How I learnt to love Britain’s uncoolest star
Ilove Cliff Richard and I don’t care who knows it. Britain’s longest serving pop star is back in the album charts with Rise Up at No 4, 60 years after he made his debut. This is his seventh decade of pop success. He’s been around for so long that he’s become a British institution, and not one we always treat with respect. So let me redress that. As a child of the Sixties, I was raised on Cliff every bit as much as I was raised on the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. His dreamy good looks, soft pliant voice and wholesome disposition made him the perfect conduit to the strange world of pop for those of us still too wide-eyed for the wilder excesses of the era. He was a twinkly-eyed movie matinee idol, a Saturday night TV staple, singing with the easy joy of someone delighted by melody and simply thrilled to perform.
When Cliff appeared as a supermarionation puppet in the film
Thunderbirds Are Go in 1966, singing Shooting Star in a space-age nightclub, he was imprinted on my imagination forever as the very definition of a modern icon. This was pop as science fiction years before Bowie fell to Earth. Yet who would have dared to predict that decades later, in the far-flung future of the 21st century, Cliff would still be going strong, as plastic and impermeable as his marionette?
There have been many versions of Cliff over the years, some cool, some corny, but at the core of his appeal are damn near impeccable pop instincts. He was Britain’s first rock’n’roll star in 1958, a home-grown Elvis with Hank Marvin’s stinging guitar licks lending him an aura of street credibility that he never really achieved again. The dirty thrill of Move It was the first of many brilliant recordings. Cliff was 21 when he recorded The Young Ones in 1961, and he is still singing “We won’t be the young ones very long” at the age of 78. I don’t think there is another star of this vintage who is quite so well preserved. A regime of tennis and celibacy obviously work wonders for the voice.
The sexual politics of Living Doll may not have aged well, but the song was sprightly enough to hit number one in 1959 and 1986. The Day I Met
Marie, from 1967, is a wondrous slice of psychedelic bubblegum, a paisley pattern pop dream. In the Seventies, Cliff found a new soft-rock groove. How about aching ballad Miss You
Nights, snappy rocker Devil Woman and heartache singalong We Don’t
Talk Anymore for a trio of classic singles? As the Eighties dawned, Cliff incorporated faux-new-wave sleekness into Carrie and protosynth-pop classic Wired for Sound.
“Power from the needle to the plastic/ AM-FM I feel so ecstatic…” You don’t get to score 68 solo top 10 hits without knowing what makes a killer record.
All winning streaks fade. By the time the Nineties dawned, Cliff was increasingly relying on Christmas songs to stay at number one. But at least he sings them with the conviction of a true believer. His squeaky-clean Christian church-going image may never lend him counter-cultural hipness but he is a man of conviction, with a worshipful sideline in gospel music. Van Morrison, a genius who does not suffer dodgy singers lightly, invited Cliff to duet on the joyous
Whenever God Shines His Light in 1989. In his time, Cliff has sung with Elton John, Dionne Warwick, Barry Gibb, Tammy Wynette, Candi Staton, Roberta Flack and (I kid you not) Janet Jackson and Aswad. When Cliff finds a song suited to his voice and persona, he is a match for anyone.
It’s easy to make fun of Sir Cliff. Our original rocker remains too rooted in a pre-rock mindset of family friendly light entertainment to ever develop the artistic gravitas he seems to crave. He can come across as prickly and over-sensitive at times (but then, who wouldn’t when they are subject to so much sneery condescension). The
Bachelor Boy evidently has his secrets. But whatever drives Cliff may well be the engine that keeps him feeling he has something to prove. There was a sense of injustice about his treatment over a police raid in 2016 that, in the end, added up to nothing but malicious innuendo. He has received substantial payments in redress but Cliff ’s new album is a better answer to his travails than his victorious court cases, proof that one of our all-time great pop stars is still movin’ and a groovin’. Rise Up marks his highest chart position in 25 years. You can’t call it a comeback though, because Cliff has never been away.
When Cliff appeared as a puppet in ‘Thunderbirds Are Go’ in 1966, he became the definition of a modern icon