Place” was still in her set, alongside “My Love”, “Downtown” and “This Is My Song”, two years and several hits after its release. A follow-up single is normally the most disposable object in pop — its job is to be replaced by the next one. Clark instead folded hers into the permanent furniture of her act, where it sat for decades in her hit medleys, a fixture of her stage shows long after the chart arguments were forgotten. The song had been written to survive a season. She treated it as built to survive a career, and it obliged.

Number Three

The chart run was a war of inches fought in the most competitive season of the British Invasion. “I Know a Place” spent twelve weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, five of them inside the Top Ten: it reached No. 9 in its fourth week, No. 4 in its fifth and sixth, and peaked at No. 3 in its seventh — on the chart dated 1 May 1965 — before slipping back through No. 6 and No. 11. Rival chart Cash Box placed it one position higher, at No. 2. On Billboard‘s year-end reckoning it stood among the forty biggest singles of 1965. For a supposed carbon copy, it was a formidable result: nearly two months in the American Top Ten in the spring of the Beatles, the Stones and the Supremes.

The two records above her in her peak week tell their own story. At No. 1 sat Herman’s Hermits with “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter”, a piece of Lancashire music-hall charm that had debuted at No. 12 — then the third-highest debut of the decade — and swept to the top. At No. 2, descending from a week at No. 1, was Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders’ “The Game of Love”. The entire American top three, in other words, was British. Clark’s battle that spring was not against American competition; it was for rank inside an invasion, competing with younger, hipper compatriots for the same finite supply of radio time and teenage money — and the 32-year-old from Paris finished ahead of all but two records in the country.

Around the world, the map was emphatic in her favour. “I Know a Place” reached No. 1 in Canada — topping the RPM chart for a week in April 1965, her second Canadian No. 1 after “Downtown” — and No. 1 in South Africa, No. 3 in Rhodesia, No. 7 in Australia and No. 10 in India. And then there was the exception that defined her decade: in Britain, her homeland, the single stalled at No. 17 during an eight-week run. The moderate home performance, as her chart historians note, established the mid-60s pattern of Clark having more hit impact in the United States than in Britain. At home she was still filed as a light-entertainment veteran of radio and pantomime, a survivor of an earlier show business; abroad, unburdened by memory, audiences simply heard a great pop singer. She was, in the old show-business phrase, a prophet without honour in her own country — except that the dishonour came with a No. 3 American single attached.

It is worth pausing on what No. 3 actually certified. Pop history is littered with follow-ups that charted respectably and still ended careers, because a modest second hit reads as confirmation that the first was the ceiling. “I Know a Place” did the opposite work: arriving while “Downtown” was still in the charts, it overlapped with its predecessor like a relay runner taking the baton at full speed, and it converted a three-month sensation into an ongoing concern. Record World, the third of America’s trade charts, matched Billboard at No. 3; the record was, by every American measure except one chart position, as big as the machinery of 1965 could make a second single. Clark has said she was ecstatic simply that it was “nearly as big a hit as ‘Downtown’”. Nearly, in the follow-up business, is not a consolation prize. Nearly is the whole game.

Viens Avec Moi

While all this was happening in English, Clark was simultaneously fighting on a second front that none of her British Invasion rivals even had: France. Her French career was not a sideline but a parallel stardom, serviced with its own recordings for Vogue, and so “I Know a Place” was remade in French as “Viens Avec Moi”, which charted in both France and Belgium. The arrangement was the same, the voice was the same, but the persona was different — in France she was not the cheerful visitor from London but an established chanteuse with years of hits behind her, and the song joined a repertoire that French audiences considered partly theirs.

That French stardom had itself been hard won. Invited to sing at the Olympia in Paris in 1957, she had conquered the room so completely that an entire second career had been constructed on the spot — and, remarkably, she had at first declined to record in French at all before being persuaded by Claude Wolff, the publicist she would marry in 1961. By 1965 she was so thoroughly naturalised that French record shops filed her as a French singer. The result was a workload no other British act carried: each Hatch single existed to be re-thought in another language, another persona, another market that regarded itself as her true home. “Viens Avec Moi” is the sound of that double life at full stretch — an American hit, written by an Englishman, sung by a Parisian.

The French front produced the single most poetic footnote in the song’s whole history. On 31 March 1965 — the very month the English single was released — French television filmed a special at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, the subterranean room where Brian Epstein had discovered the Beatles. On a bill with Sandie Shaw, Manfred Mann, Gerry and the Pacemakers and Gene Vincent, Clark performed “Viens Avec Moi”. Which means that the woman singing about “a cellar full of noise”, in a lyric written as a nod to Epstein’s book about that exact cellar, performed the song standing in the cellar itself, in French, while its English original was climbing the American charts. Pop history rarely arranges its symmetries so neatly.

Yet the double career was also a genuine burden, and it forms the quieter battle behind this record. Clark’s life in 1965 was a triangle of Paris, London and New York: French sessions and French television, English recording dates at Pye with Hatch, and American promotional sorties executed at a run — the Sullivan dash from the airport being only the most famous. Every market assumed it had first claim on her; every language required its own versions, its own interviews, its own television rounds. That “I Know a Place” succeeded everywhere except, relatively, at home is partly a story about a singer stretched across three show-business capitals, succeeding by sheer professional stamina where younger rivals needed only one country at a time.

The Album Trail

A hit single in 1965 demanded an album behind it, and the LP I Know a Place followed on Warner Bros., entering the Billboard album chart at the end of May 1965 and peaking at No. 42 during a seventeen-week run. In Britain, Pye released the same album under a different, revealingly anxious title: The New Petula Clark Album. “New” was a word her British handlers felt she needed and her American ones did not — in America she was simply new, full stop. The British title was eventually dropped from later reissues because it confused record buyers, a small publishing comedy that neatly summarises the two markets’ different Petulas: in London she had to be relaunched; in New York she merely had to be supplied.

The album, arranged and produced by Hatch and closing with the title track, turned out to be a song factory whose products escaped in every direction. It introduced “You’re the One”, written by Hatch with Clark herself, which became a UK hit for Clark and then a US Top Ten hit for the Vogues; and it introduced “Call Me”, which Chris Montez took into the US Top 30. Hatch later explained the mechanism without embarrassment: his American publishers would take an album he had made with Clark and “immediately go out and try and get covers on all the album material… That was my publisher in America working the songs.” Even its obscurities travelled: another album cut, “Strangers and Lovers”, was the song a young Helen Reddy chose for the Australian television talent contest she won in 1965 — the victory, as Reddy told it in her memoir, that carried her from Australia to America. The sequel album to a sequel single was quietly seeding other people’s careers.

The rest of the album’s programme shows the tightrope Clark was walking. It opens with “Dancing in the Street”, the Motown anthem, and includes Dobie Gray’s recent hit “The ‘In’ Crowd” — gestures toward the young, Black American music her singles were competing with — then sets them beside Gershwin’s “A Foggy Day”, “Every Little Bit Hurts” and “Goin’ Out of My Head”, the standards-and-soul repertoire of the supper-club singer she had always been. There is even “Heart”, co-written by Clark with Georges Aber and Hatch, a reminder that the supposed puppet of her producer was a composer in her own right. The LP is the documentary evidence of her double identity in 1965: half British Invasion hit machine, half international cabaret artist, and wholly unwilling to surrender either half.

And the conveyor belt ran on. Clark’s next two singles were again Hatch compositions in the same vein: “You’d Better Come Home”, which reached No. 22 in the US against No. 44 in Britain, and “Round Every Corner”, No. 21 in America and No. 43 at home — both repeating, with diminishing but still substantial returns, the formula and the transatlantic pattern of “I Know a Place”. Critic Joe Viglione described “Round Every Corner” as embracing the positivity of her first hit of the year, an anti-protest song at the moment pop was turning towards protest. The brand was now unmistakable: in a darkening decade, Petula Clark sold lit windows and low lights, the promise that somewhere nearby there was a room where things were fine. Within months she would be back at No. 1 in America with “My Love”, and the streak that “I Know a Place” had protected would eventually stretch to fifteen consecutive US Top 40 singles. None of it happens if the second single fails.

The Grammy Verdict

The industry’s formal judgement arrived at the 8th Annual Grammy Awards in 1966, when Clark won Best Contemporary (R&R) Vocal Performance, Female, for “I Know a Place”. It was her second Grammy in two years — “Downtown” had won Best Rock & Roll Recording at the previous year’s ceremony — and the same evening found her nominated in the flagship Best Vocal Performance, Female category for the Downtown album. Across her career she would collect nine Grammy nominations and two wins; the second of those wins belongs not to the phenomenon but to the follow-up.

That distinction matters, because of all the battles behind this record, the Grammy settled the most important one: whether the singer or the song had been the fluke. Awards for a breakthrough can be sentiment — an industry applauding a surprise. An award for the sequel is a professional assessment, made by voters who had heard “I Know a Place” in direct comparison with everything else sung by a woman in popular music that year and concluded that the grown-up English singer’s supposedly derivative second single contained the finest contemporary vocal performance of 1965. The “carbon copy” had been weighed by the establishment and decorated. Critics could call it formula; the formula had a Grammy.

The category itself captures the era’s confusion about what Clark was. The Grammys of the mid-1960s were still deciding, in public, what rock and roll was and whether adults could make it; hence the anxious parenthesis in “Best Contemporary (R&R) Vocal Performance”. Her male counterpart that year was Roger Miller, who won the equivalent men’s award — and Best Contemporary (R&R) Single — for “King of the Road”, a record about as far from teenage rock as Clark’s was. The Academy, in other words, had created a small fenced enclosure labelled rock and roll, and filled it with grown-ups: a Nashville humorist and a 33-year-old Paris-based Englishwoman. It is easy to smile at the taxonomy, but it accidentally told the truth about 1965. The year’s most durable pop was being made by professionals with pasts, and “I Know a Place” — written to order, against the clock, under maximum commercial pressure — was its Exhibit A.

The practical rewards matched the symbolic ones. Clark told The Boston Globe in 1966: “No matter what anyone tells you, to make it in the United States is still the dream of every transatlantic performer. You work for it. Long for it. And I can’t tell you how ecstatic I was when ‘I Know a Place’ was nearly as big a hit as ‘Downtown’ and the Copacabana Club in New York signed me.” The quote is a precise map of what the single bought her. The Copacabana was America’s most prestigious nightclub room — the adult, dinner-jacketed end of show business, the world Clark had actually been trained for since childhood. The follow-up hit had not merely kept her on the pop charts; it had carried her, at last, into the room at the top of American entertainment, on terms her teenage rivals could not have entered. The place she knew, it turned out, was real.

Everybody Finds the Place

The surest sign that a pop song has escaped its moment is the company it starts keeping, and “I Know a Place” was adopted almost immediately by the generation above its singer. Dick Contino recorded it for his 1965 album Dick Contino Plays & Sings the Hits. Sarah Vaughan, one of the supreme vocalists of the century, took it for her album Pop Artistry, released in January 1966. Sammy Davis Jr. recorded it for The Sounds of ’66, and Ricky Nelson covered it as well. A song dismissed in some quarters as a teenybopper copy of “Downtown” was simultaneously being entered into the repertoire of the supper-club immortals — the same two-way traffic, pop hit and adult standard at once, that Clark’s whole career embodied.

It travelled linguistically, too, in the old European manner: Gabi Novak sang it in Croatian as “Znam Jedno Mjesto”, Jacco van Renesse in Dutch as “Ik ken een tent”, Gigliola Cinquetti in Italian as “Un bel posto”, Trio Esperança in Portuguese as “Sei de um lugar”, Helena Blehárová in Slovak as “Znám Jeden Kout” and Melissa in Spanish as “Sé de un lugar”. In 1967 the Bob Florence Big Band released Pet Project, an entire album of big-band arrangements devoted to songs associated with Clark, “I Know a Place” among them. Decades later it was still being treated as songbook material: Karen Mason folded it into a medley with “Downtown” on her 1991 album When the Sun Comes Out, Ann Hampton Callaway and Liz Callaway paired the two songs on their 2011 live album Boom! Live at Birdland, and the vocal group Something Big included it on Hatched, their 2012 tribute EP to Tony Hatch.

Its screen life has been stranger and longer. The song turns up in the film The Anniversary Party, in several episodes of Here’s Lucy including “Mod, Mod Lucy”, and as the soundtrack of Mike Jittlov’s 1977 animated short Fashionation. In 2000 it surfaced on the CBS soap opera As the World Turns, performed in character by Colleen Zenk’s Barbara Ryan; in 2010 it played as background music in “The Beautiful Girls”, an episode of Mad Men — television’s great elegy for the decade the song came from. Australian audiences of a certain age know it in altered form, as a 1970s Pizza Hut jingle. Julian Cope borrowed its chorus for the bridge of his 1990 remake of “Five O’Clock World”. It even serves as the opening theme of a political podcast, Bill Whittle’s The Stratosphere Lounge. Sixty years on, the place keeps being found by people who were not born when it was built.

Why It Endures

“I Know a Place” endures, first, because it won the battle it was built for. It is pop’s definitive answer to the one-hit-wonder question: proof, delivered four months after the breakthrough, that Petula Clark was not an accident of one song but an artist with a sound, a writer and a will. Everything that followed in her American career — “My Love” back at No. 1, the Chaplin song, the subway song, fifteen consecutive Top 40 singles — is downstream of the spring of 1965, when a follow-up single held its nerve at No. 3 while the whole British Invasion crashed around it. History files the record as the second Petula Clark hit. Structurally, it is the load-bearing one.

It endures, second, because its invitation never goes out of date. “Downtown” promised the city; “I Know a Place” promises a room — smaller, warmer, more secret, and somehow more modern. Every generation since has had its version of that room: the club down the stairs, the bar with the low lights, the scene you have to be told about by somebody who already belongs. Hatch wrote it as a sequel and accidentally wrote it as a archetype, complete with its own wink at the Cavern, the original place that everybody who mattered once knew. Clark, who had spent her life being shown into rooms — as a child star, as a French chanteuse, as an American pop phenomenon — sang it with the authority of the one person in the story who genuinely knew where the good rooms were.

And it endures, finally, in the gap between its reputations. To Britain it was a No. 17 shrug; to America a No. 3 coronation; to the Grammy voters, the finest female contemporary vocal of its year. A record can survive being loved or being dismissed, but “I Know a Place” survived being both at once, on opposite sides of the same ocean, and came out the other side as a standard. Modern reappraisal has quietly promoted it: classic-rock historians now rank it among the very best records of Clark’s career, and one recent reassessment of her catalogue awarded it the silver medal among all her songs, behind only “Downtown” itself, noting that she won a Grammy for the vocal and that, all these years later, it is still clear why. The follow-up has become, in the long view, the connoisseur’s Petula Clark record — the one that proves the voice, precisely because it had the most to prove.

Somewhere below street level, the music is still fine and the lights are still low. She told us she knew a place. She was right.