2pm: Cliff update "You asked for favourite Cliff Richard lyrics," writes Mark Smith, needlessly telling me something I already know.
"Let's face it, with the English weather what it is, the Brussels sun will feel positively Naxos-like against your pasty skin; it's hard to spend much money without any bank machines; and your newly acquired knowledge of Cliff Richard lyrics will obviously go down well with the long-haired locals".
Richards' lyrics convey an almost spiritual onomatopoeia.
Richards' lyrics, however, still drew praise; "he writes with a 19th-century novelist's ear and a Dylanesque tongue".
Richard had written lyrics that portended the relationship's end: "This grindstone's wearing me/Your claws are tearing me". Shortly after they finished the album, the couple split, and Richard paired up with a club manager named Nancy Covey.
Jonathan Bogart of The Atlantic wrote that, with her Tolkien-inspired lyrics, Richard "remains true to the oldest and most important standards of R&B, which, more than any other musical genre, charts the uncountable intricacies of the human heart".
If only Little Richard's original lyric to Tutti Frutti – "Tutti Frutti, good booty / If it don't fit, don't force it / You can grease it, make it easy" – wasn't censored by his producer, Britain would have enjoyed a top 30 ode to anal sex some 30 years before Frankie Goes to Hollywood's Relax.
But Richards had the lyrics changed to preserve the young frontman's innocent image.
(The rock critic Greil Marcus gamely tried to tease out connections between the work of Norman and Nik Cohn in his 1989 book, "Lipstick Traces," by connecting the lyrics of Little Richard to the 16th-century theology of John of Leiden).
Meanwhile, the lyrics of Little Richard's Tutti Frutti had to be toned down for radio, with lines such as "if it's tight, it's all right" and "if it's greasy, it makes it easy" snipped.
Lucky for us, there's always been something of the 18th-century war poet pulling the strings in Augie March's lyrics, and only Richards could twist this line from a cosseted officer's rallying cry to reflect on the lie beneath.
