From a chance beginning at age 9, Clark would appear on radio, film, print, television and recordings by the time she turned 17. In October 1942, the 9-year-old Clark made her radio debut while attending a BBC broadcast with her father. She was there trying to send a message to an uncle stationed overseas, but the broadcast was delayed by an air raid. During the bombing, the producer requested that someone perform to settle the jittery theatre audience, and she volunteered a rendering of “Mighty Lak’ a Rose” to an enthusiastic response. She then repeated her performance for the broadcast audience, launching a series of some 500 appearances in programmes designed to entertain the troops. In addition to radio work, Clark frequently toured the United Kingdom with fellow child performer Julie Andrews. Nicknamed the “Singing Sweetheart”, she performed for George VI, Winston Churchill and Bernard Montgomery. Clark also became known as “Britain’s Shirley Temple” and was considered a mascot by the British Army, whose troops plastered her photos on their tanks for good luck as they advanced into battle. Petula was the first female singer from the UK to hit #1 in the US during the rock era (after 1955). Clark was sometimes called “the first lady of the British Invasion”, due more to the timing of this release, as Clark wasn’t a rock ‘n’ roller. She didn’t really have anything to do with the explosion of teenage excitement that was coming out of her country at the same time that she scored her biggest hit. Instead, she was an old-school orchestral-pop belter, a part of a lineage that would come to include singers like Dusty Springfield, Barbra Streisand, and Dionne Warwick.