A voice worth returning to

Petula Clark was born on November 15, 1932, in Epsom, Surrey, England — and she had already been a star for nearly twenty years before most of the world ever heard her name. A child performer on British radio during the Second World War, a film actress as a teenager, and a chart-topping singer in Britain and France through the 1950s, Clark arrived at the 1960s as a seasoned professional in an era that worshipped the new. Then, in 1964, a song called “Downtown” made her the first British woman ever to top the American charts, and everything changed.

The partnership behind that transformation was with songwriter-producer Tony Hatch. Clark had renewed her British career in 1964 and Hatch, then a young writer with modest credits, brought her “Downtown” — inspired, he said, by a visit to New York. Released in Britain in November 1964, it reached number two at home; in America, released on Warner Bros., it hit number one in January 1965, sold a million copies, and earned Clark a Grammy. She was thirty-two years old and fifteen years into her recording career. Overnight success, two decades in the making.

What followed was one of the great hit runs of the decade: “I Know a Place” in 1965, her second American number one “My Love” in early 1966, “I Couldn’t Live Without Your Love,” “Color My World,” and then 1967’s remarkable double — “This Is My Song,” written by Charlie Chaplin for his film A Countess from Hong Kong, which topped the British charts, and “Don’t Sleep in the Subway,” her final major American hit. Listen across these records and you hear a singer of unusual intelligence: warm but never sentimental, precise but never cold, equally at home in English, French, and German.

Clark’s story did not end with the hits. She became a major stage star — Blood Brothers, Sunset Boulevard — and kept recording and performing for decades, her voice losing none of its clarity. But this collection stays with the miraculous mid-1960s run, when a veteran reinvented herself as a pop modernist and, for a few shining years, seemed to be everywhere at once. Listen for the quality that separates her from every other 1960s hitmaker: she never sounds like she is chasing a trend. She sounds like the trend is lucky to have her.

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