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One of Petula Clark's early films in her child star days was Trouble at Townsend, which was based on a short story by this blog's hero Malcolm Saville.
In her memoirs Is That You, Petula? she briefly remembers making the film:
Rather less glamorously, around the same time I made an educational film for children called Trouble at Townsend. It was about a city boy and girl going to the countryside and having adventures. The little boy in the film with me put on weight and got too plump for his costume. We filmed some of it on a farm, and I got chased and butted by a goat.
Many years ago, I wrote a press release for the Malcolm Saville and as a result...
Viola Wills featured in the Top 20 countdown on one of Friday's vintage Top of the Pops on BBC4. I had to look her up to see what song it was and found that it was her disco interpretation of Gonna Get Along Without Ya Now.
A little research into the song showed that the most influential, though not the first, version of it was by this blog's old friends, the slightly spooky Patience and Prudence.
Patience & Prudence were actually sisters and the daughters of orchestra leader Mack McIntyre. Patience (11 years old) and Prudence (14 years old) McIntyre were encouraged by their father, who was already a well know piano player and songwriter (who also co-wrote the B-sides of their two hits).
Mack McIntyre brought his daughters into the Liberty Records recording studios in Los Angeles in the summer of 1956. One of the songs from their audition tape was a cover of the 1927 hit by Gene Austin called, Tonight You Belong to Me.
Liberty Records (also the home of rocker Eddie Cochran) signed Patience and Prudence and rushed the tune into distribution. The bouncy song became a hit, charting at #4 in September of 1956 and became Liberty's biggest selling record for two years.
Gonna Get Along Without Ya Now had charted earlier that year, but it and Tonight You Belong to Me were their only hits in the US or the UK.
Prudence, who died in September 2023, grew up to embrace the counter-culture, marrying Dan Conka, a founder member of Arthur Lee's band Love. Conka, the correct spelling of his name and his drug problems are discussed on Andrew Hickey's post on the Love song Alone Again Or.
Patience, the older sister, is still with us. She was married to John Fleck of the Sixties American band The Standells for a while.
"To paraphrase Neil Kinnock, how did we end up in the grotesque chaos of a Conservative government – a Conservative government – setting about the seemingly deliberate demolition of the United Kingdom and its economy?" William Davies tries to work out the answer.
Adam Bennett argues that the Liberal Democrats should adopt Universal Basic Income as a policy.
"While the Lancet paper is a nice piece of work, it tells us very little that we didn’t already know, and it has a number of limitations. The media reaction to the paper is frankly bananas." Neuroskeptic takes a cool look at the widely reported study of the benefits of antidepressants.
"My university and, I’m betting, the lion’s share of universities in the pre-92 sector, have a peculiar sickness: an addiction to free labour. Like other addictions, it started innocently enough, but has become an all-consuming monster." Marianne O’Doherty offers a personal view of the university pensions strike.
Terence Towles Canote on how Petula Clark and Harry Belafonte changed television history.
The original giant station clock from St Pancras can be found on a farm at Thurgaton in Nottinghamshire. Thurgarton History explains why.
Gavin Stamp says Big Ben is the least of the Palace of Westminster's problems: "The House of Commons still will not commit itself to leaving the building to allow the restoration to begin. This is both selfish and financially irresponsible, for the longer the restoration is left, the further the deterioration becomes and the greater the expense of repair."
"The past has a value to the present, and you don’t have to scrub it all out and start again." Rowan Moore argues that the restoration of Liverpool's Welsh Streets offers a lesson for national housing policy.
Seventy years after it was made, Max Covill examines the allure and shock of the Powell and Pressburger film Black Narcissus.
Tim Holyoake has been to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe - and he believes in the Loch Ness Monster.
"The best compliment to the song I’ve come across was provided by Leo Moran of the Irish good time band The Saw Doctors who observed: 'One night for no particular reason we did Downtown and you could see people loved it. All ages. You could see it brought joy to people’s faces.'" Thom Hickey pays tribute to an ageless classic.
"I've always been famous as far as I can remember," Petula Clark told the Daily Mail a few years ago.
And it was not an exaggeration. She made her radio debut at the age of nine and entertained the troops during the Second World War.
Her latest album, From Now On, came out in October of last year. It features this version of While You See a Chance, the song (written with Will Jennings) that relaunched Steve Winwood for the MTV generation
Petula Clark, like everyone who performs Winwood's songs from that era today, offers a more downbeat version. They often do sound better shorn of the originals' glossy production.
There is a nice piece in the Guardian today where Petula Clark and Tony Hatch talk about the making of their classic record Downtown:
In 1964, I was a huge star in France but the swinging 60s were starting to take hold in London and I wasn’t part of it. Tony Hatch, a junior producer at Pye Records, came to see me in Paris and told me I had to record again in English.
I was in the kitchen making some tea when I first heard him playing the melody to Downtown. I ran in and said: “What’s that?”
At that point, it was just a melody and a title, but I said: “If you can write a lyric as good as that melody, I’d love to sing it.”
Reader's voice: Aren't you going to link to your Petula Clark story?
Liberal England replies coyly: You've heard it before.
Reader's voice: But we like it. Liberal England replies: Oh all right then. Did you know Petula Clark phoned me once?
Today is Petula Clark's birthday. Many happy returns.
This gives me the excuse to repeat an anecdote that appeared on this blog in July 2008:
It must have been about 10 years ago, when I was acting as press officer for the Malcolm Saville Society. The Society was planning a visit to West End Farm at Wheathampstead, because that was where the film Trouble at Townsend, based on a book by Saville and starring a very young Petula Clark, was made in 1946. Thanks to the Society, incidentally, you can now buy a DVD of the film.
Anyway, before the visit I drafted a release about it for the local papers and decided it would look better with a quote from Petula Clark. So I found an e-mail address for her agent and dropped him a line.
A couple of weeks later my mobile went at work and a voice said "Hello, this is Petula Clark."
I can therefore boast that I have told Petula Clark what a great record I think "Downtown" is - surely one of the things everyone should do before they die? It may not have been the most tactful thing to say - her reply was "I have made other records, you know" - but I am glad I did it.
What I should have added was that she gave me a good quote for the release.
The second reason for choosing it is that it gives me the chance to retail my anecdote about The Day That Petula Clark Phoned Me.
It must have been about 10 years ago, when I was acting as press officer for the Malcolm Saville Society. The Society was planning a visit to West End Farm at Wheathampstead, because that was where the film Trouble at Townsend, based on a book by Saville and starring a very young Petula Clark, was made in 1946. Thanks to the Society, incidentally, you can now buy a DVD of the film.
Anyway, before the visit I drafted a release about it for the local papers and decided it would look better with a quote from Petula Clark. So I found an e-mail address for her agent and dropped him a line.
A couple of weeks later my mobile went at work and a voice said "Hello, this is Petula Clark."
I can therefore boast that I have told Petula Clark what a great record I think "Downtown" is - surely one of the things everyone should do before they die? It may not have been the most tactful thing to say - her reply was "I have made other records, you know" - but I am glad I did it.
This clip from Trouble at Townsend has now turned up on Youtube. It is not typical of the whole film, which was an adventure story designed to educate city children about how to behave in the country - I have a feeling it even received some government funding. But I am told that, when a bootleg copy was shown at an annual gathering of the Malcolm Saville Society, this scene brought the house down.
This morning I listened to an edition of The Reunion in which Sue MacGregor brought together five women from the pop scene of the 1960s:
Petula Clark, the child star of the 1940s whose career went stratospheric in the 1960s; Sandie Shaw, the barefoot pop princess who won the Eurovision Song Contest; Helen Shapiro, Britain's first teen pop star who was supported by The Beatles, Jackie Trent, singer and songwriter who wrote hits for Petula Clark, Scott Walker and many others; and Vicki Wickham, the legendary producer of Ready Steady Go who went on to manage Dusty Springfield.
This seems to be one of those programmes that are archived on the BBC iPlayer, so it should still be available. Helen Shapiro and Petula Clark have already featured here.
One of the song excerpts played in the programme was from "Where Are You Now, My Love?" This took Jackie Trent to number one in May 1965 - she wrote it with Tony Hatch, to whom she was married for many years. Their suburban take on Bacharach and David is very effective here.
The song owed part of its success to its use in the television series It's Dark Outside, which featured Oliver Reed among its cast.
But the footage in the video above does not come from that but the film Four in the Morning. This ominous downbeat piece of late kitchen-sink suggested it could be grim in London too - Billy Liar might have been no better off if he had caught that train. It starred Judi Dench in a rare early cinema appearance. This was years before it was made compulsory for her to appear in every British film.
Four in the Morning had a notable John Barry score in its own right. Elsewhere on Youtube you can find the main theme and some of this river footage with the correct music.
Catalina Island off the coast of California is home to the British musician Spencer Davis. And from 30 June until 22 August the island's museum will be host to an exhibition entitled Gimme Some Lovin’: The Spencer Davis Group.
Not only that. On 30 June the island will see a symposium. The Catalina Island Museum Presents The British Invasion Rocks America is billed as "the first of its kind" and will examine the movement of the blues from America to Britain and back to America during the British Invasion.
And it has a remarkable list of participants:
Spencer Davis himself
Mickey Dolenz from the Monkees
Peter Asher from Peter and Gordon (who once left a comment on this blog)
Emperor Rosko, the famous DJ
Sadly, I don't suppose I shall be on Catalina Island for these events - there will also be a concert from Spencer Davis and the Catalina Island All-Stars and a firework display on 4 July - but I did shake hands with Spencer when he played in Market Harborough.
But thanks are due to Jessica Zumberge from Catalina Island Museum for sending me the photographs used in this post (the two below come from Spencer Davis's own collection) and also its press releases about the exhibition and the symposium.
On the exhibition they say:
The exhibition Gimme Some Lovin': The Spencer Davis Group opens on June 30th at the Catalina Island Museum and is the first exhibition dedicated to the band. The exhibition draws from Spencer Davis’ own archive of photographs, memorabilia and recorded interviews.
“Unlike so many groups coming out of Britain in the mid-1960s, the Spencer Davis Group was not a pop band trying to emulate the Beatles,”
Michael De Marsche, director of the museum and curator of the exhibition recently stated. “They were a band heavily indebted to American blues. They incorporated that sound with greater authenticity than any other band of the time—British or American. My question was: how did a bunch of white guys from England and Wales create music that sounded like it came from rural Mississippi or Alabama?"
To answer the question De Marsche sought out Spencer Davis, a long-time resident of Catalina Island ...
“I’ve been interested in the influence of the blues on British rock for a long time. I thought I knew a thing or two until I met Spencer. His knowledge is absolutely encyclopedic, and his interest started when he was a kid. He had exotic tastes for his native Wales, and he developed early an abiding love for black musicians from the American South. The raw emotion of the blues was far different than anything he could hear on BBC radio. The music inspired him to pick up the guitar and sing. After he enrolled in college, he realized that he could make a little money singing and playing the blues in little pubs and coffee shops.”
It was during Spencer Davis’ earliest days as a musician that a single comment from a pub owner changed his life.
“He was told that the trend was toward hiring groups like the Beatles, who were now all the rage in Britain,” states De Marsche. “He’s living in Birmingham and begins to search the city for a few musicians who might share his interest in American blues.
"He finds himself one night in a dark, little back room and hears a boy of 15 who is, in Spencer’s words, playing the piano like Oscar Peterson and singing like Ray Charles. He recognized immediately that Steve Winwood was something special. But, as Spencer is fond of saying, the important thing was that they had similar record collections.”
Spencer Davis’ discovery of Steve Winwood’s immense talent is a defining moment in rock history. Joined by Steve’s brother Muff on bass and Peter York on drums, the Spencer Davis Group exploded onto the rock scene, releasing within a startling brief period of time a series of hits, including “Somebody Help Me,” “Keep on Running,” “Gimme Some Lovin’” and “I’m a Man.”
The band rocketed from obscurity into instant stardom. Much of the group’s popularity was based on Winwood’s voice, which seemed to strain plaintively for every note. Few bands incorporated better the emotion of the blues with the driving beat, lilting rhythms and melodic lyricism of the Mersey Sound.
And on the symposium:
On December 10, 1963 the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite introduced the American public to an obscure band from Liverpool that was causing near riots among teenagers in Great Britain. The following day disc jockeys in America were inundated with calls from anxious teens to play the music of The Beatles. When the band played on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964 nearly half of all American television sets were tuned to the broadcast.
Two months later, the “British Invasion” was in full swing, and Beatles songs held the top 5 spots of the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, a feat that has never been equaled. During the next three years British groups dominated British and American charts. Groups and individuals like Peter and Gordon, The Animals, Manfred Mann, Petula Clark, Herman’s Hermits, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, Gerry and the Pacemakers, The Dave Clark Five, Donovan and the Spencer Davis Group changed the course of American music and the landscape of pop culture forever.
But just what was it that made these British groups so appealing to American teenagers? In many respects the answer is surprising. This symposium The Catalina Island Museum Presents The British Invasion Rocks America is the first of its kind and will examine the movement of the blues from America to Britain and back to America during the “British Invasion.” ...
Grounded in the recordings of African-American artists like Big Bill Broonzy, Leadbelly, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, the roots of the British Invasion were in the poor rural areas of the American South. Labeled the “blues,” it developed from the spirituals of black churches, the chants of workers in cotton fields, and the plaintive songs that filled the long, lonely evenings of Southern prisons.
Because the blues emanated from the black American South, its artists were condemned to obscurity in the 1950s. Rejected by a predominantly white establishment that related the sound with its African-American roots, the blues was labeled dangerous and a potentially corrupting influence on American youth. But singers like Little Richard, Chubby Checker, Bill Haley, Fats Domino and Elvis Presley discovered popular success by incorporating the blues into a sound that would become known as “rock n’roll.”
To appeal to a wide audience, the earliest rock n’roll recordings present a more acceptable, “homogenized” version of the blues. Its simple solos laden with melancholy were transformed into a dance music played by four-piece combos that sped up its tempo and underscored its melody with a driving, rhythmic beat.
In Britain, however, teenagers living in cities like Liverpool were purchasing recordings from sailors who had acquired a taste for the blues while traveling to American port cities like New Orleans. The gritty authenticity of the sound was irresistible and vividly evoked the smoky juke joints and sun-bleached cotton fields of a black America that was far away and, therefore, fairly benign to British tastes. It offered a striking contrast to the soft jazz and classical symphonies that dominated British radio, which was strictly regulated by the BBC.
I shall be very interested to hear or read the conclusions of this symposium, because the way that white, middle-class British youth took to the blues puzzles me too.
The common factors I have noticed amongst British musicians of this era are that they had fathers who were in jazz bands, meaning they grew up familiar with black music, and sang in church choirs as boys, meaning that they had a good musical education.
But that explains why the ground was fertile, not why the blues were the seed that grew so vigorously.
I've chosen Downtown today for two reasons. The first is that it is a great song and one of the first pop songs I can recall knowing. It reached no. 2 in 1964, so it is just possible that I can remember it being in the charts.
This version must come from the late sixties, when annoying dance troupes were obligatory when pop was played on TV. Does anyone remember the Young Generation? (Later. That video disappeared, so I have replaced it with a different on.)
The second reason for choosing it is that it gives me the chance to retail my anecdote about The Day That Petula Clark Phoned Me.
It must have been about 10 years ago, when I was acting as press officer for the Malcolm Saville Society. The Society was planning a visit to West End Farm at Wheathampstead, because that was where the film Trouble at Townsend, based on a book by Saville and starring a very young Petula Clark, was made in 1946. Thanks to the Society, incidentally, you can now buy a DVD of the film.
Anyway, before the visit I drafted a release about it for the local papers and decided it would look better with a quote from Petula Clark. So I found an e-mail address for her agent and dropped him a line.
A couple of weeks later my mobile went at work and a voice said "Hello, this is Petula Clark."
I can therefore boast that I have told Petula Clark what a great record I think "Downtown" is - surely one of the things everyone should do before they die? It may not have been the most tactful thing to say - her reply was "I have made other records, you know" - but I am glad I did it.
Next week on Among my Fragrant Souvenirs I shall be remembering Herbert Wilcox and Dame Anna Neagle.
In 1968 Harry Belafonte, whose album Calypso was the first LP to sell more than 1 million, appeared on a primetime CBS television special hosted by British singer Petula Clark. In the show, the two singers performed a duet, and Petula Clark held on to Belafonte's arm, as my still from the programme shows here. After the first take the director asked them to repeat the song, standing apart. It transpired that an executive from the show's sponsor, an automobile manufacturer, saw the first take and ordered it to be re-shot. His reason was that showing a white woman touching an African-American might adversely affect car sales in southern states.
An outraged Petula Clark and her husband Claude Wolff, the show's executive producer, destroyed all the takes except the first one. The transmission went ahead with the original duet, and the programme achieved very high viewing figures following press exposure of the sponsor's attempted inteference.
I was in Harpenden yesterday evening watching a forgotten film by the name of Trouble at Townsend. It was based on a story by Malcom Saville (which is why the viewing was organised by the Malcolm Saville Society) and starred a very young Petula Clark.
The film is best regarded as an historical curiosity, but Harpenden is a pleasant little town and well worth a visit.
He says that my 10 includes a couple of songs that he quite likes. And the reverse is true. In fact, his 10 contain two songs that I think are great:
All or Nothing is one of the very best songs by one of the very best British groups of the 1960s.
Downtown is wonderful - and I told Petula Clark as much when she phoned me a few years ago (hem, hem). It was obviously the wrong thing to say, but I am glad I said it.
I was also interested in the comment by Liberal Neil that "Many people have broad tastes," with its implied condemnation. For I think it misses the point.
Having good taste doesn't mean liking all music in a fluffy kind of way. It means being able to discriminate between the good and the bad in all the kinds of music that you listen to. (This is something I can't do in jazz, for instance, because it has never interested me enough.)
Being able to nominate a list of guilty pleasure requires a sophisticated level of appreciation. It is a sign of broad tastes, not narrow ones.
Finally, I have been thinking about my original argument that a degree of pretentiousness is necessary for a record to qualify as a guilty pleasure. Maybe the attraction of some artists is that they constantly threaten to topple over into pretention but never quite do.
Scott Walker is a good example of this and - though Neil Hannon's touch is a little less sure - the Divine Comedy are another.
There is an article by Jennie Bristow on the Spiked website which takes a similar line to the New Statesman editorial I discussed earlier. She makes another point that is worth quoting:
Ken 'Ban It' Livingstone has spent so much of his seasoned life campaigning to censure people whose remarks could be construed as racist and offensive, this seems like a just punishment: he has fallen foul of the intolerant climate that he helped to create.
Unfortunately, this is not simply a story about a po-faced politician getting his come-uppance. It reveals the petulant and censorious spirit of our times, in which references to the Holocaust are bandied about like common swear words and the response to anybody feeling offended is to call for official censure.
