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Forget all your troubles, forget all your cares: Petula Clark’s 20 best songs – ranked!
Sixty years after Downtown made her the second British woman to top the US charts, we rate the best of Clark’s exhilarating, perfectly enunciated pop
Clark’s early releases are very much of their time, the largely forgotten post-swing, pre-rock’n’roll period of British pop – aimed at adults, not teenagers – that often sounds mushy and hopelessly square to modern ears. Photograph: Everett/Shutterstock Its slightly weedy sitar is a shrugging concession to changing pop trends as 1966 gave way to 1967, but Colour My World is really all about the splendidly propulsive chorus, which one suspects Hatch was rather more invested in than Indian-inspired experimentalism. Downtown is her masterpiece, a Hatch song to match the Brill Building’s best, the thrilling promise of a night out in the big city with a slight, but distinct flirtatious frisson behind her cut-glass enunciation: “Maybe you know some little places to go where they never close … maybe I’ll see you there.”
Or read this on The Guardian
