Sir Cliff Richard
Cliff has sold over 250 million records worldwide and is the third best-selling artist in UK singles chart history behind The Beatles and Elvis Presley.
As well as having 14 No.1 UK hit singles and almost 70 UK top ten singles he holds the record along with Elvis as the only act to make the UK singles chart in each of the six decades since its inception. As well as being Britain’s most successful solo singer, Cliff has also starred in many films, making his debut in Serious Charge and then Expresso Bongo. For his third film, The Young Ones, he became the box office name, as he did with Summer Holiday, Wonderful Life, Finders Keepers and Take Me High.
Cliff’s guitar bears the name, Early in the Morning, a Bobby Darin song featured on the 1959 album The Buddy Holly Story, and was presented to him in June 2018 by the Foundation’s Peter Bradley Jnr, producer Chris Neil and broadcaster Mike Read. Chris and Mike have both written songs for Cliff, who was thrilled with the instrument and set about playing it immediately. He played it on his 2018 60th anniversary tour played the guitar on stage as he sang Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel, Buddy Holly’s Peggy Sue and the Everly Brothers Wake up Little Susie.
In 1983 Cliff’s version of Buddy’s True Love Ways, recorded at the Royal Albert Hall, made the UK top ten and was a hit in five other countries. Cliff also included Buddy’s That’ll be the Day on his debut album recorded in the presence of hundreds of fans at Abbey Road Studios in 1959. Cliff was just a nineteen-year-old, with two top ten hits, when Buddy died, but in 2019, with fourteen No.1 singles and seven No.1 albums behind him, he still acknowledges the incredible influence of a boy who was twenty-two when he died.
