Cliff Richard: An Elvis for Christ
London — It’s fully an hour before the service begins and the well-scrubbed young Londoners are queuing between the Corinthian columns of All Souls Church. One of Britain’s top entertainment personalities, Cliff Richard, once “England’s Elvis,” is making another of his witnesses for Christ.
Within half an hour the 150-year-old church is filled to its thousand capacity. Another couple of hundred chairs line the aisles. Two large rooms in the rear of the church are wired with loudspeakers for the overspill of patrons. Outside, another few hundred stand patiently, crowded as angels on the head of a pin, wrinkling their Sunday best.
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Cliff is nearby having tea with the vicar of the church, Michael Baughen, and the vicar’s family. They’d met once before when the vicar was a rector in Manchester and Cliff became the first pop singer to appear on one of the BBC’s religious programs. In a small way, then, it’s a reunion. But the conversation follows a familiar pattern.
The vicar is saying how grateful — jolly good for the young people and the church, he is — that Cliff is here today. Personal witnesses so valuable … Standing room only …
Cliff has heard it all before, for he does this two or three times each week. It pleases him. The estimated 15 million who watch It’s Cliff Richard on the television Saturday nights; the 56 singles released since 1958 and all but one in Britain’s Top 30; the successful tours of Europe and the Far East … yes, they’re satisfying, but standing room only here!
Cliff Richard is a busy man and it is unusual what he’s doing, although he’s certainly not the first performer to put down his heathen showbiz ways and publicly pick up the banner for Christ; Little Richard, Pat Boone, James Fox, Billy Preston and George Harrison have done the same, but not always to the same, enthusiastic call-and-response. In fact, Cliff indicates very strongly that he believes some of the personalities now singing Christ’s praises aren’t as sincere as they seem. More on that in a moment. But first a word from the pagan past.
Back then, in the Fifties, when it all began for Cliff, he wasn’t Cliff at all, but Harry Webb. He’d been born in India in 1940 of English parents, had come to London when he was seven, first to live with a grandmother and then to share a single room with his parents and three sisters.
Like hundreds of working-class boys whose grades would keep them from a university classroom and polish, Harry turned to music, joining first an a capella group (singing “Heartbreak Hotel,” among others), later picking up a guitar and singing in a skiffle band. Finally by 1958 he changed his name and copied his idol’s — Presley’s — act right down to the last wiggle.
Today Cliff says, “The reason I was always labeled Britain’s Elvis was because everybody wanted a Britain’s Elvis and I was sort of the nearest thing to it.” In truth, it was as much Cliff’s fantasy as the nation’s. He wore Elvis’ favorite colors: pink and black. He vibrated his legs like a cricket in hot weather. Even in a puffy paperback biography authorized a few years ago it was admitted: “His dark hair would be immaculate at the start of the act, but after a few bars it would begin to assume a carefully stage-managed kind of disorder. Such details could not be left to chance.”
His first record, “Move It,” had made him England’s Number One and riots were de rigueur, with smoke bombs and firehoses sometimes used in crowd control. Little English buds were having themselves delivered backstage in packing crates, and Cliff was having a time. “I used to remember reading write-ups saying, ‘He’s got smoldering eyes,'” Cliff recalls, “so I used to go out there and smolder my eyes.”
Suddenly there came a change in packaging. By 1958 Elvis was in the Army, turning into The Boy Next Door and Cliff was soon to follow — although the cleaning-up wasn’t the government’s, or his, idea but that of Jack Good, the gregarious Oxford graduate who was helping shape the course of pop in England through television. He picked Cliff to be the featured soloist on a new series, the now-classic Oh Boy!, and told him to drop the Presley bit. Cliff dropped the Presley bit. Why not? Elvis had dropped it, hadn’t he?
Also like Elvis, Cliff began making films marked by thin plots, good supporting casts (Anthony Quayle, Laurence Harvey, Robert Morley, Ron Moody), a preponderance of songs, innocuous titles like Summer Holiday and Wonderful Life, and sizeable profits. His singles continued successful, too, so that by 1961, 12 of the 16 had reached Number One or Two.
(He never was a success in America — not even after five visits to the US and seven shots on the Ed Sullivan Show. Only three of his songs ever appeared on an American chart, with the most popular, “Living Doll” in 1959 and “Lucky Lips” in 1963, climbing no higher than 30.)
With his dark, handsome good looks, an ordinary but comfortable voice (somewhere between tenor and baritone, in the octave below middle E) and an image that was blurred enough to satisfy everyone and antagonize no one, an audience was assured.
Again like Elvis, who’d fallen into the Hollywood money pit, Cliff was living The Good Life splendidly. He had closets and closets of fancy duds. Big cars. (He still has a weakness for both.) A large home in London with marble tables decorated with gold filigree and silver taps in the bath. A villa on the coast of Portugal.
And again like Elvis, Cliff was plagued by vanity — never wearing his glasses in public, fretting about his weight — and noted for a ferocious temper.
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