2. Petula Clark‘Downtown’ / ‘You’d Better Love Me’
I remember going to Robbs, a department store in Birkenhead that had a record department, to get this with mum. I think I was three or four. Maybe I’d heard it on the radio, but I was mad on Petula Clark. Her songs were very optimistic, lots of melody, groovy sounds and such a great voice. I was allowed to stay up late because she had a show on at nine on a Saturday night, and I’d sing all her songs when I was five at Woodchurch Road Primary School in a very lame 1960s kind of way – not a full show like it would be now! I don’t think anyone had asked me to do it.
You’ve spoken before about how this song reappeared when you were living with Dave Ball of Soft Cell in Leeds…
I remember going past Dave’s room and he had his synth set up, he had a copy of Downtown on a cassette, and he was playing it through his Prophet and re-mixing it live. I’d never seen anything like it before. It felt like something very new. I always carried that song with me, even when you go through a period where you dismiss everything that isn’t cool. Everybody that I hung around with was the same, at [Leeds pub] The Faversham they had all the cool underground stuff and electronic music on the jukebox, but there was also Cabaret and other stuff on there. That was also a part of what we were listening to, and the cinema we were watching. We were camp, let’s face it. There were a lot of gays involved!
