Review: Cliff Richard - Cliff Richard (1965)

Tracks: 1) Angel; 2) Sway; 3) I Only Came To Say Goodbye; 4) Take Special Care; 5) Magic Is The Moonlight; 6) House Without Windows; 7) Razzle Dazzle; 8) I Don’t Wanna Love You; 9) It’s Not For Me To Say; 10) You Belong To My Heart; 11) Again; 12) Perfidia; 13) Kiss; 14) Reelin’ And Rockin’.

REVIEW

I wish I could say that Cliff Richard’s first «proper» album after two years of non-stop musical soundtracks and suave recordings in Italian and Spanish for the Hot Latin Market was a «return to form»™. After all, it was self-titled, and a self-titled album in the middle of a stagnant career often means some sort of reboot, rehaul, reinvention, or at least an attempt at shaking off some of the old cobwebs. But given that the recording sessions for the album are listed as having been stretched all the way back to 1962 (!), and seeing as how the opening track is a cover of an Elvis movie song from that same year, you know your hopes will be nipped in the bud before you even put the record on.

If we set March 22, 1965 — the day Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home was unleashed upon the world — as that one symbolic date which separates rock music’s innocent childhood from its responsive adolescence — then, formally, Cliff Richard (the LP), coming out just a few weeks later, can be excused for not paying one iota of attention to whatever was happening out there. The problem is that it is corny, boring, and forgettable even according to the innocent standards of 1963–64. Even if the record, as usual, is still divided into the «sweeter» half with the Norrie Paramour Orchestra and the «harder» half with the Shadows, this division is felt nowhere near as strongly as in the good old days of Me And My Shadows or even 21 Today. This is because when he is with the Shadows, Cliff now prefers to use them for his tepid embrace of calypso and bossa nova, rather than for rock’n’roll — or for suave country balladry, only a few steps removed from the generic sap of the old standards he entrusts to the Orchestra.

There are exactly two rock’n’roll oldies in the track listing — one of them is Bill Haley’s ‘Razzle Dazzle’, done very close to the original and adding absolutely nothing to it: Hank Marvin imitating Franny Beecher and Cliff imitating Haley himself is a curious one-time experience, but lends itself to repeated listenings with about the same ease as the Foo Fighters covering the Rolling Stones on some tribute album. The other is Chuck Berry’s ‘Reelin’ And Rockin’ (actually, a mash-up between that one and ‘Around And Around’), on which Cliff and the band show that they can neither capture and expand upon Chuck’s sense of humor nor push the song into a properly aggressive direction like the Stones could. In the end, both songs just feel like a couple of stale bones thrown out to «rock’n’roll fans» who still need some proof that this is the same guy who did ‘Move It’ six years earlier.

A few of these songs were apparently recorded in Nashville in late August of 1964, when Cliff’s American marketeers decided to bring him over to record some properly «American» material for his ever-more-skeptical overseas customers. This was the session that yielded the non-LP single ‘The Minute You’re Gone’, which still failed to make any impression on the US charts but did go all the way to #1 in the UK (Cliff’s first #1 without the Shadows); the B-side, ‘Again’, which was even slower and sappier, did make it onto the LP, as did ‘Angel’, the Elvis cover. All three are about as interesting in terms of melody, arrangement, and passion, as the average Doris Day record.

Of the Latin-style songs, the less said, the better just as well; I do like how the Shadows manage to throw in a faint echo of Buddy Holly into Cliff’s otherwise completely lifeless version of ‘Perfidia’ — if you follow Hank’s brightly jangling guitar, you shall notice him briefly going off into ‘Words Of Love’ during the instrumental section. (The Shadows themselves did a much more musically inviting instrumental version of ‘Perfidia’ without Cliff three years earlier, on their Out Of The Shadows album — should have stuck to that arrangement). But ‘Sway’, following the Dean Martin / Norman Gimbel rewrite of ‘¿Quién Sera?’, is a pure waste of the band’s acoustic guitar skills; and ‘Magic Is The Moonlight’ kind of turns me off with its title already — leave that stuff to Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole, who were at least experts.

You know things really go downhill when the catchiest song on the album is a recent Ricky Nelson recording (Mann-Weill’s ‘I Don’t Wanna Love You’) and when it sounds slothy and overproduced next to the Ricky Nelson recording in question. You know they really really go downhill when the most emotional performance is delivered on the pop standard ‘House Without Windows’ and you are almost ready to go, «wow, he finally made a bit of an effort on this one!», before you remember that he is just trying to mimick Roy Orbison’s delivery from 1963’s In Dreams. Blast this modern era of total availability, right? In 1965, there must have been plenty of British households without immediate access to Roy Orbison’s imported LP-only material. These days, all you have to do is the tiniest bit of clicking around, and the need for pale and limp substitutes dissipates instantaneously.

Overall, this is just bad — a very, very dull pop record. It may be relatively free of thoroughly tasteless embarrassments as may be encountered here and there on contemporary Elvis movie soundtracks, but at least those Elvis embarrassments could at least give you curious topics to write upon. Cliff Richard is simply dead as a doornail, easily the least interesting and exciting record he’d come up with up to that point. Still made the UK Top 10, though — it’s a love that lasts forever, it’s a love that has no past.