At 85, Sir Cliff Richard is out on the road again. Last week, he wrapped up a run of shows in Australia and New Zealand. Tomorrow, the UK leg of his Can’t Stop Me Now tour opens in Cardiff, finishing at the Royal Albert Hall on 9 December. He was the artist who opened the British rock’n’roll era, with Move It in 1958, and after 67 years he is still selling out big rooms.
To the uninitiated, Sir Cliff’s continued presence is at best a mystery, and at worst an affront to taste. That is to misunderstand him: Sir Cliff doesn’t operate in the music business – despite his gripes with it – so much as in the Cliff Richard business. When he disappeared from national radio, to his great distress, it was because he had long since ceased to operate in a world recognisable to the rest of pop.
The writer Richard Williams predicted this future as far back as 1980, when the singer was having a revival off the back of a run of sleek MOR hits such as Carrie and We Don’t Talk Anymore. “Perhaps he will become the next century’s Vera Lynn,” Williams wrote in the Times, and that is more or less what he has become – a performer to commemorate Christmases and royal anniversaries. A national institution rather than a national treasure.
How has he managed to endure? “He asks himself that an awful lot,” says Ian Gittins, who has ghostwritten two books for Sir Cliff, including his autobiography The Dreamer. “His contemporaries when he started were Billy Fury, Marty Wilde and Adam Faith, and he said to me two or three times, ‘How am I still going?’ He’s extraordinarily tenacious and incredibly driven, probably more driven than anyone else I’ve interviewed over the years. And he still cares about his career.”
He remains fit, too. He plays tennis twice a week and goes to the gym, Gittins says. And while he has long regretted never breaking America, the fact that his fame is confined to the UK and the Antipodes means he seldom plays more than 30 shows a year – his schedule is not as physically gruelling as, say, a big Stones tour (Mick Jagger is 82).
At Sir Cliff’s shows, the adoration is as fervent as that for the Gallagher brothers at this summer’s Oasis reunion: it’s just expressed a little more sedately, by a rather different demographic, principally women within a few years in age of their hero. The relationship between artist and fans is extremely gentle. “He’s very fond of them,” Gittins says. “And they’re extraordinarily fond and protective of him. They have grown up and grown old with him – they’ve seen him go through the ups and downs. But he can’t attract new fans, because he doesn’t get radio play.”
The cleaving of Cliff from mainstream pop came in the mid-60s. Though he was already a clean-cut family entertainer, the records he had been making with the Shadows were decent, peppy beat pop. But just as UK pop culture went into overdrive, he fully embraced Christianity, and in 1966 – the year of the Beatles’ Revolver – he toured the UK not as a rock singer, but as a preacher (contemporary accounts say he needed a large security contingent to deal with the fans who had not yet followed him in renouncing lust). From that point on, no matter the records he made, he was always exiled from pop’s centre.
Not that it necessarily harmed him. Young female fans often remain very loyal as they age – as Take That and Westlife have found to their benefit – and Sir Cliff has rarely shown any interest in anything other than satisfying them. He rarely gives interviews, and when he does it is to outlets that cater to the people he wants to reach: sometimes to the Daily Mail, more often to Christian newspapers and magazines. That is perhaps wise, given that two separate TV interviews in November 2023 went viral owing to their cringe-worthiness. It has also, perhaps, prevented his genuinely important legacy being reassessed: he doesn’t talk to the publications who would love to run such pieces.
But somewhere behind that perma-smiling, perma-tanned face still lurks the raw rock’n’roller who once electrified Britain. “I’ve just finished writing a book with Jimmy Tarbuck,” Gittins says, “who was on tour with Cliff in the late 50s, when they were both 18 or 19. And he said the girls were going crazy, that you couldn’t hear yourself think. And all the mums hated Cliff because they thought he was a sex object.”
