Cliff: ‘My private life is my business’
SINGER Cliff Richard says he has resigned himself to the fact that his fans are intensely interested in his private life but maintains that it is none of their business.
The unmarried 80-year-old made his comments on the BBC Radio 4 show Desert Island Discs, to be broadcast today six decades after he first appeared as a guest on the programme.
The singer – who successfully sued the BBC for breach of privacy over its coverage of unfounded sex abuse allegations against him – has told presenter Lauren Laverne that he chose to remain single amid fears that getting married could have cut his career short in its early days.
He said: ‘When I look back now, it has to be that reason... I was never going to give up this career that I had fought heavily for.
‘It was just the way it was. People would say, “No, no, the girls are all screaming at you. You have got
to be just available for them.”
‘It [getting married] would have no effect now at all... Gary Barlow’s married and got children. No one minds and that’s how it should have been then, but it wasn’t.’
Richard, who has been dogged by unfounded rumours he might be gay, said that over the years he had resigned himself to the ‘intense’ interest in his private life.
He said: ‘I have lived with it for so long now that I don’t care anymore what they think and say.
‘Certainly, my private life is absolutely nobody’s business but mine and I tell them that.’
He admitted being still ‘angry’ that his father Rodger, a catering manager who died at the age of 56, had not lived to see his success, saying: ‘It was a heartbreaking time for me, my dad missed the best.
‘He was so fast and hard behind me all the way through that I feel sometimes horribly angry that he died too early.
‘He missed the first number one. He missed the knighthood – my father would have loved to have seen me be knighted. I miss my dad still.’ Although he acknowledged being ‘a bit fearful’ of his father’s disciplinarian streak, Richard said he now realised that Rodger had been crucial to his success.
He said: ‘My father influenced me much more than I thought. I had recorded Move It [his first hit single], but it hadn’t been released and he had said to me, “You really want this?”
‘And I said, “I really want to do this”, and he said, “Well, from now on you are going to have to be the best at it that you can be – you can never let up.”’
The singer – who publicly declared his Christianity in 1966 at a rally organised by the evangelical preacher Billy Graham – spoke of the fears he had that the move would scupper his career.
‘It was a difficult choice to make,’ he said.
‘In the end I felt that it [my faith] was more important even than my career.’
Desert Island Discs is on BBC Radio 4 today at 11am and will be repeated at 8am on Christmas Day.
‘I wasn’t giving up my career for marriage’
‘My father influenced me more than I thought’