11 March 2011
The news was hardly out of his mouth before the knockers and mockers were sniding away this week. “Cliff Richard to record an album with soul singers Percy Sledge, Candi Staton, a Motown songwriter and maybe a couple of rappers! Ha-ha! There’s a laugh from that old Peter Pan of a coffin dodger”, ridiculed a chorus of instant, internet abuse.
It was an easily anticipated reaction, mimicking as it did the generational scorn and herd mentality of disc jockeys, comedians and pundits. To them Cliff Richard has long been a figure of fun, the living antithesis of everything that is, for want of a better word, groovy.
And which, the singer says, is the attitude that stops his singles being played on Radio One, the one that portrays him as a grandmas’ favourite who was never any good anyway.
Is that fair? Actually, not at all. Those of us with long memories still see Cliff Richard’s very first hit, Move It, in 1958 as the first proper British rock and roll record. He was 17 and considered at that time, not least by the BBC, to be a malign influence on British youth. Hard to believe now, I know.
For the next four years he was the British Elvis. And he didn’t just sing about his Living Doll. There was a terrific cover of a Jerry Lee Lewis hit and even a sexually suggestive (certainly for those zipped-up times) number one called Please Don’t Tease. Maybe Cliff didn’t read the subtext in the lyrics as he tried to look moody on television’s Oh Boy!
Fans may have already intuited that he wasn’t really a menace to morals, but his image problem only began in the early Sixties when he decided to pitch for the all-round entertainer market. Rock and roll was a passing fad, managers were telling their boy clients. So along came Cliff, no longer greasy hair and petulant sulk, but youth club eager, in films like The Young Ones and Summer Holiday.
The trouble was the doom-mongers were wrong. Rock and roll wasn’t dead or even poorly. It was thriving in little clubs and cellars around the country. And while Cliff was on his London bus chanting “We’re all going on a summer holiday”, or on TV singing about being a loveable Bachelor Boy, four other boys in Liverpool were plotting his overthrow.
It was the tipping point. Suddenly in 1963 Cliff, now the wholesome family entertainer but still only twenty two, looked old fashioned, as the Beatles swept the world, soon to be followed by the decidedly unwholesome Rolling Stones.
He still had hits, but his appeal, if not his boyish looks, was almost middle-aged. The greatest irony of all was that two of the Beatles, the young, new boys on the block, were both older than he was – albeit John Lennon by only five days. He’d begin too soon.
By now the moody, early Cliff, had morphed into the Cliff of the Eurovision Song Contest, where, with apologies to its very nice songwriters, he had a career-blighting success with the terrible Congratulations.
There was no way back, and Cliff couldn’t be what he wasn’t. He didn’t do drugs, or get out of his head on drink, and of groupies there was no sign. He was just a smiling, healthy goody-goody when it was becoming fashionable to be otherwise.
Not only that, he became very publicly a Christian goody-goody. Ridicule rained on him. It seemed you could believe in anything you wanted to in the Sixties, so long as you didn’t believe in Christianity. Actually it still feels that way.
Eventually there would be chart topping Christmas hymns like Saviour’s Day, which only managed to heap derision upon scorn for the now weirdly youthful-looking singer. And so it has continued.
But in all this it seems to me the detractors haven’t been listening.
Because, along the way, Cliff Richard has made some of the best pop records ever recorded in Britain, songs like Miss You Nights, Devil Woman, It’s All Over, You Mean Nothing To Me with Phil Everly, and We Don’t Talk Anymore, a huge hit in 1979 in which he had to sing in a higher key than he would normally have attempted. He’s never stopped trying.
The truth is the guy can sing. You don’t have over a hundred hits, or get up out of your seat on a rainy day at Wimbledon and entertain unaccompanied for forty minutes to keep the tennis fans happy as he did in 1994, without having something going for you.
Will be make a hit with his new soul album? Will be he able to reinvent himself as did Johnny Cash in the last years of his life, or Tom Jones, now a white haired gospel singer? Probably not. No matter how good the album is, his detractors still won’t be listening, even it’s recorded in Memphis and he wows them (maybe) in Las Vegas as he hopes.
But if it is good, he’ll have proved something to himself, which, I would have thought, is pretty much all a multi-millionaire of seventy, needs to do.
