PETULA CLARK – "This Is My Song"

This was a number one?

Funny how your memory screens out the garbage.

I think I was probably a bit harsh on it too, it maybe should have got a 2. Oh well – sorry Pet!

Engelbert’s WMC dirges at least have tunes; this is all faux-continental fluff, expensive sounding but meaningless, and hard to recall beyond the line that includes the title. It’s inexplicable how this got to number one when none of her Tony Hatch-penned 45s did the same. It also made no.1 in the US. Number 2 watch if I’m not mistaken (don’t have Guinness book to hand but I’m fairly sure) was Harry Secombe’s version!

Pet’s The Little Shoemaker had been happily tapping his clogs in the very first chart, while Al Martino did his own quiet/loud thing at no.1; yes, it’s a much better record than This Is My Song.

Charlie Chaplin did write a couple of hits in the 50s which fell one spot short of Tom’s attention: Nat King Cole’s Smile (the instrumental of which was the theme to Modern Times) and Frank Chacksfield’s Limelight are both gorgeous melodies, both epitomise the post-war swaddling sound, that communal cocoa, and would rate a 7 each from me. This Is My Song is a stone 1.

Was Chaplin the first person to change his first name, to indicate a maturing of the young buck (Charlie) into a serious artiste (Charles, as he was in ’67), and thus setting an example to Ricky Nelson, Rob Newman, and my uncle Mick? Probably.

Listening to this sentimental tosh reminds me of the Letterists who greeted Chaplin’s 1952 visit to Paris by handing him their No More Flat Feet missive: “The footlights have melted the make-up of the supposedly brilliant mime. All we can see now is a lugubrious and mercenary old man. Go home Mister Chaplin.”

“Thees ees mah sawnng … ” ….. Pet had obviously by this time spent too much time with her French husband!

Worse was to follow a couple of months later, when ex-Goon Harry Secombe all but scored a No 1 hit WITH THE SAME SONG!!

TOTPWatch: Petula Clark twice performed This Is My Song on Top Of The Pops;

2 February 1967. Also in the studio that week were; Paul Jones and Chris Farlowe, plus The Go Jo’s interpretation of ‘Sugar Town’. Pete Murray and Samantha Juste were the hosts.

25 December 1967. Also in the studio that Christmas were; Sandie Shaw, The Foundations, Jimi Hendrix, The Tremeloes, The Who and Tom Jones. Jimmy Savile, Alan Freeman and Pete Murray were the hosts.

Neither edition survives.

a different number 1 for the USA – one that I’m unfamiliar with – as noted here

Who’s that singing at the beginning then?

Yes. Sounds much more like Secombe to me – Sellers never really had a singing voice.

Like her previous (US) #1 (‘My Love’), Petula hated this. I agree with her.

A conflict I have as a reader with the early years of this project is an apparent tendency to mark records down for not being rock ‘n’ roll-derived, as I think the most interesting number 1s are those that aren’t part of that culture. Things before or after their apparent time are always more interesting than things that are of their time, because they reveal the plurality of any time and its no. 1-buying public. This record seems to be the least-defended casualty of this slant, so I’d like to try to defend it.

Apart from the mandolins in this arrangement, I’m not sure why WL calls this song ‘faux-continental’. Chaplin was writing a kind of classical pop which, though more obviously European than American, had been as popular in America as in Europe in the thirties, and he had originally hoped that Al Jolson would record the song, not having been aware that Jolson had died (had Jolson been alive and accepted, this choice would have had personal and historical significance – Jolson had mocked Chaplin’s objections to the coming of sound in personal terms). All his influences were classical, but they would be, wouldn’t they? He was 77 when he wrote this. He had been living in Switzerland for years, and, if his children’s subsequent Europeanness is any indication (check out their careers), this wasn’t purely an 80s Bowie or Phil Collins kind of tax exile. The number of times it was recorded by European artists also seems to indicate that it functioned as a European song for European listeners without any impression of imposture.

But for me, the Europeanness of this isn’t the main thing about it, the main thing about it is that its old-fashioned composer is deliberately exaggerating rather than diminishing his old-fashionedness; lines like ‘I care not what the world may say’ would have been ideal for voices like Jeanette MacDonald’s or Irene Dunne’s. Or Harry Secombe’s, despite his apparent derision. This kind of bloodyminded focus on the logic of the work at hand and indifference to possible incomprehension is always admirable. The film and this song both made Chaplin momentarily harder to swallow for the youth audience gathering around his earlier films, especially Monsieur Verdoux, and anything that prevents the co-opting of older artists into young people’s narcissistic Whig histories of culture (“wow, he was such a genius, he was almost as clever as *us*”) is positive in my view.

A Countess from Hong Kong, a very underrated film, is worth Popular readers’ time for the scene in which Angela Scoular’s character listens to pop on her transistor radio – Chaplin’s idea of what pop sounds like in 1966, fifty years after his first tunes were published, is swing with an adenoidal singer (basically an effete version of what he thought rock ‘n’ roll sounded like in 1957’s A King in New York, which had been relatively accurate). You can laugh at this or with it; I laugh with it. Your amusement may depend on whether you think a septuagenarian who had lived through the Jazz Age should have been impressed by – but of course, I’m loading the question there.

Looking at what I’ve written, perhaps I’m defending the composer, context and intention more than the record itself, which you either like or don’t. I think one real flaw it has may be that waltz-time(?) thing the brass does during the chorus under Clark’s (manually) double-tracked vocals, which seems slightly to weigh down something that could have soared in the way the instrumental theme on the film’s soundtrack does, but on the whole, I like it a great deal. 10.

How on earth did this reach #1, while “Downtown” and “I Know A Place” didn’t?