Petula Clark

During the years 1977-1978 Petula Clark recorded for Columbia, updating her sound to fit the dominant pop production standards of the day. In 2007, the U.K.'s Zone label came out with a second volume of her CBS recordings from this period, naming the disc "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" after the popular song from Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical +Evita. Never one to resist hopping on bandwagons, Clark came out with her own cover of Julie Covington's number one hit single version in 1977, and it appears at the beginning of this collection with the flip side, Petula's own "A Carousel." Tracks 3-14 reproduce in its entirety her 1978 album Destiny, followed by two titles issued as a single in 1978: "Life is Just a Dance with Time" (theme song from +The Last Tycoon) and "Don't Stop the Music." This heady dose of late-'70s pop closes with a series of previously unissued tracks, including an alternate arrangement of "Put a Little Sunbeam in Your Life," a souvenir of Petula Clark's ongoing dalliance with the automotive industry, which manifested itself during the '60s in the form of a jet-set commercial for radial tires. "Sunbeam" actually originated as an advertisement for the Chrysler Sunbeam, a product for which Petula served as spokeswoman. So popular was the ad that she had it rendered down into a regular pop song, effectively reversing a procedure used ten years earlier in the televised transformation of "It's a Sign of the Times" into "It's the Radial Age" on behalf of B.F. Goodrich. ~ arwulf arwulf, All Music Guide