THE HIT HAMMER: Petula Clark's "Downtown"

(The Hit Hammer is where I'm reviewing each #1 song on the Billboard Hot 100. Starting from when the chart started in 1958 and eventually working my way to the present. To see my inspiration and more information about this blog, please refer to the "Poor Little Fool" post)

Petula Clark - "Downtown"

Hit Number 1: January 23, 1965

Stay at Number 1: 2 Weeks

Some songs get it. There are days when you just don't have it, and it feels like life continues to slap you in the face. Sometimes that can happen for weeks, or even months. In Petula Clark's "Downtown", she tells you that there is one place you can go where you won't feel as lonely. Spoiler alert: It's downtown. A little bit of history with this song, is that when it hit #1 in January 1965, Clark became the first British woman to score a #1 single in the U.S. in the midst of the British Invasion. However, it's a lot different from the other British Invasion songs that have had or will have their moment in this blog.

The song's origins stemmed from when Clark's producer, Tony Hatch, was staying at New York City while searching for material from music publishers for artists that he was producing, such as Clark. He would recall "I was staying at a hotel on Central Park and I wandered down to Broadway and to Times Square and, naively, I thought I was downtown. I loved the whole atmosphere there and the [music] came to me very, very quickly". He said the melody first came to him while looking towards Time Square and the neon signs went on. While he had a melody in place, he thought it would work more as a doo-wop song and thought that the Drifters would do well with the song. It isn't hard to see why, when you consider the fact that Hatch's greatest achievements had to do with the Drifters, whether his songs were covers of their songs or they were modeled after Drifters songs. But it wound up going to Petula Clark after Hatch played for her what he had come up with so far. She seemed very interested in taking a crack at the song, and Hatch finally completed it, lyrics and all, after Clark expressed her desire to record it. He would later say that before Clark wanted to record it, he said "It never occurred to me that a white woman could even sing it". According to Hatch, the Drifters never got offered the song.

Clark took it and ran with it. The song is filled of grand instrumentation: blaring horns, lush strings, and a swift and lovely piano that doesn't grab your attention, but the song wouldn't be the same without it. On the outro, there even seems to be a saxophone honking away, wanting to jump in on the action. All of it sounds amazing together. Couple that with Clark's uplifting message to the song's listeners, and it makes for a truly lovely song. I really like how this song proved to America that the British weren't all about rocking bangers, that they were very much capable of bursting out a wail of a ballad when they needed to. That's exactly what "Downtown" is.

GRADE: 9/10