“How Are You Still Going On?”: The Eternal Appeal of Cliff Richard | Cliff Richard

AAt 85 hours, Sir Cliff Richard is out on the road again. Last week, he wrapped up a series of shows in Australia and New Zealand. Tomorrow, the UK leg of his Can’t Stop Me Now tour opens in Cardiff, ending at the Royal Albert Hall on December 9. He was the artist who inaugurated the era of British rock ‘n’ roll, with Move It in 1958, and 67 years later is still selling out big rooms.

For starters, Sir Cliff’s continued existence is at best a mystery, and at worst an insult to taste. This is a misunderstanding: Sir Cliff is not in the music business – despite his complaints about it – as much as Cliff Richard. When he disappeared from national radio, the reason he failed so badly was because he had long since ceased to function in the world known to the rest of pop music.

Writer Richard Williams predicted this future as far back as 1980, when the singer performed a series of elegant MOR hits like Carrie and We Don’t Talk Anymore. “He may become the Vera Lynn of the next century,” Williams wrote in The Times, and that is more or less what he has become – an entertainer to commemorate royal birthdays and anniversaries. A national institution, not a national treasure.

How did he manage to survive? “He asks himself that a lot,” says Ian Gittins, who has written two books about Sir Cliff, including his autobiography The Dreamer. “His contemporaries when he started out were Billy Fury, Marty Wylde, Adam Faith, and he said to me two or three times: ‘How am I going to keep going?’ He’s very stubborn and incredibly driven, probably more driven than anyone I’ve interviewed over the years. And he still cares about his career.”

And he stays fit too. Gittins says he plays tennis twice a week and goes to the gym. And although he has long regretted never breaking America, the fact that his fame is limited to the UK and the Antipodes means he rarely plays more than 30 shows a year – his schedule isn’t as physically grueling as a major Stones tour, for example (Mick Jagger is 82).

At Sir Cliff’s shows, the adoration was as intense as that for the Gallagher brothers at this summer’s Oasis reunion: it was expressed more subdued, by a somewhat different demographic, mostly women a few years their hero’s age. The relationship between artist and fans is very nice. “He’s very fond of them,” Gittins says. “And they love him and are extraordinarily protective of him. They’ve grown up with him and grown up with him – they’ve seen him go through ups and downs. But he can’t attract new fans, because he doesn’t listen to the radio.”

Cliff’s break from mainstream pop music came in the mid-1960s. Although he was already a clean-cut family artist, the recordings he was making with The Shadows were decent and energetic. But when UK popular culture was at its peak, he fully converted to 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 squad to deal with fans who had not yet followed him in renunciation of lust). From that point on, no matter what recordings he made, he was always banished from the pop music milieu.

Not that it necessarily harmed him. Young female fans often remain extremely loyal as they grow older – as Take That and Westlife have found to their advantage – and Sir Cliff has rarely shown any interest in anything other than pleasing 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. This may be wise, given that two separate television interviews in November 2023 went viral for their seriousness. This may have prevented a truly important reassessment of his legacy: he does not talk to publications that want to publish such articles.

But somewhere behind that perpetually smiling, always tanned face, there still lurks the raw rock ‘n’ roll singer who once electrified Britain. “I just finished writing a book with Jimmy Tarbuck, who was on tour with Cliff in the late 1950s, when they were 18 or 19,” Gittens says. “He said the girls were so crazy, you couldn’t hear yourself think. And all the mothers hated Cliff because they thought he was a sex object.”