Sir Cliff Richard believes he will never recover from the trauma of the police raid on his home six years ago, nor from its worldwide media coverage. Although no charges were pressed against the 80-year-old following allegations of historical sexual assault, and though he has since successfully sued the BBC for broadcasting the incident around the world, the singer has said he does not think he will get over it: “It’s not something you can wipe from your memory.”
Appearing on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs , the veteran entertainer recalls how he collapsed in shock on the floor of his Berkshire home. “I couldn’t stand up and I found myself absolutely weeping like a child,” he says. “I was never suicidal but I thought a couple of times I might die … I’m thinking, ‘I don’t want to kill myself, but this could kill me’.”
He tells host Lauren Laverne: “But I survived it all and that’s the main thing for me, and I’m past it now. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it, though.” He adds that he hopes his action against the BBC will deter the media from behaving in the same way in the future.
The programme is a rare second visit to the fictional radio island. In 1960, when the singer had already topped the charts three times, he was interviewed by the show’s late creator Roy Plomley. Laverne plays a clip in which the 20-year-old singer tells how he was regularly surrounded by fans in the street, because in “the provinces” they “don’t hesitate to gather round”.
Richard’s music choices include Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel, which he also picked back in 1960, plus Aretha Franklin’s Rolling in the Deep and his own recording of What’s Love Got to Do with It?
Richard, who was born Harry Webb in India, where his father was working for a catering company, also recalls his return to England in 1948. The family arrived with only £5, then the equivalent of £200, and the singer remembers sharing a room with his parents and three siblings before they moved to a council house in Carshalton.
“I wake up in Barbados [where he now lives] every day and think, ‘How did I get here?’” he says.
The singer also tells Laverne about his decision not to marry as a rising star in the 50s: “People marrying and singing now doesn’t have anywhere near the effect it would have had when I started in the 1950s,” he says. “It was just the way it was. People would say, ‘The girls are all squealing at you, you have to be just available’.”
The problem became clear, he said, when a girlfriend, Jean, was spotted sitting on his lap in a car after a gig.
“I’m waving at the fans and I turned around and they are throwing the programmes on the floor and stamping them in the gutter.
“I was focused. That focus was not going to change. I was never going to give up that career I fought heavily for and am still battling for. Now it doesn’t matter – Gary Barlow is married and has children, no one minds, and that’s how it should have been then. But it wasn’t.”
Richard’s return to the programme after 60 years has set a record as the longest time between appearances in Desert Island Discs’ eight-decade history.
Looking back on his long career, he tells Laverne: “It’s been better than I could have expected. I didn’t think we [meaning his then backing band, the Shadows] would have lasted that long … You have to get realistic as you get older and I realise now that I wouldn’t be able to fill Wembley Stadium as I did twice before. As long as there are one or two people who will come and see me, I can still perform.”
Desert Island Discs is on BBC Sounds and BBC Radio 4 on Sunday at 11am