Professionally Speaking » Songs of Innocence and Experience

When you’re alone and life is making you lonely
You can always go downtown
When you’ve got worries, all the noise and the hurry
Seems to help, I know, downtown

In January 1965 British singer Petula Clark claimed the number one position in the US charts with the song Downtown that had been written by the London-based songwriter Tony Hatch after he’d visited New York.

The music critic, Ludovic Hunter-Tilney, writes in the Weekend FT that this was a song ‘full of Americanisms…immortalized by a singer from Surrey with impeccable tones, the sort of voice that speaks of jolly good shows, not ‘sidewalks’.

So go downtown
Where all the lights are bright, downtown
Waiting for you tonight, downtown
You’re gonna be alright now, downtown

You say tomato

Indeed, the lyrics themselves are a cross-cultural mash-up, since all native New Yorker’s know it was more accurately about Midtown Manhattan, not downtown. It didn’t matter, Clark’s exuberant promise that ‘everything’s waiting for you’ downtown and there are ‘places to go that never close’ (in the city that never sleeps) hint at a naughtiness that the British, from Benny Hill to Mr. Bean, are uniquely suited to imply.

The combination of preppy British chanteuse and mean streets was so compelling that Sandi Shaw jumped on the bandwagon and cut her own version.

In Brooklyn

Other British singer-songwriters were not so coy. Four years after Petula sang about the bright lights of downtown, folk-rock musician Al Stewart crossed the East River to write explicit lyrics about his amorous conquests in Brooklyn:

‘Oh I come from Pittsburgh to study astrology,’
She said as she stepped on my instep,
‘I could show you New York with a walk between Fourth Street and Nine.’
Then out of her coat taking seven harmonicas
She sat down to play on a doorstep saying
‘Come back to my place I will show you the stars and the signs’
.
.
And its eighty degrees and I’m down on my knees in Brooklyn

(Al reports that Leonard Cohen complimented him on that last line. Well the guy who wrote so graphically about what Janis did to him in the Chelsea Hotel would, wouldn’t he?)

The Boxer

By 1970 New York had lost all traces of innocence. Like Al Stewart, Simon & Garfunkle sang of a very different city to Petula’s:

Asking only workman’s wages
I come looking for a job,
But I get no offers,
Just a come-on from the whores
On Seventh Avenue
I do declare,
There were times when I was so lonesome
I took some comfort there.

The evolution from innocence to experience in pop music is mirrored in the movies, from the 1960’s romp of The Apartment to Scorsese’s 1976’s Taxi Driver.

Downtown is situated in the America of bobby-soxers — a time when a cut-glass English accent was cat-nip to Anglophiles. It’s the era of early Mad Men, before it went pear-shaped and Don Draper got divorced and Roger Sterling got mugged.

By the late 70’s British musicians were more likely to sound like they came from South Carolina than Surrey, as Jagger does on Far Away Eyes.

Songs of Innocence and Experience

You say tomato

In Brooklyn

The Boxer

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