TORMENTED CLIFF ‘WAS BAG OF BONES’ SAYS POP PAL
SHADOWS LEGEND BRUCE WELCH
THE first time the Shadows’ legendary guitarist Bruce Welch met Cliff Richard he was performing with his backing band The Drifters at the 2i’s coffee bar in London’s Soho. The year was 1958. “He looked fantastic,” Bruce recalls. “He was swarthy with swept-back hair and big sideburns, just like Elvis.”
Fast forward 60 years and Bruce found his old friend in a very different state indeed. He last saw the Bachelor Boy singer at one of his sell-out concerts at the Albert Hall on Cliff’s 78th birthday on October 14.
“I gave him a big man hug, drank all his champagne. He’s on the mend now. But when I gave him a hug last year, it was like holding a bag of bones.”
Bruce shakes his head in a mix of anger and disbelief. “Whatever happened to innocent until proved guilty? There he is in his farmhouse in Portugal. He switches on the telly and sees live footage of forensic officers raiding his lounge and bedroom in his UK apartment. No one had contacted him in advance. No charges had been put before him.”
He is referring, of course, to the now -infamous 2014 police raid on Cliff’s home in Sunningdale, Berkshire, sparked by unsubstantiated allegations of historical child sex abuse.
Cliff, had the last laugh, winning £210,000 in damages for invasion of privacy. But the toll it took on his health, his reputation and his earning power is incalculable.
“The thing that angers me most is that we’ll never know the identity of the guy who made all the false underage sex accusations,” says Bruce. “It robbed Cliff of four years of his life. Still, he’s back now – and that’s fantastic.”
The day the two men first met all those years ago was Bruce’s second day in London. He has come a long way from humble beginnings.
A Geordie born out of wedlock – the result of a brief wartime tryst – he has no memory of his mother Grace, who died of tuberculosis when he was five: “I’ve got one photograph of me on her lap when I was about nine months old. That’s it.”
His father, Stan Cripps, “cleared off when my mum got pregnant” and he was brought up by his mother’s sister, Aunt Sadie.
He went to the local school in Chester-le-Street. “And yes,” he says, “there was a stigma attached to being illegitimate. I was known as a b ***** d child. It used to make me smile when the 1960s came round. People like me were then known as a love child. Not that anyone teased me. I was always a big lad. I could look after myself.”
It was at grammar school that he met Brian Rankin who later morphed into Hank Marvin. Brian was already pretty adept on lead guitar, while Bruce was picking up the fundamentals of rhythm guitar.
In April 1958, aged just 16 – and much to Aunt Sadie’s consternation – the two boys decided to head south to London as part of a skiffle group called The Railroaders. “There were four of us with barely a penny to our names and with no idea where we were going to stay.”
It didn’t take long for the other two group members to head straight back to Newcastle but Bruce and Hank decided to stay on.
“The manager of the Granada Edmonton, a big Scots guy, took pity on us, rang a landlady he knew who just happened to be a fellow Geordie and she let us sleep in her attic in Finsbury Park for free. We were there six months. I’ve always been a bit of a chancer.”
But not, he insists, a gambler. “When the Shadows hit it big, I was given good financial advice which I followed for years, putting money into a pension fund from the age of 21. I never frittered my money away on drink and drugs. I’ve got my house in Richmond by the Thames, a villa in Portugal.” So he’s comfortably off? “Very.”
IT was on their second day in the Big Smoke that Bruce and Hank made their way to the 2i’s: “Tommy Steele was the resident star there: we’d read about it in one of the music papers. In time, we asked if we could get up and perform. Eventually, they said yes and we’d do Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly numbers. We were paid 18 shillings a night – the equivalent of about 90p now.”
In time, it’s how they met the man who was to become The Shadows’ bass guitarist, Jet Harris, their drummer Tony Meehan and, perhaps most fatefully of all, Cliff Richard.
One day, Cliff’s manager, John Fos-
ter, said he was looking for a lead guitarist to tour with him. “Hank said he’d do it but only if I could play too.”
So they were invited to Cliff’s house in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, for an audition. “We got on a Green Line bus outside the BBC and off we went to play in his parents’ front room.”
They got the job and embarked on a three-week tour headed by the American Kalin Twins. By the end of the tour, Cliff’s first record, Move It, was No 2 in the charts. That was October 1958. “And here we are 60 years later. Jet and Tony have sadly gone. Hank now lives in Australia although I see him when he’s over here. And Cliff has been a mate for all those years.”
At 77, Bruce is in good shape. He weighs 14 stone and walks everywhere: routinely six or seven miles a day. He has a full head of luxuriant white hair and gleaming white teeth. “And so they should be,” he says, smiling obligingly. “They cost me 20 grand.” His has been a (mostly) charmed life. “But if I have a regret, it is that, unlike quite a few of my friends, I haven’t had a 50-year marriage. I think that would have been really nice. But it just didn’t pan out like that.” He has a son, Dwayne, 57, from first wife Anne and three grand-children: Bluebell, 24, Mimi, 21, and 19-year-old Milo. Like his first marriage, his second ended in divorce, also after nine years.
He met Magda, half-Polish, halfIrish, in 1992. Bruce brought up her daughter, Lauren, now 30, as his own from the age of four. “She calls me Papa.”
In 2000, a routine check-up before going on another tour, revealed that he had prostate cancer. “I’d had no warning signs. I was 59 and fit.” He underwent radical surgery and happily there has been no recurrence.
But it fundamentally changed his relationship with Magda. “She’s 25 years younger than me. We went our separate ways in 2004 although I still see her.”
Talk of cancer also inevitably reminds him of Olivia Newton-John, his girlfriend and fiancée in the late 1960s and 1970s.
“She’s still in my life although she lives in America and Australia. Sadly, her cancer has come back for a third time. It’s now in her spine. But she’s an incredibly positive person with exactly the right attitude.”
ALTHOUGH he’s pretty much retired, The Shadows are by no means forgotten. The band that gave us No 1 hits such as Apache, Kon-Tiki and Dance On! have two tracks on the latest Dreamboats & Petticoats CD, a compilation franchise featuring 1950s and 1960s hits that was launched 11 years ago by Universal. The first one sold 400,000 copies and there’s been a new one every year since. It spawned a West End musical that toured the UK.
On the newly released CD set, there are 100 tracks featuring everyone from The Beach Boys to Dusty Springfield in addition to the Shadows’ hits Theme For Young Lovers and Wonderful Land.
And to this day Bruce isn’t averse to dusting off his Fender Stratocaster. “Funnily enough, I got a call from Duane Eddy just yesterday. He’s 80 now and doing a few farewell gigs in the UK. Would I like to accompany him on a number called Shazam at the Palladium tonight? Well, in the end I couldn’t resist.”
Mostly, though, he fills his time, he says, studying ancient Roman history – “I go to all the ruins in Italy: Pompei, Herculaneum and so on” – and the Second World War, an interest which involves visiting Duxford Aerodrome in Cambridgshire, and reading round the subject.
It’s time to go. I’m just getting up to leave when he grabs my elbow. There’s clearly something he wants to get off his chest. “For six, seven years now,” he confides, “I’ve been with a lovely lady called Jill.”
And, with that, a contented Bruce Welch heads off to the Palladium to rehearse with Duane Eddy.
Dreamboats & Petticoats: The Golden Years is out now on UMOD. To order go to amazon.co.uk