“Performing will be a labour of love”
Superstar Petula Clark chats to Gillian Thornton about her plans to sing at her first-ever UK music festival.
PETULA CLARK has performed in a huge range of venues since she first entertained the troops as a nine-year-old during World War II. Hailed as Britain’s home-grown Shirley Temple, she went on to appear on stages from the West End to Broadway, Vegas to Los Angeles.
And this summer Petula clocks up another first. On August 11, she will step out on stage at Fairport’s Cropredy Convention in the leafy Oxfordshire countryside.
Run by folk-rock band Fairport Convention, who celebrate their 50th anniversary this year, the three-day event is widely known as Britain’s Friendliest Music Festival. Not surprisingly, Petula can’t wait.
“I was so excited to be invited,” she tells me by telephone from her home in Geneva, where she has lived for 42 years.
“It just sounds so much fun. I did a UK tour last year, and I’ll be bringing my UK band with me to Cropredy, and working with the same musical director and sound man. So I’ll feel like I am amongst friends before I even meet the audience. “I’ve done outdoor shows before and there’s always an exciting challenge about singing in a space that isn’t contained.” I find it hard to believe that the youthful voice on the end of the phone belongs to a woman of eighty-four, but watching the video for her 2016 single “Sacrifice My Heart”, I can see she’s still incredibly elegant.
I met her in London nearly 20 years ago when she had just finished starring in “Sunset Boulevard” and have always remembered her account of working through two bouts of bronchitis. A professional like Petula was never going to let poor health keep her off stage!
She began her radio career by accident in October 1942 when she went with her father to the radio show “It’s All Yours” to record a message for an uncle stationed in North Africa.
The air raid siren went off so the producer asked if anyone would like to sing a song or recite a poem to calm the atmosphere, and Petula stepped up to the mic. The rest is history.
After entertaining the troops with concerts and recordings, Petula sang at the national victory celebration at Trafalgar Square, and during the Forties and Fifties was one of the pioneer stars of British television.
Then, after a number of chart hits, she was invited to sing at the Olympia Theatre in France. The audience loved her and an international career was born. But not just a career . . .
At first Petula was reluctant to record in French but was persuaded to take the plunge by the record company PR man, Claude Wolff. They’ve been married since 1961.
As well as becoming a French star, she also began recording in German and Italian, soon clocking up No. 1 hits across Europe.
In 1964, Petula launched her American career when her recording of the Tony Hatch song “Downtown” shot to No. 1 and earned her a Grammy; 1969 saw her in “Goodbye, Mr. Chips”, the Seventies saw her as a Vegas superstar, the Eighties on the London stage and the Nineties on Broadway.
She’s played the lead in “The Sound Of Music”, “Blood Brothers” and “Sunset Boulevard” as well as doing a one-woman show and numerous television shows.
Last year, Petula delighted her international army of fans by releasing not only
“Sacrifice My Heart” but also a new studio album entitled “From Now On” which includes cover versions of the Beatles melody, “Blackbird”, and the classic hit “Fever”.
“I’ve not decided on the set for Cropredy yet,” Petula tells me. “But there’ll certainly be songs from the new album and, of course, I have to sing ‘Downtown’. It’s one of those songs that just doesn’t go away – it seems to have a life of its own!
“But I never tire of singing it, nor old hits like ‘Don’t Sleep In The Subway’ and ‘I Couldn’t Live Without Your Love’. So I’m delighted that audiences still love to hear them.”
When we speak, Petula is preparing for a tour of Australia, a country she’s visited many times before.
“It’s like no other country in the world,” she tells me. “It’s very beautiful, but I love the people, too, the laidback lifestyle and of course all those unique animals.”
It still sounds quite a challenge for a performer of advancing years but retirement clearly isn’t a word in Petula’s vocabulary. Her Cropredy appearance will be followed by a Paris concert in September and US dates in the autumn. But she makes light of it.
“I’m very lucky to be in good health and when I’m not working, I just relax around my home in Geneva. We live in the city, but I have a lovely view of Mont Blanc from my bedroom window and I enjoy walking in the local countryside.
“Even when I’m not working, I still travel around regularly to visit my three children and their families. One of our daughters is a yoga professor and spends a lot of time in Paris, though she travels a lot.
“Our son works in golf in California and though I don’t play golf myself, I feel like I’ve walked round courses all over the world with him! And our other daughter lives in New York with our grandchildren so it’s always lovely to visit them. We also have a place in Miami.”
So when she performs outdoors in Oxfordshire this summer, what does she hope Cropredy audiences will take away from their evening with Petula?
“The whole concept of performing in front of an audience is what this business is all about,” she says. “It’s not about TV and making records. What we will be doing at Cropredy has been going on for thousands of years – a performer and an audience interacting together. It’s all about communion.
“So if I can communicate something from the stage and they can communicate back to me, I think we’ll all enjoy ourselves. I choose all the songs myself and I sing songs that I love.
“So performing at Cropredy will be a labour of love – love for the songs, love for the audience, and love for being back in the UK again.” n