“Everybody has a summer holiday...”
The winter of 2015 is the warmest in history but not in New York City where there has been a relentless onslaught of cold that has left the denizens of Gotham, shivering, wet, tired and had enough. I haven’t seen less concerts in a two month span than I have in this two month span since I started this website seven years ago. Dreaming, daydreaming, of a different place and time.
Not unlike Gig Young in the “Twilight Zone” episode “Walking Distance” where the advertising business has worn him out so thoroughly he returns to his childhood (and terrifies himself as a kid…), childhood is the last refuge of the thoroughly miserable and this lead me back to Cliff Richard’s hugely successful fourth movie “Summer Holiday”.
Last summer I saw the UK superstar at Gramercy Theatre (here) so perhaps he was on my mind… summer, childhood, warmth, youth, I dunno, dreaming and wishing… I was six years old when “Summer Holiday” was released and my Dad wasn’t a movie gooer so he left it to my big sister to take us. The movie was, in retrospect, a bubbly little excursion. Lower Middle Class Cliff and mates work as bus mechanics where he manages to borrow a double decker bus and along with his back up band the Shadows drives to Europe, pursued by cops, jewel thieves, girls and a runaway pop singer disguised as a boy.
Choreographed by the one day major director Herbert Ross (he did “The Turning Point”) and the first movie directed Peter “Bullitt” Yates, the songs are strong, in the UK hit after hit, “we’re going where the sun shines brightly, we’re going there the sea is blues” Cliff sings and the movie explodes with a vibrant youthfulness.
While some of it went over my head at the age of six, the music certainly didn’t. With pop rock beauties by the likes of mainstream Phillip “Santa Baby” Springer, “The Next Time”, “Bachelor Boy”, “The Next Time”, “Big News” have stood the test of time. And Cliff’s vocals? Listen to the alternate take of “Bachelor Boy”, Cliff has sweep and ease, a tuneful gentleness that leads you along all the way.
As you grow older the past moves so far away, you can’t reach it any more,. I read an article about a 100 year old man explaining how the world looks in extreme old age, how you forget how love feels, how love felt, how life in youth was, except in dreams, and I would if except in music and movies where the extremeness of returning precisely to the past might not trigger something in you.