PETULA CLARK LOOKS BACK
Tour and album celebrate her bond with Quebec
AT A GLANCE
Petula Clark performs at
Théâtre Maisonneuve of Place des Arts on May 10, 2018; tickets cost $59.75 to $95.50 via placedesarts. com. Tickets are on sale now. Clark’s 2018 tour of Quebec also includes dates in Brossard (May 6), L’Assomption (May 11), Beloeil (May 12), Quebec City (May 13), St-Jérôme (May 16), StHyacinthe (May 17), Gatineau (May 18) and Sherbrooke (May 22). For more information, visit evenko.ca. Sitting in a penthouse suite in downtown Montreal last month, Petula Clark couldn’t help but recall another room in another hotel just a few blocks away, 48 years ago.
“I’d been coming here for years to perform in French,” said the 84-year-old English singer and actress, whose 1964 all-time classic Downtown is only the tip of a remarkable show-business iceberg. “So when I was invited back after having hits in English, I thought: ‘This is great. I can do a bilingual show.’”
The show in question — actually a series of them, at Place des Arts, straddling late May and early June of 1969 — didn’t go as Clark had hoped. This was a time when language in Quebec was an especially contentious issue. When Clark sang in French, the anglophone half of the audience would break out in catcalls; when she sang in English, the francophone half would do the same.
“It was like open war,” recalled Clark, still sounding a little bewildered by it all. “I couldn’t win. I was really heartbroken. I needed someone to talk to. I had never met John (Lennon), but I knew he was in town. I remember it was pouring with rain, and I walked over to the (Queen Elizabeth) hotel, a far enough walk to get drenched. I went up, no security whatsoever. The door was open and there John and Yoko were, sitting on the bed. I walked in looking like a drowned rat, crying.
“John was very sweet, very funny — he was from Liverpool, they’re all funny. I told him what had happened, and he said — can I say it? He said: ‘You know what, Pet? F--’em!’ I said, ‘Oh! Thank you, John.’ Later they were passing around these sheets with lyrics, and we all started singing. Everything was being recorded.” The song, as sharp readers may have guessed by now, was Give Peace a Chance. “I am on that record. I can’t hear my voice, but I’m there,” Clark laughed.
The spur for this reminiscence, and the reason for her Montreal visit this spring, is that Clark has been soliciting songs from a range of contemporary Québécois artists (“I want them to write for me in the now — I’m not looking for nostalgia”) for a French-language album to be recorded here this year and released in time for an extensive Quebec tour announced for spring 2018. The album and tour have the potential to be something special — a perfect capper to a unique artist-audience relationship.
It’s a connection that goes back a long way. Clark performed regularly from the early 1960s at Gratien Gélinas’s old Comédie-Canadienne theatre on Ste-Catherine St. (It’s now the site of Théâtre du Nouveau Monde.) She was also here during Expo 67 as part of a Montreal-produced episode of the Ed Sullivan Show; for the aforementioned 1969 shows; and notably again in 2000 for a rapturously received autobiographical (and bilingual, this time without the catcalls) one-woman concert at Théâtre St-Denis.
“Quebec has been a very special place for me,” she said. “The idea of touring here again is wonderful.”
The story of how an Epsom, England-born child star who sang for the British troops during the Second World War came to be embraced by several generations of francophone fans is one of the unlikelier ones in 20th-century pop.
Clark, already a young veteran of the English stage and screen, began singing in French only because a singer named Dalida was having hits with French covers of her songs and she was urged by management to come to France and reclaim them.
Soon she was based in Paris and a huge star in France, years before her fame went global with Downtown.
Her polyglot profile doesn’t end there. Talk to Germans of a certain age and they will probably remember Monsieur, a No. 1 German hit in 1962. Italians took Ciao Ciao, an Italianization of Downtown, to the top of the charts in their country in 1965.
Of the mainstream pop performers of the 1950s and early 1960s, Clark was one of the few who weren’t wiped out by the Beatles; on the contrary, she managed to catch their wave and for a few years became the female face of the British Invasion.
“I had this career in Europe, and now suddenly I was having to nip across the Atlantic a lot,” she recalled. “It was overwhelming and it complicated my life — I already had two children — but you didn’t think of saying no. You can’t plan that kind of luck.”
The stature of the peerless Downtown, the song that made Clark a worldwide superstar, shouldn’t overshadow the other hits she made in collaboration with producer/songwriter auteur Tony Hatch: I Know a Place, My Love, I Couldn’t Live Without Your Love (“I still love that one; I do it onstage with great joy”), the sitarlaced Colour My World and maybe best of all, Don’t Sleep in the Subway, a Summer 1967 hit that can stand alongside Scott Walker as a marker for where orchestral pop met psychedelia.
Other milestones for Clark were her 1968 NBC TV special, where a duet she sang with Harry Belafonte — during which she spontaneously touched his arm — caused controversy in the immediate aftermath of Martin Luther King ’s assassination. (“I didn’t understand the reaction then. I was English and had never witnessed racial problems first-hand.”) There were also two starring roles in film musicals: in 1968 with Fred Astaire in Finian’s Rainbow and with Peter O’Toole the following year in Goodbye, Mr. Chips. Well reviewed in both, Clark might well have gone on to bigger things on screen had musicals not fallen out of fashion in the ’70s.
Clark now lives mostly in Geneva, Switzerland, still married to Claude Wolff, the man she met on her first visit to Paris in 1957. She keeps up with contemporary pop, reserving her highest praise for Adele (“marvellous, obviously”) and Amy Winehouse (“she was the real deal”). Her Quebec tour is part of a trek also encompassing the U.S. and Australia; she looks forward to reconnecting with her fan base, which includes a large gay contingent (“They’re wonderfully loyal, and they get all my jokes”). All of which begs a question: when this is done, will it be time for ...
“The R word?” she asked. “Not yet. I don’t think I’m ready for it. I’m still totally energized.”