Over the Moon

by David Essex

  I was fast becoming the bane of the Residents’ Co-Operatives’ lives, and the nadir was reached when I attempted to do a good deed. The complex’s janitor was a kindly, amiable black guy named James who lived with his wife in a minuscule space in the basement next to the heating system. Feeling sorry for them, and given that I was in London more than New York, I gave James the keys to my apartment and told him that they could stay there while I was not around.

  My warm glow from this Good Samaritan act lasted until I got a call from the NYPD a few weeks later. The cops informed me that using my loft as a base, James had ransacked the unoccupied apartments in the building of all of their owners’ possessions. His relatives had then driven up from Louisiana in a truck, loaded the goods on to it – including all of my stuff – and disappeared with him into the night.

  As a parting gift, James and his cohorts had also left my flat littered with syringes from their drug use, with blood from injections spattered all over the walls. My neighbours were contemplating a lynching by this stage and I felt I had no choice but to sell up. At least I passed the loft on to a very conservative Chinese Wall Street financial adviser, and even managed to make a profit while doing so.

  My New York property-owning adventure had come to an end but I was leaving the city with more ties than I had brought to it. Carlotta and I had already tentatively discussed living together in London and we decided to give it a go. When I flew out of JFK after selling the flat, she came with me.

  18

  WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH THE DRUNKEN SAILBOAT?

  THROUGHOUT MY LIFE and career, people have always seen me as terminally laid-back. I remember once in the eighties turning on the TV and seeing an impressionist doing an impersonation of me. His routine consisted of saying ‘I’m David Essex … zzzzz!’ and slumping forward as if asleep or, more likely, comatose.

  It made me laugh and I can understand this reading of my nature but I don’t actually think it’s accurate at all. My body language and laconic speech rhythms may appear pretty laid-back but in actuality I have always been intense and driven to find new challenges and take myself out of my comfort zone, in work and in life.

  While I had been zooming back and forth between London and New York in 1983 and ’84, I had been working on an ambitious and fairly audacious new project. Being a writer of songs, and having appeared in a number of other people’s musicals, it seemed to me that the logical conclusion was to write a stage musical of my own.

  I didn’t have a subject matter in mind and vaguely wondered if I could translate some of the dark-hued, seductive Grimm’s Fairy Tales to this format. I was fairly unimpressed the day that Derek suggested that an alternative might be to write a musical around the famous mutiny on the Bounty of 28 April 1789.

  As every schoolboy knows (except for any unlucky enough to attend Shipman County), the mutiny on the British Navy ship the HMS Bounty in the South Pacific was led by a seaman called Christian Fletcher against the domineering and inflexible Captain Bligh. The mutineers cast Bligh adrift on the high seas and settled on the paradise island of Tahiti.

  I was initially sceptical about this suggestion, but Derek pointed out that as well as the central dramatic conflict between Fletcher and Bligh, the narrative presented opportunities to write violent, spectacular music to illustrate sea storms and the chance to use the exotic rhythms of the Polynesian music of Tahiti. The more I thought about it, the more this epic story felt appropriate to turn into a musical.

  It has always been a personal bugbear of mine that the sections in musicals where characters segue from spoken dialogue into song can seem forced and contrived, so I was determined that every line in Mutiny! should be sung. We still needed to flesh out the story, and Derek suggested a meeting with a Brighton-based playwright named Richard Crane, who had already written a version of Mutiny on the Bounty for children.

  Richard was around my age, mustard-keen and steeped in knowledge of the mutiny and we hit it off straight away. Over the following months, as I zigzagged from London to New York, he worked at the storyline while I began crafting the music and lyrics.

  We soon picked up a couple of heavy-duty accomplices. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Terry Hands agreed to direct the show and recruited the Ballet Rambert’s leading choreographer Christopher Bruce to plot the dance sequences. We were a long way from having a show, but it was reassuring to have two such big hitters on board so early.

  I read up religiously on the story of the Bounty but I felt that to truly bring the tumultuous tale to life we needed more first-hand experience. The mutiny had come after the ship’s crew had spent five months in Tahiti and been so enchanted by the island that they could not tear themselves away.

  What was it about this magical, mysterious island that could drive men to such heinous acts of insurrection and rebellion? There was only one way to find out. We would have to go to Tahiti.

  As soon as Terry, Christopher and I landed at Tahiti’s sole airport at Faa’a, the spellbinding appeal of the island became clear. It was one in the morning, and a spectral moon glowed through a necklace of twinkling stars as nature’s fragrant aromas suffused the warm night air. It was impossible to imagine how welcoming Tahiti must have appeared to Bligh’s crewmen after the ordeal of their ten-month journey over harsh seas on the Bounty.

  Our two weeks on this beauteous isle were hugely productive. Chris studied the local traditional dances, Terry tracked down and talked to actual descendants of the original mutineers and I listened to and started to write music. I composed the single ‘Tahiti’, which was to go Top Ten, on my hotel balcony with a rented keyboard as the island of Moorea glowed on the horizon in the sunset.

  We leavened this hugely enjoyable work with a little pleasure, venturing into the capital of Papeete to experience its highly idiosyncratic nightlife. The city is also a major port and base for the French Navy, whose sailors had traditionally enjoyed the embraces of the accommodating South Seas women while on shore leave until the Catholic Church altered local attitudes towards casual sex.

  The love-starved Gallic sailors now had to look elsewhere to sate their appetites, as became clear when we visited a place called the Piano Bar. Initially I thought its bar was lined with gorgeous women, but soon realised that they were lady-boys.

  As Christopher, Terry and I sat at a corner table and drank in the scene, not to mention a few cocktails, the boy-girls could tell that we had a different agenda to the drunken sailors and four of them came to sit with us and keep us company. This aggrieved a French sailor who had evidently had his eye on one of them, and he charged at us with a bottle – at which point a lady-boy in a leopard-skin mini-skirt leapt to her feet and took him out with a right hook that Ali in his prime would have been proud of. As a gaggle of boys in dresses heaved the battered matelot head first into the street, we made our excuses and left.

  Seeking to avoid the pursuing British Navy back in the nineteenth century, Fletcher Christian and his gang of mutineers had taken refuge on the spectacularly remote Pitcairn Island, and I was keen to continue my journey there to speak to Christian’s descendants. I was told my only option was to wait for a passing boat that might call at Pitcairn to deliver post and supplies. How long would this wait for a ship be? I asked. ‘About six months.’

  Yet although Pitcairn proved beyond our reach, the expedition to Tahiti yielded countless ideas and inspirations for Mutiny! Back in London, I finished the score and John Cameron and I set about recording a soundtrack album to be released prior to the show’s staging to try to drum up interest in the production.

  Having decided to play Fletcher Christian myself, I needed a Captain Bligh. My first choice was Frank Finlay, the marvellous and authoritative actor who had been so kind to me when I was an extra in Assault all those years ago, and I was delighted when Frank agreed and showed enormous enthusiasm for the project.

  I scored another coup when I showed my score to the leader of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and he congratulated me
and agreed that the orchestra would record the soundtrack album with me. Buoyed by this vote of confidence, I decided that I would initially conduct the orchestra myself, to attempt to impart my vision for the music.

  I am not sure I have ever felt so nervous as when I stepped on to the conductor’s podium in front of sixty-five of the crème de la crème of the nation’s classically trained musicians. It was such a big deal for me, and yet I gazed around and saw three-score bored-looking people who looked like they wanted to be anywhere but here as they mulled over phone calls they had to make and what to have for dinner that night.

  The disconnect between their seeming indifference and the rich, exquisite waves of music that washed over me as the Royal Philharmonic struck up was staggering. How could these people tease such a magnificent noise from brass and strings yet look so unmoved by it? I found working with this brilliant orchestra so nerve-wracking that I started smoking again, fifteen years after I had stopped. Sadly, that filthy habit remains with me to this day.

  Mutiny! was taking shape but there now began a hugely frustrating period in its genesis. It was hard to find a West End theatre to stage the show. After we missed out on the Theatre Royal Drury Lane to 42nd Street, Terry Hands reluctantly had to drop out of the project to return to the Royal Shakespeare Company.

  Losing a director is pretty disastrous but – as had happened so many times in my career – Derek came to the rescue. He suggested that we go to see a show at the National Theatre based on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner directed by the renowned Michael Bogdanov. It obviously had a nautical theme, which seemed relevant, and we were delighted when Michael agreed to replace Terry.

  Michael brought enthusiasm and expertise to Mutiny! but he also wanted changes. He felt we should add spoken dialogue to the production, and although this went against my instincts, I agreed. Even more significant were his alterations to the staging. Under Terry Hands’ instructions, set designer William Dudley had built an abstract set using billowing sails and evocative space. Michael wanted a boat: a Big Boat.

  William fulfilled this brief, and then some. He somehow created an extraordinary replica of HMS Bounty that was not far off the original vessel’s actual size. Pitched on a complicated hydraulic system deep beneath the stage, its rigging and sails flew in the flies above the stage as the cast literally built the boat in front of the audience. William’s Bounty was an amazing achievement – yet the physical requirements it would make of whichever venue was to house the show made the search for a theatre even more difficult.

  Eventually the show’s producers announced they had secured use of the Piccadilly Theatre behind Piccadilly Circus. Despite its central-sounding name, I had strong reservations as the venue was a little hidden away in a side street and had a history of shows closing early because of poor attendances. But beggars can’t be choosers. The Piccadilly Theatre it was.

  As we waited for the theatre to become free, we tweaked and tinkered with the show for close on two years. I filled the time with a couple of albums and tours, flying to as many dates as possible in my new toy, the helicopter. It was often a challenge to find landing sites near to the provincial venues I was playing.

  One hair-raising flight between gigs in Bournemouth and Northampton saw me hit an electrical storm around Bath. With nowhere to go, I had no choice but to descend to 500 feet and do a few airborne laps of Bath before the storm cleared enough for me to continue my journey.

  Having given up my New York apartment, I was making fewer transatlantic flights, particularly after Carlotta moved over to live with me in Manchester Square, central London. She had understandably taken a while to decide to make the move, as Rash of Stabbings had been poised to sign a major record deal with A&M in America.

  It was great to have her over with me, and any trepidation I had about her meeting the other all-important woman in my life, Verity, receded when thankfully the two of them got on great from the start. I also knew it was important that Carlotta had an outlet for her creativity, and encouraged her to carry on making music in my small home studio in Manchester Square: I was to record some of her songs on future albums.

  Carlotta was a true bohemian and we gave each other a lot of space in our relationship. It was never constricting and that was how we both wanted it. If she became homesick, she would fly home to Rhode Island for weeks or even months at a time. I’d go to visit her, or she’d fly back, and we would pick up as if we had never left off.

  She understandably absented herself quite a lot in early 1985, as Mutiny! finally began to come together and seemed to occupy my time 24/7. Christopher Bruce’s Ballet Rambert connections ensured that we had terrific dancers and Michael Bogdanov and I also oversaw open casting auditions.

  One day in particular resembled an early episode of Britain’s Got Talent, with hundreds of hopeful amateurs and, without being too unkind, well-meaning incompetents tumbling on to the stage. I was fighting giggles long before one hapless individual arrived to yodel gratingly out-of-key versions of the songs from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang while busily fire-eating during their instrumental breaks. Sliding from my chair to the floor, I crawled to a cupboard at the back of the theatre to give vent to my hysterics, only to find one of the producers had beaten me to it to do exactly the same thing.

  The rehearsals proper began in May ’85 in a hall in Wandsworth in south London, and were a riot. Mutiny! was to be a very physical show, with sea storms, hornpipes and vigorous dance routines in the ship’s rigging. Frank Finlay was an example to us all, hurling himself into the show with the brio of a wet-behind-the-ears teenager despite being close on sixty.

  While the acting side of things was going well, the technical rehearsals were turning into a nightmare. Our HMS Bounty’s vast proportions meant that a team of construction workers had to dig deep beneath the Piccadilly Theatre to house the ship’s complex hydraulic system. The workers dug so deep they had to be careful not to hit the tube’s Piccadilly Line.

  When our rehearsals shifted from Wandsworth into the theatre, it immediately became clear that the set was a Health and Safety minefield and potentially highly perilous. As the hydraulics pitched the Bounty from side to side as it rounded an imaginary Cape Horn, it was all the dancers could do to hang on to the rigging: if they fell, it was a serious drop to the boards below.

  Michael turned to the Jameson’s whiskey bottle as he attempted to direct our renegade ship, which sporadically crashed into the back wall of the theatre, shattering stage lights and sending the broken glass cascading onto the cast below. These technical difficulties meant our opening date had to be postponed twice.

  The producers were becoming understandably impatient and even though we still didn’t feel entirely ready, Mutiny! opened on 24 July 1985, the day after my (extremely apprehensive) thirty-eighth birthday. Thankfully the technical gremlins stayed away, HMS Bounty remained afloat, and after all the grief we had been through, the standing ovation at the curtain call sounded like the music of the spheres.

  This approbation was reflected in the comments of the guests at the after-show party, with some people saying that it was the best musical they had ever seen, so the newspaper reviews the next morning were a punch in the stomach. They were terrible: the first time a project I had starred in had been utterly savaged.

  The gist of the criticism seemed to be that as a mere pop star, I had ideas above my station in attempting both to write and star in a musical, a feat of creative multi-tasking that had previously only been achieved by such luminaries as Noël Coward and Anthony Newley. The slating seemed extreme, gratuitous and unfair, but luckily the public voted with their feet, the standing ovations kept coming and Mutiny! sailed on a successful eighteen-month run.

  Carlotta was back in America for much of Mutiny!’s run and our unrestrictive, kind-of open relationship was on a bit of a break. I found myself growing very close to Sinitta, the young American singer who was the female lead in the production as Fletcher’s girlfriend, Miamiti. She was a great
girl, full of life and vitality, and eventually our onstage relationship grew into a real-life affair.

  Sinitta and I had a lovely time together, and when we went our separate ways as Carlotta and I hooked up again, we did so with a lot of mutual affection and no bad feelings. It seems a shame to me that her music career has always been defined by her novelty eighties hit, ‘So Macho’. It has been the same mill-stone around her neck as the Wombles have been for the ultra-talented Mike Batt, and ‘Oh my, thigh high, dig dem dimples on dem knees’ could have been for me all those years ago, had I been unlucky enough for it to be a hit.

  Mutiny! gave me a huge sense of achievement in having dreamt up, written and performed such a vast project in the West End. Nevertheless, it was a very demanding show to be at the heart of, especially as the looming HMS Bounty was such an erratic and unpredictable co-star.

  In the end the troublesome vessel didn’t give us too many problems apart from occasionally gently bumping the back wall of the theatre, although once it overshot its stage mark for a crucial scene. This meant that we found ourselves accidentally acting out a burial at sea with our backs to the puzzled audience.

  As our ever-professional Captain Bligh, Frank Finlay delivered a magisterial address to the back wall of the theatre: as Frank is slightly short-sighted it is possible he had not even realised that anything was wrong. We might even have got away with it had not one cast member, Bill Snape, slipped on the misplaced set and farted loudly as he fell, triggering a giggling fit among the funeral party, including the Union Jack-covered corpse.