Review: Cliff Richard - Listen To Cliff! (1961)
Tracks: 1) What’d I Say; 2) Blue Moon; 3) True Love Will Come To You; 4) Lover; 5) Unchained Melody; 6) Idle Gossip; 7) First Lesson In Love; 8) Almost Like Being In Love; 9) Beat Out Dat Rhythm On A Drum; 10) Memories Linger On; 11) Temptation; 12) I Live For You; 13) Sentimental Journey; 14) I Want You To Know; 15) We Kiss In A Shadow; 16) It’s You.
REVIEW
Cliff’s third studio album was released upon the heels of ‘When The Girl In Your Arms Is The Girl In Your Heart’ — an acoustic Tepper/Bennett «original» which could, perhaps, be mildly memorable if sung by Elvis, but hearing it sung by Cliff only makes you wonder if you’d thought any better of it if it had been sung by Elvis. Unfortunately, the same feeling accompanies much of Listen To Cliff!, an album that throws the promise of Me And My Shadows out the window and pretty much symbolizes Cliff’s concession to the role of tame teen idol.
Although the Shadows still back Cliff on many of the numbers, all five Shadow-related compositions, credited to Bruce Welch and his friend Pete Chester, are unremarkable pop ballads — sweet, inobtrusive, with no major original hooks to speak of and no details worth mentioning. In fact, next to them the Rodgers and Hart standards like ‘Blue Moon’ and ‘Lover’ feel positively stunning — even if there are no reasons whatsoever to prefer this run-of-the-mill version of ‘Blue Moon’ as performed by the «Norrie Paramor Orchestra» to Billie Holiday or Elvis (heck, even Bob Dylan had a more musically interesting version on the universally hated Self-Portrait).
The album still pretends it might be of interest to the dying-out breed of rock’n’rollers by opening things up with a Rough and Rowdy performance of Ray Charles’ ‘What I’d Say’, with all the provocative lyrics taken out and, for no particular reason, replaced by a verse from ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’ — and, what with the Shadows stepping in for the Raelettes on backing vocals, the song’s infamous group sex act imitation now sounding more like a bunch of guys lugging heavy furniture across the room. (It doesn’t even sound much like a group gay sex act imitation, which would at least have been a socially outstanding move back in 1961). It is still an okay performance, largely saved by Reliable Hank’s immaculate instrumental break, but what is essentially the point of performing a quintessentially provocative number while taking out all the provocation? diet Coke all over again.
The only other instance of rock’n’roll on the album is stuck far away on the B-side, a cover of Fats Domino’s ‘I Want You To Know’, whose main attraction, unsurprisingly, is once again a couple of jagged bluesy guitar breaks, very reminiscent in tone and structure of the types of solos Keith Richards would soon be playing on early Stones’ numbers. Just a few more of these numbers couldn’t have hurt — but alas, the closest we get to «energetic» elsewhere is ‘Beat Out Dat Rhythm On A Drum’ from the Carmen Jones musical, another strange as heck choice where little white boy Cliff Richard has to step into the shoes of big black girl Pearl Bailey and try to stir up jungle-level excitement... why?
The sad truth of the matter is that, of course, Cliff was still being marketed as the British answer to Elvis, and this transition had to mirror Elvis’ own transition — if Me And My Shadows was Cliff’s Elvis Is Back!, a record that could still combine pop hooks with leftover rock’n’roll energy, then Listen To Cliff! is more like his Something For Everybody, a record which openly admits that the rock’n’roll fad is largely over, the kids are all grown up, and society is all but ready to return to a more dignified and civilized existence. "I’m gonna take a Sentimental Journey, gonna set my heart at ease, gonna make a Sentimental Journey, to renew old memories" — no truer words have been spoken on the album. And while this was certainly not the end of Cliff’s career, this was definitely the cut-off point after which he’d lost all hope to remain on the cutting edge of Britain’s popular music.