Over the Moon

by David Essex

  We had a short chat as we cruised the New York streets. John asked me, ‘Are you going to the after-show party?’ I don’t think so, I told him. It’s not really my thing. ‘No, me neither,’ he concurred, and after some more amiable chitchat they dropped me back at my hotel and headed off to the Dakota Building.

  Back on the road, my States tour was short but memorable. In St Louis we played to 28,000 people in a vast stadium, supported by US soft rockers Journey. They had overrun their slot by twenty minutes and showed no signs of stopping when Derek, losing his rag, pulled out the main plug and plunged the stage into darkness.

  Georgia yielded rock ’n’ roll antics when a band member – no name, no pack drill – decided to pee into the hotel’s ice-making machine. The management didn’t take kindly to this, and we had to make a run for it into the woods around the hotel as the local sheriffs fired their guns over our heads.

  In Los Angeles we played the Roxy on Sunset Strip. Led Zeppelin came down to see us, and when we hung out with them after the show, Zep told us that FBI agents were guarding their apartments and remained very diligent about protecting famous people after the Manson Family murders.

  Well, that had been five years ago and nothing untoward was about to happen to us now, right? Wrong. Taking my leave of Zep, I returned to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where Maureen and Verity had already gone to bed. Slipping between the sheets next to Maureen, I was drifting off when I saw a figure by the bed.

  ‘Verity?’ I asked, sitting up. No: we had a burglar. Maureen also woke up and took a swing at the intruder with her handbag as he bolted from the end of the bed. She succeeded only in smashing me full in the face as he ran from the room.

  We then went into slapstick mode. I jumped out of bed to give chase, but was naked, and so grabbed what I thought were my jeans. Wrong again. They were Maureen’s, and as I hopped around trying to get them on and then off, I crashed my toe against the leg of the bed. Eventually I stumbled to Verity’s room, where she and her nanny, Shirley, were safe and sound.

  Zeppelin’s talk of the Manson murders was still echoing in my head as I nervously opened the door to the suite’s lounge, half-expecting to see naked hippies waving knives. It was empty, but immediately the phone rang. It was the LAPD, telling me they had apprehended two men running down the fire escape from our suite.

  I met the police officer in the lobby and he quickly proved that the LAPD hadn’t made any gains in the humour or people-skills departments since I had met them on Sunset Strip a few months earlier. First, he insisted I had to identify the two intruders. I explained that this would be hard as I had only seen one of them, in silhouette in the dark, but I would have a go.

  The cop led me to his patrol car where two men were sitting in cuffs in the back. I peered in the window, which one of them promptly spat on. The officer then produced a small packet of brown powder. The thieves had dropped it as they ran away, he told me. It was heroin: as I was a rock star, he assumed it was mine?

  I hastily assured the cop that I had never seen heroin before and had no idea what it even looked like, adding that Maureen and I would like to locate our missing cash and credit cards, if possible. I wished I’d never spoken, as the officer then insisted on me accompanying him on a painstaking search of the entire hotel.

  We took the lift to every single floor. The officer would spring out, his gun levelled in classic LAPD style, survey the scene then nod to me that the coast was clear, at which point we rooted around each corridor, including emptying the sand buckets. We never found a thing – but there again, we never searched the cop.

  Outside of this unwanted encounter with the LA criminal underworld and a bone-headed cop, the US tour had been an unqualified success. Yet I never repeated it: it was to be my sole tour of America.

  It’s hard to say why, exactly. I had always loved the idea and the ideal of the country, and I’m aware that most artists regard breaking America, with the global fame that ensues, as the entertainment industry’s Holy Grail. I guess with my three-headed music, film and theatre career I always seemed to be busy with projects in Britain, and after hassling Derek and me for a while for a return visit, the record label just got bored and stopped asking.

  So why didn’t I try harder to conquer the States? I suspect the answer is extremely prosaic: at heart, I am very, very English.

  12

  FAIRGROUND ATTRACTIONS

  AT LEAST ONE good thing came out of my Los Angeles trip. While in the City of Angels, another song had come to me from nowhere, almost fully formed: a simple, upbeat little number called ‘Hold Me Close’, further proof of my theory that the catchiest, most successful tunes arrive via inspiration, not perspiration.

  It got me off to another good start with the writing of my third album. The 1970s were the days when record companies expected their main artists to produce an album every year, not one every two or three years as is the case nowadays, and CBS were keen to move quickly to capitalise on the success of David Essex and its three hit singles.

  For the concept behind the album, I went back to the future – to the lure of the fairground, and my gypsy roots. Travelling fairs have always excited me, ever since I worked on the funfair in Canning Town in my early teens, and I guess That’ll Be the Day had brought that lifestyle to the front of my mind again.

  Even as a kid, I was aware that fairs had a unique glamour and sense of danger. I loved the way that the fun and frivolity of the rides and candyfloss were delivered with an edginess that hinted at an undercurrent of violence in the rough-and-ready workers and the loud rock ’n’ roll music. Even the smell of fairs had a unique, heady allure.

  The album was to be called All the Fun of the Fair, and the opening track, of the same name, set the scene:

  Roll on up, see the main attraction,

  Get your money ready to step inside…

  Unusually, I was able fully to concentrate on All the Fun of the Fair without having to juggle the commitments of a film or a theatre production at the same time, and the album was a joy to record. Jeff and I were on the same wavelength, the band were tight from spending months playing together, and we brought in Liverpool soul band the Real Thing to add some rich, honeyed backing vocals.

  Jeff and I might have loved making the album but we were not working as quickly as CBS wanted and their delivery dead-line passed. Eventually the record company lost patience and fixed a date for the playback for executives who were flown in from all corners of the globe.

  It’s a sign of how tardy we were that we had to keep the CBS big cheeses waiting in the studio reception for an hour and a half as we finished off the last track, ‘Hold Me Close’. I only had time for two vocal takes and Jeff had to speed-mix it in thirty minutes, so it was kind of ironic that it went on to be such a big hit for me.

  Record-label album playbacks are always fraught affairs, with all the yes-men and lesser executives trying to gauge the mood of the big boss man before deciding how to react themselves. The CBS head honcho enjoyed hearing All the Fun of the Fair so we were good to go. Against their better instincts, they even let us persuade them to release ‘Rolling Stone’ as the lead single.

  I was keen to push the fairground theme further when we took the album on tour that autumn and suggested to Derek and Mel Bush that we used a funfair for the stage set, with a Big Wheel as the centrepiece. All the Fun of the Fair was the first tour that ventured outside Britain and America and it was a lot of fun.

  We played some great European dates, with the French reliably enthusiastic and not just for ‘America, ca, ca’, and Holland and Scandinavia really welcoming us. As we rocked Stockholm, I vaguely wondered how my old flame Beth was, and if she even knew what had happened to me in recent years.

  I’ve never gone down great in Germany, and I didn’t make the situation any better on our first night, in Frankfurt, when I muttered a dumb aside to the band about ‘Don’t mention the war’. The crowd picked up on it, and booed. It wasn’t my finest moment.
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  The levels of hysteria at the UK dates had not diminished, though, and Bev Bush became a master at spiriting me out of the venues after shows via increasingly torturous routes to avoid me being lovingly torn to pieces. For my part, I remained both flattered and, mostly, flummoxed by this bizarre adulation. Creeping through back exits and down corridors, I felt more like a member of the SAS than a pop singer.

  Driving to a gig one Tuesday lunchtime, with Johnnie Walker unveiling the new singles chart on Radio One, we learned that ‘Hold Me Close’ had gone to number one. If you had a single out, Tuesday was always the day you learned about its performance. If a song had leapt from number fifteen to number three, say, I could expect congratulatory Tuesday morning phone calls from Derek, Steve Colyer and a host of other people. If I had to call them for news, I could safely assume things had gone less well.

  The highlight of the British autumn ’75 dates was a week at Hammersmith Odeon in London. To mark the occasion, Mel commissioned an enormous billboard painting of me to cover the entire front of the theatre. He needn’t have bothered: Hammersmith council ordered us to take it down after one day in case the drivers on the adjacent flyover were distracted by a fifty-foot man looming over them.

  My first trip to Australia was a great way to round off the tour, and I’ll never forget until the day I die a wonderful Melbourne night when we played a vast tennis stadium. The crowd seemed to stretch to the horizon and my bass player, Mike Thorn, leaned over and whispered in my ear: ‘Is this a dream or is this real?’ I think, to be honest, I was asking myself that question every day.

  Maureen and Verity were not accompanying me to nearly so many dates now, partly because Verity had started nursery and was nearing school age but also because I preferred it if they didn’t.

  I had very good reasons for this. In Britain, some of my nuttier fans were jealous of Maureen, and I had enough to worry about at my shows without wondering if someone would take a swing at her. As a protective father, I also hated the thought of Verity being frightened by the madness of Essex Mania, or hurt in one of the baying crowds trying to get near to me.

  I also had a deeper, more selfish reason. Given the lunacy of my day-to-day existence, I valued the privacy of family life with Maureen and Verity more than ever. They were my refuge and I was desperate to keep the two worlds separate. Yet Maureen was keen to be involved, and while she understood the pressure I was under, there were times that she felt excluded.

  In three years, Maureen had seen her husband go from signing on and doing cash-in-hand odd jobs to being a pop star and a sex symbol. She trusted me and she could hardly have been more supportive, but human nature being what it is, she must have felt insecure on occasion. Tensions had crept in to our marriage.

  Fame also exerted some pretty insane pressures on us. We had decided to move from Havering-Atte-Bower back into London and so bought a place in Primrose Hill. Somehow this became public knowledge, and when we turned up to move in, we found the whole street packed with teenage girls playing my hits on cassette players. We had to sell it without even living there.

  Instead we bought a house near Abbey Road and built a big wall around it to stop people seeing in, but even so it was clear we would also need a place far from the madding crowds. In 1976 we purchased a farm down in Kent, and while Maureen, Verity and I didn’t do any hop picking, we had some idyllic times there.

  By now, we had acquired two dogs: a mongrel named Scruff and also Rover, the LSD-scoffing hound from Jim MacLaine’s alcazaba in Stardust, whom I had adopted and brought home to be a family pet. For her part, Verity’s favourite down-on-the-farm pastime was dressing up to sing Top Forty hits to the cows.

  I needed the respite that the farm gave me. After so long in the spotlight, I think that I was subconsciously craving anonymity, and I relished retiring to the backroom to produce albums by the Real Thing and my friend Steve Colyer. Possibly nostalgic for the camaraderie of the Everons and Mood Indigo, I was also keen to merge into the band a little more rather than always being David Essex, Solo Star.

  Unfortunately this put me at odds with Jeff when we came to record the next album, Out on the Street. I was keen to use the same band I toured with and make a far harder-edged, rockier album. Jeff didn’t agree at all and we suffered our first fall-out over artistic differences.

  Selfishly and stubbornly, I stuck to my guns and Jeff went along with my vision, despite the new friction between us. It made the recording sessions somewhat fraught at times. Jeff may have felt he was vindicated when Out on the Street sold less than my first three albums and stalled outside the Top Thirty, but I think it still stands up musically.

  The first single from the album, ‘City Lights’, was more than five minutes long so didn’t get much radio play and only got to number twenty-four in the chart. This didn’t stop Paul McCartney hearing it. One evening in an Italian restaurant, I heard somebody crooning it and looked around to see Paul, at a nearby table with Linda, singing and beaming at me. Maybe he was stalking me.

  The music world was changing in 1976 and 1977, with punk rock exploding on the scene with its scorched-earth policy of disdain towards everything that had gone before it. Punk was a bit of a cartoon but I had no problem with it, especially as Chris Spedding, the guitarist who had worked with me for years, was to become a pivotal part of the scene, producing the Sex Pistols’ first demos.

  Punk struck me as a bit of a media hype but it was all about knocking the Establishment and I guess that was what I seemed like to them. The Clash gave an interview to Melody Maker in which they sneered that they were keeping it real and ‘not driving around in a white Rolls-Royce like David Essex’. This struck me as ironic, as I hadn’t been in one of those since Alfie sorted it out for us the day I married Maureen.

  Mostly, though, the punks were nice enough to me if I bumped into them at a TV show or radio station. They might try hard to be aloof and angry when we met, but they generally sought me out in a quiet moment later to politely ask for an autograph.

  There was very little that was punk rock about the extravaganza that I mounted at the London Palladium late in ’76. I had been very impressed by a club that I stumbled across in Paris called L’Ange Bleu, which obviously took its cue from the Marlene Dietrich film of the same name.

  I loved the dark humour and theatricality of the 1920s Berlin cabaret that Dietrich had come to embody and decided to import a little of this decadent glamour to the West End. Its appeal to me was not a million miles from the allure of the fairground that I had celebrated in All the Fun of the Fair.

  The Palladium show was magnificently over the top, with baby tigers, llamas, clowns, and a risqué dance troupe named Hot Gossip who were dressed as Tiller Girls. I had seen them in a club and booked them via their choreographer, a rising star named Arlene Phillips.

  I had met Arlene before. A few years previously, Ken Russell had told me I was to play opposite Twiggy in a film called The Boyfriend and dispatched me for refresher tap-dancing lessons with Arlene. Ken then binned me in favour of a ballet dancer. When I saw his finished film, I could not have been more relieved at my lucky escape. Ken clearly didn’t rate me: he also asked me to sing ‘Pinball Wizard’ in his movie of the Who’s Tommy, then dropped me for Elton John.

  The Palladium spectacular was magnificently bonkers, although the aura of twisted mystique was arguably sullied slightly by the llamas depositing great steaming piles of crap on the stage every night as I sang ‘If I Could’. There again, it was the same stage where I was French-kissed by a brown bear in Dick Whittington. Maybe I should have expected it.

  Derek and I had made a conscious choice at this stage to step back a little from the promotional treadmill. I definitely felt in need of a little more downtime, and after the non-stop musicals, movies, albums and tours of the last few years, we also figured the public might need a break from wall-to-wall David Essex.

  Although we were still resisting their entreaties to tour there, Derek and I headed back to
the States for some high-profile TV shows. We did The Johnny Carson Show, although I never got to meet Heeeere’s Johnny! I did, however, get to sing a duet with Cher on The Cher Show, although the ‘comedy’ sketch I had to perform with Jerry Lewis was an absolute stinker. Ticking off the American icons, I also did The Merv Griffin Show a few times. It didn’t mean that much to me, but with his encyclopaedic knowledge of showbiz, Derek was in raptures that we were rubbing shoulders with these light-entertainment legends.

  There was talk of me taking the lead role in a new musical film being shot in America called Grease. Producer Robert Stigwood met me to sound me out and shortly afterwards I bumped into the movie’s female lead, Olivia Newton-John, in London. She enthusiastically told me, ‘I really hope you do it – it would be great!’ but I never heard any more, and when the film finally appeared, John Travolta was clearly perfect for Danny.

  My fifth studio album was to be the last of my contract with both CBS and Jeff Wayne Music. After the minor fallings-out and frosty relationship that had developed between Jeff and me on Out on the Street, I decided that I would produce the record myself. This was the direction I wanted to go, and also our friendship was too valuable to risk damaging it with work disagreements.

  This also suited Jeff, who had his own epic project to occupy him. He asked me what I thought of him writing and recording a musical version of H G Wells’ classic sci-fi book, The War of the Worlds. I told him it was a fantastic idea, and he went off to begin work as I set about recording Gold and Ivory.

  It was the first record I made outside of Jeff’s Advision base, and the band and I decamped to Richard Branson’s Manor Studios near Oxford. Working without Jeff felt a little like taking the stabilisers off a bike, but I had an experienced band and penned a couple of songs with Steve Colyer.