Guildford G Live
Guildford, England UK
3 October, 2016
Songs Performed
PART ONE
- You and I
- Meant to Be
- Don't Sleep in the Subway
- While You See a Chance
- Who Am I /Color My World
- A Miracle to Me
- My Love
- Crazy
- Pour Etre Aime De Toi
- Sacrifice My Heart
- I Know a Place / Sign of the Times
- This is My Song
- You're The One
PART TWO
- Never Enough
- Blackbird
- Fever
- With One Look
- Look to the Rainbow / Glocca Morra
-
Let's Hear It For The 60's
Round Every Corner/Don't Give Up/Call Me/ The Other Man's Grass - Living for Today
- Reflections
- Dis moi au revior/Kiss Me Goodbye / Marin/Sailor
- I Couldn't Live Without Your Love
- Downtown
- Here For You
© Pat Fox
5 October, 2016
Colston Hall
Bristol, England UK
5 October, 2016
Colston Hall
Bristol, England UK
6 October, 2016
The Anvil
Basingstoke, England UK
6 October, 2016
The Anvil
Basingstoke, England UK
7 October, 2016
Swan Theatre
Wycombe, England UK
7 October, 2016
Swan Theatre
Wycombe, England UK
St. David's Hall
13 October, 2013
Leas Cliffs
Folkestone, UK
13 October, 2013
Leas Cliffs
Folkestone, UK
Town Hall
Leeds, England UK
19 October, 2016
Press
Review
Leeds Town Hall 9t October 2016
Calling your tour (and new album) "From Now On" is unusual in your eighties, but then very few people are touring a new album at 83. Pet explains (I can call her Pet, can't I? It seems she's become a national treasure, property of an era of pop). Anyway, Pet explains that Norma Desmond (main character in Sunset Boulevard) is everything she despises. The film tells the story of a silent movie star clinging to memories of her fame. It was made into a musical that Clark toured for two years and we hear a couple of songs from it. She may not be living in the past but there is a lot of back catalogue to traverse, interspersed with songs from more recent releases, songs she is proud to show off and tell us about the Sunset Boulevard songs arrive with stories and songs from other musicals, including a couple of dangers from Finian's Rainbow - the cringe worthy Irish accent is self-mocked and is worth it for the stories about Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas stumbling from a car and Tommy Steele as a six-foot cockney leprechaun.
When you reach your eighties. you have the same sort of puff you had in your twenties and the show tonight is a lesson in how to perform with dignity. Petula eschews belting and sustaining notes, she does it all with phrasing, letting the band cover the parts mere volume is needed. She also adds in lots of breathing space for stories - she's covered some ground in her career - and we are entertained with stories about Jimmy Page, Charlie Chaplin, Fred Astaire, Peggy Lee, Tony Hatch and others, often with a sense of not quite believing she was there. But she was and wrote a melodies herself (the one lyric on show, Reflections, suggests music is her strength) with collaborations such as Charles Aznavour.
She has tons of sixties material, particularly from her Tony Hatch and Jackie Trent days, enough that, at one point, she throws some away in snippets in a medley. Others, like early openers You & I, Don't Sleep In The Subway and Who Am I, get the full treatment and awed appreciation from the audience. Leeds Town Hall is a great setting and the spotlight is on Petula, while washes of purple and blue show up the huge pipe organ and Late Victorian slogans of the grand old hall.
The four-piece band provides a rich soft rock! MOR backing and the guitarist indulges in some pantomiming as Clark regales us with the story of having Jimmy Page on a session for You're The One. Her arrangements were always big and bouncy and we recognise them tonight. As we recognise Gnarls Berkeley's Crazy. She makes a good fist of this track from her last album and it's the sort of thing people like Sinatra did in the sixties, reworking contemporary pop hits. She later takes The Beatles' Blackbird and jazzes it. Less contemporary covers include Stevie Winwood's While You See A Chance and a punchy, seventies-styled Fever.
She delivers a couple of lesser songs in French and nonsense like Sailor's "harbour of my heart are better that way I was hoping for some stories of her time as one of France's biggest 'Ye-Ye'' girls but we'd need a longer evening for that. The evening moves on and when she reaches I Couldn't Live Without Your Love, she gets sassy and almost carried away; her finger wags, her arms wave and a few decades drop from her. She wraps things up with Downtown (of course) and works it as a call and response, clap-along showtune. Here For You, a much more recent song. brings us to a gentle close and reinforces that, as far as she is concerned, Pet is living in the present as she wisely avoids the artificiality of an encore, sending a happy audience out into the streets of Leeds. Tonight has been a lesson in how to retain your style, please the audience, present new work without displeasing those there for the hits, yet project the decorum of a grande dame of pop.
She delivers a couple of lesser songs in French and nonsense like Sailor's "harbour of my heart are better that way I was hoping for some stories of her time as one of France's biggest 'Ye-Ye'' girls but we'd need a longer evening for that. The evening moves on and when she reaches I Couldn't Live Without Your Love, she gets sassy and almost carried away; her finger wags, her arms wave and a few decades drop from her. She wraps things up with Downtown (of course) and works it as a call and response, clap-along showtune. Here For You, a much more recent song. brings us to a gentle close and reinforces that, as far as she is concerned, Pet is living in the present as she wisely avoids the artificiality of an encore, sending a happy audience out into the streets of Leeds. Tonight has been a lesson in how to retain your style, please the audience, present new work without displeasing those there for the hits, yet project the decorum of a grande dame of pop.
21 October, 2013
Royal Concert Hall
Glasgow, Scotland UK
21 October, 2013
Royal Concert Hall
Glasgow, Scotland UK
Theatre Royal Drury Lane
London, England UK
23 October, 2016
©Photos by Pat Fox
©Photos by Brenda Redpath 
©Photo by Pat FoxPress
Alan Bennett once said: "If you live to be 90 in England and can still eat a boiled egg, they think you deserve the Nobel Prize."
Do we have a fixation with age? Maybe, but witnessing Petula Clark on stage in her current British concert tour, where she delivers two hours of songs from her vast catalogue, it is impossible to believe she turns 84 next month.
Sally Olwen Clark, renamed Petula by her ambitious father and manager Leslie, was a child star who entertained the troops on the radio during the Second World War. Her first hit single came in 1954, heralding ultimate career sales of 70 million records from such standards as Don't Sleep in the Subway, and the glittering Downtown. She was the first British female artist ever to win a Grammy, appeared in 30 films, and on stage headlined such musicals as The Sound of Music and Sunset Boulevard. If her vocal range on the current tour is, perfectly reasonably, not quite what it was when she first recorded Downtown 52 years ago, it is still powerful, while her speaking voice and bearing are those of a woman a generation younger.
The tour culminated in London on 23 October with her 15th show in 20 days. But when we met the morning after the opening night, Clark shrugged off any questions about her demanding schedule even though she's well into her ninth decade.
"I just don't think about my age," she says, at the Chelsea house that has served as her London base for decades, when she is not at home in Geneva. "Then again, sometimes I realise my oldest child is 54 and I think, 'How did that happen?'
"Being on stage is invigorating. People have the impression I'm a workaholic when I'm really not. This is my first tour in three years. I've been doing concerts here and there, and making a record. Mostly I've just been living. Watching television - I love quizzes or a good drama, although I think I'm the only person in the world who hasn't seen Downton Abbey - doing a bit of shopping, a lot of walking. "I travel a lot to see my children. I have a daughter in New York, where my two grandchildren are, a son in California and another daughter based between Paris and Brussels. We're a gypsy family."
Sally Olwen Clark, renamed Petula by her ambitious father and manager Leslie, was a child star who entertained the troops on the radio during the Second World War. Her first hit single came in 1954, heralding ultimate career sales of 70 million records from such standards as Don't Sleep in the Subway, and the glittering Downtown. She was the first British female artist ever to win a Grammy, appeared in 30 films, and on stage headlined such musicals as The Sound of Music and Sunset Boulevard. If her vocal range on the current tour is, perfectly reasonably, not quite what it was when she first recorded Downtown 52 years ago, it is still powerful, while her speaking voice and bearing are those of a woman a generation younger.
The tour culminated in London on 23 October with her 15th show in 20 days. But when we met the morning after the opening night, Clark shrugged off any questions about her demanding schedule even though she's well into her ninth decade.
"I just don't think about my age," she says, at the Chelsea house that has served as her London base for decades, when she is not at home in Geneva. "Then again, sometimes I realise my oldest child is 54 and I think, 'How did that happen?'
"Being on stage is invigorating. People have the impression I'm a workaholic when I'm really not. This is my first tour in three years. I've been doing concerts here and there, and making a record. Mostly I've just been living. Watching television - I love quizzes or a good drama, although I think I'm the only person in the world who hasn't seen Downton Abbey - doing a bit of shopping, a lot of walking. "I travel a lot to see my children. I have a daughter in New York, where my two grandchildren are, a son in California and another daughter based between Paris and Brussels. We're a gypsy family."
Clark retains a low-key British reserve, evidenced even in the details of her dressing-room rider. "Over the years I've found I enjoy ironing my own outfit for the show, so I ask for an iron and ironing board," she says.
"I find it a stress-free, therapeutic time. I did have a disaster once when the iron was a bit fierce and I burnt a hole in my skirt. Fortunately I had another one. I also ask for a bottle of port, although at most I have one glass and sometimes none. It's a tradition."
She cheerfully admits to doing "pretty much nothing" to keep her voice in shape. Not for her the regime of 24 hours' silence before a show or a recording session as espoused by Celine Dion.
"It works for her, I guess," muses Clark, who never so much as warms up. "I'm disgraceful, I know. In 2012 I did a duet with a French singer called Ben l'Oncle Soul, who was then in his 20s. On arrival at the studio I was ready to go straight away, but he needed almost two hours, blowing bubbles into a bottle and doing all kinds of funny exercises. I thought, 'Blimey'."
She is equally opaque about her private life. She and Wolff, the father of her three children, effectively separated 25 years ago, but they still share the same house. Meanwhile, for several years she has had a new partner whose name she declines to divulge.
"It works and we're both enjoying it. We were friends first and the romantic side happened later. Yes, he's younger than me. I don't want to elaborate. If I start getting into details it won't work. It's a delicate subject.
Of course he's seen me perform. No, that's not really a particular thrill. The thrill for me is performing to the audience, rather than stopping to think about somebody else out there. I'd rather not know."
For now, the tour occupies all her thoughts. "I'll probably be knackered by the end of it. It's intensive, but that's the job. If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. And I'm not getting out of the kitchen for a long time yet."
"I find it a stress-free, therapeutic time. I did have a disaster once when the iron was a bit fierce and I burnt a hole in my skirt. Fortunately I had another one. I also ask for a bottle of port, although at most I have one glass and sometimes none. It's a tradition."
She cheerfully admits to doing "pretty much nothing" to keep her voice in shape. Not for her the regime of 24 hours' silence before a show or a recording session as espoused by Celine Dion.
"It works for her, I guess," muses Clark, who never so much as warms up. "I'm disgraceful, I know. In 2012 I did a duet with a French singer called Ben l'Oncle Soul, who was then in his 20s. On arrival at the studio I was ready to go straight away, but he needed almost two hours, blowing bubbles into a bottle and doing all kinds of funny exercises. I thought, 'Blimey'."
She is equally opaque about her private life. She and Wolff, the father of her three children, effectively separated 25 years ago, but they still share the same house. Meanwhile, for several years she has had a new partner whose name she declines to divulge.
"It works and we're both enjoying it. We were friends first and the romantic side happened later. Yes, he's younger than me. I don't want to elaborate. If I start getting into details it won't work. It's a delicate subject.
Of course he's seen me perform. No, that's not really a particular thrill. The thrill for me is performing to the audience, rather than stopping to think about somebody else out there. I'd rather not know."
For now, the tour occupies all her thoughts. "I'll probably be knackered by the end of it. It's intensive, but that's the job. If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. And I'm not getting out of the kitchen for a long time yet."