MO
London
For years now - decades even - it has been an affectionate joke that Sir Cliff Richard never ages.
There are those who mock the suspiciously thick thatch of conker-brown hair, the veneer-white teeth and magnificent year-round tan, but, until recently, no one could deny that, at 74, he was holding back the ravages of time very successfully. However, when he returns to Britain at the end of the summer, we will see a very different Cliff.
Where he used to look trim and healthy, thanks to meal-skipping and daily tennis, now he looks positively weak and even frail. That air of cheery, wholesome confidence has gone. In its place is an unmistakably haunted man.
People who bumped into him at the Holders musical festival, Barbados, in March reported he didn’t look like the familiar Cliff at all, and was suddenly looking his age. Even when mingling with dozens of fans at an event in Aalborg, Denmark, earlier this month, he appeared strained, with deep rings around his eyes and wrinkles etched deep in his face and neck. The controversial and very public police raid of his Berkshire home last August over historic claims of abuse, has taken a deep toll on the man once described as the ‘Peter Pan of Pop’. As his dear friend Cilla Black observed last week: ‘It’s awful. Cliff is not all right, not at all.’ In his sole public statement three months ago, Cliff described his current predicament as ‘unbelievably difficult’. And after months of shying away from public view, he has decided enough is enough. His first decision has been to put his beloved £3 million Berkshire home on the market.
Following the police raid, broadcast live by the BBC, he feels his sanctuary has been violated and says he can never feel comfortable there again. ‘It’s the saddest thing for him, but he had to do it. He said he never wants to live there again,’ Cilla told the Daily Mail’s Diary last week. She added: ‘He will never, ever go back there again. I don’t blame him.’
Associates say the decision to sell was taken within days of the raid; Cliff sensibly waited for the market to make its spring rise before listing the magnificent apartment for sale.
‘It was an experience a bit like a burglary,’ says a friend of long standing. ‘He had an emotional response to it and, although time has passed, it hasn’t changed the way he feels.’
Cliff has spent just one night in the house in nine months - at the start of May when he was en route from his home in New York to a ‘wine signing’ event (literally signing bottles of wine for fans) in Denmark.