This Is My Song: A Biography of Petula Clark by Andrea Kon, W H Allen, 256pp, 1983
Is That You, Petula?: Petula Clark – An Autobiography by Petula Clark with Ian Gittins, Ebury Spotlight, 312pp, 2025
Mention the name Petula Clark, and the chances are that the first thing that pops into most people’s heads is the title of a song. ‘DOWN-town!’ they may bellow back at you. Much the same can be said, or indeed bellowed, of Petula’s sixties peers. ‘What’s it all about, ALFIE?’ asks Cilla. ‘Well-ell-ell-ell-ell-ell-ell-ell. . .’ replies Lulu.
If we want to understand the work of those other singers, though, there’s usually a wider context we can draw on. Take Dusty Springfield: she leaves the folk trio behind to enjoy a stellar run of singles, then enjoys solid gold chart success twenty years after she first started having hits. Or Sandie Shaw: Eurovision Song Contest, performs in bare feet, late-career deification by Morrissey.
With Petula Clark, it’s not so easy. We might vaguely know something of her time as a child star in films, or the fact she that moved to France. But what else? That lack of knowledge does her extensive work on record and on film a serious injustice. When Bob Stanley interviewed her for Record Collector in 2020, he summarised her career as “the widest-ranging and the longest-lasting” of any major figure in the world of pop that he could think of. In fact, she’s had multiple careers. There’s the child star singing on the radio, soon to be followed by the juvenile star of British films from the mid-1940s; the sixties pop star who found fame in Britain, and France, and the USA; and her acclaimed roles in the stage musicals The Sound of Music, Blood Brothers, and Sunset Boulevard. It’s a story of resilience, of being prepared to adapt, and of a refusal sometimes to take the easy or the obvious next step.
(From the biography) The happy couple: Claude and Petula on their wedding day, 1961
There’s a fair amount of refusal going on in these two books as well. “This is the book I swore I would never write,” begins the back cover blurb for her 2025 autobiography. She has no interest in looking to the past, she insists, but decided to write her book following the death of Claude Wolff, her husband since the sixties, the previous year. In the Author’s Note to her 1983 biography of the star, Andrea Kon states that Petula Clark “made it clear that she would rather this book had been left unwritten” – and yet, as she goes on to confirm, she agrees to answer the author’s questions, and to share “frank conversations on previously unreported facets of her life”.
Unlike the stark differences between the Glen Campbell books considered previously on these pages, these two volumes present the details of Petula Clark’s life in similar ways. The first of Clark’s many careers started improbably early. Encouraged, if not actually shoved, into the bright lights by her star-struck father Leslie, the eight-year-old Petula makes her debut with an orchestra playing in the escalator hall at a local department store, and soon starts appearing regularly at troop concerts. In 1942, on the BBC radio programme It’s All Yours, she’s booked to read a message of support to a relative in the armed forces, but to make sure the programme meets its running time, she ends up singing ‘Mighty Lak’ a Rose’.
(From the biography) Petula appears on It’s All Yours, BBC Radio, November 1942
More work for the BBC follows, and it’s here that Andrea Kon’s book comes into its own. With access to the BBC’s Written Archives at Caversham, Kon reveals the extent to which the broadcaster agonised over how much or how little the young Petula should work for them. The author’s diligence shows the determination of father Leslie to keep Petula working – he regularly suggests sketches and songs to the broadcaster that might suit her – and for her to be remunerated appropriately. If there’s a cliché about stage mothers pushing their children into the world of entertainment, then Leslie proves to be every bit their equal.
In both books, Petula makes it clear that she always loved and admired her father, and that he wanted to do the best thing for her. But it’s clear too that tensions arise during her transition from child star to young female performer. Under contract for her film work to the Rank Organisation, Petula becomes frustrated by the company’s insistence on offering her parts that play on her youth and afford her few challenges. “It’s a topic that I find difficult to talk about even now, seventy years on, but I suspect my Dad was a bit like the Rank Organisation – he wanted me to stay a child forever,” she writes in her autobiography.
She makes the break from her father as her manager in the early fifties, and although she releases pop records in Britain with some success, things really start getting interesting when she’s persuaded to go to France in 1957. Her performance of four songs on a radio show at L’Olympia in Paris is a sensation, the French immediately taking to her as a living example of le style anglaise. Claude, whom she has only just met and who is the reason she moves to the country at the start of the sixties, later joked that she appeared on stage that night wearing what looked like two large pink lampshades.
The musical relationship that continues to define Petula Clark is the one she enjoyed with Tony Hatch. The singer had met the composer at the end of the fifties, but their work together only really takes off in 1964 when Hatch writes ‘Downtown’ – a song whose American-influenced lyrics he thought might suit Ben E. King and the Drifters, who had had hits with ‘Under the Boardwalk’ and ‘On Broadway’. ‘Downtown’ becomes a hit in Britain and in North America, the first of a string of singles which would include ‘I Know a Place’, ‘My Love’, and a song which, Kon’s biography reveals, had a nonsense chorus before Hatch’s partner Jackie Trent sorted out the lyrics. Perhaps a track called ‘Don’t Shit in the Custard’ wouldn’t have become quite as big a seller as ‘Don’t Sleep in the Subway’.
(From the autobiography) The dream team of engineer Ray Prickett, Petula, Tony Hatch – and lost in the wonder of it all – Johnny Harris
For the most part, the musical focus in both books is on singles and hits – or flops. But there’s another story to be told about Petula’s music. The singer announced herself as a performer of discriminating taste when she included a version of the Beatles’ ‘Rain’ on her album I Couldn’t Live Without Your Love, only a few months after the band had released the song as the B-side of ‘Paperback Writer’. Across the late sixties and early seventies, her album output displayed real quality and style. 1969’s Just Pet saw her work with arranger Michel Colombier; the soulful Memphis, released in 1970, was recorded with Chips Moman; and on the bang-up-to-date Petula ’71, Johnny Harris brought his magical influence to the singer’s music after his own memorable work with Tom Jones and Shirley Bassey.
The captivating Petula ’71 album, with a little help from Johnny Harris
A 2014 BBC documentary about Petula Clark, Blue Lady, takes this approach in presenting the singer as a hipper, more significant artist than she’s often given credit for, with no less a cultural commentator than Paul Morley on hand to proclaim his enthusiasm. The documentary takes its title from a mid-seventies album, unreleased until 2009, of country songs that’s now seen as one of many high watermarks in her long career. Blue Lady wasn’t the only occasion that the singer was stymied by record company machinations. A final album with Tony Hatch, recorded in 1970, didn’t emerge until it appeared thirty years later under the title Conversations in the Wind. Petula ’71 came out at the time of recording in the UK, but was denied a contemporary US release.
These days, if we’re looking for a reason why the achievements of Petula’s music aren’t more widely celebrated, the absence of a decent reissue programme might be one of them. But as the star herself assures us, she doesn’t have much time for nostalgia. “I rarely listen to my old records or rifle through old photos,” she writes in the Introduction to her book. “I much prefer to live for today.”
Maybe Petula will allow us a little indulgence if we pick out two wonderful songs from her remarkable career(s). ‘Flash-Back’, tucked away on a 1972 French-language album, Comme Une Prière, was written for her by Serge Gainsbourg in collaboration with Michel Colombier. ‘Cut Copy Me’ is from her 2013 release, Lost In You. I remember hearing the song on the radio when it came out, and being astonished and delighted by its modernity, as well as thinking how well it suited her.
Petula Clark was eighty years old when ‘Cut Copy Me’ was released. In November this year, she’ll be ninety-four. Bravo, Petula. May we long be surprised and delighted by your work – even if you don’t want to talk about it.