Jamie Rees speaks with legendary singer and actress Petula Clark about growing up in Wales, looking ahead to the future and her latest tour.
Within seconds of speaking to the best-selling British female artist in recording history, Petula Clark, all nerves go out of the window as this charming, humble and fascinating lady talks me through her packed and successful 70-year career. Ms Clark’s answer to my opening “toughest of questions”, where I ask her to tell me what the biggest influence was on her magnificent career, she responds… “growing up in Wales”.
The Pentre-Bach girl, schooled there in her formative years and who used to love visiting the big town of Merthyr on the weekends with her parents, Petula Clark credits Wales with inspiring her love of singing.
Indeed, she used to speak Welsh as a child, and now speaks French, German and Italian – her Welsh not disappearing totally as she greets me with a ‘prynhawn da’ and the odd ‘diolch’ here and there throughout the interview.
I ask her to pick her favourite artform from the many disciplines she has worked in. She tells me off for asking her to pick her favourite things all the time and recalls, in jest, the time she performed in her first West End musical in 1981 as Maria in The Sound of Music. She says “I love all forms of music… it changes almost daily, but right now I’m enjoying opera after a recent visit to the Met in New York. I confess to trying not to listen too much to contemporary music. Everyone is trying to perform fashionable contemporary songs and I don’t want to be influenced by that, I like to sing the music that I love and things that inspire me”.
[wpdevart_youtube]Zx06XNfDvk0[/wpdevart_youtube]
This brings me on nicely to musical theatre and Petula is thrilled, as am I, to talk musicals. I mention to her that my first experience of her work was as Mrs Johnstone in Willy Russell’s master-piece Blood Brothers. “Ah yes, I loved that show,” she tells me. We both sing the same little refrain for the show’s most famous song Tell Me It’s Not True. We giggle. “I performed it on Broadway and I did an American tour. Bill Kenwright asked me to perform it one more time in Liverpool but I was amazingly offered the role of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard in the West End by Trevor Nunn at exactly the same time so I was torn”.
I jokingly suggest that I can see why she chose London over Liverpool and she quickly stands to correct me. “Oh no, I love Liverpool. The best, most generous audiences in the UK are in Liverpool – they have the most wonderful sense of humour… No, I chose Sunset because I’d never played the role before and Mrs Johnston is a nice compassionate character whereas Norma Desmond is scary, uncompassionate, a diva and a little bit crazy – they’re always more fun to play”.
Quite self-deprecating and entirely humble, Petula was keen to take me back to her youth, obviously a special time for her, most of which was spent in Wales. “When I was growing up most people were Judy Garland fans but I was always drawn to Peggy Lee, in fact I do Fever on this tour. I wasn’t sure whether I should tackle it”, she confesses, “I mean, Fever is Peggy’s song.”
[wpdevart_youtube]8ZyFVY1aG-s[/wpdevart_youtube]
I agreed it must be quite hard to take on a song by your idol. She quips, “You should try singing a song with your idol! Peggy and I became good friends and we sang together on numerous occasions.”
So what can we expect from her touring show, entitled From Now On, which is also the name of her new album. “It will be a mixed bag of the old and the new with some musical theatre thrown in” she tells me, clearly excited about performing on stage. There’ll be One Look, Downtown (of course), something from Fineon’s Rainbow and possibly Goodbye Mr Chips. It’ll change nightly. I’ll even sing a French song entitled An Unknown Song. My life’s philosophy has always been live for the day. If you live your life like that it’s amazing what you can achieve”.
Petula Clark, St David’s Hall, Cardiff, Sun 9 Oct. Tickets: £25-£45. Info: 029 2087 8444 / www.stdavidshallcardiff.co.uk