1967 Petula Clark: This Is My Song

I tend to feel a bit sorry for Petula Clark. Taken solely on the evidence of her number one singles then a layman could fairly see her sixties persona as some prim, stick in the mud schoolmarm type of singer trying to keep order in a class from St Trinians. I can picture Sandie and Dusty, all miniskirts and mascara, giggling at the back and flicking ink pellets at her while Cilla asks crude sexual questions in an innocent voice designed solely to get her blushing. Her previous 'Sailor' had an old time music hall vibe that swung as gracefully as a leg in callipers and now 'This Is My Song' comes along to compound the image of a singer out of place and time. For me anyway.

Which is a bit unfair on our Pet (and untrue too); 'This Is My Song' is not a song she ever wanted to record and it was written by someone who didn't want her to record it in the first place. Charlie Chaplin (yes, that one) wrote it specifically for his 'A Countess From Hong Kong' film and, more specifically, for Al Jolson to sing (the plan developed a crimp when it was pointed out to Chaplin that Jolson had been dead for over a decade by that time). 'This Is My Song' eventually found its way to Clark who was happy to record French, German and Italian versions but balked at the thought of singing Chaplin's stiff and anachronistic English lyric (which is by itself unfair on Chaplin - he deliberately wrote it as an art deco throwback to bygone days).

The music and melody remain unchanged throughout, but the playful fluidity that Clark brought to the foreign versions to melt the formal iciness is absent here. Instead, she adopts a brittle and curious twang to her diction ('this is my sawng') that buries the lyric further in the deep freeze and wrings no emotion from their clichés; "Why is my heart so light? Why are the stars so bright? Why is the sky so blue, since the hour I met you?" - the distance between artist and song sounds unbridgeable and probably will be forevermore. I've no doubt Jolson would have generated the evocation in Chaplin's head had he recorded it in the same way a plaster bust of Caesar would add evocation to a mock Roman villa, but the effect would be surface only - 'This Is My Song' has a swinging brick where its heart should be and no amount of tender loving care is ever going to change that.