Not Fade Away 1958: Move It by Cliff Richard and the Drifters

This, I know, is the coward’s choice. If I was going to select a Cliff Richard song for this blog – and I always was for all sorts of reasons we’ll come to shortly - Move It is the obvious one, the track that still retains some credibility. The Cliff song it’s okay for non-Cliff lovers to like.

It would have been braver to select a song from well into Richard’s career when the pale shadow of his days as Britain’s Elvis had been well and truly bleached out by the sixties movies, the Eurovision years, and the man’s outspoken Christianity (always a much greater issue for British pop fans than American ones).

Maybe We Don’t Talk Any More from 1979, which is a sublime example of a commercial pop song (and which, if anyone else had recorded it, would be much more highly regarded than it is) or even Wired From Sound, with its very 1981 state-of-the-art Alan Tarney production that now seems rather sweetly dated (along with a lyric that’s a hymn to the Sony Walkman).

But Move It, as well as being a pretty good record by anyone’s standards, allows me to raise three things that we really need to talk about in this space.

The first is to point out that increasingly as we go along, biography is going to have some kind of impact on my choices. This is an early example, an outlier, of what will become apparent in the seventies and eighties choices when we get there. Cliff is in some ways the first pop star I was really aware of. This is partly because as a kid I grew up watching his films on Saturday morning telly (in the days before Swap Shop), but mostly because my late Uncle Tommy – my mum’s brother and the youngest in her family – was a fan. He was a huge influence on me and I absorbed some of his tastes as a result (I can trace my support of Spurs to him). When I think of Cliff I think of my Uncle Tommy and that inevitably makes me feel kindly towards the former.

Secondly – something that may become a recurring theme - it raises notions of authenticity. There is possibly no word in pop’s vocabulary that I’m more suspicious of. All too often it’s used to elevate denim-clad dullards about more flashy, trashy talents (who are usually more fun). Still, it’s impossible to look back at British pop in the fifties and not see it as a strange, curious dilution of rock ’n’ roll. No doubt Marty Wilde and Joe Brown and even Tommy Steele liked the stuff they were hearing from America. But none of them were able to translate it into a British sound that had any thing like the muscle and energy of their American influences.

Maybe that was the inevitable result of the managers who ran British pop culture at the time, and who were steeped in older notions of showbusiness, most notably Larry Parnes, a kind of Louis Walsh before-the-fact. As a result British pop was stripped of risk or heat. “There is not a trace of sex, real or implied,” Trevor Philpott wrote of a Tommy Steele gig in Picture Post in February 1957. In his 1970 book Revolt into Style, George Melly accused Tommy Steele’s films of being emblematic of the “castration of early rock’n’roll”.

Perhaps that was also the inevitable consequence of a culture that was sure that the rock ’n’ roll craze was going to blow over any day now, as the opening line of MacInnes’s novel suggests. Indeed, on into the early sixties the photographer Terry O’Neil has in the past recalled sitting in London’s Ad Lib club with various members of the Beatles and the Stones, all of them discussing what they’ll do when they grow up.

Clearly the arc of Cliff Richard’s career showed that Richard felt as much too. Rock ’n’ roll was just a starting point. He could already see Royal Variety Shows beckoning to him. (The Beatles followed him there, of course).

But let’s imagine an alternative. Let’s have a go at a thought experiment. Start by listening  to Move It again. Written by Ian Samwell, it’s not as raw or vivid as its American counterparts but it has more life to it than any other British pop record in that decade. And Richard’s vocal is an imitation of an American vocal but it has none of the chirpy, cheeky harmlessness of Tommy Steele.

Now combine that with Richard’s performance in Expresso Bongo a year later, a sly, knowing satire of the music industry in which Richard outwits his mentor played by Laurence Harvey. In the film Richard was no innocent. Maybe not in real life either. The fate of the Drifters showed that. He got rid of his former bandmates and replaced them with better musicians in Bruce Welsh and Hank Marvin.

Add to that an image I remember seeing at a huge exhibition of sixties art in London a few years back. A young Cliff in nothing but a pair of trunks, bronzed and beautiful, a girl’s dream. Some boys’ dream too, I’d imagine.

What we have here is the merest outline of a pop counterfactual. In their early eighties book Elvis the Novel, an attempt to reclaim Elvis from the monstering he’d received in Albert Goldman’s biography, authors Robert Graham and Keith Baty imagined the King retooled for liberal sensibilites. An Elvis who shot Colonel Parker and recorded with the Beatles.

I’ve often thought you could do the same with Cliff. Imagine Move It was the start, not the end of something. Imagine Cliff  hadn’t stampeded towards showbiz and kept to the rock ’n’ roll line. Imagine him singing Lennon-McCartney songs, appearing on the cover of Sergeant Pepper, leading the Anti-Vietnam demos in the sixties. Imagine the Sex Pistols giving us a cover of Move It ten years later in appreciation of Cliff’s place in the culture.

Impossible? Probably. After all, as he admits in his biography before appearing on Oh Boy! to perform Move It Cliff had just done a short season at Butlin’s in Clacton. He was a light entertainment star just waiting to happen. But in 1958, for a very short time, he represented something else. A proper British rock ’n’ roll star. He’d make other records that should be much better regarded. But at this moment he represents a new beginning in pop, one that would take another few years to blossom into life.

Other contenders

Summertime Blues, Eddie Cochran

Lonely Teardrops, Jackie Wilson

Good Golly Miss Molly, Little Richard

One More For My Baby (and One More for the Road), Frank Sinatra