You Are My Lucky Star

AMG Review of You Are My Lucky Star

Bruce Eder
All Music Guide

You Are My Lucky Star was Petula Clark's first LP of all new songs (Pye Records had issued a pair of 10" long-players in 1956 comprised of singles and B-sides from 1954-1956), and it was even a concept album of sorts, made up entirely of songs associated with Hollywood musicals. This was the Petula Clark of the 1950s, a long way from ock & roll and much closer in spirit to Doris Day (or, stylistically, Shirley Bassey) than to Dusty Springfield. The interpretations here are outstanding in their style -- she gives a playfully lilting performance of "It's Foolish but It's Fun," wraps herself around the sincerity of "Sonny Boy" in a way that it had hardly been heard since its origins decades earlier, and bounces through "Zing Went the Strings of My Heart" with some rippling accompaniment on electric guitar, vibes, and piano. And she takes "Alone," from A Night at the Opera, and imparts a smoldering yearning to the lyric and the word, in sharp contrast to the weepy loneliness inherent in the original Kitty Carlisle performance -- the arrangement, by contrast, has a larger-than-life reverb effect that anticipates the one used on Judy Collins' rendition of "I'll Be Seeing You" some 19 years later. Clark is almost eclipsed by the band on "I Yi, Yi, Yi, Yi," but on everything else -- including a sultry "As Time Goes By" and a briskly paced, impassioned "You Are My Lucky Star" -- she quietly dominates the proceedings. This LP is something of a rarity, having appeared in England at a time when albums didn't dominate sales and in America at a point where no one really knew Clark's work well, and it was later eclipsed by Clark's revamped 1960s sound and image; it's worth tracking down on its own merits, however. Later reissued on CD by Sequel Records with 16 bonus tracks.