Richard S. Love

Lauded as one of the most successful pianists of all time, Richard Clayderman releases an album of twelve new recordings, produced in the last year during global pandemic. The album features beautiful renditions of modern classics including Coldplay’s ‘Viva La Vida’ and Ed Sheeran’s ‘Perfect Symphony’, classical favourites ‘The Waltz of the Flowers’ and ‘The Radetzky March’, plus four new original compositions by Richard Clayderman’s long-time collaborator and composer of the 1977 signature recording ‘Ballade Pour Adeline’, Paul de Senneville.

Cliff Richard was the biggest thing in British rock & roll – and in the years after the Beatles, he was never far from the top of the U.K. charts. Arriving in 1958, just a couple of years after skiffle swept Britain, Richard was the first English singer to approximate the hip-shaking rebellion of American rock & roll with his 1958 debut single "Move It."

With his lush and sophisticated instrumental approach to pop music, Richard Clayderman (born Philippe Pagès) is, according to The Guinness Book of World Records, "the most successful pianist in the world." Clayderman's albums routinely sell millions of copies and his concerts are quickly sold out. In a review of his 1985 Carnegie Hall concert, Variety wrote, "(Clayderman's) main appeal lies in his youth and boyish good looks…coupled with his gentlemanly charm and his thick French accent, they promise to rope in the romantically inclined middle-aged Yank ladies who cotton to this ilk of soothing entertainment."

Such an unimaginative title for such a imaginative boxful. Across four discs and 105 songs, Cliff Richard's earliest catalog comes in for precisely the kind of treatment every rock & roll star should have: an all-encompassing study of his most important period. Even more impressively, though the song titles all sound familiar, the performances rarely are. Thirty-seven tracks are bona fide unreleased (South African 78s notwithstanding), but several dozen more are culled from scarce EP-only mixes, rarely resurfacing B-sides, and unusual mixes.

In the years after Elvis Presley but before the Beatles, Cliff Richard was the biggest thing in British rock & roll – and in the years after the Beatles, he was never far from the top of the U.K. charts. Arriving in 1958, just a couple of years after skiffle swept Britain, Richard was the first English singer to approximate the hip-shaking rebellion of American rock & roll with his 1958 debut single "Move It." A smash hit right out of the gate, "Move It" kicked off an astonishing five decades' worth of hits (as of 2014, his last time in the U.K. Top 10 was in 2008, when "Thank You for a Lifetime" went to number three). The earliest recordings, most made with his backing band the Shadows, were his hardest-rocking and undoubtedly his most influential, making an impression on nearly the entire first generation of British rock & rollers. Like Presley, who was certainly Richard's key influence, Cliff's popularity wound up pushing him ever so gradually to the status of an all-around entertainer. He moved into movies quickly – the first came just a year after "Move It" – and the Shadows tamed their rockabilly, but the real shift into the mainstream came after the Beatles opened the flood gates for homegrown British rock & roll, banishing Richard to the status of an older generation. Cliff continued to have hits in the '60s, even after he and the Shadows disbanded in 1968, but he split his time between pop and Christian music; in the early '70s, he focused on hosting a variety show on the BBC. Toward the end of the '70s, he made a big pop comeback with 1976's "Devil Woman," which became his first Top 10 hit in the U.S., and over the next five years, he racked up several intercontinental soft rock hits, including 1979's "We Don't Talk Anymore," 1980's "Dreamin'," and the Olivia Newton-John duet "Suddenly," taken from the 1980 soundtrack to Xanadu.

Cliff Richard's fiftieth anniversary celebrations saw some remarkable releases brought together, although this one was surely one of the least interesting despite its title holding out a lot of promise. Collectors and fans, after all, will already have gathered together the majority of Richard's Extended Play material across a wealth of other discs, not least of all the See for Miles EP compilations in the early '90s. This package is very much a poor echo of those sets, all the more so since anybody drawn in by the promise of material from 1991 will be disappointed to find the set petering out into Christmas songs and show tunes at the expense of far more deserving material from the other end of the chronological span. A handful of oddities do include an alternate take of "It's Wonderful to Be Young," and the lesser fabled English-language versions of "Frenesi" and "Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps." But the overall mood is largely disposable, and Richard continues to await a full examination of his complete EP catalog.

But that’s exactly what he’s done with Music Is Love (1966 – 1970), the legendary artist’s first covers album. The first single, ‘Summer In The City’, is out now. ‘Summer In The City’ was originally recorded by The Lovin’ Spoonful in 1966, written about an unprecedented heatwave in New York. Richard says, “John Sebastian was, and is, amazing. Doing this vocal nearly killed me – I’ve never done a song before with no breath at all! What a song. It’s been with me all my life.”

Cliff Richard In the years after Elvis Presley but before the Beatles, Cliff Richard was the biggest thing in British rock & roll – and in the years after the Beatles, he was never far from the top of the U.K. charts. Arriving in 1958, just a couple of years after skiffle swept Britain, Richard was the first English singer to approximate the hip-shaking rebellion of American rock & roll with his 1958 debut single "Move It." A smash hit right out of the gate, "Move It" kicked off an astonishing five decades' worth of hits (as of 2014, his last time in the U.K. Top Ten was in 2008, when "Thank You for a Lifetime" went to number three). The earliest recordings, most made with his backing band the Shadows, were his hardest-rocking and undoubtedly his most influential, making an impression on almost the entire first generation of British rock & rollers. Like Presley, who was certainly Richard's key influence, Cliff's popularity wound up pushing him ever so gradually to the status of an all-around entertainer.