Petula Clark – Goin’ Out Of My Head

Petula Clark sang somebody else’s 1960s hit on late-night TV, eleven years to the day after Downtown made her an American star.

Eleven years to the day after Downtown reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, NBC broadcast Petula Clark singing a song from that same American winter. On the chart dated January 23, 1965, the week her Tony Hatch hit took the top spot, Little Anthony and the Imperials’ Goin’ Out of My Head sat at No. 12, sliding down from a No. 6 peak. Clark had her own version on record within months. On January 23, 1976, she sang it on The Midnight Special, choosing a song that had been someone else’s hit over the one that had been hers.

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Teddy Randazzo wrote the song with Bobby Weinstein for the Imperials, a Brooklyn group he had known since childhood. Randazzo and Don Costa produced it for DCP Records, and Billboard logged it on the Hot 100 on November 7, 1964, at No. 75, the highest debut of that week. It went on to No. 6, and Canada’s RPM chart took it to No. 1. Britain was a different story. The Imperials’ record never reached the bestseller lists there, which left the field open for British singers who wanted it.

Clark was among the first to take it. She cut it with Tony Hatch, who arranged and produced her records and had written Downtown, and the track appeared on The New Petula Clark Album, which Pye released in Britain in May 1965. Warner Bros. issued the same set in America as I Know a Place, retitled for the Hatch song that follows Goin’ Out of My Head on the track list. Cilla Black recorded it in the same early wave. Over the rest of the decade it passed through Nancy Wilson, Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66 and the Zombies, the Lettermen folded it into a medley that reached the Hot 100’s Top 10 in 1968, and Frank Sinatra took his own version onto the chart for Reprise late in 1969.

Late Night on NBC

The Midnight Special gave that kind of song a stage few other American shows offered. Burt Sugarman’s series filled NBC’s airtime after 1 a.m., a slot no network had programmed before, with Wolfman Jack announcing, and for the 1975–76 season Helen Reddy served as host. Clark had already appeared that winter, on the episode broadcast December 19, 1975. Her return in January shared the bill with Natalie Cole, C.W. McCall, Uriah Heep and Ted Neeley, a lineup that ran from soul to trucker country to hard rock in a single night.

Clark sang two songs on that broadcast, Give Me a Smile and Goin’ Out of My Head, and left Downtown for other stages. The second choice says more about her than a hit would have. She had been singing professionally since her BBC radio broadcasts during the Second World War, and she approached a ballad first sung by a Brooklyn vocal group as material any serious singer could take on, no special pleading required.

The Imperials own Goin’ Out of My Head, and nothing about this performance changes that. What it shows is how the song outlived its own chart run. Records peak and fall away, while the songs that last get passed from singer to singer, and Clark was there at the start of that chain. Eleven years after the week both records shared a Billboard chart, she still had the song, and the song still had room for her.