The Daily Telegraph

After ‘a rough 22 months’ Cliff has an unforgetta­ble night

- By Tristram Fane Saunders

Pop Cliff Richard Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich

Everybody has a summer holiday. This was mine. I arrived as a cynical, 24-year-old hipster, ready to jeer at the prince of cheese and his blue-rinsed followers. I left as a Cliff convert.

Framed by the elegant white pillars of the Old Royal Naval College, the sun setting on the London skyline behind him, Cliff Richard gave his fans everything they wanted.

He sang, he smiled, he waggled his 76-year-old rump in tight gold trousers. Richard began with his latest single (his 146th, if you’re counting), (It’s Gonna Be) Okay. It was more than OK. Greenwich Music Time, the last weekend of his tour, was a joyous affirmatio­n of pop’s power to charm, uplift and console.

Each generation of fan had their Cliff. The Eighties crowd stood up for the power-pop of 1981’s Wired for Sound.

Those who remembered his band The Drifters before they became The Shadows were on their feet for his Fifties debut, Move It. The woman sat next to me had come all the way from Chorley, Lancashire. Like many in the crowd, this was not her first night with Cliff. She quietly mouthed every word of Ocean Deep, hands clasped tight in excitement. Few performers are so completely at one with their audience. They give him devotion, and he repays them with warmth and intimacy.

Richard has had, in his words, “a rough 22 months” – his only reference to his long battle to clear his name, following a police investigat­ion into historical sex abuse claims that was finally dropped last year. Sounding almost nonchalant, with his usual self-deprecatin­g smile, he told the crowd how he had spent those months crying himself to sleep, night after night, praying for a single kind word from God. And then he heard Robin Gibb’s song Don’t Cry Alone, and felt as if his prayers had been answered. His own version left some of us in tears.

To listeners my age – the young ones – Richard can seem like Stonehenge: something ancient and inexplicab­le, faintly absurd.

He is older than Vince Cable and duct tape. Yet he’ll outlast us all.

Congratula­tions, and jubilation­s, on an unforgetta­ble night.

 ??  ?? Back with a bang: Cliff Richard gave his devoted fans a musical tour de force
Back with a bang: Cliff Richard gave his devoted fans a musical tour de force

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