Cliff Richard’s 21 Today, to be strictly honest, isn’t quite a rock’n’roll album. It had plenty on it to interest Cliff and The Shadows fans, however, and many took it as evidence of the star’s growing maturity… Words By Jack Watkins
Released in October 1961, Cliff’s fifth long-player 21 Today gave him a first UK album chart topper. It showed an artist continuing to track towards the pop middle ground and, predictably, the ultra-conservative Melody Maker pronounced it “definitely the best Richard album to date”.
Only a major star, as Cliff was by this point, could contemplate the indulgence of kicking off an album with The Shadows and other ‘friends’ serenading him with Happy Birthday to mark his reaching the age of 21. It was backed up with a prettily-lit sleeve cover photo of Tony Meehan, Hank Marvin, Bruce Welch and Jet Harris watching Cliff blow out some super-large birthday cake candles. It may have seemed like a fun idea at the time, but posterity has judged it a mistake, and it also set the mood for many pundits to be less than kind.
Key To The Door
How the modern listener reacts to the record now is probably determined by whether you regard early ’60s music as a powder-puff interim before the advent of the more raggedy, rootsy Beatles and Bob Dylan, or are charmed by the period’s sweet innocence and more than acceptable tunefulness. Certainly, Cliff had no belief he could sustain his career by staying in rocker mode. Many stateside contemporaries working similar markets, such as Gene Vincent, Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke and Clyde McPhatter, all felt exactly the same, and were desperate to cut more ‘adult’ material.
All the same, 21 Today – laid down at Abbey Road in early 1961 – did contain a smattering of rockers. Among them was an almost inevitable Chuck Berry number, Forty Days; far better was the Shadows’ own Without You, plus a rousing version of Johnny Otis’s Tough Enough. Otis was a big favourite with the band, and the song gave good scope for Marvin to show his skills, backed by Welch’s driving rhythm guitar. Shame On You was unexceptional, and there was a laborious version of Gene Vincent’s The Night Is So Lonely.
Tough Enough
In reality, it was the gentler material that suited Cliff best. How Wonderful To Know, with its big string orchestrations, was originally an Italian song, and was immensely effective. Fifty Tears For Every Kiss was a lovely, yearning ballad, well sung; no-one was ever going to call Cliff a rangy, big-voiced balladeer, but he had the knack of keeping things simple.
New York songwriters Sid Tepper and Roy C Bennett, who had written The Young Ones, contributed two songs: Catch Me, with good guitar work, was stronger than the period-typical mid-tempo ballad Outsider. To Prove My Love made far too much use of a female chorus, the bane of so many songs of the period. Melody Maker was ecstatic about the inclusion of the old chestnut Tea For Two, dating back to the 1925 musical No No Nanette, but given a cool, jazzy makeover with a cha-cha break.
21 Today may have suffered from its packaging and may have disappointed the more elemental rock’n’roll fans, but it reflected Cliff and The Shadows’ growing confidence across a range of styles.
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