Something Wonderful: "Cut Copy Me" by Petula Clark, the 80 Year Old Pop Star

"Petula Clark started her career in the middle of the last century,

when she was a pre-teen wartime radio star who became known as Britain’s Shirley Temple. Her largest successes came in the sixties, when she recorded hits such as “Downtown” and “I Know a Place,” and she had a career both before and after that as a French-language singer; she worked with Serge Gainsbourg and Jacques Brel. She has remained a star on both sides of the Channel, and over the course of her long career she has sold almost seventy million records.

This month, she’s looking to add to that number with “Lost In You,” her first English-language record of new material in more than a decade. There have been other comebacks this spring by aging British icons—David Bowie, for example—but, at eighty, Clark is a full generation older...." -- Petula Clark's "Lost In You," Reviewed : The New Yorker

Impressive enough in the abstract, but here she is performing last January:

And here's the same singer and the same song a mere 47 years ago:

She has sold more than 68 million records throughout her career. "Downtown," besides being a tune that billions would either know or recognize or both, won the Grammy Award for "Best Rock and Roll Song" in 1965 and has been covered by everyone from Frank Sinatra to Alvin and the Chipmunks. Post 9/11 it became an anthem for promoting tourism to lower Manhattan.

Clark will be touring England in October of this year in a series of 10 concerts.

Posted by gerardvanderleun at April 2, 2013 3:26 PM