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Just five days separated the births of John Lennon (9 October 1940) and Cliff Richard (14 October 1940).

By the winter of 1958 Cliff had become a big star, number 2 in the charts with ‘Move It’. Meanwhile, John remained a no-hoper, scuttling around Liverpool with his Quarrymen, playing the odd village hall or private function, often for no more payment than a beer and a sandwich.

‘Is this boy too sexy for television?’ gasped the Daily Sketch after Cliff had gyrated a little too suggestively on television’s Oh Boy. The critic on the New Musical Express was even more perturbed: ‘His violent hip-swinging was revolting, hardly the performance any parent could wish her children to see.’ Before 1963 it was Cliff, not John, who was the rebel, the firebrand, the threat to civilisation. The same evening when Cliff and the Shadows were causing a stir on national television, the Quarrymen were playing skiffle standards at George Harrison’s brother Harry’s wedding reception in Upton Green.

From 1958 to 1962 Cliff had twenty songs in the top 20, including six number ones. He also starred in two films, Expresso Bongo and The Young Ones. Small wonder then that John, no stranger to envy, entertained mixed feelings towards him. When the Beatles finally squeezed into the charts with ‘Love Me Do’ in December 1962, reaching a high point of number 17, Cliff was looking down at them from number 2 with ‘Bachelor Boy’. The following month, the New Musical Express published its annual readers’ survey. In ‘Top Acts’ Cliff Richard came second to Elvis Presley, with the Beatles a lowly joint 111th. They did better in the more specialist ‘British Small Group’ category, coming eighth with 735 votes; but the Shadows came first, with 45,951 votes.

Three months later, in March 1963, the Beatles reached number 2 with ‘Please Please Me’, but they were prevented from reaching number 1 by Cliff, who was already there with ‘Summer Holiday’.

But as 1963 rolled on, the tables turned. By the end of that year the Beatles were making Cliff seem old hat. For George Melly, Cliff’s erotic twitching was now no more than ‘a bent-kneed shuffle, not so much a sexual courtship dance as a suggestion that he’d wet himself’. The Beatles were the future, and Cliff the past. Try as Cliff might, it niggled. In a rare fit of candour, he grumbled about the Beatles’ primitivism to a reporter from the Daily Mirror: ‘All they’ve done is revert to rock’n’roll. We’ve played the whole thing down, the screaming and the raving. The Beatles have stoked the whole thing up again.’

That Christmas, the Beatles occupied the number 1 and number 2 slots in the UK charts with ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ and ‘She Loves You’, while Cliff languished at number 8 with ‘Don’t Talk to Him’. By now, his fans were drifting off in search of brighter, brasher idols. In the New Year it was revealed that Cliff’s own sisters had recently formed a Dave Clark Five fan club.

For five years Cliff had struggled to crack the American market, but without success. In fact, it was Cliff’s failure that spurred Brian Epstein to plot the Beatles’ American campaign with such meticulous care. ‘Cliff went there and he died,’ John told the American journalist Michael Braun with pitiless relish as they boarded their plane to Kennedy Airport. ‘He was fourteenth on a bill with Frankie Avalon.’

Cliff was in the Canary Isles, completing his third movie, Wonderful Life, when he heard the news that the Beatles had achieved the success in America that still eluded him. Wonderful Life was released on 2 July 1964, but was overshadowed by A Hard Day’s Night, released four days later. A Hard Day’s Night broke box-office records, and was hailed by critics on both sides of the Atlantic for its freshness and originality. In contrast, Wonderful Life was called ‘a sad little picture’ by Films and Filming, while the Sunday Times described it as ‘this bloodsome bore of a film’ and ‘drivel’. The film was retitled Swingers’ Paradise for the American market, but to no avail. At the age of twenty-three, Cliff’s film career was over.

Soon after the release of both films, Melody Maker published a feature on the shifting tastes of youth. ‘I grew out of my Cliff Richard days a couple of years ago,’ said a twenty-year-old man. ‘When I look back I think how soppy I must have been. Groups now like the Beatles and the Stones have really got something and I can’t see me getting tired of them. Not until I’m old, anyway.’

From then on, John occupied such a peak of fame and fortune that he rarely bothered to glance down at Cliff Richard. On the other hand, the slightest allusion to the Beatles played havoc with Cliff’s composure. From the mid-sixties he was an ‘all-round family entertainer’, wholesome and unthreatening, performing in cabaret, in pantomime1 and on Saturday-evening television. Deep in his bones, he knew he was no longer ‘with-it’: ‘The success of the Beatles and the Stones had shelved me and the Shadows. We were now the oldsters.’ On Saturday, 6 April 1968, while John Lennon was staying with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India, composing songs for The White Album, Cliff was bouncing his way through ‘Congratulations’ in the Eurovision Song Contest, dressed in a light-blue double-breasted suit with frothy white ruffles around the neck and wrists. When the final scores were totted up, it emerged that Cliff had come second to Spain’s Massiel singing ‘La La La’.

Though he was known for his pleasant, can-do persona and his Christianity, Cliff never quite managed to stifle his indignation towards the Beatles. On Sunday, 19 January 1969 he was singing hymns in an Edinburgh church and talking about his religious beliefs when he snapped, ‘The Beatles are very successful artists, and yet they are not successful in life. The Beatles do nothing but chase around the world after a dream, and they must now realise that their Maharishi just doesn’t help them at all. I think they are looking for what Christians have found.’

John Pratt/Stringer

Almost a quarter of a century later, Cliff could still be rattled by a mention of the Beatles. Interviewing him for Q magazine in 1992, Tom Hibbert2 asked if he had ever felt jealousy towards them. The vehemence of his reply suggests he had never stopped brooding.

‘There was a certain amount of jealousy. It was hurtful to be overlooked so dramatically by the media. But I still sold records by the million, so what the heck? And look at me now. The Beatles don’t exist any more, and I was going five years before the Beatles, so no one’s ever going to catch me up. I’ll always be ahead of everybody. I’ve just done my thousandth week in the chart and my nearest competitor hasn’t reached five hundred weeks in the chart, which means that if that person is to catch me up, I would have to stop recording now and they’d have to have a record in the charts every week for the next five years. It’s not possible. I’m well ahead … And another thing: when it came to rebellion, we were far more the rebellious crowd. The Beatles were accepted by royalty, they were accepted by all the high society. The Shadows and I never were. So we had one up on them.’

1 I myself greatly enjoyed Cliff Richard’s performance as Buttons in Cinderella at the London Palladium in 1966, with Terry Scott and Hugh Lloyd as the Ugly Sisters, Tudor Davies as Dandini, and Jack Douglas as Baron Hardup. The Brokers’ Men were played by the Shadows. The speciality act was a baby elephant called ‘The Adorable Tonya’. During this same period, the Beatles were recording ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’.

2 Tom Hibbert (1952–2011) wrote very funny interviews with, among many others, Robert Maxwell, Bernard Manning, Yoko Ono and Sir Jimmy Savile for Smash Hits and Q magazine. In his obituary of him in the Guardian, Mark Ellen wrote: ‘Tom was unafraid of silence. He would give his subjects the impression that, despite their obvious successes, they were still somehow shameful underachievers, and then sit back quietly with a cigarette to enjoy the panicked response.’