Cliff gives up recording… hmmm

So Sir Cliff has given up recording because radio won’t play his tracks – what a damn stupid reason not to record music! It says a lot about Cliff’s motivation and his relationship with his fan-base, who would buy whatever he put out regardless of the perceived radio-snub.

In general, I have a bit of a soft-spot for Cliff. He’s faintly ludicrous, but whenever he actually speaks or is interviewed, he aquits himself superbly, and is pretty hard to fault.

However, refusing to make records because a handful of style-crippled stations won’t play music by a man pushing 70 is pretty foolish. If he wants to retire from recording, good luck to him, but don’t try and lay the blame at the feet of radio. If that happened to me (like I’ll ever have enough radio play to notice if anyone stopped playing it!) I’d see it as a challenge to make better music, unless it was just that the demographic my music was aiming towards was different from that the radio station was targeting (as is clearly the case with Radio 1 and Cliff).

He’ll keep touring, which I guess is good news for his fans, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the occasional live album came out. I guess that would even give him a way to sneak the occasional new song on there. Although, maybe that’s what this is about – he just can’t be bothered to learn any news songs!

Anyway, it’s a shit reason for not recording, and Cliff should really know better.

Soundtrack – The The, ‘the Singles’.

© 2008 Steve Lawson and developed by Pretentia. | login

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