With Cliff Richard it’s tempting for commentators and critics to pull a conceptual double bluff. Cliff is regarded as naff, safe and beloved of grannies, so restating that angle and sneering is tired - it was tired 40 years ago. So what to do? Dig around his back catalogue for a corner to be fought? (I’m Nearly Famous and Wired for Sound are the usual contenders.) Make the valid case that he was the British stepping stone between rock’n’roll and The Beatles? Or simply quote the stats – upwards of 200 million records sold, a national treasure, etc?
It doesn’t wash, any of it. Cliff and the Shadows' early work may have been vital when Conway Twitty was king but today it sounds anaemic. Compare it to, say, Jerry Lee Lewis and it’s a hairdryer beside a Pontiac. Fifty years later Sir Cliff is duetting in Memphis with a who’s-who of black music – Percy Sledge, Candi Staton, Freda Payne and so on - and it’s still tepid. The songs are mostly original - which is admirable - composed by Lamont Dozier, Ashford & Simpson and others, but Cliff removes all meat, grit and feeling, singing like a karaoke George Michael with a mouthful of marbles, while tasteful strings and power-ballad guitars schmaltz about behind him.
There are moments when he raises his game, as on the falsetto groover “Every Piece of My Broken Heart” and the brassy froth of the Womack & Womack classic “Teardrops” but, from the twee barber-shop moves of “Are You Feeling Me” to rock-funk closer “Birds of a Feather”, it’s all so horribly controlled and antiseptic, as if sex didn’t exist. On which point, on “When I Was Your Baby” (with Roberta Flack) he does some weird panting thing, possibly intended as erotic but which made me feel in need of a good scrub.
This isn’t autopilot Cliff - he could just turn out the same MOR dross and his fans wouldn’t mind. He’s trying something, experimenting, but the results are as earthy and sensual as Tupperware - which is surely not very soulicious?
Watch Cliff Richard and Freda Payne perform "Saving a Life"
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