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Underground > Radio & Music >

The Greatest Record Ever Made: Petula Clark's "Downtown"

  
 
grant
14:48 / 29.10.03
OK, as an introduction, here's an exchange from this thread here:


Xoc
moderate post
At 04:44 24.11.2002:
Ain't there one damn song that makes you break down and cry? warbled Bowie, inimitably, on Young Americans.

Any tunes guaranteed to make you well up or even burst into floods?[...]

Jack Fear
moderate post
At 15:42 24.11.2002:
Petula Clark singing "Downtown." Every time.

Greatest record ever made.

Xoc
moderate post
At 09:26 26.11.2002:
[...]And Downtown may very well be the greatest record ever made, Sir Jack, but I don't find it sad at all. Quite the reverse, makes me want to partayyy, just me and Petula swinging our handbags and hitting the bars, where all the lights are bright.

Jack Fear
moderate post
At 15:13 26.11.2002:
Well, yeah. That's why I cry, 'cher--it's tears of joy at the promise of hope renewed, that life is good and love is real and all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.

I mean, it's fundamentally an optimistic song, but it's a hard-won optimism--reaching for the light while never denying the dark, saying Yes, there is hope, but it is fragile and must be nurtured.

There's this struggle even in the music--you've got these brassy builds, and then the reassurances come--"How can you lose?"--but the music decresendos and Petula's voice drops down, husky, almost breaking, as it shifts to the minor key... and from almost nothing the music fights its way back up, as Petula ascends the melody back up the high point.

"Downtown"'s promise of happiness is meaningless without the fear of loneliness to drive it. That it manages to suggest both (and the happiness it promises isn't specifically sexual--it's the promise of a kindred spirit: "You may find somebody kind to help and understand you, someone who is just like you and needs a helping hand to guide them along...") is what makes this the Greatest Record Ever Made (no disrespect to "River Deep, Mountain High").

Trench optimism. Hope in hell. There's nothing as joyous or as heartbreaking as someone putting on a brave face, reaching for love in a cruel world.


---------------------

If you're not familiar with the song, the full lyrics are here.

-----------------------

Jack recently sent me the lyrics & chords for this song. I've been learning it, and I've developed a theory.

Not only is "Downtown" a song of hope in the face of diversity -- but it's a plea for an imaginary friend. It is song as Magick, a pop servitor designed to create an ideal companion, to summon a Guardian Angel and elemental guide. And that's what makes it the greatest record ever made.

Here's the trick. The subject matter is a person alone in the city, unsure of what to do, where to go... the words "alone" and "lonely" are there in the first line. It's written, though, as advice, in the second person. You can always go... downtown. So, the singer is offering encouragement to the listener. The change in the verse, the real gorgeous part, comes next. (This is one of those 60s songs where the first half of the verse has the same chord progression as the chorus, but with a different melody. This is a great trick to pull off if you want to show two perspectives of the same subject.)

The change is lyrical, extolling the virtues of this strange new world, where the traffic is musical and the neon signs are pretty. There's a hush, where we (and this is important) ALMOST step into the listener's shoes. (Musically, we're there, but the words are still second person. They *feel* rhetorical: How can you lose?)

Then we come to the chorus, which recapitulates the first part of the verse, only instead of a suggestion, it's this brassy paean, ringing out the glory that waits downtown (no finer place for sure); the song is longer about "you," it's about "downtown." "You" have been brought there already, within the structure of the song.

OK, the second verse is a little more pushy than the first. Instead of the passive "when" constructions, you've got advice-as-command: Don't hang around, it starts. Maybe you know... the theme of doubt vs. knowledge is a central concern of the song. (Notice, too, that all the visual images are of light, particularly light from above -- a gnostic code?) Just listen... yes, we are listening. The third character is introduced here, too -- the "him" that "you" will be dancing with, before the night is over.

The doubtful how can you lose is replaced by the statement of desire: Happy again.... Followed by yet another image of lights, which are now brighter.

This chorus is followed by two things in quick succession: a key change and an instrumental break. A key change is always a trick to make the same, repeated progression (the mystic chant at the heart of pop music, if you will) seem fresh and charged, right? So we've kicked it up a notch. THEN, we re-enter the verse at the change, the gorgeous part, the gut-dropper... and it's here that the secret heart of the song is revealed.

The song, you see, suddenly switches from second-person *advice* to first-person *promise*, an intention to meet:

And you may find somebody kind
to help and understand you
Someone who is just like you
and needs a gentle hand to...

Guide them along

So maybe I'll see you there
We can forget all our troubles,...

You see what has happened? The narrator has turned the listener into a doppelganger, a homunculus, someone like you, a "you" who is "I" who needs a helping hand... a guide through the confusion and light.

All of a sudden, you realize the song is NOT second-person at all... it's a first-person summoning of a "you" -- not just a message in a bottle to all who hear it, but also a ritual creation of a guide and companion. Who is waiting there, downtown.

I believe it's also possible to add an even more gnostic level of interpretation based on descent from the immaterial, spiritual world into the hubbub of material life, but that might be stretching it a little.

So, this song is a ritual that works. And once you really listen, at that preconscious level, you can feel it work... you become part of the spell. The barrier between "you" and "I" is, if not broken, then at least compromised. And that's what makes it work.


Feel free to challenge any of these points, or to bring forward any other contenders for the title.
 
 
Jack Fear
16:24 / 16.12.03
Taken me a long time formulate a response to this, prompted now by reflections on singing "Downtown" at recent gigs.

If we take "Downtown" as an invocation, as a magickal act, then we must see it in context as a continuation of Petula's wartime work: she entered public life in 1943, as the eleven-year-old star of her own radio program, "Pet's Parlour," singing songs of hope and glory for Britons living through the terror of the Blitz.

I've long thought that the popular songs of WWII represented a remarkable exercise in creative visualization, or NLP, or "fake it 'til you make it"—put simply, of magick. Remember, when these songs were first written and sung, there was no guarantee that the lights ever would go on again all over the world, that certainty that there ever would be bluebirds over the white Cliffs of Dover. These songs visualized victory, and peace, and a return to the status quo—and singers like Vera Lynn and Vaughn Monroe and, yes, Petula Clark sang this world into being: the secret heroes of the second World War.

This has been Art's purpose since caveman days. Those paintings of the bison hunt at Lascaux—once thought to have been commemorative in nature—are now believed to have been painted before the hunt, as a magickal act to ensure its success.

Having played her part (consciously or not) in assuring Allied victory in WWII, Petula Clark turned her attention to the great postwar crisis, a disaster no less damaging, in its way, than any war, and developing out of postwar alienation and the breakdown of traditional communities—what Harold Kushner calls "the plague of loneliness."

May I expand the brief of this thread a tad—to take in other pop songs of magickal intent or creative visualization? This sort of thing—songs that dare predict a preferred future—have fallen out of fashion: more and more, musicians see their role as primarily journalistic (viz. Chuck D's famous comment that "Rap is Black America's CNN")—reflecting the world, not shaping it. But there must be a few visionaries out there...
 
 
Jack Fear
16:26 / 16.12.03
For starters...

"Visionary" isn't a word that most people associate with the likes of Simple Minds—and indeed, their song "Mandela Day," released a few years before Nelson Mandela's release, took a beating from critics. I remember that, at the time, one critic accused Jim Kerr and the boys of having played into the hands of apartheid's architects: the song's tag line runs, "Mandela's free," and this critic indignantly (and somewhat bizarrely) claimed "that's just what the DeKlerk government wants us to think!" Uh, yeah.

But when apartheid was indeed dismantled a few years later without the bloody race war we'd all been fearing, when the man stepped off the boat from Robben Island, when a government was taken down by moral force, when I heard the two most astonishing words I'd ever heard, "President Mandela"—who can say that wasn't magick at work?

Structural analysis of the lyrics later, maybe...
 
 
rizla mission
18:15 / 16.12.03
I've never listened to it in much detail before, but reading them back from the above link..wow, the words to 'Downtown' are just beautiful. Thanks for drawing my attention to them. I'll be listening with both ears next time I happen to hear it.

Regarding the theory of the song as a summoning ritual I'm reminded of an anecdote from a completely different field of music, as reported in the book 'Our Band Could Be Your Life';
Apparently, in the early days of Dinosaur Jr, Lou Barlow was having a pretty lonely time of things, and he was also convinced that he could use the power of music to directly change the world (using music as magic pretty much, although the book doesn't mention the M word).. so he wrote and recorded a short song about how he didn't want to be alone anymore or something like that, and convinced the rest of the band to let him put it on the next Dinosaur album. And as soon as they'd sent out promo copies, a woman who worked for a college radio station phoned them up and requested an interview, and she really liked Lou's song and asked him a load of questions about it and, well, obviously one thing led to another and they were planning marriage before the year was out..
A real indie-rock fairy tale or what.

Could we idly speculate about whether Petula Clark or co-writer Tony Hatch had similar luck, expected or otherwise?
 
 
Caleigh
17:45 / 17.12.03
Psychick Televison "Dreams Less Sweet"
 
 
Spatula Clarke
19:15 / 17.12.03
What about it?
 
 
Jack The Bodiless
18:28 / 31.12.03
Yes, what about it? Tell me more, Caleigh...
 
  
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