Petula Clark - Blue Lady Legends

# When you're alone and life is making you lonely

# You can always go Downtown... #

Downtown.

It's the sound of the sixties.

The decade when British pop crossed the Atlantic

and shook American popular music to its roots.

But the singer, Petula Clark,

fitted none of the Swinging Sixties stereotypes.

With 20 years of stardom already behind her, Petula Clark was yet again, on the up.

From the forties to the noughties, in Europe, America and the UK,

Petula Clark's career is an essay in international superstardom.

Pop Idols, take note!

# You're gonna be all right now! #

People love her. They, she just is so great with an audience.

Everybody looks at her and thinks it's little vulnerable Petula.

Uh-huh. She has got chutzpah, she has tremendous drive.

Nobody could survive in this business...

..without having that.

There's no doubt that one of the great marvels is,

that she keeps coming, decade through decade somehow

without having to do Blind Date, without having to become Lulu.

Without having to do the facial surgery, without having to become the nostalgia act.

She does manage to maintain it.

She's fantastic!

She's a sexy woman. She really is.

# I...couldn't live without your love

# Now I know you're really mine

# Gotta have you all the time. #

Petula Clark arrives at Kennedy Airport, New York,

with Kenny Clayton, her long-time musical director.

Only the waiting limousine gives a hint of her status in America.

With Downtown, Petula Clark achieved the holy grail of British pop, an American number one.

# Listening to the music of the traffic in the city

# Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty

# How can you lose? #

I was on tour in French-speaking Canada at the time when Downtown hit in the States,

and Ed Sullivan, who was like the big guy over there,

they were calling all the time.

Eventually, I did the Ed Sullivan Show

and they start playing Downtown and the place goes wild.

# Downtown, everything's waiting for you... #

It was what all great pop songs should be.

In a kind of disguise it was about sex in a really great symbolic way.

There's this hint that she's a posh lady and she's going to take you

"Downtown" and aren't you lucky that she's going to take you.

# Downtown

# Just listen to the rhythm of the gentle bossa nova

# You'll be dancing with them too before the night is over

# Happy again... #

When you hear Roy Orbison sing Only The Lonely,

you're touched by greatness.

When you hear Del Shannon sing Runaway,

you've experienced something that you can't explain.

Petula Clark and Downtown is one of those.

40 years on, Petula is still performing.

Downtown was the song that opened doors in the sixties,

and it continues to do so.

But she's always maintained a kind of nonchalance as to how the song came about.

-PETULA:

-Tony Hatch said, "I think I've got a song." He said "I haven't finished it yet.

"I've got the title, I've got the idea and I've got the music.

"Would you like to hear it?"

And I said, "Yeah, OK.

"I'll go and make the tea and I'll listen to it through the thing,"

and he sat down and played...

SHE PLAYS THE INTRODUCTION ON THE PIANO

I heard it and thought, "Wow! I like that!"

You had rock music, you had soul music just assaulting the airwaves, and at that point Petula

was identified with the old school and light entertainment tradition.

If you were an artist from that, you didn't have a hope in hell.

You had to really change your style and adapt in order to survive.

And I came back with the tea and I said, "If you can write a lyric

"up to the standard of that music, I think we've got a great song."

I think she could sense that this was her way through, and it really

suited her because it had that soul inflection but it was quite light.

It really suited her voice.

Certain singers, if you hear them you know exactly who it is.

Vera Lynn or Edith Piaf or Judy Garland.

Petula Clark falls in to that category.

She has a distinctive quality.

# My love is warmer than the warmest sunshine

# Softer than a sigh... #

The big sale in records is to younger people and she had that appeal,

when she came and did Don't Sleep In The Subway

and Downtown and My Love and some of the other hits that she had,

one right after another.

I don't mean that only teenagers liked her, everybody liked her.

Petula was actually the most successful of the British female singers in America.

I Know A Place, My Love, they all went right into the top five in the US,

whereas, interestingly, the other British beat girls like

Dusty Springfield and Cilla Black, they had success in the States, but it wasn't as phenomenal.

Tony Hatch's song-writing partner, Jackie Trent, remembers the scale of the success.

There were 13 hits in a row for goodness sake!

And we thought it was like the goose that had laid the golden egg.

As writers it was unbelievable.

And everybody went, well, we can't get a Clark song because you two are well in there.

But we were coming up with the songs that Pet wanted to record and were absolutely right for her.

Tony Hatch rescued her and gave her this extraordinary kind of iconic presence that I think

distracted us from what she probably actually is, as a songwriter, as a performer, as a musician.

As something other than just being the sixties dolly bird.

On the strength of one almighty pop classic, we've persuaded ourselves that Petula Clark

is just one of the Sixties Girls, alongside Lulu and Cilla,

Sandie and Dusty - perhaps even the least of them.

But nothing could be further from the truth.

Petula Clark is a whole lot more than Downtown.

PHONE RINGS

'It's no use waiting little girl. No room for you on the bill. Full up.'

Petula's singing talent had been recognised when she was still a child and encouraged by her family.

My Dad was in the Army.

My mother was Welsh, therefore musical.

I think that's where I got my musicality from.

I used to sing at the drop of a hat really.

I was very shy, so when I was singing I didn't feel so shy.

So anyway, the chance came along to do this broadcast on the BBC

for the forces serving abroad, and that was the first time

I sang on the air and the reaction to that was huge.

# Let's you think that heaven... #

By the time she was eight, Petula was a star, performing

alongside Vera Lynn and the young Julie Andrews, on BBC Radio and at troop concerts all over England.

Six decades later, touring American casinos and concert halls,

her childhood shows are still remembered with great affection.

-How are you?

-I'm well, well. How lovely to see you.

At the American Red Cross Club during the Second World War,

she entertained there, and we were there every night she was there.

She provided a little break for us

from the horrors that we were facing. This is her.

She belted out a song at 11 years old that would knock you off the wall!

Spotting her appeal, Petula was signed up

by The Rank Film Organisation, and while her new fans were

very much children of the sixties, she also connected with

their parents, who remembered her as "Our Pet".

She'd been around in our lives forever.

My mother and father were absolute fans when she was The Huggetts and everything else.

And all of a sudden I thought, I'm writing lyrics for Petula Clark

and it was a bit daunting, but very exciting.

Jackie Trent's lyrics, were right for Petula.

They weren't cliched, they were really convincing,

and Petula could sing with real passion there.

# I long to wake up in the morning... #

Thanks to Jackie and Tony, Petula was one of the hottest properties in American entertainment.

And it was not just the commercial success of working in America

that was to have its impact on her career.

-PETULA:

-America was another take on show-business.

Very, very professional.

If you have success, then you are revered and you are treated...

They do everything but tuck you up in bed.

You decide you want 25 musicians,

you've got them, and they are all good.

You want two days of rehearsal.

You've got them.

In Las Vegas, they give you a house, a car, a driver...

if you want, a cook, and everything it's easy.

But if, offstage life was easy,

when it came to facing an American audience, the pressure was on.

I remember going to the opening at the Copacabana in New York, and she was positively heaving.

She was sick with nerves.

And I thought, "How does she go on and perform,

"feeling that ill before doing a show?"

Because the nerves took over.

Soon as she walked out in the spotlight she was fine.

She was whoosh, up and flying, but she was literally running to the loo and I thought, "Oh, My God!

"How dreadful!"

But there again that got her adrenaline going to get out there

and do what she does, which is absolute perfection.

The musicality of it was very important and I think I became a better singer

in America because I was working with people who were better than me.

And I was...just learning from them, just being around them.

Petula's American polish was even beginning to impress British critics

who, by the late sixties, were putting her in the top rank.

It's almost a cliche to say that excellence needs very little dressing.

The best television performance that Sinatra ever gave,

was the concert he gave at the Festival Hall five or six years ago.

Just a man, a microphone and a small backing group.

Only the very best performers can work like this,

and I think Petula Clark is of this company.

# You are the day or the night

# You are the dark on light

# Only my heart can know

# Only my heart can know. #

All through this, I was having to unlearn all the silly things I'd learned as a child performer.

About being cute and...

..the little tricks that kids do, they just do because it works.

And I had to get rid of all of that.

# ..the kids will say

# That old man won't give a dime away. #

I didn't have a showbiz mum.

I suppose I had a showbiz dad, but he wasn't really at all.

A lot of things written about my dad were rather unkind.

He was a bit stage struck himself, I suppose.

He had always wanted to be in the theatre. Wanted to be an actor.

He was very handsome,

he looked a bit like Errol Flynn.

And he was never allowed to do it.

So when a kid came along, who had a little bit of talent, he said, "I'm going to help her along."

Petula's father, Leslie Clark, was very dominant in her life.

Right up to the age of 25, she was still living with him.

He chose a lot of her material, he really guided her career.

He was the one who steered her into the limelight,

and I guess saw her as a sort of British Shirley Temple.

It was strange, I didn't have what you might call a normal childhood,

because I was working and I didn't have many friends of my own age.

I was working with adults in film studios.

So in a way, I was sort of quite grown up,

and in other ways I was totally naive.

And I loved going to Wales.

Wales was another place, another thing for me, you know?

I was really like a little wild animal when I went there.

I used to go up into the mountains and sing all day

and play in the streams.

And come back and look as if I've been pulled through a hedge backward.

A bit, the way I look now.

And, er, happy.

I love that. I love the whole Welsh...sound.

I love the sound of the language

and it was a more simple life and I really, really loved it.

Everybody sang and I used to sing in chapel.

And I went to school there when I was about six and came out Welsh.

I spoke Welsh. It was great. I've lost it unfortunately,

but I can still hear it. It's like it's there inside me somewhere.

I was a little nervous about coming back

because I know things have changed. Everything changes. That's life.

But the people are still the same.

The mountains are still the same.

The stream is still here.

And the rest? Well...

The rest is just in my memory.

But the memories of her working life are less tranquil.

As the "child" in Rank's stable of actors, Petula was constantly busy.

Her most popular role was as the youngest daughter

in the Huggett family, alongside Jack Warner and Diana Dors.

Come in.

-Did you want me?

-Yes, I did.

All the time you're in my house you'll iron your own smalls.

-You understand?

-It's OK by me.

They don't take long, Uncle.

Don't call me Uncle, otherwise I might forget myself and behave as though I was.

What are you looking at?

Nothing.

Despite appearances, Diana Dors was barely a year older than Petula,

who continued to be cast much younger than her actual age.

-It's my mother.

-Crippen! Your mother?

Yes.

Growing up in show business at that time it was almost a formula.

I had to be cute, dress a certain way and sing certain songs and they were keeping me very, very young.

I was probably about 17 in that. Poor little thing.

# Clickerty-clack along the track That's taking me back to you

# I've had enough the going's rough

# You're calling my bluff I'm through... #

The transition was difficult.

That was the tough bit. Adolescence was not good.

I don't suppose it's good for most,

but it was particularly difficult for me because...

I was doing all my growing up in public and...

by then I had a television show.

I was pretty well known,

but I wasn't allowed to wear certain clothes.

I wasn't allowed to go out with boys.

It was pretty well controlled and I was pretty unhappy.

Because you started so young, you've got so many decades ahead of you,

and so much awareness that you've got so many decades ahead.

And trying to sustain this pace, this glory, this attention.

And the dreadful possibility of losing that attention.

It's clearly driven Petula. If she hadn't reinvented herself

she might have just been remembered as the British Shirley Temple,

flowering in the forties and whatever happened to that little girl?

But while Shirley Temple never made the transition from child star to adult performer,

and Petula was struggling, not everyone seemed to be having such a difficult time.

Julie Andrews sort of emerged at about the same time.

And in a way Julie Andrews became the queen

of that sort of dramatic musical role and is taken very seriously as an actress as well as a singer.

And Petula in a way that's where she could have gone and she was slightly hampered, I think,

by maybe not very wise choices on the part of her father.

He was seen as more of a hindrance after a while in the business.

She maybe didn't get the parts that she needed to at the right time.

Well, I adored my father.

He could do no wrong in my eyes.

But of course as I got older, you know what happens.

"I want to do things my way.

"Make my own mistakes," and all that stuff.

And I was going through that.

I would come home from the studio

and not be sure if I was having dinner with my dad or with my manager.

And it got very difficult, emotionally, very, very difficult, for both of us.

Even after breaking with her father, Petula would continue to trust those closest to her with her career.

Initially her pianist and boyfriend Joe Henderson, then her husband and manager Claude Wolff.

And access to this inner circle was no foregone conclusion,

as Tony Hatch's new wife Jackie Trent would find out.

Petula was quite friendly with his ex-wife

and then Jackie came onto the scene and it was interesting

that they kept that from Petula for a little while

because they weren't sure how she'd react and they were right.

When she did find out she was extremely annoyed.

And she didn't treat Jackie very nicely.

She was quite icy with her.

# No-one knows that you're so understanding

# Even though my love is so demanding... #

Couldn't Live Without Your Love I wrote on a number 12 bus.

And I'd written the lyric, as a personal lyric, to me, for me.

Right.

Of course Claude comes steaming in, "Petula is in...

"and we are in for three days, we need to record!" OK.

What else do we have in the bag?

Couldn't Live Without Your Love,

and I went,"OK. Wear your writing hat, don't wear your performer's hat."

Always wore two hats, two hats.

One as a performer, one as a writer.

And she had a big hit with it, and I smiled.

# You wander around on your own little cloud

# When you don't see the why or the wherefore

# You walk out on me

# When we both disagree

# Cos to reason is not what you care for... #

I can imagine her being quite jealous of other women.

She's surrounding herself with men to an extent and allowing them in

to her world to create the vision she has of herself

and I guess it's another little hint of the side of Petula Clark

that we do not know, that we've not been allowed, if you like, or have not bothered to understand

that she's a lot more dynamic and powerful and what would the word be?

Edgy, if you like, than the little cartoon we have of her in our heads.

The cartoon Petula was a hangover,

not just from her childhood and teenage years,

but from the fifties when she was making hit records, but in an entirely different style.

Women in the fifties, really in Britain particularly,

tended to sing more novelty tunes, or light ballads.

Nothing too taxing. It was strictly family entertainment. Quite popular.

Artists like, Dusty Springfield was in the Lanna Sisters

and they were doing sweet little novelty things like,

Seven Little Girls In The Back Seat and Petula fitted in with that tradition at that time.

Your women artists weren't expected to be too racy.

It's all right. Could it be a bit quicker?

-What, in tempo?

-Try it in tempo, please.

# Have I told you lately that I love you? #

That's better.

They were all sort of themed, sort of songs.

It was the little waists and the full skirts.

What we would all call very twee. Pet wasn't like that at all.

I think there was a very impressionable woman.

I think there was a very passionate woman inside her that wanted to get out.

Petula's chance to break out came when her French record company asked her to perform in Paris,

with a view to persuading her to record in French.

They kept calling and calling

so eventually I said, "OK, I'll come over."

"It's just for one night."

Little did I know that it was at the Olympia,

which is, was the Mecca of show-business in France

and Europe Number One was THE radio station and I sang three songs in English.

Couldn't even say bon soir.

In front of a huge French audience, in the Olympia Theatre and they loved it.

And I to this day, will never understand why they loved it.

In France, they really warmed to her.

I think they saw her as an English rose

and they loved that she sang French with a strong English accent.

And I think they quite liked the fact that she didn't have much style.

French women are so chic and yet she would,

her husband Claude said when he first met her he wasn't that impressed

because she was singing, she was wearing a dress that looked like two large pink lampshades,

but they still warmed to her.

Despite the success of the evening, Petula had little enthusiasm

for recording and performing in France, until the lights went out.

She came to office the day after - I was a PR at the time.

And the boss called me at one point

because his lamp broke down

and I was the only tall guy who could fix it upwards.

And I jump on the desk, changed it.

And I look up at this guy, this...

Cette homme!

I said, "Who's that? Who's that?"

He said, "Ah, he's our PR man

"and if you decided to do a record he would be taking you around Paris

"and helping you out with the interviews, television, radio, journalists."

And I said. "OK. Well, maybe I'll have a little try."

She became a big star there in France.

She really absorbed that chanson tradition

and was hanging out with Sacha Distel and Charles Aznavour.

Again, very light entertainment, but with depth to it because of that chanson tradition

and the whole ballad format that Edith Piaf had set up.

And I think Petula learnt a lot there and you can hear those influences in her singing

and I think that gave extra depth to her singing.

SHE SINGS IN FRENCH

The wonderful thing about the success that I was having

in France was that it had nothing to do with my childhood.

It had nothing to do with my background.

They just liked me the way I was and that was important to me.

I could leave my luggage behind me.

I'll give you three, four in to this, guys. Three and a four - in.

Petula still works with her musical director

from those early French tours - Kenny Clayton.

They said, "Right the musicians go in the Citroen estate car,

"cos it could take the bass, the drums and the three musicians

"and we'll see you in Lyon."

But on the way in to Lyon

I'm looking at these gigantic posters

with Pet's image on it saying,

"Petula, Palais d'Hiver, Lyon, ce soir."

I'd never seen posters this size.

I thought, "My, God, this is good publicity."

I didn't know what the Palais d'Hiver was.

Well, it's an arena and it holds 5,000 people,

and it was packed and they were jumping up and down like a football crowd for Petula.

I was just amazed by the whole thing.

I was learning about another kind of show business...

..because for a long time, for me anyway, in England

it was all about wearing a big frock and singing a jolly song

and finishing with a great big ballad and not getting too involved really, in any of it.

And in France I was seeing something else.

The first time I saw Piaf she sort of stumbled on to the stage

in her funny little black dress, which was not chic at all, and she looked ill.

And it was a black stage, no fancy tra-la-las at all.

No special effects and I thought,

"I don't know if I'm going to enjoy this much."

Then she started to sing.

And it was all about what she had inside her.

And she could sing about anything - life, death, madness, sex - you name it.

It was all in her songs.

SHE SINGS IN FRENCH

And she wasn't the only one.

There were many other singers of that kind around.

And it was quite a... quite a revelation really.

# Pour toi

# Pour moi L'amour... #

She is an actress. I think, probably, she's an actress first and foremost.

And I think the...the...

the box of pop star that we put people in in those days

was probably too tight a box, too tight a fit for her.

And I think there was a lot more freedom for her over there.

And, um... The French chanson, the Jacques Brel, the things she used to sing over there,

I think possibly brought out the actor in her more than the uniform of a pop personality over here.

In 1961, Petula and Claude were married in Paris in a frenzy of media and fan attention.

Ya Ya Twist went to number one in France, and though it made the British charts too,

a second wedding here was an altogether quieter affair.

Well, I married a French man, so everybody thought that was naughty.

Particularly the English, you know, the...

"Our little Pet," you know, "she's gone off to marry a foreigner, a Frenchman."

We had two children quite quickly and my career was really pretty extraordinary in France.

I was voted their top singer and, er...

I was also making hit records in Italy and Germany. It was wonderful.

I was doing all my growing up, really, in Paris.

It is a great pleasure to welcome to our programme Miss Petula Clark.

Back in the UK, we might have had trouble

seeing Petula's French adventures for more than their novelty value...

SHE SINGS IN FRENCH

..but Our Pet had definitely moved on.

She did look a lot more chic and she became very international, really.

She was able to sort of project that famous poise

and that really helped her when she broke through into America.

# My funny Valentine

# Sweet comic Valentine

# You make me smile

# With my heart... #

When I first met her, when we first worked together, in the sixties, and she did my television show

and I did a special of hers, she's such a great performer.

People would come to see her expecting to hear Downtown

and the other songs that they knew of hers.

Um...

And they got so much more.

They got, you know, a woman who knew how to perform, who'd been...who'd done theatre,

who knew how to act,

who knew how to handle an audience.

She's just terrific.

# Visions of sugarplums race through my head

# You and I drinking yesterday's wine...

I think there's much too much emphasis on....

You can't complain. I mean, it's given her a wonderful lifestyle.

Much too much emphasis on Downtown and I Know A Place,

which are, by the way, great songs

and indelibly stamped by her no matter who else tries to do them.

And there's too little emphasis on her wide, wide range of talent.

There isn't anything she can't sing.

# I'm in with the in-crowd I go where the in-crowd goes

# I'm in with the in-crowd

# And I know what the in-crowd knows... #

In demand for TV shows and concerts, not just in Britain,

but in Europe and America as well,

Petula was that rarest of British commodities - an international superstar.

And with two young children, Bara and Kate, it can't have been easy to fit it all in.

I think it must have been terribly difficult for her.

To have the two daughters - Katie and Bara.

They went from the Lycee in Paris to the Lycee in Los Angeles, New York. They were all over the place!

And it must have been terribly difficult, because you're uprooting all the time.

And I know her sister travelled with them quite a lot, so she could be there for the girls, you know?

Um, yes... She took a lot on. She took a heck of a lot on.

My work in America, I think, was really good for me,

although it was complicating my life, if you like.

You know, the constant travelling.

You know, and I would finish a season in - I don't know -

Vegas or Los Angeles or wherever I was, in Chicago, and instead of,

hanging out and having fun with it,

I would get on a plane, you know, and go back.

So...it was a...

It was not totally satisfactory.

# Life is never what it seems We're always searching in our dreams

# To find that little castle in the air... #

In one way, it's a comfortable life, because you make money.

On the other hand, they don't have a real mother like other children.

Some, maybe Bara suffered a little bit of it. Kate, I don't know.

We tried at the time to do, we'd do Las Vegas or Reno or Tahoe.

To do that during Easter or the summer holidays or Christmas,

to take them with us.

But we've done our best.

They have to make their own life and now they're old enough too.

# Look! Look!

# Look to the rainbow... #

At the height of her pop career, Petula starred in two films - Finian's Rainbow with Fred Astaire

and Goodbye Mr Chips with Peter O'Toole - but neither revived the success of her earlier film career.

They were a couple of odd movies, in a way.

The kind of movies you put an ex-pop star in anyway,

not necessarily because she was an actress.

In the Huggett movies, she was, er...she was brilliant.

You couldn't see the join, she was in it, she was of it, and she was something.

Who knows what would have happened if that had continued

and she'd found a way to grow up as a film actress, if you like, and actually make films.

From child star to movie star, through her rise as a singer

during the fifties and her reinvention as a pop star, Petula's career had soared.

The stumbling of her film career was the first hint of trouble ahead.

The seventies was a very difficult time for sixties artists.

On the whole, um, they were seen as old hat.

And there was a whole raft of new bands, and really, um...

the seventies was a lot more about bands,

like big super groups like Led Zeppelin or The Eagles.

And then, in the late seventies, it was punk and, obviously, at that point

everyone tore up the rule book.

# We're so pretty Oh, so pretty

# We're vacant!

# We're so pretty Oh, so pretty

# We're vacant! #

# You wander round on your own little cloud... #

I think Petula handled the transition from the sixties to the seventies very well.

And the main reason she did that was because she embraced that international market.

She could do clubs, she could do cabaret, she could do pop, and she did it all with this

real charm and she moved very easily within different circles, whether it was Frank Sinatra, Vegas or, um...

a more hip sort of Motown crowd.

She could move very easily between all those, um, places.

# I've heard it all a million times before...

# My love is warmer than the warmest sunshine

# Softer than a sigh... #

One of my favourites. One of the Tony Hatch, Jackie Trent songs.

Tonight, it's for you.

# You're the only one that I rely on... #

Petula re-worked her back catalogue for the middle of the road.

But the artist in her wanted more.

OK, she was doing this cabaret thing, but also, she was exploring

her own artistic depth with the albums Memphis and Blue Lady, which she recorded in Nashville in '75.

And she was working with Chips Moman, who's a wonderful producer-songwriter,

who's worked with everyone from Elvis Presley to Bobby Womack to Aretha Franklin. Lovely guy

and a real enabler.

# I wanna see morning with him I wanna see morning with him

# No, I'm not made of stone... #

You got the feeling this was at the heart of what she wanted to do.

Sing great songs from a female point of view about disappointment and defiance.

Sing them beautifully.

Not necessarily have hits, as such, but sort of have album hits, I guess.

And join in a world where there was Joni Mitchell and Carole King, James Taylor.

I think there was a glimpse of the possibility that Petula Clark could have done that.

# The room was crowded when I walked in... #

Petula also recorded with Arif Marden, who - 30 years later -

would be responsible for producing Norah Jones' 20 million-selling album Come Away With Me.

# ..no welcome, not a trace

# I felt so out of place

# And then I saw your lovely face... #

You know, it's 30-odd years ago, but you think of it now as a template for the Norah Jones album.

You know, that kind of strange way of putting an unclassifiable female voice

with this wonderful mixture of jazz and country and blues and rock.

And that album - the Arif Marden one - does stand up and it is a kind of lost masterpiece.

There's a new maturity there, um...and it's an area that really

I think she could have explored a bit more, because I think it

got to her that she couldn't really find her own intrinsic musical style and I think it was probably there.

If she'd stuck in that groove, maybe we would've trusted that,

but she got restless that it wasn't taken and kept moving about.

By the mid-seventies, she'd become a... Just singing covers,

just singing the hits of the day, and again really fantastically.

You know, the only thing that dates them is the sound of them, not the way she sings them.

And by the mid-seventies, she'd run into the final cul-de-sac.

The reinventions, no-one was really noticing.

Eventually, the struggle to combine her creative interests with her more commercial work

and her family life began to take its toll.

I was feeling really torn apart, so I stopped.

I stopped for a couple of years,

which was a very strange experience.

Just not performing at all, really.

And, er... By then, of course, we had three children.

Our lovely Patrick had been born in Geneva.

And I thought, "Well, OK..."

But you know, there was something missing from my life.

# I don't know how to love him

# What to do

# How to move him... #

Before the seventies were out, Petula was back on stage,

and staking her claim to a new kind of performance.

When she took on the role of Maria in the stage version of The Sound of Music, the critics muttered.

They needn't have worried.

The show ran for over a year in the West End and Petula had found herself another career.

A very good move, actually.

Because there was a big revival of the musical in the eighties.

It's a whole other circuit now and it's enormous.

Um...

And I think, um... it is the place to go for a lot of older artists

or pop artists who, um, have maybe grown out of that young audience

and are not quite sure where to go, but don't want to go somewhere too left field or too startling.

Entering into the musicals to give yourself the eighties, to give yourself the nineties -

that takes a kind of courage, and a kind of...

Having to force yourself to deaden part of yourself to keep the career going.

And it certainly did keep going.

After the success of The Sound of Music, Petula was called upon to rescue a show in dire straits.

It was a bomb. And it was not just a critical disaster, it was a financial disaster.

I remember my lawyer in New York, saying,

"Claude, you are taking a big risk, because if this show doesn't work..."

I said, "Look,

"you have two ways to look at it.

"I'm looking that way the show doesn't work.

"If Petula goes in it and it doesn't work, we will say the show's bad.

"And if the show works,

"it's because of her."

And he said, "Well, you're taking a risk." And it worked very well.

I had never done Broadway before. The idea of going into, um...

a show which was in trouble was kind of exciting.

I kind of liked that - the challenge.

Producer Bill Kenwright was making frightening losses on Broadway,

with Willy Russell's Blood Brothers and facing eviction from the theatre.

Gerald Schoenfeld, who is the Godfather of New York Theatre,

he owned the theatre, came to see me and gave me notice.

He said, "We have Stacey Keach coming in, in Kentucky Cycle or something,"

and I said, "I'm going nowhere."

We were in my London office and I said, "I'm going nowhere!"

He said, "What do you mean? I'm giving you notice!"

I said, "No, you're not, because I've got..." And I sort of looked up there

and I heard myself saying, "I've got David Cassidy and Petula Clark taking over."

And he went, "Have you really?"

I said, "Yup." I didn't have David Cassidy and Petula Clark.

And he went and phoned his head office and said,

"Bill's got David Cassidy and Petula Clark..."

"Oh, well, that's a different story!" So we shook hands

and I thought, "How do I get hold of David Cassidy and Petula Clark?"

Playing a mother destined to see the tragic death of her twin sons,

Petula, alongside David and Shaun Cassidy, defied the critics.

Against all odds, they turned round the fortunes of the show.

It was actually called the "Miracle of Broadway".

So she - and David I have to say - but she gave Willy Russell and myself just dreams-come-true time.

First of all, she loves what she does.

And she loves people around her.

She just makes you feel comfortable, you know,

and sometimes you feel you're not doing your job.

You think SHE'S taking care of everybody.

Though still very involved in each others' lives, Petula and Claude had grown apart.

By 1995, she was free to tour America with Blood Brothers for nine months.

When you have someone as experienced and as professional as Petula Clark,

you can throw the ball

and know that it's going to be caught and tossed back to you.

That's a trust and a comfort as an actor, that...

..this is why I do it - to have experiences like that.

# Tell me...

# Won't you tell me

# It is not true?

# Say you didn't mean it! #

She shows you her loneliness, she shows you her truth and her honesty with such a bravery.

When she sang, "Tell me it's not true, say you only dreamed it,"

and those two boys are in front,

you believed that was their mother and your heart just snapped.

# Oh, oh, oh...

# Oh, oh

# Oh, o-o-o-o-oh! #

Now, you wanna take it from the top? Why don't you sing this verse?

'I always think of Petula, besides from the extraordinary voice,

'of her ability to write.'

I mean, not only is she a great writer, writes great songs, but she is so prolific,

that at one point during the sixties,

her husband Claude was able

to come up with two separate contracts

for her as a songwriter. One under a pseudonym,

of all people Al Grant, was the name he chose, and the other as herself.

So, in addition to everything else, she made two very good incomes as a songwriter.

# Oh, what can I do now?

# My heart is beating just for you... #

Despite the financial advantages of writing her own material, the creative possibilities

of Petula the songwriter went unrecognised and unpromoted.

Heart, co-written by Petula, was never released as an A side.

# ..out of my head Yeah, heart!

# You gotta stop now!

# I'm feeling hazy

# Because I've got it so bad! #

Petula did write her own songs, but that was an area that never

really got developed, along with her more artistic side.

And I sort of feel that, again, that was something that was discouraged.

Female singers - "Oh, well, that's not really your strength.

"Song-writing's not your strength.

"You just... We'll compose and you sing,"

and I think she internalised that quite a lot.

If she'd been born, you know, 20 years later,

she might have been like Carole King - writing her own songs and really creating a new sound.

# Tragedy's not my...

# But it looks like it has found me

# Wrapped its grey old arms around me

# You're looking at a blue lady... #

INAUDIBLE

None of Petula and Claude's three children has chosen to follow them into the music business,

though Kate, their middle daughter,

is a visual artist, with her own take on her mother's career.

I think I'm probably not your personal taste.

Oh, no. No, that's not true.

There's actually some albums, or some songs anyway that I really like.

And... I love your voice. I think you have a really beautiful voice.

Now all the songs, are maybe not the songs that I'd love to listen to, but some of them...

I've even got some CDs here, sometimes when I work I listen to a couple of songs.

-Wow.

-Uh-huh.

Scary, eh?

-I like the Blue Lady album, actually.

-Oh, the Blue Lady album. Yes - that's the one we did in Nashville.

Nashville, yeah. I love that one.

There's something about the Nashville and the Memphis albums

that they have a certain sound to them that, er...I don't know...is a little bit strange.

And I... And I like that.

-I would have liked to have done more of that kind of thing.

-Yeah.

# It's midnight

# Do you know where your baby is? #

Blue Lady was recorded in 1975, with the title song written by Petula.

Like Memphis, from earlier in the decade, it was produced by Chips Moman,

one of American music's finest producers.

Yet despite the quality of the line-up and of the songs recorded, it lay gathering dust for 20 years.

It's odd to think of Petula Clark being dangerous,

but in a record company in the early seventies definitely dangerous.

And the idea of making a country album.

I can imagine that it drifted off into

the margins and sort of got held on the shelves, because it was oddly, er...

almost an experimental album.

You think of that period of Petula Clark as being experimental.

Her trying to find...

a new formula, if you like, that was comfortable for her as an artist, but also sustained

her economic reasons for being, for the record companies and the managers and the producers.

The money men had taken fright, but Petula had proved her bankability in musicals.

Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber and Sir Trevor Nunn

asked her to take on the role of Norma Desmond, the washed-up silent movie star of Sunset Boulevard.

She delivered a West End hit, a two-year American tour

and a triumphant concert performance opposite Michael Ball.

When you're that close to an actress and a great singer,

and you see in their eyes the belief in what they're doing,

she became Norma Desmond. It was quite terrifying.

And when she did the mad scenes at the end, it was so convincing.

I sort of went, "Oh, my God, has she gone off on one?"

And then, we'd finished rehearsing the scene and back to regular Petula.

It was a great experience.

I really went into that reluctantly.

And I was scared. It is a very, very frightening thing to do.

I've always been a nice... a nice lady, you know,

in everything I've done.

The Sound of Music, Blood Brothers.

The "Aw" thing, you know, "Aw!"

There's no "Aw!" in this at all.

I mean, she is...weird.

It would be very easy to stand on a stage and make a pleasant noise, but that doesn't engage an audience.

You have to have something else, you have to share something

of yourself. That's what she does - shares something of herself.

# I've spent so many mornings

# Just trying to resist you... #

Well, I finished up loving the younger Norma Desmond -

the one that we never saw -

because she'd become this crusty, difficult, bitter woman...

because she'd lost all that...

that youth and beauty and fame.

Instead of playing it hard

and, you know, that kind of mad sort of nasty, um...

I played her like a young woman.

And it was...

It's the only time in the show, when we saw, we had a glimpse of what she might have been like before.

And I found that very moving.

And I have to say, by the time I'd finished playing her

for two years, which is a long time, I felt very differently about her.

I actually sort of loved her

and missed her when I wasn't playing her any more.

BUZZ OF CONVERSATION

Which I like actually...

You think of Garland and Temple and you think of both of them self-destructing.

Temple evolving into something, not to do with entertainment, making really a decision to get out of that.

Garland staying in entertainment and completely destroying herself by

having to face up to those problems of...

of loss of reputation, loss of nerve, er...

loss of voice, loss of material, loss of audience.

All those things that Petula has faced up to and somehow penetrated and kept going.

If you look at somebody's career and say, "You've been there, you've done that,"

and my God has she ever, and done it in the best possible way.

She's unique! She's totally and utterly unique, and you cannot take that away from her.

We may have not got on very well at the beginning, but I admire her tremendously.

Admired she may be, but after a 60-year career, in which

she's wiped the floor with the competition, shouldn't there be more?

Audiences who never saw the sixties know Cilla and Lulu.

Critics rate Sandie and revere Dusty.

But where's Petula in the roll call?

I think her story is, oddly enough, the most interesting.

It might be the most complicated, which is why we've had difficulty.

The Lulu one is two or three moves.

Cilla is the big Blind Date move.

Sandie Shaw is a little bit of the Smiths in the eighties.

But she's probably a better singer than all of them.

Her ability to interpret a song is better than any of them.

She was around for a lot longer.

She's done a lot more interesting things, in a way, after.

She's made better albums as works of art than any of them.

Petula's almost too complicated really to fit into

the nice comfortable boxes that making the canon has ended up being.

She became too restless and we haven't been able to deal with that.

-How are you?

-Hello, darling.

And Petula in her seventies is no different.

If something,

you know, out of left field came along, that I fancied doing, sure, I'd do it.

It's fun. It's got to be fun for me.

It's got to feel... Yeah, you know.

So what next?

Who knows?

Watch this space.

# When you say you love me You're not lying

# So when people want to stare

# I know I don't really care Just as long as you are there

# I couldn't live without your love

# Now I know you're really mine

# I gotta have you all the time!

# No, I couldn't live without your love

# Now I know you're really mine I gotta have you all the time... #