On Thursday Owen and I made the perilous journey to the southern outpost of Croydon to see the one and only Petula Clark.

I am sure the home of Kirsty MacColl - and she couldn't wait to get out! - has many charms but all my trips there have been for entertainment - hard to believe I know - twice at the Warehouse Theatre and the Fairfield Halls once.

The Fairfield Halls sadly isn't the most atmospheric of auditoriums - it's like the years of James Last and Daniel O'Donnell concerts have left a heavy musk of resignation in the air so it's got to be a special performer to liven it up a bit... luckily our Pet has been doing concerts for - WHAT??? - 64 years????? A radio star at ten, she made her concert debut at the Royal Albert Hall the next year - no pressure then!

From an early age I was aware of Petula Clark - we had her number one single SAILOR at home and she was a staple on shows like Radio 2's Family Favourites at Sunday lunchtimes. However I had never felt the urge to see her before - her home counties appeal and difuse career always made her a hard personality to concentrate on. I saw her in the short-lived 1990 American Civil War musical she also co-wrote SOMEONE LIKE YOU at the Strand and squirmed all the way through it and I know I saw her around the same time on one of the innumerable Terrence Higgins Trust benefit nights.

But a few years ago I started listening to my Greatest Hits double cd more closely and apart from knowing the songs almost word-perfectly I found myself playing them over and over again. Perfectly produced for her voice her mid-60s hits DOWNTOWN, I KNOW A PLACE, YOU'D BETTER COME HOME, YOU'RE THE ONE, A SIGN OF THE TIMES, DON'T SLEEP IN THE SUBWAY and my favourite and one of the best British pop singles of the 1960s I COULDN'T LIVE WITHOUT YOUR LOVE are fantastic records which need a serious re-evaluation. So when Owen suggested going to see her the time had come!

An Epsom girl by birth she was duly welcomed like a Homecoming Queen but the audience - a heady mix of suburbanites, feebs and mature homosexuals - were a bit slow at first to give her something good to bounce off of. She certainly proved how diverse her catalogue is. She revisited two major theatre successes, as Mrs. Johnson in BLOOD BROTHERS on Broadway and as Norma Desmond in SUNSET BOULEVARD in London and on a US tour which lasted nearly two years. She also sang Stephen Sondheim's LOSING MY MIND from FOLLIES which made me wonder how good she might be in a production of it. She also sang quite a few songs at the piano which she composed herself, another string to her bow. By the encore of I COULDN'T LIVE WITHOUT YOUR LOVE - of course I sang along! - she was given a rapturous and well-deserved standing ovation.

She has a few more dates in her strangely-plotted tour - Skegness and King's Lynn - then she's back over to the US to play Ohio and Pennsylvania then back in September playing Hayling Island and Cricket St. Thomas!! You can't say she doesn't bring it to the fans. Maybe that's her appeal to her undeniablely large fanbase? Unlike Julie Andrews (younger than Petula by three years) and who also had a similar start in the 1940s as a singing juvenile radio and stage performer, Clark never capitalised on her 1950s film career - possibly due to her father who strictly managed her career up until her marriage in 1961. She did of course star in two major musicals in the late 1960s FINIAN'S RAINBOW and GOODYE MR. CHIPS but these were in the last years of the big-budget studio musicals and could not equal the success Andrews had with MARY POPPINS or THE SOUND OF MUSIC. Maybe that is why she has the aura of being 'our Pet' and not the legendary status her longevity would suggest.