Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
Our mate Cliff BY HIS FRIENDS
They’ve stuck by him through thick and thin. Now Cliff Richard’s friends and family share their memories in a TV tribute to his 60-year career
Sir Cliff Richard is determined to find a silver lining. After what he calls ‘four bad years’, fighting a court battle against the BBC and South Yorkshire police, he’s thrown himself back into recording and touring. ‘I’m back where I’m meant to be,’ he says inside Abbey Road recording studios. ‘It’s strange that I’ve had to have the four bad years before somebody said, “Let’s do an album of brand new songs.” I haven’t been broken down. I’m reborn recording-wise, I didn’t know I was ever going to do this again, I thought those days were way behind me.’
New ITV documentary Sir Cliff Richard: 60 Years In Public And In Private celebrates his six decades in showbusiness, spending time with 78-year-old Cliff at home in Portugal with his younger sister Joan, and includes contributions from Brian May, Olivia Newton-John, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Dame Joan Collins, Gloria Hunniford and fellow Shadows band members Bruce Welch, Hank Marvin and Brian Bennett. It also follows him on tour and at Abbey Road, where 60 years earlier he recorded his first hit. His new album is called, appropriately, Rise Up!
Of course, there’s also reaction to his court case, of which Brian May says, ‘Cliff’s been through stuff that would break many a man – to be accused of stuff you’re not guilty of and have that kind of smear on you, I can’t imagine how hurt he must have been.’ His sister Joan admits that she was seriously concerned. ‘I wasn’t even sure if Cliff was going to pull through it.’
The documentary looks back to when Cliff started as a rock’n’roll heartthrob, hanging out in The 2i’s Coffee Bar in London’s Soho. He was, recalls Dame Joan Collins, ‘clean-cut, he was the boy next door and he had this enormous charm’.
His big break came in 1958 with the song Move It. ‘It was the first real British rock’n’roll hit,’ says Hank Marvin, who was in The Shadows, then known as The Drifters, which became Cliff’s backing band the same year. He certainly made an impact.
‘ It was apparent to Bruce [ Welch] and me that he had something special,’ says Hank.
‘We could see it straightaway in rehearsal. We just weren’t ready for the audience’s response. As soon as Cliff’s name was mentioned they went nuts, screaming. Quite honestly we couldn’t hear ourselves play.’
The band moved from appealing to a teen audience to the mainstream with the 1959 hit Living Doll, which Lord Lloyd Webber describes as ‘one of the greatest pop records ever made’. Cliff’s clean-cut image continued, heightened further when he came out as a Christian in the 1960s. ‘The rock star is a very rebellious kind of creature,’ says Brian May, ‘and he’s scornful of the morals of the time. For Cliff to cast himself in that role but still maintain his open faith was, I think, hard for him to pull off.’
Olivia Newton-John, who had a hit with Cliff in 1980 with the song Suddenly as well as starring with him in the 1972 film The Case, saw his failure to fit into the rock stereotype as no setback. ‘Not having that image of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll obviously didn’t hinder him... he managed to have that sexy image without the stuff that supposedly goes with it,’ she says.
Over the years, Cliff has worked hard to safeguard his privacy, or as he puts it, ‘The only thing you have to be sure of is to only tell the public what you want them to know.’
He is deeply affected by recent events, but Cliff has a childish excitement that his new album may make it into the charts. ‘There’ll never be another Cliff Richard. There’ll never be anyone who has 130 or 140 hits over 60 years,’ says Bruce Welch. Talking of when Cliff became Sir Cliff in 1995, Bruce adds, ‘He wasn’t knighted because he was a pop star, it was for his charity work, being a Christian, and being a good guy.’
Although still in a ref lective mood, Cliff is eager to look to the future. ‘For me and other artists who’ve survived the years, our age is a plus – we’ve done it before,’ he says. ‘We know how to deal with situations and we still want fame... You can’t kill ambition!’