Cliff Richard

• 1. Introduction

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  Cliff Richard owes his breakthrough song to a bus ride. Guitarist Ian Samwell wrote "Move It" on a number 715 Green Line bus, on his way to a rehearsal at the singer's house. The song became Richard's 1958 hit, and it is often described as Britain's first authentic rock and roll record. It launched a career that has now run for more than 65 years. In the UK singles chart, only the Beatles and Elvis Presley have sold more than Richard, whose total is over 21.5 million copies.

  Yet the same man spent decades complaining that radio would not give him a fair hearing. He also made choices that cost him dearly in a business built on rebellion. How did an unknown teenage singer come to lead British pop? And what did he keep, and what did he give up, to stay there?

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• 2. From Lucknow to Cliff

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  Lucknow, in what was then British India, is where Harry Rodger Webb was born on the 14th of October 1940, at King George's Hospital. His father, Rodger Oscar Webb, worked as a manager for a catering contractor serving the Indian Railways. His mother was Dorothy Marie Dazely. The family lived modestly in Maqbara, close to the main shopping centre of Hazratganj. Harry had three sisters: Joan, Jacqui and Donna, who lived from 1942 to 2016.

  The violence of Direct Action Day convinced his parents to settle in Britain for good. In 1948, after Indian independence, the family spent three weeks at sea aboard the SS Ranchi, landing at Tilbury in Essex. They traded a company-supplied flat at Howrah, near Calcutta, for a semi-detached house in Carshalton, in north Surrey. Harry started at a local primary school, Stanley Park Juniors.

  A job in the credit control office of Thorn Electrical Industries in Enfield came to his father in 1949. The family then shared space with relatives in Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire, where Harry attended Kings Road Junior Mixed Infants School. In 1950 the council allocated them a three-bedroom house at 12 Hargreaves Close in nearby Cheshunt. From 1952 to 1957 Harry attended Cheshunt Secondary Modern School. Placed in the top stream, he stayed beyond the minimum leaving age and passed his GCE Ordinary Level exam in English literature. Afterwards he worked as a filing clerk for Atlas Lamps. Cheshunt now has a block of retirement flats called Cliff Richard Court.

  The craze for skiffle caught Harry at 16, when his father bought him a guitar. In 1957 he formed a school vocal harmony group, The Quintones, and then sang with the Dick Teague Skiffle Group. Next he became lead singer of a rock and roll band called the Drifters, which had no connection to the American group of the same name.

  The entrepreneur Harry Greatorex wanted the rising singer to change his name. The first name Cliff was chosen because it sounded like cliff face, which suggested rock. Ian Samwell proposed the surname Richard, as a tribute to Webb's musical hero Little Richard. In 1958 the group played its first large-scale show at the Regal Ballroom in Ripley, Derbyshire, billed as Cliff Richard and the Drifters. Alongside Webb were Samwell and Norman Mitham on guitars and Terry Smart on drums. None of the three later played with the Shadows, though Samwell kept writing songs for Richard.

  Agent George Ganjou saw the group perform in London and recommended them to the producer Norrie Paramor for an audition. For the debut session, Paramor supplied "Schoolboy Crush", a song the American singer Bobby Helms had already recorded. Richard was allowed to place one of his own songs on the B-side, and Samwell's "Move It" took that slot. Session guitarist Ernie Shears played lead and Frank Clark played bass.

  Nobody agrees on why the two sides swapped places. One story says Paramor's young daughter raved about the B-side. Another says the influential TV producer Jack Good, who used the act on his show Oh Boy!, wanted "Move It" to be the only song they performed. Richard, facing television for the first time, said he felt so nervous he did not know what to do. He added: "I shaved my sideburns off last night... Jack Good said it would make me look more original." The single climbed to No. 2 on the UK singles chart.

  In those early days the marketing pitch was simple. Richard was Britain's answer to Elvis. Like the earlier British rockers Tommy Steele and Marty Wilde, he copied Elvis's clothes and hairstyle. On stage he struck a rebellious pose, rarely smiling and avoiding both the audience and the camera. His fifth record, Lionel Bart's "Living Doll", would soon become his first No. 1.

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• 3. The Shadows

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  Hank Marvin, Bruce Welch, Jet Harris and Tony Meehan were the men standing behind Richard by the time "Living Doll" was recorded. It was on that record that the Drifters first backed him. Trouble came when the song entered the American top 40, licensed there by ABC-Paramount. Legal complications with the American Drifters forced the British group to rename itself the Shadows.

  The Shadows were no ordinary backing band. They were contractually separate from Richard, and they received no royalties for records on which they backed him. In 1959 the group, still billed as the Drifters, won an EMI recording contract of its own. That year it released three singles. Two had vocals on both sides, and one had instrumentals on both sides. Later hits included five UK No. 1s, and on more than one occasion a Shadows instrumental knocked a Richard song off the top of the British chart. The band also wrote many of his hits.

  That fifth single also set a gentler course. The No. 1 hits "Travellin' Light" and "I Love You" followed, along with "A Voice in the Wilderness", lifted from the film Expresso Bongo, and "Theme for a Dream". Together they made Richard a mainstream entertainer alongside contemporaries such as Adam Faith and Billy Fury. Through the early 1960s his hits were consistently in the top five.

  Tony Meehan left in 1961, and Jet Harris followed in 1962. Both later had chart successes for Decca. Brian Bennett took over the drums for good. Brian Locking played bass from 1962 to 1963, and John Rostill held that job from 1963 to 1968.

  A party for Richard's 21st birthday, held in 1961 at the EMI headquarters in Manchester Square in London, ended up on an album. Photographs of the celebration were used for 21 Today, and Meehan joined in despite having left the band only days earlier. Paramor led the festivities.

  On stage, the Shadows closed the first half of the show with a 30-minute set of their own. They then backed Richard for 45 minutes to end the night. The retrospective album Live at the ABC Kingston 1962 preserves that format.

  Richard also recorded ballads with the Norrie Paramor Orchestra, with Meehan and later Bennett drumming as session players. His first single without the Shadows was "When the Girl in Your Arms Is the Girl in Your Heart" in 1961. In 1965 sessions in Nashville, Tennessee, under Billy Sherrill produced "The Minute You're Gone", which topped the UK chart, and "Wind Me Up (Let Me Go)", which reached No. 2.

  The Shadows disbanded in 1968. They still reunited with Richard in 1978, in 1984 and again in 1989-90.

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• 4. Cinema and Eurovision

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  In both 1962 and 1963, Richard was named the top cinema box office attraction in Britain, a ranking that put him ahead of the James Bond films. Behind that sat six feature films made with the Shadows. They began with Serious Charge in 1959 and included The Young Ones, Summer Holiday, Wonderful Life and Finders Keepers. Together they formed a genre of their own, known as the Cliff Richard musical. Serious Charge used "Living Doll" in a country arrangement rather than a rock and roll one.

  The title song of The Young Ones became his biggest-selling single in the UK, passing one million copies. Decades later, the irreverent 1980s sitcom The Young Ones borrowed its name from the film. In mid-1963 Richard and the Shadows played a season in Blackpool, where Victor Heyfron modelled a portrait of the singer.

  On the Eurovision stage in 1968, Richard sang the UK entry "Congratulations", written by Bill Martin and Phil Coulter. It finished second by a single point to Spain's "La La La" by Massiel. According to John Kennedy O'Connor's official history of the contest, no result had been closer. Richard locked himself in the toilet to escape the tension of the voting. The song still became a hit across Europe and in Australia, and it was another UK No. 1 in April 1968.

  In 1973 he returned with "Power to All Our Friends", which finished third. It trailed close behind Luxembourg's "Tu te reconnaîtras" by Anne-Marie David and Spain's "Eres tú" by Mocedades. This time he took Valium to overcome his nerves, and his manager was almost unable to wake him for the performance.

  From 1970 to 1976, Richard hosted his own BBC variety series, It's Cliff Richard. It starred Olivia Newton-John, Hank Marvin and Una Stubbs. He also presented the BBC's Eurovision previews in 1971 and 1972 and hosted its qualifying heat, A Song for Europe. In 1972 he made a short BBC comedy film, The Case, which included his first duets with a woman, Newton-John. His final film acting role was in the 1973 British film Take Me High.

  In 1975 Richard released "Honky Tonk Angel", produced by Hank Marvin and John Farrar. He was unaware of what the phrase meant. Once told that it was southern US slang for a prostitute, he was horrified. He ordered EMI to withdraw the single and refused to promote it, even though a video existed. EMI agreed, despite expecting strong sales. Only about 1,000 vinyl copies are known to exist.

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• 5. Faith and Giving

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  In 1964, Richard became an active evangelical Christian. Baptised as an Anglican, he had not practised the faith in his early years. At first he believed he should quit rock and roll. He felt he could no longer be the rocker who had been called a "crude exhibitionist" and "too sexy for TV". He planned to reform his ways and become a teacher, but evangelical friends advised him not to abandon his career.

  Soon he re-emerged, performing with Christian groups and recording some overtly Christian material. He kept making secular songs with the Shadows, but he gave much of his time to Christian work, including appearances with the Billy Graham crusades. In 1967 he starred in Two a Penny, released by Billy Graham's World Wide Pictures. He played Jamie Hopkins, a young man who drifts into drug dealing while questioning his life after his girlfriend changes her attitude. Over time he balanced faith and work, and he remained both one of Britain's most popular singers and one of its best-known evangelicals.

  Money followed belief. Since March 1966, Richard has tithed, giving away at least one-tenth of his income to charity. He has named two biblical principles that guide him. "Firstly, it was the love of money (not money itself) that was the root of all evil. Secondly, to be good and responsible stewards of what was entrusted to us." In 1990 he said: "Those of us who have something to offer have to be prepared to give all the time."

  In 1971 Richard became a leading supporter of the Nationwide Festival of Light, a movement of British Christians worried about the permissive society. He joined Malcolm Muggeridge, Mary Whitehouse and Bishop Trevor Huddleston in a London demonstration "for love and family life, against pornography and moral pollution". Muggeridge accused the media of being largely in the hands of those who favoured "the present Gadarene slide into decadence and Godlessness". About 30,000 people gathered in Trafalgar Square. One target of the protest was the Swedish sex education film Language of Love, showing at a nearby cinema.

  For over forty years, Richard has supported Tearfund, a Christian charity that tackles poverty in many countries. He has travelled to see its work in Uganda, Bangladesh and Brazil. He has said: "Playing a part in relieving poverty is, as I see it, the responsibility of us all." He has also donated to Alzheimer's Research UK and raised awareness by speaking publicly about his mother's condition. Through the Cliff Richard Charitable Trust, he has backed many UK charities and made personal visits to schools, churches, hospitals and homes for special needs children.

  In 1991 he founded the Cliff Richard Tennis Foundation. The charity has encouraged thousands of primary schools in the UK to introduce the sport, and over 200,000 children have joined its touring tennis sessions. The foundation has since become part of the charitable wing of the Lawn Tennis Association.

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• 6. Renaissance and America

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  By 1976 the decision had been made to present Richard as a rock performer again. Bruce Welch, of the Shadows, produced the landmark album I'm Nearly Famous. It carried the guitar-driven and controversial "Devil Woman" and the ballad "Miss You Nights". Geoff Brown, reviewing the record in Melody Maker, heralded it as the renaissance of Richard. Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton and Elton John were seen wearing I'm Nearly Famous badges, glad that their boyhood idol was returning to the heavier rock where he began. Faith stayed in the mix. Small Corners, from 1978, contained the single "Yes He Lives".

  The pop single "We Don't Talk Anymore" arrived in 1979, written by Alan Tarney and produced again by Welch. Bryan Ferry added hummed backing vocals. It reached No. 1 in the UK, his first time on top in over ten years, and became his biggest seller worldwide at almost five million copies. The song was added to the end of the album Rock 'n' Roll Juvenile, which was retitled after the single for American release. Later that year he performed with Kate Bush at the London Symphony Orchestra's 75th anniversary celebration at the Royal Albert Hall.

  America had long been the missing piece. In 1960 Richard and the Shadows toured the United States and were well received. But a revolving door of American record labels gave them lacklustre support and distribution. They appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, which was crucial for the Beatles, yet nothing lasting followed. To the Shadows' chagrin, "Apache" reached No. 2 in the US through a nearly identical cover by the Danish guitarist Jorgen Ingmann. Between August 1963 and August 1964, Richard placed four songs on the Hot 100, including the top-25 "It's All in the Game". Even so, he was not considered part of the British Invasion.

  That changed after 1976, when "Devil Woman" became his first true hit in the United States. "We Don't Talk Anymore" reached No. 7 there. It made him the first act in the Hot 100 top 40 of the 1980s who had also appeared in each of the three previous decades. In 1980 "Carrie" entered the US top 40, and "Dreamin'" climbed to No. 10. His duet "Suddenly" with Olivia Newton-John, from the film Xanadu, peaked at No. 20. On the last Hot 100 of 1980, three of his singles charted at once: "A Little in Love", "Dreamin'" and "Suddenly". Across his career he has had eight US top 40 singles.

  At home in 1980, "Carrie" reached No. 4 and "Dreamin'" reached No. 8. That same year Richard legally changed his name by deed poll from Harry Rodger Webb to Cliff Richard. He also received the award of Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to music and charity. In 1981 "Wired for Sound" reached No. 4 in the UK, and "Daddy's Home" ended the year at No. 2. His string of top ten albums included I'm No Hero, Dressed for the Occasion, recorded live with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and Silver, which marked his 25th year in show business in 1983.

  In 1986 Richard reached No. 1 by re-recording "Living Doll" with the cast of the comedy series The Young Ones for the charity Comic Relief. The record included comic dialogue between Richard and the cast. That same year he opened in the West End in Dave Clark's multi-media musical Time, playing a rock musician called upon to defend Earth in a trial set in the Andromeda Galaxy.

  In August 1986 a five-car crash in torrential rain on the M4 motorway in West London wrote off Richard's car. He hurt his back but was not seriously injured. Police called a cab from the scene, and he performed in Time that night. Afterwards he said: "I'm lucky to be here." He credited his seatbelt for keeping him from flying through the windscreen. In October 1986 his duet with Sarah Brightman, "All I Ask of You", from Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera, reached No. 3.

  The 1987 album Always Guaranteed became his best-selling album of all-new material. In 1988 "Mistletoe and Wine" gave him a Christmas No. 1. It was his 99th UK single and spent four weeks at the top. It sold 750,000 copies, making it the best-selling UK single of 1988. At the same time his compilation Private Collection held the top spot on the album and video charts, and the album was certified quadruple platinum.

  In May 1989 Richard released "The Best of Me", his 100th single, becoming the first British artist to reach that figure. It peaked at No. 2. That year he received the Brit Awards honour for Outstanding Contribution. In June he played London's Wembley Stadium for two nights with a spectacular titled The Event, in front of a combined audience of 144,000.

  On the 30th of June 1990, an estimated 120,000 people watched him at Knebworth Park, England, in an all-star charity line-up with Paul McCartney, Phil Collins, Elton John and Tears for Fears. The concert was televised around the world and raised $10.5 million for disabled children and young musicians. That Christmas, "Saviour's Day" gave him his 13th UK No. 1 single and his 100th top 40 hit.

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• 7. Knighthood and Radio Resistance

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  On the 17th of June 1995, Richard was appointed a Knight Bachelor, becoming the first rock star to receive that honour. He was invested on the 25th of October that year. In 1996 Wimbledon officials asked him to entertain Centre Court during a rain delay, and he led the crowd in a singalong.

  Clive Black, a former managing director of EMI UK, joined Richard in the late 1990s to found the record label Blacknight. In 1998 Richard put radio to the test. He released a dance remix of his forthcoming single "Can't Keep This Feeling In" on a white label record, under the alias Blacknight. Stations kept it on their playlists until his identity was revealed. He then released the single under his own name as the lead from the album Real as I Wanna Be, and each reached No. 10 on its respective chart.

  In 1999 EMI, his label since 1958, refused to release "The Millennium Prayer", judging that the song had little commercial potential. Richard took it to an independent label, Papillon, which issued it as a charity record in aid of Children's Promise. It spent three weeks at No. 1 and became his fourteenth UK chart-topper. As of December 2022 it is also his most recent.

  Also in 1998, Chris Evans, then the breakfast host on Virgin Radio, vowed never to play Richard again, saying he was "too old". In June 2004 the disc jockey Tony Blackburn was suspended by Classic Gold Digital for playing Richard against station policy. Programme head Paul Baker had emailed that Richard "doesn't match our brand values. He's not on the playlist, and you must stop playing him." Blackburn read the email aloud on his next breakfast show to its 400,000 listeners, then played two Richard songs.

  In 2011 the digital station Absolute Radio '60s announced that it would not play Richard because he did not fit the "cool sound... we're trying to create". The presenter Pete Mitchell named the timeless acts of the decade as "the Beatles, the Stones, the Doors and the Who, not Sir Cliff." Richard replied: "They're lying to themselves, and more importantly they're lying to the public."

  Richard made his own case on ITV's The Alan Titchmarsh Show in December 2007. Long-established artists, he said, need airplay for the same reasons new bands do. In December 2013 he said he felt two of his singles, "Mistletoe and Wine" and "The Millennium Prayer", had stirred a negative reaction. He added: "There is an ageism in the radio industry."

  Writing in The Guardian in 2011, the journalist Sam Leith blamed Richard's "uncompromising Christianity" and "clean-living ways". Those traits, he wrote, had made Richard an object of "incomprehension, even ridicule" among younger listeners. Another Guardian writer, John Robb, argued that this "rebelling against rebellion" made him something of a countercultural icon. In 2009 Richard called himself the "most radical rock-and-roll singer Britain has ever seen", saying: "I've never wanted to trash a hotel room."

  He has defenders. The critic Tony Parsons said: "If you don't like at least some Cliff Richard, then you don't like pop music". Sting called him "one of Britain's finest singers technically and emotionally." John Lennon reportedly said that before Cliff and the Shadows, British music had offered nothing worth listening to.

  In 2008, the eight-CD box set And They Said It Wouldn't Last (My 50 Years in Music) marked his half-century in the business. The single "Thank You for a Lifetime" reached No. 3 on the 14th of September 2008. The Shadows reunited with him for a golden anniversary UK tour in 2009, which ended their partnership. The album Reunited, their first studio project in 40 years, peaked at No. 4. Most of its 28 tracks were re-recordings of earlier work.

  The campaign to extend sound recording copyright in the UK from 50 to 95 years was initially unsuccessful. UK copyright on many of Richard's early recordings expired in 2008. After another campaign in 2013, the term became 70 years after first publication for works still in copyright. His recordings from 1958 to 1962 are therefore out of copyright in the UK, while those from 1963 are protected until 2034.

  In November 2013 Richard released The Fabulous Rock 'n' Roll Songbook, the 100th album of his career. By then he had released 47 studio albums, 35 compilations, 11 live albums and 7 film soundtracks. In October 2018 his single "Rise Up" reached No. 1 on the UK Vinyl Singles Chart. On the 4th of July 2022, he sang his 1963 hit "Summer Holiday" at Wimbledon, as part of the Centenary Celebration.

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• 8. Private Life, Public Ordeal

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  In October 1961, Richard wrote a three-page letter to Delia Wicks, an Australian dancer and his first serious girlfriend. After 18 months together, he ended the relationship. He wrote that being a pop singer meant giving up "one priceless thing", the chance of a lasting relationship. His father had died that year, aged 56, and his mother and sisters relied on him completely. He told her: "I have showbiz in my blood now and I would be lost without it." The letter became public in April 2010, after Wicks died of cancer aged 71. Her brother Graham Wicks said she had been "devastated".

  Richard's mother, Dorothy, died in October 2007, aged 87, after a decade with Alzheimer's disease. A year after the end of the Wicks relationship, at 22, he had a brief romance with the actress Una Stubbs. Later in the 1960s he considered marriage to the dancer Jackie Irving, who went on to marry Adam Faith.

  In 1982 Richard met the tennis player Sue Barker, then aged 25. Their romance drew heavy media attention after he flew to Denmark to watch her play and they were photographed together at Wimbledon. In 2008 he said that he had seriously contemplated proposing but did not love her quite enough to commit the rest of his life. Of Olivia Newton-John, with whom he fell in love in the early 1970s, he said: "I'm afraid I lost the chance."

  Richard has never married, but he has rarely lived alone. For many years he shared his main home in Weybridge, Surrey, with Bill Latham, his charity and promotion schedules manager, and Latham's mother. In 1982 he called them his "second family". In 2001 he met John McElynn, an American former missionary, in New York City. Richard later described him as a companion and said: "I don't like living alone, even now."

  Rumours about his sexuality followed him for decades. In 1996 he said: "I'm aware of the rumours, but I am not gay." In 2013, asked whether he regretted not starting a family, he said his freedom let him continue his career. He added that he had always played a part in the lives of his three sisters' children.

  Friendship tested his faith in 1999, when the television presenter Jill Dando was murdered. "I was really angry with God," he said. In April 2004 he performed "Miss You Nights" at the funeral of Caron Keating, the daughter of his friend Gloria Hunniford. After Cilla Black died in August 2015, he sang "Faithful One" at her funeral in Liverpool.

  In 2006 Portugal appointed him Commander of the Order of Prince Henry, in recognition of 40 years of personal and business involvement there. In 2010 he confirmed that he was no longer a UK resident and had been granted citizenship by Barbados. "I will always be British and proud of it," he said. He divides his time between Barbados and Portugal. In 2019 he relocated to New York.

  In August 2014, Richard's apartment in Berkshire was searched after a complaint to the Metropolitan Police's Operation Yewtree, which was investigating sexual misconduct allegations in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal. Richard was not arrested, and he strongly denied the allegations. The BBC was criticised for its coverage of the search. Lord Macdonald of River Glaven, a former Director of Public Prosecutions, called the police conduct "completely disreputable" and said it could make the warrant unlawful.

  Richard pulled out of a visit to the US Open tennis championships. He turned down the freedom of his adopted Portuguese home city of Albufeira and cancelled an appearance at Canterbury Cathedral. He returned to the UK and was interviewed voluntarily by South Yorkshire Police. He was never arrested or criminally charged. In February 2015, an independent report concluded that South Yorkshire Police had interfered with his privacy by telling the BBC about the search. A review by the former chief constable Andy Trotter found that the force had breached guidance on protecting the identity of those under investigation.

  In May 2016 South Yorkshire Police sent a file of evidence to the Crown Prosecution Service. The following month the CPS announced there was insufficient evidence to charge Richard over claims of non-recent offences made by four men, covering 1958 to 1983. Richard said he was thrilled that the "vile accusations" had ended. He asked: "How can there be evidence for something that never took place?" South Yorkshire Police apologised. During the 22-month investigation, a man was arrested over a plot to blackmail Richard. The BBC apologised publicly on the 21st of June 2016. On the 27th of September 2016, the CPS upheld its decision after reviewing the evidence at the request of two accusers.

  Richard then sued the BBC and South Yorkshire Police. The police later agreed to pay him £400,000. The case against the BBC opened in the High Court on the 12th of April 2018, and Richard described the coverage as "shocking and upsetting". On the 18th of July 2018, he won and was awarded £210,000 in damages. The BBC did not appeal, and The Guardian estimated its legal fees and damages at £1.9 million.

  In December 2025, Richard revealed that he had been treated for prostate cancer during the preceding year. He said the disease was "gone at the moment". He also voiced support for a national screening programme for men.

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