Petula Clark – ‘This Is My Song’

27 February 1967

Fans of UK pop chart lore will know that The Beatles’ double-A-side single of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’ was kept off the UK number one spot by a cabaret crooner ballad which we’ll see next here. As for Ireland, there isn’t an official Irish chart place for ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, which suggests either that ‘Penny Lane’ was released here as an A-side with ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ as its B-side, or our chart compilers took an executive decision to count only the less weird one. The song that kept ‘Penny Lane’ at no. 2 in Ireland in March 1967 was this single by Petula Clark, which was also a UK chart-topper that February. Our American friends will be scratching their heads at all this, since ‘Penny Lane’ was a US number one – ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ was counted separately by Billboard, received less airplay from spooked radio stations, and only peaked at no. 8.

(Thanks again to the IRMA chart database at irishcharts.ie for providing the official stats, and the enthusiastic chart historians on the Irish charts thread at the UKMIX online forum for digging up published Irish chart listings from back in the day.)

Another notable fact arising here: ‘This Is My Song’ was written by Charlie Chaplin. Does his name still have the same cultural clout as it did back in the 20th century? Perhaps not. Anyway, for my fellow young people reading this, movies used to be made without colour or sound, and Charlie Chaplin was a huge movie star of that time for playing an Adolf Hitler lookalike who was a comical tramp, later freshening up his act by playing an Adolf Hitler lookalike who was Adolf Hitler. (Also for young readers: Adolf Hitler was…) ‘This Is My Song’ indeed sounds like an artefact from the days of movies with no colour or sound: its Piaf-esque orchestral sweep is as modern as the thing gets, and otherwise you can feast on its diffuse yet overpowering Tin Pan Alley schmaltziness. Petula Clark, with the free and youthful style of an actual pop singer, is a strange choice for this. Her vocal sounds oddly double-tracked, perhaps to meet the swelling orchestra, but more likely because no one making this record really cared. Apparently Clark hates it. Nothing to get hung about.