It seems like virtually every artist from the 1960s has gone the standards route, now that even Paul McCartney himself has done so with his new album.
At Feinstein’s At Loews Regency Thursday night (the first of a three-night extended stay there following a highly successful two-week run), McCartney contemporary Petula Clark started her show with Cole Porter’s “I Concentrate On You,” then proceeded into other standards, show songs and film fare like Gershwin’s “Someone To Watch Over Me.”
But most of her set featured the classic ‘60s hits penned by Songwriters Hall of Fame nominee Tony Hatch including, of course, her 1965 chart-topping U.S. debut “Downtown.” When she followed “I Concentrate On You” with a pairing of her Hatch hits “Who Am I?” and “Color My World” (the latter was marked by her music director/pianist Grant Sturiale’s ingenius approximation of the recording’s sitar part), it was surprisingly clear that these songs, in a cabaret setting also employing drums, bass, and guitar, are themselves pop standards, even as they originated during rock ‘n’ roll’s British Invasion.
But Clark comes to the style naturally. She actually starred opposite Fred Astaire in the 1968 film version of Finian’s Rainbow, and when she sang the score’s Burton Lane-E.Y. Harburg song “How Are Things In Glocca Morra?” she prefaced it with an inside story of how its young director Francis Coppola and the venerable Astaire were at odds early on, then evolved into mutual admiration.
She likewise led into “With One Look,” from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Sunset Boulevard, by relating the admonition of Glenn Close, who preceded her on Broadway in the show’s lead role of faded silent screen star Norma Desmond. Close told her to quit the hideous character after eight months, lest she “end up in a clinic,” said Close; Clark then put on a nervous tick as she noted her two-year stint in the show.
Clark, who was a child when she entertained troops during World War II, has also had an international career. She sang “This Is My Song,” her 1967 hit version of the Charlie Chaplain film composition, after noting that she recorded it first in Italian, French and German (“a bit of a sweat!”).
Most revealing, though, was her intro to Edith Piaf’s “La Vie En Rose.” Clark, who will return to Paris to finish a French CD following her Feinstein’s gigs, had seen Piaf perform in Paris at the end of her career.
“She was singing with her mind and heart and guts and her sex,” said Clark, accompanying herself here on piano. Singing of “love and hate, life and death,” the great Piaf was “not intellectual to me but a street singer”--a pop singer of a different sort.
So, too, is Clark. Her voice still supple but now showing a harder edge, she’s a much more versatile vocalist than her ‘60s hits indicated, and displayed her range further with a bluesy version of Hatch’s “I Know A Place” and a country take on “My Love” (also a Hatch hit). She also did one song that she co-wrote, the 9-11 affected “Starting All Over Again,” and after the show’s obvious climax of “Downtown”—which Hatch wrote on his first trip to New York--she demonstrated her knowledge and love for the city with a very funny parody.
Observing the prevalence now of Starbucks, banks, nail salons and drugstores, she sang, to the tune of “Downtown,” “Duane Reade.” Sample lyric: “You'll find me left of the cookies and men's underwear.”
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