Cliff Richard's current concert tour is described as a "Celebration of 40 Years of Hits". Sadly, for his fans it might turn out to be a farewell tour, at least in terms of his time as a hit-maker. The singer may have responded in a relatively muted manner during last Friday's Kelly show on UTV, when reminded that radio stations throughout Britain refused to play his last single because "they said you were too old" - but there was no doubting the truth in his reply. "I felt snubbed and, therefore, it was painful," he admitted. "I've spent my whole life living for pop-rock music."
Cliff, who will be 60 next year, could also have said he has spent much of his life living through pop music. When he was 16, he first heard Elvis's Heartbreak Hotel roar forth from a car radio and realised "with absolute certainty that I wanted to sing and be part of this new world of rock'n'roll," as he writes in the recently published official biography, Cliff Richard: A Celebration. By 1958, thanks to his breakthrough single Move It, Cliff was part of that world and has probably marked the passing of time ever since, in relation to hits.
As a consummate, market-oriented singles artiste from the start of his career, Cliff left as little as possible to chance. Livin' Doll was followed by the sound-alike Travellin' Light. A year later he actually polled the members of his fan club, asking them to select, from a batch of new recordings, his latest single, which resulted in Please Don't Tease. Not long afterwards he turned again to Tepper And Bennett, the American composers of Travellin' Light as well as many of Presley's movie songs, and commissioned them to write what would turn out to be the title track for his movie The Young Ones.
During the beat boom of the early 1960s he recorded Blue Turns To Grey, composed by two of his arch-rivals, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and nearer the end of that decade he even got Shadows guitarist Hank Marvin to add a little Hendrix-like "fuzz" guitar to Throw Down A Line. In other words, no fad, no fashion, no element of revolutionary or evolutionary change in pop was sacred to our Cliff. If he thought he could use it to keep the hits coming, he sure as hell would, and so it has continued up to his latest album, Real As I Can Be, which was produced by a former member of Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention, Peter Wolf, and includes tracks such as Can't Keep This Feelin' In, where Cliff claims he sounds like, eh, Michael Jackson. Indeed, the older Cliff got the more desperate he seemed to be for chart success, although exactly why only became apparent, roughly a decade ago when, during an interview, I asked him whether having hits was more important to him than perceiving his music as a form of self-expression.
"No. They are part of it, because if I didn't have hits I wouldn't have a career. And if I don't have a career I can't express myself through my faith," Cliff replied. He also addressed the question of why he no longer released message singles such as the environmentally-aware Silvery Rain, which he recorded in 1970.
"As much as I am drawn to songs that have such a message, those singles were not, unfortunately, my greatest hits. Yet the greatest hits give me the position to speak similar messages. I create a set of circumstances where people like me because they've got the hits to latch on to, so they come to concerts. In that context I can get across what I think and believe. "I can talk about apartheid, pollution, nuclear war, love, life, loneliness and Jesus and, because the audience likes songs such as Summer Holiday, they listen and accept my message. Whether that then changes them or not is not for me to say; what really matters is that I've done what I can do, and what I believe I have to do, with the position I've been given in society."
Whatever else one may say about Cliff, he is consistent. That comment was made in Hot Press in 1990. Nearly a quarter of a century earlier, just a week after turning up at Billy Graham's Crusade in Earl's Court and telling 25,000 people that he'd become a Christian, Cliff made the probably more perilous decision to "come out" in the New Musical Express. He said: "someone suggested that it is sissy to proclaim your Christian beliefs. I don't think it is. I feel great all the time and I know it is because of my beliefs. I've felt this way for two years now and it has helped me to help others, I hope." Cliff, a sissy? That must have brought an additional sneer to the lips of those people in the music industry who had been tossing the word "queer" in his direction since 1958, and have ever since. Particularly after 1966 when he began living with fellow Christian, Bill Latham, about whom Cliff has said; "we don't have anything to be ashamed of or anything to hide", describing Latham as his "spiritual adviser" and "closest friend".
At this stage does anyone really care if Cliff is "queer" or not? In A Celebration, he himself admits that "all the sexual speculation" is still "very painful", partly because "of all the things I do in life, so much interest is aimed at the sexual side."
Yet one could also argue that all the speculation about his sexuality and religion has, in a sense, let Cliff off the hook and deflected attention away from his music, which is rarely subjected to the kind of critical appraisal so often applied to his peers. "40 Years of Hits" may be a nice sales pitch but isn't it about time we asked what, exactly, has Cliff Richard contributed to pop/rock since 1958? Not much, according to at least one recent "best of the 20th century" list, which included only his single Move It, widely regarded as the first, great rock'n'roll recording made outside America. But to include only one of his 120 singles and not a single track from his 60 albums in such lists is patently absurd. Cliff is right when he claims "I am a rock/ pop singer and what those critics can't do is change the rules and move the goalposts more than 30 years down the line. I started in the 1950s and, with others, we invented rock'n'roll," although he would be more correct to say "British rock'n'roll".
The 1997 box set, Cliff Richard: The Rock `n' Roll Years 1958-1963 features more than enough tracks to back Cliff's assertion. Admittedly there are far too many pallid Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis imitations, but if you listen to the way he implies pure sexual delight as he sings the word "recreation" in The Snake And the Bookworm, it's as true to the roots of rock as Hank echoing that longing in even a single guitar lick.
Cliff, the singer's debut album, was a live set recorded in the presence of hundreds of screaming fans and highlighting himself and the Shadows at their purest; a raw blend of post-skiffle and early rock'n'roll. The same passion resurfaces, albeit less frequently, in early 1960s recordings such as Forty Days, We Say Yeah and It'll Be Me.
Then again, as Cliff himself says, he is a rock/pop singer - a divide that was defined on his second album, Cliff Sings, where half the songs were recorded with the Shads, and the rest were standards sung with the Norrie Paramour Orchestra. The latter led to cries that Cliff had sold out, which is only true if you deny the do-wop ballad tradition in rock'n'roll and the fact that guys like Dion were also recording songs such as That's My Desire.
Indeed, it is this more lyrical side of Cliff's music that resulted in some of his most delicious and under-rated recordings; singles such as The Next Time, Constantly, Visions, The Day I Met Marie, Miss You Nights, When Two Worlds Drift Apart, Daddy's Home, All I Ask of You, and numerous album tracks up to Butterfly Kisses on his latest album, Real As I Can Be. As for Cliff himself, he would regard some of his Christian tunes such as Thief In The Night to be his finest, and probably most truthful, recordings.
That said, there is an alarming lack of substance at the soul of the work of Cliff Richard. He may be the consummate, market-oriented singles artiste, but he was never an artist. Cliff certainly never produced even one album that is as essential as, for example, Elvis Presley's debut album, nor will he ever be remembered as one of the greats. Probably because Cliff Richard really has managed to live his life through rock/pop, but failed to leave any sense of a life lived in the world of popular music. If, to cull a title from one of his own songs, It's All Over for Cliff in terms of hits, he really can't complain.
Cliff Richard plays Belfast's King's Hall tonight and tomorrow night and the Point Theatre, Dublin on Monday, June 7th and Tuesday, June 8th
