Unless you have been on the moon for the past fortnight, it will not have escaped your notice that the near- pensionable popster Sir Cliff Richard is top of the charts with a song called “Millennium Prayer”. This is nothing less than a miracle.
Unlikely hits are nothing new. As a nation, we have over the years rushed out and bought “Itsy-Bitsy Teeny Weeny etc”, “Agadoo” and Funkies “Moped” and “Gibbon”, so why shouldn’t a ditty fusing the Lord’s Prayer with “Auld Lang Syne” conquer the Christmas charts? No, the miracle is that “Millennium Prayer” reached the top spot despite universal derision and practically no airplay.
I mentioned miracle. You see, I’ve always found Cliffie an intriguing figure. Charismatic yet modest, famously religious, ascetic and occasionally bearded, born in a hot country (India), possessed of a fanatical following and, despite often encountering problems, getting his message through to the philistines. Sound familiar?
A recent survey revealed Cliff to be a more famous Christian than the Pope and the second most famous Christian after God. Makes you think, doesn’t it? And there’s more. Anyone who’s seen the 59-year-old Cliff live and leaping about the stage with his trademark thumbs in the air knows that he certainly moves in a mysterious way.
And there’s the sex question. Hardly a week goes by when his single status and apparent celibacy – since losing his virginity in the 1960s – is not alluded to by some fascinated tabloid or other (Cliff himself once pointed out that Saint Paul never got married, either).
If the Bible is the best-selling book of all time, Cliff has also done his bit for the retail industry by shifting more units than the Stones and the Beatles put together. And wasn’t there something Pilate-like about the way in which both EMI and Radio 2 recently washed their hands of the suffering Cliff and, rendering him practically dead in professional terms, threw him contemptuously to the mob (who promptly resurrected him)?
These impressive parallels aside, the erstwhile Harry Webb is obviously not really the Second Coming.
The case against is too compelling – Cliff’s famous condemnation of Madonna as vulgar hardly smacks of filial respect. In addition, Cliff was attacked by the NME in 1958 for his “violent hip-swinging and short-sighted vulgar tactics”. Then there’s Cliff’s little-known violent streak – he admitted enjoying playing the eponymous hero of his 1996 musical Heathcliff because “on stage I beat up my wife and almost kill my brother and I love it”.
His taste is also questionable – besides the stringy mullet he sported for many years there were narrow-lapelled, eighties pastel checked jackets and aviator sunglasses. One of his houses boasted a lavish bathroom with a gold tub (Cliff is, to be fair, not the only pop star with a love of 18-carat sanitaryware – the rap artist M C Hammer famously had a gold toilet seat). And as for his idols . . . when he wrote, breathlessly, of how “I met my idol, the one person in all the world”, it was not Elvis or Frank Sinatra he was talking of. It was the Duke of Edinburgh.
Cliff has also been known to have more than a streak of ego. “The Beatles left the country because of us,” he recently told Q magazine. “We had it sewn up here, so they went away to Hamburg and came up with something else.” There are his attempts to ruin the reputation of the Stones by claiming they were notorious – for throwing porridge out of windows.
Then there’s his body fascism – Cliff famously gets by on one meal a day and once turned down the chance to meet Elvis because the King “was grotesquely fat. I wanted to wait until he’d been on a diet.”
His increasing bitterness at a music industry increasingly embarrassed by him flares up periodically in feuds with Chris Evans – he once took out an ad declaring “Small Ginger DJ Refuses to Play New Cliff Single”. His tendency to bypass critics (banning them altogether from Heathcliff) reached its apogee with the success of “Millennium Prayer”.
To paraphrase Norma Desmond, Cliff is still big; it’s just the record industry that got small-minded. His fans still adore him. “Cliff inspires devotion which is quasi-religious,” remarked one interviewer. “His Christianity, celibacy and eternal youth confer on him Messianic status.”
Like Elizabeth I’s courtiers, Cliff’s blue-rinsed tidal wave of worshippers are kept in suspense by his continuous lack of wife, girlfriend or even mistress. “I haven’t married; I’m still waiting for him,” sighs a 49-year-old Boots worker from Scunthorpe. “And I think he’s waiting for me.”
He undoubtedly isn’t. But it’s sweet that someone thinks so. Cliff may be bad-mouthed for being a Bible-basher and so terminally unhip as to be beyond irony, but where’s the harm in him? He’s famously generous, staunchly principled and his latest success speaks volumes about his determination and courage.
And there may well be a millennium message in it after all. Cliff’s new number one demonstrates that, in our tell-all, show-all times, there is, ironically, only one thing that sells better than sex. No sex at all. Both Vanessa Feltz and Rachel Hunter have just made sensational front-page news by admitting that they hadn’t had sex for a year and three months respectively, and the evidence from a stream of new surveys is that people generally have sex much less often than is popularly imagined. Could celibacy be the new rock’n’roll?
The author’s “Bad Heir Day” is published in January by Headline (£10)
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