In the previous article in this series we reviewed two female singers who started their solo careers at the onset of the British Invasion. We now turn to two more experienced singers who had monster hits in 1964, both fine examples of orchestrated pop at its best.
Petula Clark – Downtown
At the end of 1964 Petula Clark was in need of a single in the UK. The last time she made the top 10 singles chart in the UK was in 1961 with her songs ‘Sailor’ and ‘Romeo’. Both hits were English-speaking versions of French and German songs, a time when Clark’s career focused on European countries. In 1963 her longtime producer Alan Freeman, who worked with her since 1949, vacated the producer seat. Tony Hatch, who was Freeman’s assistant when Clark recorded her 1961 hits, took over. For a couple of years he was not able to make a dent in the charts with any of the 10+ English-spoken songs he produced for her. Desperate for a hit and with two weeks left before a booked recording session, Clark invited Hatch to her house in Paris.
Hatch played a number of songs he received from publishers in New York during a recent visit to the city. None of them impressed Clark, who then asked if he had any new material of his own. Hatch had a sketch of a song, with a strong melody and hardly any lyrics. In order to convey the topic and mood he was going for, he slipped the word ‘Downtown’ in a few places. Clark immediately saw the potential in the melody and asked Hatch to finish the song and lyrics with a plan to record it in two weeks.
Hatch later talked in detail about the song’s inception: “Downtown was written on the occasion of my first visit to New York. 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 song came to me very, very quickly. People say about Downtown that it’s a mini musical, that it’s a Broadway show in three minutes. I like that compliment.”
The recording of ‘Downtown’ took place on October 16th 1964 at Pye Studios in London. In the studio Hatch assembled a formidable group of musicians consisting of eight violinists, two viola players and two cellists, four trumpeters and four trombonists, five woodwind players with flutes and oboes, percussionists, a bass player and a pianist. In addition to the orchestral instruments, Hatch invited session drummer Ronnie Verrell, female vocal trio the Breakaways, Big Jim Sullivan, Vic Flick and one young guitarist named Jimmy Page. Petula Clark remembers the occasion: “I was walking into a studio in London with 40 musicians. They were all top guys – the guitarist was Jimmy Page – and when I first heard the orchestration, it was so great I nearly fell over, even though Tony was still finishing the lyrics in the bathroom.”
That combination of classical and studio musicians was no fluke. Tony Hatch later said about that session: “I had to connect with young record buyers in the States but not alienate Pet’s older audience in the U.K. and France. The trick was to make a giant orchestra sound like a rock band.” The immediacy of the sound on that song is clearly noticeable from the very first moment, and only becomes more urgent as the song develops and the orchestra picks up. Sound engineer Ray Prickett talked about how they achieved that sonic wonder in the studio: “The sound wasn’t as good when we recorded different sections separately. When the whole orchestra plays together, something happens — all of the air is being moved by those instruments and that’s what gives you a big, ambient sound. This is why there was minimal screening even around the vocalists; maximum separation would have defeated the object of having all those people playing in that room.”
Clark said of her intuition after the session was over, “We knew we’d made a great record but we didn’t know we’d made a monster record.” Amazingly, the song was not considered a potential hit by Pye Records’ executives. Clark’s distinct English accent was deemed a barrier for American audiences. Things took a sharp turn when Joe Smith, Warner Bros.’ head of A&R, was invited to listen to it and voice his opinion about suitability to the American market. Hatch remembers his reaction: “I want that song and I want it now. It’s perfect. It’s just an observation from outside of America and it’s just beautiful and just perfect.”
Smith was right. In January 1965, Downtown made it to No. 1 on Billboard’s Top 100 chart, making Petula Clark the first British female to reach that spot in the US since Vera Lynn twelve years earlier. She was also the first British girl singer to earn a gold record in America for sales of one million copies. She even won the Grammy for ‘Best Rock & Roll Song’ in 1965.
If, like me, you hear the spirit of Burt Bacharach in Downtown, you are not mistaken. The legendary songwriter is definitely an influence here, as Tony Hatch explains: “Bacharach was so important to all of us. When a music arranger composes, he does not deliberately copy but you hear a shape or a sound or a structure of a song and you think well, you know, you don’t always have to have three chords. We can start in minor keys and we can do other things because people are buying it. So that was the biggest influence he had on me. I never copied a Bacharach song but I always felt I want to listen to everything he’s doing because it’s like looking at a painting and beginning to understand how the creator is thinking.”
Shirley Bassie – Goldfinger
From one great orchestrated pop song to another. In 1964 Shirley Bassey was already an established singer in Britain, having started her recording career in 1956 and amassing ten top 10 songs in the UK singles chart. In December of 1963 she went on a concert tour accompanied by a 23-piece orchestra with John Barry acting as musical director and conductor. When the tour ended Barry approached Bassey with a melody he wrote for the third installment in the James Bond movie series. His score for the previous two films, Dr. No and From Russia With Love, made a him a world-famous composer and he was asked to come up with the theme song for the follow up movie, Goldfinger.
The first to hear an early version of the song was none other than a young Michael Caine, who was boarding with John Barry at the time. The actor remembers: “He bloody played the piano all night. I was upstairs trying to get to sleep, and when I came down in the morning to breakfast, he was sitting there. He hadn’t been to sleep either. He looked at me and said, ‘Listen to this,’ and played me a tune. I knew he was working on a Bond film, but I didn’t know what he was writing. I was the first person to hear ‘Goldfinger.’”
Guy Hamilton, the director of Goldfinger, played John Barry a song as a reference to the mood he was looking for. He recalls: “I’d got a recording of ‘Mack the Knife’ that seemed to me dirty and gritty and sort of Goldfinger-ish. He came up to my apartment, I played this for him, and I think it cued him in.” Barry got the drift, and knew he had to come up with something unique: “Goldfinger was the name of the villain—a guy that painted nude bodies in gold to suffocate them—so it’s kind of a weird thing to have to write a song about. I sat down and wrote this rather strange, angular thing which, for me, was right. It couldn’t be a free-wheeling, open melody. It had to have angles.”
Barry reached out to Trevor Peacock, asking him to write lyrics for the song. After futile attempts that included ‘Goldfinger’, ‘mustn’t linger’ and ‘right-winger’ Peacock gave up. Barry then turned to songwriting duo Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley. Bricusse remembers the moment he first heard the song: “We went over to Barry’s apartment in Cadogan Square, number 65, went upstairs and schmoozed for a bit. And then he sat down at the piano and played dah-DAH-dah [the opening three notes] and Newley and I both went, ‘wider than a mile . . .’ without even looking at each other.”
The first recorded version of the song had Anthony Newley singing the lyrics. Barry remembers: “It was terrific. Tony sang it in a very creepy way. He didn’t want to sing it in the movie because they thought it was a bit weird.” One man’s trash is Shirley Bassey’s treasure. When Barry played her the melody, she got goose pimples and made a commitment to sing the song, no matter the lyrics. Barry made the right choice: “Shirley was great casting for Goldfinger. Nobody could have sung it like her. She had that great dramatic sense. When it came to the studio, she didn’t know what the hell the song was about, but she sang it with such total conviction that she convinced the rest of the world.”
The recording took place on August 20, 1964 at CTS Studios, a session that is now a classic in the history of recorded music. Barry was not satisfied with the proceedings, asking for multiple takes. Bassey remembers: “I had to do it over and over again, because something went wrong with the musicians, or there was something technically wrong, or I went wrong. It was an all-night session.” The session also included a young guitar player (you guessed it: Jimmy Page) and the more experienced session guitarist Vic Flick, who tells the story: “Barry wanted this long note held. He said to do it again, and she said she couldn’t. But then there was a rustling noise and suddenly this bra comes over the top of the vocal booth. And then she really let it go. Some of the string players shouted, ‘Take it up a tone!’ so she’d have to take more off.”
You may think this is just locker room talk, a made up lore of session musicians, but the singer confirmed the tale: “I had this restricting bustier on, and so I let it all hang out. And then came the end with that note. I was holding it, and holding it. I was looking at John and I was going blue in the face – and he’s going, hold it just one more second. When it finished I nearly passed out. They gave me water. It’s a cruel business, show business!” John Barry has his own version of that episode, as he recalled in an interview with GQ: “The full orchestra sounded absolutely amazing, but then Shirley Bassey arrived. She arrived with a friend, was very quiet and then was asked to come out and sing. And it took her just one take. And at the end of the tape, she collapsed on the floor … she just held this one note and she basically ran out of breath and collapsed. You know how dramatic she is usually, what with all the stuff she does with her hands, but this was even more dramatic.”
But that was not the only startling moment on that legendary session. One of the most distinct features in this song is the trumpet section, a part that amazingly did not exist just minutes before it was recorded. Barry: “The wah-wah-wah-wah figure was not in the original orchestration. We’d been rehearsing with Shirley and the orchestra for about an hour and a half. They broke for a 20-minute tea break. And I just heard that by-yah-yah-yah-yah, I don’t know why. I went to the piano and I put it down. I got the copyist to put it on the trumpet parts with the wah-wah mute. And when they came back from their tea, I’d written this figure in. And thank God, because it was the hook, the thing that really grabbed you.”
Goldfinger was not a major hit in the UK, climbing only to No. 24. It made the top 10 in many European countries and climbed to the top in Japan. But it in was the US that it saw a big success, driven by the popularity of the movie. Goldfinger made it to No. 2 in the Adult Contemporary chart and No. 8 on Billboard’s Top 100 chart, Bassey’s only visit to the top forty. The single sold a million copies in the US.
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