At 80, Petula Clark has just released a new album, Lost In You. She tells Andy Welch how it was put together and reflects on her remarkable career

PETULA CLARK seems to take meetings, interviews, TV and radio appearances and performances all in her stride though, and baulks at the suggestion that she might slow down. She is 80, after all.

“I’ve been doing this most of my life, It’s just normal to me,” she explains, adding that she started singing at the age of six and has never really stopped. I could live without the travelling, but then it’s not the actual travelling I mind, it’s the security.

I don’t fly on private jets. Well not often, anyway.

“As for slowing down, I don’t know how to do anything else! I was a child star and had very little education because I didn’t really go to school.

What would I do?”

Clark started singing professionally when most children were starting school, first in plays, and later with an orchestra in the foyer of a department store, for which she was paid with a tin of toffee and a wristwatch.

In 1942, with Britain in the grip of war, a nine-year-old Clark accompanied her father to the BBC where they were hoping to record a message for an uncle stationed overseas. When the broadcast was delayed by an air raid, she ended up singing Mighty Lak’ A Rose for panic-stricken listeners.

More than 500 appearances on broadcasts for servicemen and women, earned her that nickname of The Singing Sweetheart. Post-war, Clark moved into films and she had a number of hit songs in the early 1950s.

But it took the release of her signature song Downtown, in 1964, to produce international stardom.

“I love the song,” she says. “Of course I do. I knew it was a good record at the time, it was obvious, but no one could’ve known it was going to be such a monster. I’ve sung it very many times, in different arrangements.”

Clark’s latest album, Lost In You, features, among a number of other covers, a reworking of her most famous hit. When producer John Williams suggested a new version, Clark was set against it. “Re-record Downtown? I said no, no way.”

WILLIAMS set about recording a new, laid-back arrangement and played it to Clark when she returned to the studio a few days later. “I said, ‘This is lovely, what is it?’ and he told me. I nearly dropped. It was interesting, so I got up to the microphone and sang it. I don’t know how many times I’ve sung that, but this was something entirely new.

“My relationship with Downtown is funny. I suppose I love it, but I’m not ‘in love’ with it. I feel like this new version has made me love it all over again. Like a long-term partner getting a new haircut,” she says.

Clark looks nearer 70 than 80 and age has not dimmed the sparkle in her eye or her sense of humour, which veers from self-deprecating to playfully catty.

She lives in the Swiss Alps with her husband Claude Wolff and says she spends most of her time watching TV and films, playing with her grandchildren, reading, writing and listening to jazz. She recounts with glee the night she turned down Elvis Presley’s advances. “I wouldn’t say we were friends, although we did meet a few times. I think he wanted to be more than friends. Well, I know he did. He was doing his big comeback in Vegas, so this was late Sixties. I was playing Vegas too but had a night off when my friend Karen Carpenter came to see me. We planned this big girly night out and went to see Elvis’s show.”

She describes how he introduced her and Carpenter to the crowd, then invited them back to his dressing room.

“He was drop-dead gorgeous, and he was clearly quite impressed with us too. We might have been the two biggest female stars in the world at that time, and it was pretty obvious he had plans for us. It was flattering but I shuffled out, dragging Karen behind me, saying we had other things to do. He was very amused by that. It was probably the first time anyone had turned him down.”

Speaking of Elvis, Lost In You features a cover of The King’s Love Me Tender, along with John Lennon’s Imagine and, the unlikely Crazy by Gnarls Barkley.

“I had heard the song and thought I’d give it a go on John’s suggestion, but I didn’t think it was right for me.

After three or four times through, I found myself really, really enjoying it. I did it on Jools Holland’s Hootenanny and it was a lot of fun. We had some great feedback about it. I can’t wait to sing it on stage.”

She’ll get the chance later in the year when she returns for a string of shows throughout October.

“I’m from Britain, and even though I work and live all over the world, when I come back to the UK I feel like I’m home.”

TOUR DATES:

October 5, Newcastle Tyne Theatre

October 6, York Barbican