Tony Hatch was 22 years old on his first visit to New York. He wandered from his hotel near Central Park down to Broadway and Times Square and assumed he had found downtown. He was wrong about the geography but right about the feeling. Back in London he worked a melody out on piano. He knew the word “downtown” belonged in it somewhere but did not yet have the full lyric. He brought it to Petula Clark in Paris, where she was living with her French husband and conducting a successful career in continental Europe. They worked it out together. She recorded it at Pye Studios in London on October 16, 1964. It was released a week later.

The song proposes a specific remedy for loneliness. Not love. Not time. The city. The narrator is unhappy and the instruction is to go downtown, where the lights are bright, where the music plays, where people like you are. The lyric is both naive and absolutely correct. Cities have always served this function. Hatch wrote the prescription and Clark delivers it with such certainty that the medicine works even if you know it should not. The arrangement is part of it. The piano figure at the opening, the strings that arrive to confirm that yes, this is important, this is about something. By the time Clark sings the first word you are already halfway there.

“Downtown” reached #2 in the UK and #1 in the United States on January 23, 1965. It was the first US number one for a British female artist during the rock and roll era. It won the Grammy Award for Best Rock and Roll Recording in 1965. Frank Sinatra recorded it the following year. In 2003 it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Fifteen consecutive US Top 40 hits followed. Tony Hatch received the Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically in 1981. The song has sold over three million copies in the United States alone.

Petula Clark was born November 15, 1932, in Epsom, Surrey. She began performing as a child during World War II, entertaining troops with her father. She was 31 when she recorded “Downtown.” She is 93 now and still performing. The song she made in one session in October 1964 outlasted the decade, the century, and every era that came after and decided it no longer applied.