Category: Music

Pet Duet

Despite two of my recent items about Petula Clark, my pal Denro has accused me of neglecting her. So I’ll remedy that with a link to an excellent interview with Pet from a year ago on Irish TV. I can’t embed it, so click on the link and you’ll see where to find “Petula Clarke” [sic]. From there you’ll have to click PLAY CLIP 14:54 for the interview, and the 2:54 clip is of Petula at the piano. Note: The video is in Real format, and you may need to install some plug-ins, but it’s worth the trouble and waiting.

A fascinating aspect of Petula Clark’s career is that she reinvented herself several times. Beginning as a child star in England, she went on to films and television before establishing herself in France. Petula’s childhood chum Julie Andrews was a Broadway star for eight years before she was in “Mary Poppins,” but when Pet first appeared here in America in late ’64 we had no idea she had been in show business for twenty years.

Something I didn’t know about Petula until recently is that she’s something of an icon for gay men. Sincerely, that was news to me, and I can’t even say I understand why she has that status, because she’s neither tragic nor kitsch, and as far as I know her father wasn’t gay. Judy Garland impersonations are, of course, a staple of gay revues. Something that Judy Garland and Petula Clark share was appearing on screen with Fred Astaire. In this scene from “Easter Parade,” Judy and Fred perform “A Couple of Swells.”

Petula, sounding very bright and young, can be heard in a duet with one of England’s great dance band leaders, Billy Ternent, doing their own version of “A Couple of Swells.”

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2010/JAN/ACoupleofSwells.mp3]

And here I must do the only sort of singing I can do — singing praises. Because I would have had no idea who Billy Ternent was without Clare Teal on BBC Radio 2. Since getting my Logitech Squeezebox WiFi Radio, I have become a big fan of Clare’s big band show.

This ‘n’ that

I get to be semi-lazy today, because these items were all handed to me by friends.

First, I refer you back to my Elvisible post. Those photographs were taken by Alfred Wertheimer, and published in a book called “Elvis ’56: In the Beginning.” Denro points out an article in Vanity Fair called Elvis at 21, about a traveling exhibit of Wertheimer photos.

Next, SamJay notes an unusual auto accident of sorts, near Boston, where a Ferrari fell off a truck. I have to say, it’s hard to feel bad for somebody who can afford a car that costs almost a quarter of a million. Ernie Boch, Jr. inherited a chain of car dealerships from his father, the late Ernie Boch, who was one of the richest men in Massachusetts and was well known for his sales pitch “Come on down!” Boch Jr.’s vocation may be cars, but his avocation is blues guitar, and he has a Boston-based band called Ernie and the Automatics. My one experience with a Boch dealership, in ’02, wasn’t good. The guy handling the loan left us for over half an hour, and when I got fed up and found him, he was just shooting the breeze with someone. Then he botched the paperwork, as we found out when he sent a FedEx package to us a few days later. After I took care of that he failed to follow through on something he promised he would do.

This last item is by far the most personal. tastewar forwarded a link about a stack of old love letters that were found in London.

It’s a lovely, somewhat tragic story, but I have to question the motive and judgment behind its publication. I am assuming that Anna left the letters behind unintentionally. If neither she nor her lover from long ago agreed to have their romance revealed, then why was it? And aren’t I just compounding the offense right now? I’ll justify it with the references in the article to the Beatles and Swinging London.