Cliff Richard
Sir Cliff Richard is a British singer and actor. He has total sales of over 21.5 million singles in the United Kingdom and, as of 2012, was the third-top-selling artist in UK singles chart history, behind the Beatles and Elvis Presley.
Richard was originally marketed as a rebellious rock and roll singer in the style of Presley and Little Richard. With his backing group, the Shadows, he dominated the British popular music scene in the pre-Beatles period of the late 1950s to early 1960s. His 1958 hit single "Move It" is often described as Britain's first authentic rock and roll song. He had a successful screen career with films including Expresso Bongo, The Young Ones, Summer Holiday and Wonderful Life, and his own show on BBC Television. Increased focus on his Christian faith and subsequent softening of his music led to a more middle-of-the-road image, and he sometimes ventured into contemporary Christian music.
In [|a career] spanning over 65 years, Richard has amassed several gold and platinum discs and awards, including two Ivor Novello Awards and three Brit Awards. More than 130 of his singles, albums, and EPs have reached the UK Top 20, more than any other artist. Richard has had 67 UK top ten singles, the second highest total for an artist. He holds the record, with Presley, as the only act to make the UK singles charts in all of its first six decades. He has achieved 14 UK No. 1 singles, and is the only singer to have had a No. 1 single in the UK in each of five consecutive decades. He also had four UK Christmas No. 1 singles, two of which were as a solo artist; "Mistletoe and Wine" and "Saviour's Day".
By the late-1990s, Richard had sold more than 250 million records worldwide, making him one of the best-selling music artists of all time. He has never achieved the same popularity in the United States despite eight US Top 40 singles, including the million-selling "Devil Woman" and "We Don't Talk Anymore". In Canada, he had a successful period in the early 1960s, the late 1970s and early 1980s, with some releases certified gold and platinum. He has remained a popular music, film, and television personality at home in the UK as well as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Northern Europe and Asia, and retains a following in other countries. When not touring, he divides his time between Barbados and Portugal. In 2019, he relocated to New York.
Life and career
1940–1958: Childhood and adolescence
Cliff Richard was born Harry Rodger Webb on 14 October 1940 at King George's Hospital, Victoria Street, in Lucknow, which was then part of British India. His parents were Rodger Oscar Webb, a manager for a catering contractor that serviced the Indian Railways, and the former Dorothy Marie Dazely. His parents also spent some years in Howrah, West Bengal. After the violence of Direct Action Day, they decided to relocate to Britain permanently. Richard is primarily of English heritage, but he had one great-grandmother who was of half Welsh and half Spanish descent, born of a Spanish great-great-grandmother named Emiline Joseph Rebeiro.The Webb family lived in a modest home in Maqbara, near the main shopping centre of Hazratganj in Lucknow. Dorothy's mother served as the dormitory matron at the La Martiniere Girls' School. Richard had three sisters, Joan, Jacqui and Donna.
In 1948, following Indian independence, the family embarked on a three-week sea voyage to Tilbury, Essex, England, aboard the. The Webbs moved from comparative wealth in India, where they lived in a company-supplied flat at Howrah near Calcutta, to a semi-detached house in Carshalton, north Surrey. Harry Webb attended a local primary school, Stanley Park Juniors, in Carshalton.
In 1949, his father obtained employment in the credit control office of Thorn Electrical Industries, Enfield, and the family moved in with other relatives in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire, where he attended Kings Road Junior Mixed Infants School, until a three-bedroom council house in nearby Cheshunt was allocated to them in 1950, at 12 Hargreaves Close.
He then attended Cheshunt Secondary Modern School from 1952 to 1957. As a member of the top stream, he stayed on beyond the minimum leaving age to take GCE Ordinary Level examinations and gained a pass in English literature. He then started work as a filing clerk for Atlas Lamps. A development of retirement flats, Cliff Richard Court, has been named after him in Cheshunt.
Harry Webb became interested in skiffle. When he was 16, his father bought him a guitar, and in 1957, he formed the school vocal harmony group The Quintones, before singing in the Dick Teague Skiffle Group.
1958–1963: Success and stardom
Harry Webb became lead singer of a rock and roll group, the Drifters. The 1950s entrepreneur Harry Greatorex wanted the up-and-coming rock 'n' roll singer to change his name. The name Cliff was adopted as it sounded like "cliff face", which suggested "Rock". It was "Move It" writer Ian Samwell who suggested the surname "Richard" as a tribute to Webb's musical hero Little Richard.Before their first large-scale appearance, at the Regal Ballroom in Ripley, Derbyshire in 1958, they adopted the name "Cliff Richard and the Drifters". The four members were Harry Webb, Ian Samwell on guitar, Terry Smart on drums and Norman Mitham on guitar. None of the other three played with the later and better known Shadows, although Samwell wrote songs for Richard's later career. Agent George Ganjou saw the group perform in London, and recommended them to Norrie Paramor for an audition.
For Richard's debut session, Paramor provided him with "Schoolboy Crush", a song previously recorded by American Bobby Helms. Richard was permitted to record one of his own songs for the B-side; this was "Move It", written and composed by the Drifters' Samwell while he was on board a number 715 Green Line bus on the way to Richard's house for a rehearsal. For the "Move It" session, Paramor used the session guitarist Ernie Shears on lead guitar and Frank Clark on bass.
There are various stories about why the A-side was replaced by the intended B-side. One is that Norrie Paramor's young daughter raved about the B-side; another was that influential TV producer Jack Good, who used the act for his TV show Oh Boy!, wanted the only song on his show to be "Move It" as opposed to "Schoolboy Crush". Richard was quoted as saying:
The single went to No. 2 on the UK singles chart. John Lennon credited "Move It" as being the first British rock record.
In the early days, Richard was marketed as the British equivalent of Elvis. Like previous British rockers such as Tommy Steele and Marty Wilde, Richard adopted Elvis-like dress and hairstyle. In performance he struck a pose of rock attitude, rarely smiling or looking at the audience or camera. His late 1958 and early 1959 follow-up singles, "High Class Baby" and "Livin' Lovin' Doll", were followed by "Mean Streak", which carried a rocker's sense of speed and passion, and Lionel Bart's "Living Doll".
It was on "Living Doll" that the Drifters began to back Richard on record. It was his fifth record and became his first No. 1 single. By that time, the group's line-up had changed with the arrival of Jet Harris, Tony Meehan, Hank Marvin and Bruce Welch. The group was obliged to change its name to "The Shadows" after legal complications with the American group the Drifters as "Living Doll" entered the American top 40, licensed by ABC-Paramount. "Living Doll" was used in Richard's début film Serious Charge, but it was arranged as a country standard, rather than a rock and roll standard.
The Shadows were not a typical backing group. They became contractually separate from Richard, and the group received no royalties for records backing Richard. In 1959, the Shadows landed an EMI recording contract of their own, for independent recordings. That year, they released three singles, two of which featured double-sided vocals and one of which had instrumental A and B sides. They thereafter had several major hits, including five UK No. 1s. The band also continued to appear and record with Richard and wrote many of his hits. On more than one occasion, a Shadows instrumental replaced a Richard song at the top of the British charts.
Richard's fifth single "Living Doll" triggered a softer, more relaxed, sound. Subsequent hits, the No. 1s "Travellin' Light" and "I Love You" and also "A Voice in the Wilderness", lifted from his film Expresso Bongo, and "Theme for a Dream" cemented Richard's status as a mainstream pop entertainer along with contemporaries such as Adam Faith and Billy Fury. Throughout the early 1960s, his hits were consistently in the top five.
In 1961, EMI records organised Richard's 21st birthday party at its London headquarters in Manchester Square led by his producer Norrie Paramor. Photographs of the celebrations were incorporated into Richard's next album, 21 Today, in which Tony Meehan joined in despite having very recently left the Shadows to be replaced by Brian Bennett.
Typically, the Shadows closed the first half of the show with a 30-minute set of their own, then backed Richard on his show-closing 45-minute stint, as exemplified by the retrospective CD album release of Live at the ABC Kingston 1962. Tony Meehan and Jet Harris left the group in 1961 and 1962 respectively, and later had their own chart successes for Decca. The Shadows added bass players Brian Locking and then John Rostill and took on Brian Bennett permanently on drums.
In the early years, particularly on album and EP releases, Richard also recorded ballads backed by the Norrie Paramor Orchestra with Tony Meehan as a session drummer. His first such single without the Shadows was "When the Girl in Your Arms Is the Girl in Your Heart" in 1961, and he continued to release one or two per year, including covers of "It's All in the Game" in 1963 and "Constantly" in 1964, a revival of the popular Italian hit "L'edera". In 1965, sessions under the direction of Billy Sherrill in Nashville, Tennessee were particularly successful, yielding "The Minute You're Gone", which topped the UK singles chart, and "Wind Me Up ", which made No. 2.
File:Princess Margaret meets Cliff Richard at the 59 Club, 1962..jpg|thumb|right|Princess Margaret and Richard at the 59 Club, London in 1962
Richard, and the Shadows in particular, however, never achieved star status in the United States. In 1960 they toured the United States and were well-received, but lacklustre support and distribution from a revolving door of American record labels proved an obstacle to long-term success there, despite several chart records by Richard, including the aforementioned "It's All in the Game" on Epic, via a renewed linking of the worldwide Columbia labels after Philips ended its distribution deal with CBS. To the Shadows' chagrin, "Apache" reached No. 2 in the US through a cover version by Danish guitarist Jorgen Ingmann which was almost unchanged from their worldwide hit. Richard and the band appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, which was crucial for the Beatles, but these performances did not help them gain sustained success in North America.
Richard and the Shadows appeared in six feature films, including a debut in the 1959 film Serious Charge but most notably in The Young Ones, Summer Holiday, Wonderful Life, and Finders Keepers. These films created their own genre, known as the "Cliff Richard musical", and led to Richard's being named the No. 1 cinema box office attraction in Britain for both 1962 and 1963, even beating the James Bond films. The title song of The Young Ones became his biggest-selling single in the United Kingdom, selling over one million copies in the UK. The irreverent 1980s TV sitcom The Young Ones took its name from Richard's 1962 film. In mid-1963, Cliff and the Shadows appeared for a season in Blackpool, where Richard had his portrait modelled by Victor Heyfron.