Over the Moon

by David Essex

  The nation’s police force were also big fans of the tune. While in the south of France, I went for a drink with a friend, Kenney Jones, the former drummer of the Small Faces. Somehow we got roped into judging a beauty contest in a nightclub in St Tropez, although we were quickly kicked off the panel after I insisted on marking the girls in fractions such as 39¼.

  Kenney and I headed back to the villa but made the error of stopping on the way to pee against a handy wall. Big mistake. It transpired we had chosen to relieve ourselves against the wall of the local police station, and a burly gendarme’s arm suddenly materialised around my neck and dragged me away before I had even finished.

  Inside the police station there was very little entente cordiale and Kenney and I were getting a severe ticking-off until one policeman suddenly recognised me: ‘Ah, Davide Essex – America, ca, ca!’ The mood suddenly changed and I was offered a plea bargain – they would spare me a night in the cells if I gave them an intimate, impromptu concert.

  This was the best offer I was likely to get so I got on a table and gave them a lively rendition of ‘America’, with les gendarmes enthusiastically joining in on the ‘ca ca’ chorus as Kenney tried and failed to keep a straight face behind them. Thank Dieu it happened in the days before mobile phones and YouTube.

  Writing ‘Gonna Make You a Star’ had got my second album, which with devastating imagination I had decided to call David Essex, off to a flying start. More songs followed, and back in London, Jeff and I went into the studio and set about committing them to vinyl.

  Stardust was out that autumn and I decided to write a song with the same name for the film soundtrack. The words told the tale of the sorry decline of deluded rock star Jim MacLaine:

  Ah look what they’ve done to the rock ’n’ roll clown

  Ah rock ’n’ roll clown, look he’s down on the ground

  Well he used to fly high, but he crashed out the sky…

  In my head was an eerie, resonant sound that I wanted to echo behind the crucial line: ‘In a stardust ring see the rock ’n’ roll king is down’. Jeff and I experimented with weird synthesiser effects then a detuned bass, but it was percussionist Ray Cooper who hit on the idea of striking a gong and dropping it into a bath of water. Weird? Maybe, but this time David Puttnam was more than happy to put it on the soundtrack, and it played as the final credits rolled after doomed Jim MacLaine had shuffled off this mortal coil.

  While Jeff and I were pushing back the sonic frontiers of music once more, Derek was busy trying to arrange my debut tour for that autumn. There were plenty of interested promoters but we settled on a keen, honest-sounding West Country boy named Mel Bush. There was no way of knowing then that Mel would go on to work with me for nearly forty years.

  So autumn ’74 would see the release of the Stardust film, its soundtrack album, the David Essex album and a major fifteen-date UK tour. That would surely be more than enough to satisfy any poor, unfortunate soul who was suffering from Essex Mania.

  Or would it?

  11

  ‘IT’S BECAUSE WE F ****** LOVE YOU’

  AFTER THE PRODIGIOUS success of ‘Rock On’ in America, Derek had received some approaches from various Porter Lee Austin/Larry Hagman-type figures for me to stage my first live tour in the US, but I wasn’t really tempted. Bob Dylan once talked about Bringing It All Back Home, and I was determined that my first tour should be in my homeland, where it had all happened for me: Britain.

  In actual fact, my first live date was to prove more significant still. When Mel Bush delivered the itinerary for my autumn ’74 tour, the opening date jumped off the page at me: East Ham Odeon, not three miles from where I had been born and enjoyed such a wonderful childhood.

  I knew the prognoses for the tour were good. Stardust had been released to a similar fanfare to that which had greeted That’ll Be the Day. The David Essex album was to reach number two in the chart, while ‘Gonna Make You a Star’, that simple song dreamed up next to a French swimming pool, became my first number-one single. Yet movies and albums I was well versed in. Playing live was a new experience.

  We weren’t intending to stint on the production. Jeff Wayne had recruited a nine-piece band, plus backing singers, and we spent two weeks selecting a set list, running through the material and rehearsing the band until they were ultra-tight. Tickets went on sale and the entire fifteen-date tour sold out in two days. We felt prepared, and ready to go.

  That didn’t mean I wasn’t nervous. As I sat backstage at East Ham Odeon before the first show, a million twitchy thoughts and memories ran through my head. As I heard the excited crowd streaming into the venue, I tried to focus on the slick, professional show we intended to give them.

  There is a bizarre paradox with live performance of any kind: for two hours you are the centre of everybody’s attention, a magnet for their adulation and love, yet the time immediately before and after you take the stage is an intense and lonely one. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more nervy and psyched-up than that night in that East End dressing room.

  Derek and I had hired Mel Bush’s brother, Bev, to be my road manager for the duration of the tour, and eventually he tapped our secret coded knock on the door and told me, ‘They’re ready when you are.’ So this was it. Showtime. I donned my jacket and made my way to the side of the stage.

  Hidden in the wings, I could hardly believe the volume of the noise as the lights went up and Jeff and the band kicked into the first number of the night. However, even this cacophony seemed like nothing compared to the frenzy that erupted when I joined them on stage. It sounded as if twenty Concordes were lifting off all around us. Was this what it had felt like for the Beatles at the Shea Stadium? How could anything be this loud?

  I felt stunned. The noise onslaught was so relentless that my mind seemed to be shutting down. Everything felt like it was in slow motion as, working from memory and instinct, I walked as if through quicksand towards the mike, certain that nobody would be able to hear a word I sang.

  Somehow, I became aware of a shadow looming over me. As I twitched in shock, a girl who had jumped from one of the side boxes ten feet or so above the stage landed at my feet in a crumpled heap, yelling as she bounced on the boards. What should I do? Retreat? Pick her up? On autopilot, I moved to the other side of the stage, hoping security would sort it out.

  I had fondly imagined that filming the fictional Stray Cats gig at Belle Vue in Manchester for Stardust had prepared me for being the object of mass worship and adoration. I could not have been more wrong. This was a hundred times more berserk than that ordeal, and this time there was no filter, no scripted Jim MacLaine, between me and the audience: they were screaming just for, and at, me.

  How did it feel to be the cause of that baying mayhem, the sole reason for such an extraordinary mass explosion of passion? I simply didn’t know. I had no idea how I was supposed to feel. I was grateful for the love being shown to me, of course, but also I felt grotesquely uncomfortable. What was so special about me? How could I ever be deserving of this?

  In truth, I also felt a slight, strange resentment. Jeff and I had assembled this killer live band, worked for weeks on songs and arrangements, rehearsed and honed them until they were perfect, and now nobody could hear a thing through the shrill, piercing wall of screams. We might as well have been playing anvils and farting didgeridoos.

  Nevertheless, you get used to anything, eventually, and as my tender ears gradually became accustomed to the cacophony, the show went well. The bouncers in front of the stage needed the sharp reflexes of West Ham goalie Phil Parkes to intercept the countless girls launching themselves towards me. I even saw the girl that had crashed from the box, still in one piece, come back for another go.

  The noise levels hardly dipped all night, although they went up another notch for hits and crowd-pleasers such as ‘Rock On’, ‘Gonna Make You a Star’ and ‘Stardust’. I staggered back to the dressing room at the end of the night as my incipient tinnitus kicked in only to re
alise that the greatest challenge still awaited us.

  Put simply: we had to get out of the building. The thousands of fans might have streamed out of the theatre but none of them seemed to have actually gone home. Every exit of the Odeon was blocked solid as girls milled around, chanting my name and longing for a close encounter.

  This was when Bev Bush came into his own. Together with the venue’s security men, he devised an innovative escape strategy that involved creeping across the Odeon’s roof to an adjacent building and exiting via their service entrance into a waiting car. Even then, a few intrepid fans intercepted us, and were rewarded for their anticipation with autographs.

  I had never even remotely anticipated a reaction such as that, in my wildest dreams (or nightmares). The next day, my ears still ringing, I surmised that maybe the reaction was partly due to my first night being in East Ham and me being a local boy made good. Nope. The thrilling, sometimes terrifying scenes of lunacy followed me through the entire tour.

  Even the scenes after the opening gig paled next to the mayhem in Liverpool. I was playing two sold-out, back-to-back shows at the Empire. The crowd for the first show decided to stick around outside the venue to hear the second set, which meant that when that performance finished, there were not one but two audiences blockading the venue: 6,000 people.

  This was too much for even Bev Bush to overcome with one of his amazing exit strategies. The police were called, and roamed the area outside the Empire with dogs as the superintendent in charge hatched a cunning plan. Disguised in a police uniform, I would burst out of the venue with nine or ten ‘fellow officers’, jump into a police car and be rushed back to the Adelphi Hotel.

  This might have worked were it not for the fact that the Scouse plods had no shoes for me to change into, which meant that I dashed into the throng in a too-big uniform and the same bright red, instantly recognisable boots I had been wearing on stage. I was twigged immediately, my outnumbered police escort was sent flying, and I would have been torn to pieces had a burly sergeant not put me over his shoulder, used me as a battering ram, and dumped me in the back of a police Land Rover. The Adelphi was clearly out of the question: for my own safety, I spent the night at the police station.

  So Essex Mania wasn’t just a glib phrase that the newspapers had invented. It really existed. As the tour hit south Wales, the band and I checked into our hotel and I was shown to my room. As I opened my suitcase on the bed and began to unpack it before heading off to the soundcheck, a girl emerged from my wardrobe. I gazed at her in shock.

  She didn’t bother to say hello: she cut straight to the chase. ‘I love you,’ she told me. I asked her what she was doing there, and she fell silent. This was a phenomenon I was to become very accustomed to in years to come: girls who, for whatever reason, were utterly obsessed with me would meet me and fall completely mute. Faced with the object of their desire, they simply wouldn’t know what to do.

  ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ I told her.

  ‘I know,’ my intruder agreed.

  ‘How did you get in?’ She gave no answer, so I opened the bedroom door and politely gave her a red card: ‘I think you’d better leave.’ She meekly filed through the door and trudged off down the corridor.

  Of course, many rock stars, and men in general, would have behaved very differently when confronted with a nubile young lady leaping out of a wardrobe at them. My standard reaction was a million miles from that of a predatory Jim MacLaine, but that was just the way I was, and still am.

  So why didn’t I take advantage of the hundreds – thousands – of girls who would have liked nothing more than a night of passion with David Essex, the adored pop star? The main reason was very simple. I had a wife, and a young child. Maureen and I had our ups and downs, but I hated the thought of cheating on her or, particularly, doing anything that would diminish me in Verity’s eyes. I loved them and I wanted them to respect me.

  On a deeper level, I also had a very strong moral code that I guess must have been instilled by my parents. I knew that these girls who ‘loved David Essex’ didn’t even know me, with all of my foibles and idiosyncrasies: they loved an impossible, glossy, unrealistic ideal of me, assembled from the music, the cinema screen and the pages of Jackie magazine.

  I might have had my occasional romantic encounters on tour with Mood Indigo, all those years ago, but that was different. These girls were young and vulnerable and I knew at heart it would be wrong to abuse them and their ‘love’ for me.

  In any case, it wasn’t always girls who stalked me. Before my first-tour gig in Lewisham in south London, I was changing in my third-floor dressing room when a teenage boy appeared at the window, having shinned up a drainpipe. ‘’Allo, mate, I think you’re great, you’re my ’ero!’ he informed me, before vanishing from view as abruptly as he had appeared. I was quite worried about him, but hearing no ambulances, could only assume he was OK.

  I was also keen not to exploit fans with dodgy souvenirs and tacky merchandise. I never liked the idea of a fan club, and although I occasionally wrote a letter for it to send out to the members, I generally kept such activities at arm’s length. I also cringed whenever I saw a David Essex tea towel, or opened a copy of Jackie or Look-in to find a pull-out poster of me. For one thing, fame had not destroyed my basic shyness.

  The tour had been madness from start to finish, but even when the dates were over, with me thankfully still in one piece, the insanity did not end. Promotional appearances were equally high-risk, and possibly more so, as I didn’t have a gang of security guards watching my back as I usually did at gigs.

  Possibly my most perilous encounter with out-of-control fans came when I was due to go into Radio One for an interview with breakfast show DJ Tony Blackburn. Blackburn had talked this up on his show, and as we were about to leave, my promotions man, Colin, received a call warning that an enormous crowd had gathered outside Broadcasting House.

  The most sensible reaction would have been to postpone the appearance, but desperate not to lose this high-profile publicity opportunity, Colin had a bright idea. I had a blacked-out Mini, and Colin suggested that I went with Bev in that while Colin travelled in the limo with one of CBS’s promotional cardboard cut-outs of me. The theory was that the fans would mob the limo, leaving Bev and I to scuttle into Radio One unmolested.

  It’s hard to believe now that we agreed to this ridiculous plan, but we did. Arriving in convoy at Portland Place, we found thousands of girls waiting. Fans may be many things but they are not stupid and they paid little attention to the limo, instead converging on my poor little Mini as soon as they saw it appear.

  In no time there were so many girls on top of the car that we thought the roof would give way. The weight broke the back springs. It was scary, and possibly the only time that I ever saw Bev panic. ‘Stay here, I’ll go for help!’ he said and forced his way out of the Mini as I locked the door behind him.

  I was now on my own, trapped in my poor battered Mini and engulfed in a sea of shrieking girls. Twenty or so faces pressed against the car’s windscreen and windows, and fans fought behind them to get to the front. I was terrified, and at the same time – ridiculous as it sounds – I had no idea how to react.

  What was the protocol? Should I smile at the girls? Frown at them? Ask them to get off my car? I settled for staring vaguely into the middle distance as if I were somehow oblivious to the carnage around me. But I couldn’t help catching the eye of a black girl with her face squashed against the windscreen, who helpfully explained their motivation in this scene: ‘You know why, don’t you? It’s because we f****** love you!’

  Tony Blackburn was not to get his scoop interview. Bev fought his way back through the crowd, scrambled into the Mini and explained that the BBC commissionaires’ response to his plea for help had been to tell him: ‘Don’t you bring him in here!’ The good news was that the police were on their way. By the time they arrived, half of the West End seemed locked down.

  It was yet more evid
ence that as 1974 ended and the dust settled on my chaotic first tour, I was arguably the most successful pop star and performing artist in Britain. For the first time, I became grateful for the years of failure and obscurity that I had endured when only Derek had any faith in me, because those hard-knock days of rejections were helping me to stay grounded.

  I might have been enjoying number-one records, selling out venues and entertaining thousands of besotted fans, but I knew I was still the same East End boy who had driven mini cabs, trod the boards in rep and made up the numbers in pantomimes. No matter what Jackie magazine might think, I hadn’t turned into a god.

  It was ironic that America, the country that I had idolised as a teenager and whose music had first inspired me, had a far more measured and level-headed reaction to me. That was just what I felt I needed then, so when CBS returned to us still wanting US dates, I was ready.

  There was only one place to kick off: New York. Our show at the legendary Bottom Line venue was packed, with people such as Rod Stewart in the audience, and I loved the fact that we could hear ourselves think during the show and the audience actually listened to the music.

  Around the same time in New York City I attended the Grammy Awards at the Uris Theatre on Broadway. I was nominated for a Grammy for best new artist and also presented an award and sang a duet to a TV audience of millions with jazz legend Sarah Vaughan, which put Derek into seventh heaven.

  The Grammies is a very stiff and formal ceremony that seems to last for days and after a couple of hours I was pretty bored of hanging around the venue booted and suited. I had lost Derek and had no security with me but decided to stretch my legs and have a fag, so I wandered out through the theatre’s front door – and was immediately besieged by 500 autograph hunters.

  I was trying to sign something for everyone but it was all getting a bit overwhelming when a black limousine suddenly pulled up alongside me, a window lowered and a voice emerged: ‘David, get in here!’ I had no idea who it was, but opened the door and hopped in, to find myself sitting next to John Lennon and Yoko Ono.