DO YOU REMEMBER? Billboard #1 HOT 100 (This Week in 1965) Petula Clark: Downtown Downtown is a song composed by Tony Hatch which, as recorded by Petula Clark, became an international hit – No. 1 in the US and No. 2 in the UK – at the end of 1964. Tony Hatch had first worked with Petula Clark when he assisted her regular producer Alan A. Freeman on her 1961 #1 hit Sailor. In 1963 Freeman had asked Hatch to take over as Clarks regular producer: Hatch had subsequently produced five English-language singles for Clark none of which had charted. In the fall of 1964 Hatch had made his first visit to New York City seeking material from music publishers for the artists he was producing. Hatch would recall: 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. Forgetting that in New York especially downtown is a lot further downtown getting on towards Battery Park. I loved the whole atmosphere there and the [music] came to me very, very quickly. Hatch was hoping to pitch the song to the Drifters. Shortly afterward Hatch visited Paris to present Clark with possible material - none of it written by him - for a London recording session scheduled for 16 October 1964: Hatch - she was not very enthusiastic about [the material] and asked me if I was working on anything new myself. Reluctantly (because the [lyric] was still so unfinished) I played her the tune of my New York inspiration and slipped in the word Downtown in the appropriate places. Thats the one I want to record, she said. It just needs some great lyrics. Downtown was recorded 16 October 1964 at the Pye Studios in Marble Arch. Thirty minutes before the session was scheduled, Hatch was still touching up the songs lyrics in the studios washroom. Hatch always insisted on recording all the personnel on his productions actually performing together as would be heard on the finished track: the large number of personnel contributing to the Downtown session necessitated that two studios be utilized for the tracks recording, with a closed-circuit television connection allowing Hatch to conduct the personnel in both the studio in which he was physically present and the auxiliary studio. The session personnel on Downtown included guitarists Vic Flick, Jimmy Page and Big Jim Sullivan, and also drummer Bobby Graham and the Breakaways vocal group. Petula Clark #petulaclark #downtown
Posted on: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 15:09:27 +0000
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