The Next Time - Cliff Richard

 What I thought I could do while taking as long as it takes to compile the playlist for A Perfect Day of Pop Radio with its 60's, 70's, maybe 80's shows and overflow programmes of Soul, Reggae, Rock and Singer-Songwriters, was attempt some of the little essays on each. We will see how it goes. It's just that the first such thing, after having done a couple and saved them elsewhere, outlined itself during today's highly productive walkabout.

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I was moved when Danny Baker not only selected The Next Time on his Desert Island Discs appearance but ended with it, as the film Summer Holiday does.

It's been a long time since Roy Plomley's show was really about the music, if it ever was, rather than a choice of eight records to hang an interview on and Danny made no attempt to include such favourites of his as The Beatles, Steely Dan or Earth, Wind & Fire, nor anything from 1976/77 when he was the coming man at the NME. It was a self-consciously 'period' choice of records and notable for how he identified The Next Time as marking the end of an Age of Innocence before the arrival of The Beatles, all arch, knowing and clever.

One might think that Donny Osmond and generations of Non-Threatening Boys, which is the magazine Lisa Simpson reads, for which British viewers can understand 'Jackie', were as innocent and that Cliff was a safe, British version of Elvis in the same way that Tamla Motown was white-friendly soul music, Lover's Rock was 'reggae chic' made for, and often in, London rather than Kingston but it was becoming increasingly contrived as such.

Bob Dylan, quite rightly, identified Smokey Robinson as the 'poet' among pop lyric writers but the authors of,

I'll soon forget your kiss 

and heartaches such as this
Will just be ancient his-  tory.

are poets, too. It is credited to Buddy Kaye and Philip Stringer, Kaye having had a hand in A, You're Adorable and the partnership contributing to the work of Dusty Springfield, Sinatra and Elvis. It is sublime 'hit factory' product, though, with proven talent used in each role. The Shadows had no.1 hits in their own right, being specially selected from the circuit, but were never as good as in the role of Cliff's support band on such records as Dancing Shoes, The Young Ones, Summer Holiday and the Blue Turns to Grey that outdoes the Stones' version. Here, though it is the lilting arrangement and orchestra of Norrie Paramour that augment Cliff, who was by no means just a pretty face, had writing credits on a few of his seminal records and, like his friend Cilla, didn't let anything get in the way of a spectacularly successful career.