Petula Clark, York Barbican, October 6

The October 6 show will be the fourth of a ten-date autumn tour, when the singer, actress and composer with the seven-decade career visits the city for first time since The Ultimate Tour brought her to the Grand Opera House in May 2002.

She will be promoting her new studio album, Lost In You, released through Sony Music in February with its 12 tracks including a new version of her signature hit Downtown, a cover of Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy and a fresh take on John Lennon’s Imagine, Lennon having once cited her as one of his favourite singers.

Petula cut her first record in 1949 and has since sold more than 68 million records. As ever, the latest album has required a rush of meetings, interviews, TV and radio appearances and a couple of performances, but she has taken it all in her stride. Indeed she baulks at the suggestion that she might slow down.

“I’ve been doing this most of my life, it’s just normal to me,” she says, adding that she started singing at the age of six and has never really stopped.

“I could live without the travelling, but then it’s not the actual travelling I mind, it’s the security. I don’t fly on private jets. Well, not often, anyway,” she says.

“As for slowing down, I don’t know how to do anything else. I was a child star and had very little education because I didn’t really go to school. What would I do?”

More to the point, why would Petula do anything else? She began singing professionally when most children are starting school, first in plays, and later with an orchestra in the foyer of a department store, for which she was paid with a tin of toffee and a wristwatch.

Post-war, she moved into films as well as carrying on singing, and in 1964 international stardom beckoned with the recording of her signature song, Downtown.

“I love the song, of course I do, and I have done since the first time I heard it before recording it,” she says. “I knew it was a good record at the time. It was obvious, but no one could’ve known it was going to be such a monster.”

Producer John Williams suggested Petula should do a new version for Lost In You, but at first she was set against it. “Re-record Downtown? I said ‘No, no way’.”

Williams did not take this as a final answer. Instead, he recorded a new, laid-back arrangement of the song and played it to Petula a few days later.

“I said, ‘This is lovely, what is it?’ and he told me. I nearly dropped,” she recalls. “It was interesting, so I got up to the microphone and sang it. I didn’t know how I was going to sing it, but the arrangement just won me over. I don’t know how many times I’ve sung that song, but this was something entirely new.

“I feel like this new version has made me love it all over again. Like a long-term partner getting a new haircut.”

Lost In You’s most surprising cover is Crazy, the 2006 chart topper by Gnarls Barkley. “I had heard the song and thought I’d give it a go on John’s suggestion, but I didn’t think it was right for me. After three or four times through, I found myself really enjoying it. I did it on Jools Holland’s Hootenanny on New Year’s Eve and it was a lot of fun. We had some great feedback about it. I can’t wait to sing it on stage.”

Another cover on the album, Love Me Tender, brings back memories of the night she rejected Elvis Presley’s advances. “I wouldn’t say we were friends, although we did meet a few times,” she says. “I think he wanted to be more than friends. Well, I know he did. He was doing his big comeback in Vegas, so this was late Sixties. I was playing Vegas too but had a night off when my friend Karen Carpenter came to see me. We planned this big girly night out and went to see Elvis’s show.”

Elvis introduced her and Carpenter to the crowd, then invited them back to his dressing room. “He was drop-dead gorgeous, and he was clearly quite impressed with us too. We might have been the two biggest female stars in the world at that time, and it was pretty obvious he had plans for us.

“It was flattering but I shuffled out, dragging Karen behind me, saying we had other things to do. He was very amused by that. It was probably the first time anyone had ever turned him down.”

Petula, who lives in the Swiss Alps with husband Claude Wolff, is looking forward to returning to Britain for her autumn tour. “Even though I work and live all over the world, when I come back to the UK I feel like I’m home,” she says.

At home she watches TV and films, plays with her grandchildren, reads, writes and listens to jazz. “It’d make me very boring if all I did was think about show business,” she says. “I do indulge myself a little, and go to the opera every time I’m in New York, but that’s about it.”

Beyond the tour, Petula has no firm plans, as has always been her preference. “I’ve done a lot of varied things and that keeps it fresh. Not planning means I can go off and do something just because I feel like it or because someone asked me. There’s no masterplan, and there never has been. What comes next? You tell me.”

• Tickets for Petula Clark’s only Yorkshire show on her 2013 tour are on sale on 0844 854 2757 or yorkbarbican.co.uk