Review: Cliff Richard - 21 Today (1961)
Tracks: 1) Happy Birthday To You; 2) Forty Days; 3) Catch Me; 4) How Wonderful To Know; 5) Tough Enough; 6) 50 Tears For Every Kiss; 7) The Night Is So Lonely; 8) Poor Boy; 9) Y’Arriva; 10) Outsider; 11) Tea For Two; 12) To Prove My Love For You; 13) Without You; 14) A Mighty Lonely Man; 15) My Blue Heaven; 16) Shame On You.
REVIEW
Okay, so it’s a marketing gimmick and all, but believe it or not, Cliff Richard did actually turn 21 on October 14, 1961, and much as I would like to joke about how he ceased to be relevant on that very day, we shall actually have to wait a bit more, because (a) the Beatles were still not around and (b) this is actually a nice little album in its own right, seriously more enjoyable than Listen To Cliff! (When You’ve Totally Run Out Of Sinatra Records). I do not know if the strategy was in any way connected to Cliff’s coming of age, but the idea is to definitely and intentionally provide a Cliff-o-pedia, including a little bit of everything he did up to the present day and perhaps throw in a bit of extra. There’s balladry, there’s rock’n’roll, there’s upbeat pop, some old standards, some pseudo-Mexican trash, some country-western, some blues, you name it, we got it, to everything that’s happening in the world of music our answer in Britain is one and the same — Cliff Richard! (It was his first #1 record, by the way).
So, first and foremost getting ‘Happy Birthday To You’ out of the way (a nice surfing arrangement from the Shadows, interspersed by tons of barely intelligible «party banter» that, weirdly enough, presages the style of The Beach Boys’ Party! by a good four years), let us take a quick look at the original material. The Shadows only contribute three tunes, of which ‘Without You’ is a catchy little Elvis-style pop rocker, while ‘Shame On You’ is a slightly more original early example of pre-Merseybeat Britpop... wait, no, I think I am just confused by all the sweet yeah yeahs, because the melody is rather in the style of the Everly brothers. Of the third song, the honey-dripping ‘Y’Arriba’, the less said the better (it is for this kind of material that the horribly abused term «cultural appropriation» has been originally invented, I hope).
Two more tunes were commissionned from the Elvis-supporting team of Tepper and Bennett, both of them syrupy upbeat ballads whose blatant sentimental cuteness is not much helped by either Hank Marvin’s warm and wobbly guitar tones (‘Catch Me’) or the thin festival-style orchestration (‘Outsider’)... but I guess Cliff sings them with enough of his still believable teenage innocence to not come across as completely unbearable. Speaking of songwriters connected with Elvis, Cliff actually does a much better job on the toughened and tightened rock version of Johnny Otis’ ‘Tough Enough’, a song whose original catchiness suits the Shadows’ robotic style to a tee — I’d love to hear this kind of song delivered by the likes of John Lennon, but in his absence, Cliff Richard will have to do, as long as he can pull off a good roar on the chorus and as long as Hank keeps playing those alarm-like rock’n’roll licks.
For even more rock’n’roll, check out the cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Thirty Days’ (which, for some reason, becomes ‘Forty Days’ — did they transcribe the words by ear? and did Chuck mess up his interdentals on the recording? bizarre...) and... well, actually, nothing else. But what is perhaps more interesting than Cliff’s meek take on Chuck Berry (nothing, really, that the Beatles or the Stones could not do with twice as much energy and debauchery) are the Shadows’ innovative takes on such old standards as ‘Tea For Two’, which is given a moody quasi-bossa nova arrangement, and ‘My Blue Heaven’, with some delicious bass work from Jet Harris; both songs also feature unpredictable key and tempo changes in their mid-sections, suggesting that the boys might have been thinking about coming up with a new kind of progressive jazz-pop (and then, of course, the Beatles came up and murdered that idea in its cradle).
All in all, this is definitely a rebound from the helpless sweetness of the previous album, if still not quite up to the energy and freshness standards of Me And My Shadows. At the very least there is enough subtle creative nuances here to suggest that, if not for the rock revolution, this style might have eventually grown into a truly mature brand of art-pop, well, I mean, given a decade or two... but, of course, the world just wasn’t going to wait that long, was it?
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