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Pop pickers' Peter Pan

Tim Hamlett

CLIFF RICHARD: The Biography By Steve Turner (Lion Publishing, $288) THIS book is walking off the shop shelves in Britain as fast as they can print it. No doubt the pleasure of those responsible is unalloyed by the thought that most of the eager buyers haven't opened a hardback since they failed CSE English.

Readers who are waiting to be told who Cliff Richard is, anyway, can get off here.

In nearly 400 pages of work, complete with endnotes, lists of sources, discographies and reproduced originals of some of the documents, Mr Turner has everything except the slightest reason for regarding his subject as important.

Cliff Richard is the ''Peter Pan of Pop''. He goes back to the days when Elvis was not only indisputably alive, but also indisputably well. Winston Churchill attended the opening of his first film.

And he is still at it, still pushing out singles and the occasional LP, still filling halls with eager listeners, still singing other people's songs. In the Wisden of music trivia he is a sort of jukebox Boycott. You may or may not like what he does, butyou have to admire the way he keeps at it.

Cliff was born in 1940, in Lucknow of all places, to the Webbs (Cliff Richard is of course a stage name), a family of minor imperial railway officials. Hongkong Brits of a nervous disposition may care to skip chapter 3, which details the miseries of the Webb family's transplant back to England when the Indians decided they could run their own railways, among other things.

We then get a 50s childhood which comes across as surprisingly like mine. Did everyone, in those days, listen to Radio Lux under the bedclothes, fumble with guitars, experiment with Elvis imitations, join pick-up skiffle bands in other people's garages? And how did Cliff emerge from this morass of amateurs flailing away at Heartbreak Hotel to become a national institution? Alas, Mr Turner has no convincing answer.

The boy had a nice voice, and looked good in tight trousers, but so did many others. Readers who are alert will spot a hidden streak of ruthlessness, as musicians, friends, agents and even potential wives are calmly discarded. Cliff was clearly ready to do whatever his career required, whether that meant not getting married, or starring in the sort of concerts where they put plastic sheets over the front-row seats so that spontaneous emissions from freaked-out fans would not spoil the furniture.

I do not criticise. A certain amount of ambition is understandable if the alternative is a lifetime in the dispatch department of a light-bulb factory. But Cliff does come across as a bit of a cold fish.

Talking of cold fishes brings us to the point which has preoccupied most of the British reviews of this book, which is the question of Cliff and sex.

The answer to the question of Cliff and sex is ''no thank you''.

As far as ladies are concerned, we are offered one brief fling with a woman called Carol Costa. She had already flogged the story to the tabloids and after the exchange recorded on page 289 I am not surprised. The affair with Ms Costa is a bit out of character as she was married to someone else at the time. On the other hand, at least in the version presented here, it was the nearest thing to reverse rape since Catherine the Great gave compulsory riding lessons to selected officers of the Russian cavalry.

Cliff is not gay, Mr Turner assures us. This seems rather a shame, as it means that he has practically had no sex life at all.

Clearly these are not your usual rock memoirs. Cliff is no sputtering comet, hurtling along a doom-laden trajectory marked by a trail of needles and condoms. On the contrary, Cliff is the rocker a million mothers asked why you could not be like. A million sons cannot quite forgive him for this and I am one of them.

A less kind pen than that of Mr Turner, who is a friend, might have lingered longer over Cliff's conversion to Christianity and his relationship with the sundry church groups which have, in return for their efforts on behalf of his immortal soul, benefitted from his worldly income.

But that is not the sort of book Mr Turner set out to write. This is really a book for those now mature ladies in whose fantasies Cliff has been starring for 30 years.

This may explain why he ducks the most interesting thing about Cliff, which is how he has managed to combine resounding commercial success with abject artistic failure. Cliff has been admirably consistent in the charts, deplorably so in the choices whichcount. He is the Evel Kneivel of evanescence, repeatedly showing that you can jump over ten top 20 hits parked end to end, without landing on one song which sticks in the memory.

Too harsh? Look at this example from the book. In 1966 Cliff had a lean year. Mr Turner, who is good at these things, points out that the standard of the competition was high: ''In June, for example, as Cliff was performing for Billy Graham, the following singles were in the top 30: Strangers in the Night, Wild Thing, Sorrow, Monday Monday, Sloop John B, When a Man Loves a Woman, Pretty Flamingo, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me, Paperback Writer, River Deep Mountain High, and Sunny Afternoon.'' Now, can you name a Cliff Richard song good enough to bump even one of those off your desert island list?

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