Song of the Day 12/28: Petula Clark, “Downtown”

Given that there’s no sign yet that Nashville suicide bomber Anthony Quinn Warner left a suicide note, let alone a manifesto, people grasping for his motive have seized on the fact that he chose* this 1964 Petula Clark smash to blast over a loudspeaker in his RV between warnings to evacuate the area.

Is there a message hidden in his choice? Was it simply location? The blast occurred in what’s considered downtown Nashville, an area where the neon lights of bars and restaurants do shine brighter than anywhere else in Tennessee outside Memphis, but a British thrush singing about New York City seems an odd choice in the country-centric setting of Music City. Is it Joker-style taunting? Warner detonated his explosives at 6:30 a.m. and effectively warned away bystanders, so sociopathy seems an unlikely factor. Maybe it was simply one of his favorite tunes, or maybe as an aging bachelor he related to its opening line — “When you’re alone and life is making you lonely…”

Petula Clark’s producer, Tony Hatch, a songwriter and producer who was known as the “British Burt Bacharach,” said the song sprang into his head on his first visit to New York City in 1964. “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,” he said years later. While standing on the corner of 48th Street, facing Times Square and waiting for the traffic lights to change, “the melody first came to me, just as the neon signs went on.”

When he got back to England he finished the lyrics at Clark’s urging, and the result was a No. 1 hit in the U.S., the first chart appearance by a female British singer since the early ’50s. It kicked off a string of 15 Top 40 hits for Clark in the U.S. over the next three years, double the number she charted in the U.K.

“Downtown” was only No. 2 in the UK, where it couldn’t dislodge “I Feel Fine” by the Beatles from the top spot. It had similar success all over the English-speaking world, but ran into difficulties in most foreign markets because many languages don’t have an equivalent phrase to “downtown.” For the French market, the lyrics and title were changed to the phonetically similar “Dans le Temps.” In Italy, it became “Ciao Ciao.”

*I really should say “apparently chose,” because the police officer who reported this didn’t know the name of the song. Tyler Luellen of Metro Nashville Police said, “What I remembered was ‘downtown, where the lights shine bright.'”