Downtown

Tony Hatch wrote it on his first visit to New York. He wandered from his hotel near Central Park down to Broadway and Times Square, thinking he had found downtown. He hadn’t, but the feeling was real enough. Back in London he worked out a melody. In Paris, where Petula Clark was living at the time, he played her what he had. She recorded it in London on October 16, 1964. It was released a week later. By January 1965 it was number one in the United States.

“Downtown” is a song about the city as a cure. The narrator is lonely. The solution is not another person but a place: the lights, the music, the noise, the crowds. The city becomes the remedy for the thing the city cannot actually fix. Hatch understood something that the song makes feel effortless. The arrangement does the emotional work before Clark sings a word. The strings build. The piano enters. Then her voice, clear and certain, makes the argument that going downtown will help. You believe her.

It reached #2 in the UK and #1 in the US. It was the first US #1 hit for a British female artist in the rock and roll era. It won the Grammy for Best Rock and Roll Recording in 1965. Frank Sinatra covered it the following year. In 2003, it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Fifteen consecutive US Top 40 hits followed for Clark. None of them carried quite the same certainty, the same conviction that the city is on your side and the night is about to improve.

Petula Clark was born November 15, 1932. She is 93. She is still performing.