Over the Moon

by David Essex

  14

  BACK ON THE BIKE

  AFTER THE SUCCESS of That’ll Be the Day and Stardust, Derek and Mel had been offered quite a few film roles for me to consider. They were a decidedly mixed bag. The chance to star opposite Joan Collins in The Stud held little appeal. There is a distinctly Victorian aspect to my nature, and I had no wish to do soft porn: after all, when I had filmed sex scenes in my previous films, I had always kept my underpants on.

  I was far more taken with a project called Silver Dream Racer. Ever since I had hammered Dad’s James Captain down the A13 at the age of fourteen, I had been obsessed with motorbikes. When I was offered a film that would give me the chance to cane 750cc monsters around the famous racetrack at Silver-stone, it was too tempting to resist. I signed up to begin filming in summer 1979.

  In the meantime, I was spending as much time as possible on the farm in Kent with Maureen, Verity, Dan and the nanny, Shirley. Dan’s arrival hadn’t miraculously resolved all of the niggling problems between Maureen and I, and our arguments dragged on, but Verity was delighted with her new little brother and we seemed to be holding things together.

  There again, I was away quite a lot because I had a new record label, Phonogram, and an album to make for them. I managed to assemble a great band including Phil Palmer, Chris Spedding and my old mate Kenney Jones, not to mention key contributions from the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

  Despite this, Imperial Wizard proved to be a very stop-start album to record. I produced half of the record, with Mike Batt and Chris Neil also weighing in, and we had some bad luck when a snowstorm sabotaged deliveries of the lead-off single, also called ‘Imperial Wizard’, which lost momentum and stalled at number thirty-two in the chart.

  Yet I had a lot of fun making the record, with one real highlight coming when I wrote a folk-type song, ‘Are You Still My True Love?’ and recorded it with a Chieftains-like Scottish reels-and-fiddles group called the Whistlebinkies. I remain very proud of Imperial Wizard, and regarded it as a good sign when it charted far higher than had either of my last two albums for CBS.

  Around this time I also made an appearance with Cat Stevens, who had just converted to Islam and adopted the name Yusuf Islam, and his brother David Gordon on a concept album called Alpha Omega. I worked on a song named ‘World’ with Yusuf and David and even sang on stage with Yusuf at Wembley. He is a special, charismatic man, and our friendship has endured.

  After that, the Silver Dream Racer movie was a blast from start to finish. It was to represent quite a commitment, as I had signed up to write the film score as well as play the lead role, but if I am honest, the appeal to me was all about the motorbikes.

  I was to play Nick Freeman, a fixated and idealistic young rider who inherits a prototype superbike when his brother is tragically killed in an accident, and sets about riding it to the world title against all the odds. I realised from the outset that the script was hardly Shakespeare, but then Shakespeare would not have given me the chance to power around Brands Hatch.

  My co-stars in the movie were Beau Bridges, who was a nice guy despite having no interest in bikes, and Cristina Raines, who was a tad highly strung but turned in a great performance. Clarke Peters played my wisecracking sidekick, Cider: Clarke is a tremendous actor who recently went on to have huge success as Lester Freamon in cult US TV show The Wire. Motorbike champion Barry Sheene also visited our set a lot and became a friend.

  Yet the real stars of Silver Dream Racer were the bikes. We used a lot of privateer bikers in the film – independent riders with no financial backing from top manufacturers like Yamaha or Suzuki – and I was amazed by their love for their machines. These were men who kept their bikes in their front rooms and seemed to adore them more than they did their wives and kids.

  Despite the producers’ extreme misgivings, I was determined to do as much riding as possible and I largely succeeded. I will never forget the day when the amazing Silver Dream Machine itself turned up on the set in Brands Hatch. A firm in Wales called Bartons had custom-made two bespoke bikes for the film: a 750cc version and a smaller 500cc one.

  The 750cc monster turned up in bits as filming was going on at the other side of the racetrack and our mechanics assembled it. Seizing my chance, I leapt on and accelerated around the track in a flurry of testosterone and blue smoke. The distraught producer was hyperventilating as his male lead and the movie’s irreplaceable main prop both unexpectedly roared past him doing more than 100 m.p.h.

  Silver Dream Racer’s main plot tension, such as it was, was that Nick’s American girlfriend, Julie Prince, played by Cristina, loyally supported her man in his motorbike dreams even though she knew they could kill him. So it was to prove: the film’s lurid climax saw Nick triumph in the world championship final only to lose control of the bike, crash into a wall and die.

  I was thus horrified to learn recently that a new DVD edit of the movie ends when Nick crosses the line and punches the air in delight, cutting out the tragic denouement because such a dark ending is seen as too bleak for American audiences. To say the least, this banal edit seems to miss the whole point of the story.

  While I was making the film, Triumph had recently closed their motorbike factory at Meriden, near Coventry, and a workers’ co-operative had emerged in its wake. I supported them and tried to publicise their endeavours in my interviews around the film, and the workers showed their gratitude by giving me my much-loved Triumph Bonneville, one of the last ever built at the plant. It’s a great British bike that I still ride to this day.

  Director David Wickes hooked me up with film composer John Cameron to write the Silver Dream Racer score and John was invaluable in teaching me the nuts and bolts of writing incidental music. As well as a tutor, John became a great friend and a frequent future collaborator.

  Sadly, away from the film set, my greatest friend of all and I were about to go our separate ways. Maureen and I had battled as hard as we could to save our relationship, and for a while Dan had seemed like the cure that could heal us, but in the end the fault lines just ran too deep and we decided we had to split up.

  It’s difficult, and very painful, to analyse in the cold light of day exactly why a marriage comes to an end. Maybe we had met and married too young. Maybe the extraordinary pressures of Essex Mania had taken their toll: certainly, Maureen had never cared for my efforts to keep my public and private lives separate. Or maybe, like so many couples, we just gradually drifted apart.

  Whatever the root cause of our break-up, it speaks volumes for the love and respect that I feel for Maureen that my admiration for her grew even as we were going separate ways. At all points of the horribly painful process, she put the children first, as did I: she behaved with immaculate honour and dignity throughout.

  Obviously, Dan was too young to understand what was going on, but Verity was eight, a vulnerable age. It probably helped that she was used to me being away for long periods on film shoots and tours, but Maureen and I made it our sole priority to present a loving and united front to her, and that is what we did. We still took family holidays together and I am incredibly proud that Maureen and I remain friends even to this day. It probably says a lot about the love we feel for each other that it took us seventeen years to get around to getting divorced.

  In the immediate aftermath of the separation, though, Maureen and the kids holed up on the farm down in Kent while I moved into a flat at the office in Paddington and worked on the Silver Dream Racer score. Sadly, bad news will always out, and when the tabloids got wind of our split, their vulture-like reporters and paparazzi besieged my office for days.

  I said nothing because there was nothing to say, but that didn’t prevent the redtops from speculating feverishly. One day Derek answered one of the many knocks on our door from journalists demanding exclusive interviews and offering me the chance to ‘set the record straight’, and came back upstairs roaring with laughter.

  It seemed the man from the now-defunct, dear old News of the World had
solved the thorny question of exactly why Maureen and I had ended: it was because I was having a homosexual relationship. Sadly, the Screws were unable to identify the other party in this sordid gay affair. This was a pity because, as I told Derek in between our gales of hysterical laughter, I would really like to know.

  In the wake of the break-up, it was good that I had some work to focus on. In addition to the incidental music, I had penned a few motorbike-themed anthems for the soundtrack of Silver Dream Racer, and I was delighted when ‘Silver Dream Machine’ hit number four around the movie’s April 1980 release.

  Silver Dream Racer also gave rise to one of my more bizarre foreign promotional trips. The movie was chosen to represent Britain in a film festival in Poland, so director David Wickes, Derek and I flew out to Warsaw to support it.

  Derek and I found we had been billeted in a squat, ugly Soviet-architecture hotel in the city centre. Having checked in, I was shown to a room the approximate size of a postage stamp, and as I have always suffered from mild claustrophobia, I asked for something bigger. This did not go down well.

  ‘In Communist Poland,’ the hotel manager loftily informed me, ‘everybody has the same.’ I replied that this was fine but I was not able to stay there and would check out straight away, at which point he performed a spectacular volte-face.

  ‘One moment, Mr Essex,’ he requested, before producing a key and showing me to a massive, oak-panelled suite that was usually exclusively reserved for visiting senior politicians and party apparatchiks. Clearly, it was true that on Animal Farm, some animals were more equal than others.

  Outside the hotel, Warsaw appeared so grey and depressing that it could have been a 1950s US Cold War propaganda film about the evils of Communism. It rained non-stop, and the streets were full of dowdily dressed, defeated-looking people queuing to buy bread. Furthermore, it was Chopin’s birthday, and the state radio appeared to be broadcasting his most famous tune, the funeral march, 24/7.

  Thankfully, things picked up at the film festival. David, Derek and I attended a screening of Silver Dream Racer, but arrived to discover that it had not been dubbed into Polish. Instead, a male interpreter stood behind the screen, microphone in hand, translating the dialogue as it was spoken.

  This deep-voiced intermediary voiced every character, male and female, with no change in his intonation, which meant that when the love scenes between Cristina Raines and I came on, we were seducing each other in two throaty baritones. It was impossible not to weep with laughter, so David Wickes and I did. Our hosts were not terribly impressed.

  For some reason, Silver Dream Racer did spectacularly well in South Africa, where it seemed to run for years. However, a trip I made to this country around the same time to play a few gigs was to prove somewhat controversial.

  South Africa’s hateful apartheid system was still in place and the United Nations had imposed economic sanctions against its regime, as well as discouraging sports teams and entertainers from visiting the country. Yet Britain and America had a policy of ‘constructive engagement’ with South Africa, and I decided to accept an invitation to tour there.

  This in no way meant that I condoned apartheid: after all, I was a man who owed his whole career in music to his love of black American blues musicians. Instead of boycotting the country, I felt I could make a more effective point by taking with me the Real Thing, the all-black soul band and good friends of mine.

  We played quite a few dates in South Africa, including Cape Town and the huge Las Vegas-style entertainment complex at Sun City. Travelling between shows, we simply ignored the train companies’ ridiculous segregation policies: if the Real Thing were not allowed to travel with me in a whites-only carriage, I went to join them in the blacks-only section.

  Apartheid was clearly abhorrent and we played to both white and black audiences as we traversed the country. Yet inevitably these subtleties were lost on some of the more knee-jerk critics, and on my return to England, Sheffield council banned me from playing anywhere in the city, while Harry Belafonte placed me on a UN blacklist.

  This was hugely ironic to me. I loathed racism and felt as if I had just challenged it, not collaborated with it. Also, the scenes in South Africa had been no worse than those I had encountered on my first trip to America’s deep south, when a gloves-wearing waiter in Nashville had served me coffee with cling-film over the cup. ‘Why is this here?’ I had asked him. ‘Because I am black, sir,’ he had replied. So where were the sanctions there?

  The South African furore blew over fairly quickly and I have many great memories of the trip. Cape Town is magical, and one day Bev Bush and I hired motorbikes and drove to the point where the Indian and Atlantic oceans meet. As we rode along the edge of a cliff, five or six monkeys suddenly rushed our bikes. I had one on my handlebars, Bev had one on his head, and we were lucky not to get bitten or go crashing to a watery grave.

  Bev was also my accomplice shortly afterwards when I gave my definitive – but secret – statement on the evils of apartheid and racism. For some reason, east London used to boast a statue of a former Boer commander, and after a few drinks one night, Bev and I located some black paint and painted his face black. It was probably the most perplexing unsolved local mystery since the days of the Canning Town Arsonist.

  15

  MY LIFE AS AN INTERNATIONAL DRUG SMUGGLER

  WHEN THE MOST central strand of your life is gone, it takes quite some getting used to. Maureen and I had been together for what felt like a wonderful lifetime and Verity and Dan had been our very heartbeat, our raison d’être. Our separation had been totally civilised and amicable but it still hurt, and becoming a single man at thirty-three was quite a lifestyle change.

  In the short term, I needed somewhere to live. I had had quite enough of kipping at the office. I was looking for somewhere in central London that felt like home and that the kids would like when they came to stay with me, and when I found a fairly big flat near to Hyde Park, I bought it and moved in.

  At the time Phonogram wanted another album from me and I teamed up again with John Cameron, with whom I had written the Silver Dream Racer score, to work on Hot Love. We kept the motorbike theme going, to a degree. For one self-written track, called ‘On My Bike’, I lugged my Triumph Bonneville into a vocal booth in the studio and nearly asphyxiated myself revving it up to provide a sound effect. I got so carried away that only a quick-thinking engineer kicking open the door of the booth averted an incipient case of carbon monoxide poisoning.

  Hot Love was to prove one of my least successful albums but for a while, things also got a little steamy in my private life. A lot of people had probably assumed that I was sexually promiscuous all through the crazy years of Essex Mania. A decent-looking pop star, with screaming girls throwing themselves at him every day: what man wouldn’t take advantage?

  I hadn’t been living that life, in fact, due to being married, my personal sense of morality and, overwhelmingly, wanting Verity to love and respect me, but now I was single and had no reason not to indulge in a few flings. With the Hyde Park flat as my base, I set about belatedly playing the field.

  Thirty-three is admittedly quite old to begin sowing wild oats but I saw a lot of girls and formed a lot of liaisons during that period. It was very lucky that my Hyde Park flat happened to have two entrances the badly planned evening that I showed one young lady out of one door as another woman arrived at the other.

  I suppose they were quite wild times, looking back, but I guess I was just doing what most men would have done in my situation and, if you will pardon the phrase, making up for lost time. Even then I think I behaved with respect towards the women. We all knew what was going on and I never led any of the ladies on, made promises I couldn’t keep, or said that they were ‘The One’.

  Because of this, I was surprised and a little disappointed when one or two of the girls then sold kiss-and-tell stories to the newspapers. Their accounts of what had transpired between us never remotely matched the truth, and on a
couple of occasions I had never even met the women. Plus, on a basic level, I just think kiss-and-tells lack respect and dignity.

  It was fun, sort of, but also there was an inescapable ache and hollowness at the heart of my promiscuous period. I had just come out of a loving marriage with a soul mate with whom I had made two children that were the light of my life. How could casual relationships not seem essentially empty after that?

  After the split, I bought Maureen and the kids a house by the Thames in Chiswick and a routine developed whereby I would pick up Verity and Dan on Friday evenings and return them on Sunday nights. We would head down to the farm in Kent or stay in London, where I was meticulous in ensuring that they never encountered any of my new female friends.

  So now I was that dreaded thing: a Weekend Dad. We always had a great time, even when they were pretending to like my fry-ups and sausage and mash, and it was noticeable how much Verity had become like a little second mother to Dan. Yet, for me, there was always an ineffable sadness hanging over the weekends, because they were so short and the time with the two of them was so precious.

  The low point always came on the quiet Sunday evenings when I drove them back to Chiswick and they reunited with Maureen. Driving away, I would inevitably feel hugely alone and outside of the family unit that I belonged in. Frequently, I pulled away from their house, stopped the car at the end of the street and wondered: how did it come to this? What went wrong?

  I wanted to spend more time with them, and Maureen and I agreed it would be healthy to all still hang out together, and so I bought a family holiday home. We had always previously headed off to the South of France but we fancied a change of scenery, so I bought a farmhouse, or finca, in a tiny cactus-filled village called Mijas in the mountains above Marbella in Spain.