Cliff Richard has done something that the music industry, with all its machinery and all its appetite for the next thing and the thing after that, insists cannot be done — he has lasted. Not merely survived, not merely maintained a legacy, not merely traded on nostalgia for an audience that remembers the beginning, but genuinely, actively lasted — releasing music and filling venues and remaining relevant to the conversation in ways that his contemporaries from the late 1950s, the ones who were there when he was there and who burned as brightly, could not sustain and eventually stopped trying to.

He arrived in 1958 as Britain’s answer to the rock and roll revolution that Elvis had ignited across the Atlantic — the boy from India via Hertfordshire whose hips moved and whose voice carried and whose face on a poster made the girls in the front row feel something that the BBC was not entirely sure it approved of — and then, in one of the most remarkable and most complete personal transformations in the history of popular music, he became something else entirely, something that the rock and roll template had no category for and that the British public, across six decades of changing tastes and changing values, never stopped finding room for in its heart. The faith that arrived in 1966 and that has anchored everything since — the clean living, the propriety, the refusal to play by the rules of an industry that rewards scandal and courts controversy, the absolute consistency of a public image maintained not as a performance but as a genuine expression of who Cliff Richard actually is — has made him one of the most singular and most genuinely admirable figures in the history of British entertainment, a man who decided who he was going to be and then was that person, completely and without apology, for six decades and counting.