Covered: Tony Hatch: 1960-2016

Here's another "Covered" album highlighting a key British pop songwriter from the 1960s: Tony Hatch. He's best known for writing "Downtown" and many other big hits sung by Petula Clark, but his musical legacy goes well beyond that.

Tony Hatch decided he wanted to become a musician at a very young age while growing up in Middlesex, England. After attending choir school in London, he got a job at a music production company when he was only about 15 years old. Starting as a tea boy, he quickly found himself writing songs and producing. His first hit song was "Look for a Star," which was a hit for four different singers in 1960. He wrote that under the alias "Mark Anthony," which he used until 1964. Although he wrote and produced a lot, he didn't have more big successes until 1963, when "Sugar and Spice" was a big hit for the Searchers (under yet another alias) and "Forget Him" was a big hit for Bobby Rydell. (I've included the version of the latter by Gary Lewis and the Playboys, as I like that one better.)

Things drastically changed for Hatch in 1964. He began working with Petula Clark, and had his biggest songwriting success with her straight away with "Downtown." It became one of the biggest hits of the year, hitting Number One in many countries, including the U.S. (though it was kept out of the top spot in Britain due to "I Feel Fine" by the Beatles). Clark was already a veteran hit maker in Britain, having first sung for the BBC in 1942 at the age of seven! But by 1964 she was 32 years old and already starting to seem washed up when "Downtown" broke her in the U.S. and many other countries and totally revitalized her career. Over the next three years, she had nine more Top Twenty hits in the U.S., with most of them written by Hatch.

In fact, Hatch wrote so many hits for Clark that I made an effort to find other versions by other singers, so this didn't end up practically a Petula Clark "best of" album. I found alternate versions for a few, such as "The Other Man's Grass Is Always Greener," "My Love," and "I Couldn't Live without Your Love," but I generally found the Clark versions were the best versions, so I ended up with eight hits sung by Clark.

But Hatch was a very busy guy, because writing and producing songs for Clark was just one of his many jobs in the 1960s. He produced singles and albums for many other musical acts, including everything the Searchers recorded from 1963 to 1967, when they were one of the most popular acts in Britain. He also recorded some lounge music style albums on his own, and even did some singing, though he didn't have any hits that way. He also got involved making music for TV shows and movies. His first big success in that domain was writing the theme to the TV show "Crossroads" in 1964. I've also included "Man Alive" from 1965 and "Neighbors" from 1985 as other similar successes. He even briefly was in the Lower Third, a band led by David Bowie in 1965! (They broke up not long after failing a BBC audition.)

Hatch was never romantically connected to Clark (she was married and had children at the time), but Hatch discovered another female singer, Jackie Trent, and they soon were romantically linked. It turned out that Trent had serious songwriting talent as well as being a pretty vocalist. Hatch and Trent co-wrote "Where Are You Now (My Love)" which hit Number One in Britain in 1965. After that, many hits were co-written by them, including: "I Couldn't Live Without Your Love, "Who Am I," "What Would I Be," "Colour My World," "Don't Sleep in the Subway," "You've Got to Be Loved," "Joanna," and "The Two of Us." They got married in 1967 and stayed married until 2002. Their song "The Two of Us" wasn't a hit in Britain, but a duet version they did together was a Number One hit in Australia in 1967.

Hatch's hits petered out around 1970. However, his career as an entertainer kept going strong. He and Trent focused more on writing for musicals, movie soundtracks, and TV shows. In the 1970s, he also became a panelist on the TV show "New Faces," and kept doing that for many years. He and Trent also hosted their own TV shows together, "Words and Music" and "It's a Musical World." 

In 2020, he was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to music and charity. He is still alive and 85 years old as I write this in 2025.

Here's a Wikipedia article if you want to know more:

Tony Hatch - Wikipedia 

This album is an hour and seven minutes long.

01 Look for a Star (Garry Mills)
02 Sugar and Spice (Searchers)
03 Downtown (Petula Clark)
04 Crossroads (Tony Hatch Orchestra)
05 Forget Him (Gary Lewis & the Playboys)
06 I Know a Place (Petula Clark)
07 Man Alive (Tony Hatch Sound)
08 Round Every Corner (Petula Clark)
09 Where Are You Now [My Love] (Jackie Trent)
10 You're the One (Vogues)
11 A Sign of the Times (Petula Clark)
12 Roundabout (Connie Francis)
13 Heart (Barry & the Remains)
14 Color My World (Petula Clark)
15 Major to Minor (Settlers)
16 Who Am I (Petula Clark)
17 You've Got to Be Loved (Montanas)
18 The Two of Us (Jackie Trent & Tony Hatch)
19 Don't Sleep in the Subway (Petula Clark)
20 Joanna (Scott Walker)
21 The Other Man's Grass Is Always Greener (Vikki Carr)
22 Look at Mine (Petula Clark)
23 My Love (Sonny James)
24 Neighbours Theme (Barry Crocker)
25 I Couldn't Live without Your Love (Mari Wilson)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/S3iEsBeT

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/GnrWVOBNq98u4gR/file

The cover photo is from 1974. 

Petula Clark - Ed Sullivan Show Performances, 1965-1969

British singer Petula Clark was a big star in Britain in the 1960s. She sang the kind of mainstream pop that the BBC loved. So you'd think she would have done many BBC sessions. But I can't find evidence of even a single BBC appearance until well into the 1970s. However, I noticed that she did make many appearances on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in the US. Promotion like that helped her become a big star in the US as well. She performed so many songs on that show that there's enough for an album. I consider this kind of a substitute for the BBC album that should have been.

As far as I know, all of these Ed Sullivan appearances are unreleased. But a nice thing about that show is that there's YouTube account for it that posts videos in excellent sound quality. Everything here comes from those YouTube videos. It also goes without saying that I wouldn't bother with this if the performances were lip-synced, but all of these were done live. That seems to have been the rule for that TV show in those days. The only snag in terms of sound quality is an enthusiastic audience cheering over the music sometimes, but that can't be helped.

Clark played most of her big songs here, but not all of them. She also did some unusual choices, such as "A Foggy Day in London Town" and a couple of songs in French. Unfortunately, a couple of songs are truncated due to being in medleys. For instance, "Don't Sleep in the Subway" is only about a minute long. (I didn't include the rest of the medley since it was "Who Am I," a song presented earlier.) I tried extending it, but that didn't work because the song had already changed keys.

Clark's music isn't for anyone. It's very mainstream and poppy - there's lots of strings here, and no wailing guitar solos. But if you're into that kind of thing, she had a string of classics, mostly thanks to the songwriting talent of Tony Hatch, who wrote (or co-wrote) and produced most of her hit singles.

The Ed Sullivan Show continued until 1971, but the last performance from her that I could find is from 1969. That's not too surprising, since her hit singles stopped around that time.

This album is 43 minutes long.

01 Downtown (Petula Clark)
02 I Know a Place (Petula Clark)
03 A Foggy Day in London Town (Petula Clark)
04 Round Every Corner (Petula Clark)
05 My Love (Petula Clark)
06 I Want to Hold Your Hand (Petula Clark)
07 Sign of the Times (Petula Clark)
08 Just Say Goodbye (Petula Clark)
09 Come Rain or Come Shine (Petula Clark)
10 Who Am I (Petula Clark)
11 Colour My World (Petula Clark)
12 Elusive Butterfly (Petula Clark)
13 C'est Ma Chanson - This Is My Song (Petula Clark)
14 Je Me Sens Bien [Aupres de Toi] - My Love (Petula Clark)
15 Don't Sleep in the Subway (Petula Clark)
16 The Cat in the Window [The Bird in the Sky] (Petula Clark)
17 Fill the World with Love (Petula Clark)
18 The Fool on the Hill (Petula Clark)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15284969/PetulaC_1965-1969_EdSullivnShowPerfrmances__1965-1969_atse.zip.html

The cover is a promo photo from 1967. I took Clark's name and the Ed Sullivan Show logo from here and there on the Internet.