Downtown (Petula Clark Song) - Saw Doctors Version

Saw Doctors Version

In October 2011 Irish band the Saw Doctors remade "Downtown" with Petula Clark singing some lines: the track is credited to the Saw Doctors featuring Petula Clark. According to Saw Doctors' member Leo Moran the group habitually played snippets of well-known songs during their encore numbers: "One night for no particular reason we did 'Downtown' and you could see people loved it. All ages. You could see it brought joy to people’s faces." Some time later the Saw Doctors' learned their producer Philip Tennant was friends with Petula Clark's manager John Williams and an invitation was conveyed to Clark to sing on a Saw Doctors' remake of "Downtown"; Clark being agreeable, a session was booked in a London recording studio allow the Irish group to liaison with the European-based Clark and "Downtown" was recorded over two days with Clark arriving to record her vocal on the second day. Moran recalls: "We did a whole lot of work the first day. came in the second evening and we discovered that the song was in the wrong key. So we had to scrap all of the first day’s work and put down the backing track with Petula because she only had a few hours that evening and wasn’t able to come back the following day. It was exciting, exhilarating, scary and privileged … rolled into one."

Top Irish cinematographer Eugene O' Connor (Father Ted) directed the video for the Saw Doctor's "Downtown" which was uploaded to YouTube on 17 November 2011. Shot on the nights of 9 November – 10 November 2011, the video focuses on the band's members walking through the town center of Galway (lead vocalist Davy Carton is also seen briefly riding in a car). Footage of Clark was shot in Paris and spliced into the completed video in which she mainly appears on the screens of televisions displayed in a shop window (the shop is in fact clothing retailer Anthony Ryans) outside of which the Saw Doctors perform on the street in the company of eight members of the Galway City Cougars cheerleading squad and also a fire juggler.

Radio presenter Ray Foley (Today FM) began a campaign to make the Saw Doctors' "Downtown" the Christmas #1 in Ireland for 2011 encouraging sales of the track upon its 16 December 2011 release with the intent of propelling it to the #1 position on the Irish Singles chart for the week ending 22 December 2011 and the Saw Doctors' "Downtown" was indeed #1 on iTunes Ireland for the relevant period. However on the Irish Singles chart dated 22 December 2011 the track debuted at #2 with "Cannonball" by Little Mix retaining the #1 position largely because of "Cannonball"'s greater availability as a CD single - 10,000 units as opposed to "Downtown"'s 2000 - making "Cannonball" a more attractive prospect for gift-buyers.

On the Irish Singles chart dated 29 December 2011 "Downtown" by the Saw Doctors featuring Petula Clark was ranked at #43 in its second and final week on the chart.