by David Essex
I also furthered the gypsy cause, or maybe set it back, in 2000 when I played a kind-hearted traveller in ITV rural cop drama Heartbeat. It was fun, but in truth the main reason that I did it was that it was one of my mum’s favourite shows.
Life in the new millennium carried on ticking along. In 2001 I made an album called Wonderful and Mel Bush lined up one of his fifty-date tours: it is hugely to Mel’s credit that he always thought outside of the usual ‘handful of big cities’ itineraries. Even more excitingly, along came another of those rite-of-passage moments as one of my children got married.
Verity’s big day was held in a castle in the West Country. It was a gorgeous sunny winter’s day and special from the outset. Your daughter’s wedding day is such a big deal and you want it to be so perfect that inevitably you get nervous, and I sweated long and hard over my father-of-the-bride speech.
Maybe because songs have always come more easily to me than speeches, I also hired a string quartet and sang her a song I had written years ago called ‘Verity’. It was actually the B-side of ‘A Winter’s Tale’ and quotes a line of Byron: ‘You are the friend to whom the shadows of far years extend.’ Everybody was in tears – including me, trying to sing the bleeding song.
A year later, Verity presented me with my first grandchild. Josef was a beautiful little boy and I learned something very interesting. Becoming a father is a wonderful thing with big responsibilities. Becoming a grandfather is a wonderful thing with much less in the way of responsibility and, whisper it soft, may even be more fun.
Around 2002, Carlotta, the boys, my mum and I moved down to Guildford, in Surrey. It was a nice big old rambling house and Bill and Kit had the top floor, which meant that their teenage fights could start there before carrying on right through the house and into the garden.
My life of semi-retirement continued as I made one album per year: Forever in 2002, Sunset in 2003 and It’s Gonna Be Alright in 2004. With Danny producing the albums in my studio down in the basement and me self-releasing them on my Lamplight label then going out on tour, I had effectively turned myself into a small cottage industry.
I had needed a break, and it had been great, but now I felt ready to get back in the game. I began to pay closer attention to the work offers that Mel was fielding and decided to return to the theatre when I was asked to take part in a musical called Boogie Nights 2 in 2004.
Following on from a production called Boogie Nights that had been based around the music of the seventies and had toured for months, Boogie Nights 2 was what is today termed a juke-box musical featuring hits from the eighties. I quickly formed a close friendship with its very talented writer, Jon Conway.
I played St Peter, the narrator and overseer of proceedings, and we opened in Bromley in August. The play was not a big stretch or too demanding in terms of the acting and singing it required from me, but, to put it in its simplest terms, it felt good to be back.
Another offer came my way and I took two months off in June and July 2005 for a new departure for me: a multi-artist tour. The Once in a Lifetime tour of UK arenas featured some fellow artists who had hit big in the seventies in David Cassidy, Bay City Rollers singer Les McKeown and the Osmonds.
When Mel first told me about this nostalgia-fest I was reluctant to be involved and probably a little snobby, but I am glad that I changed my mind because it was a great experience and turned out to be a celebration of a generation. The arenas were packed with forty- to sixty-year-olds every night as each artist played their own set and joyously relived their musical glory days.
I hadn’t known any of them first time around but the Osmonds were lovely while Les was also friendly enough. David Cassidy seemed to have a few issues, however. He was always courteous to me, but became a little vexed when I declined to swap places on the bill.
David was following me and going on last. Theoretically this should have been the best slot but he was not so keen, and while I hate to be immodest, it might have been because I was going down well and proving a hard act to follow. I didn’t want to swap for a very practical reason: as the penultimate artist, I could get home earlier.
Things came to a head in Belfast, a city that has always loved me because I was one of the few artists to tour there regularly during the Troubles of the seventies. I went down great, and after a short interval, a hacked-off David arrived to woo the audience with a killer opening remark: ‘Here we go for another night in a godforsaken city!’ What a charmer.
After Once in a Lifetime, I was back on the road with Boogie Nights 2, finishing up with a three-month season in the north’s party capital of Blackpool. That was great fun, particularly when I rented a house in the slightly more genteel Lytham St Annes just up the road.
On the music front, a guy called Bob Stanley from a band named St Etienne got in touch to ask me to be part of a concept album they were putting together called Tales from Turnpike House. I liked the central idea of the songs depicting different characters all living in a London block of flats and did a lovely spoken-word piece called ‘Bedfordshire’ with one of their kids.
In 2006 EastEnders briefly entered my life for the first time. My mum religiously watched the soap’s Sunday omnibus edition in Guildford every weekend, and when I told her that I had provisionally agreed to do a three-week stint playing Jack Edwards, the father of Holly, she was the most excited she had been since I went on Heartbeat.
When I met the EastEnders producers, however, it became clear that they would need me for far longer than the three weeks I could spare, and also the character didn’t particularly grab me, so I politely dropped out. I guess sometimes in life things just don’t happen until they’re ready.
Instead, I returned to the West End stage doing four months in a musical version of the Footloose movie and also made another album with Danny down in the basement studio, Beautiful Day. Mel must have been losing his touch when he booked me the tour for that one: I only did forty-eight dates.
We all needed a family holiday to recharge our batteries and we headed to Cuba so I could re-indulge my fascination with Latin America. As I was walking along the beach my phone rang. It was Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber.
‘I’d like you to play George in Aspects of Love,’ he told me.
Flattered to be asked I promised him I would read the script as soon as I returned to England. It seemed a little straight for my tastes, but when I met with director Nikolai Foster I warmed to him straight away and agreed to be involved.
My semi-retirement was clearly over, and as 2007 dawned I felt that my career was getting back on track and everything was reasonably rosy in my garden. However, something was about to happen that would absolutely knock me sideways.
24
THE TINKER COMES TO TOWN
DOLLY HAD ALWAYS been in rude health. My mother might have been eighty-two in early 2007 but she was still sprightly, active and never needed to see a doctor. So when Carlotta called me while I was on tour to say Mum had gone into hospital for a minor operation on a badly swollen knee, initially I wasn’t worried.
I spoke to her at the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford, where she sounded fine, and arranged to go and see her the next day. Arriving at the Royal Surrey, I made my way to her ward, but when I scanned the room, I couldn’t see her anywhere.
‘Where is Mrs Cook?’ I asked a nurse.
‘Oh, she has got MRSA,’ I was told.
‘That’s bad, isn’t it?’ I asked, shocked.
‘Well, we have antibiotics for it.’
Having gone in for a routine knee operation that should have seen her discharged the following day, Mum had picked up one of the deadly MRSA bugs that haunt hospitals, which always strikes me as bitterly ironic as they are the places that people go to in order to get better. She had been quarantined in her own room, and when I saw her I was shocked by how ill she looked.
Mum had always been a fighter, just like Dad, and managed to beat the MRSA, but then she contracted another awful strain of hospit
al-related infection. When she was still there after two weeks and getting no better, I confronted one of her consultants.
‘This is terrible,’ I told him. ‘This lady has never taken as much as a Lemsip in her life. She came in here for a simple operation and basically you are killing her.’
‘Mr Essex, hospitals are very dangerous places,’ the consult-ant informed me, in an unpleasantly patronising and supercilious manner. I am not a violent man, but it took all of my control not to knock him out.
I became a regular at the Royal Surrey County Hospital over the ensuing days, during which time Mum steadily became worse and worse. She was transferred to a hospital in Sutton and after two further months of ineffective treatment she was put on a kidney machine. By this point she could hardly communicate. She died on 10 May 2007.
It is hard enough to bear the loss of a beloved parent without also knowing that it should never have happened. Apart from a couple of minor falls, my mum had been in great shape when she was admitted to hospital. I think the NHS is one of Britain’s great institutions but it badly let my mum down. In fact, if I am being brutally honest, it killed her.
The burial service was as moving as saying goodbye to your wonderful mum who should still be with you could be, and she was buried next to my dad in East London Cemetery, reunited in death with the man who had been her life. I wondered about taking action against the NHS but in the end decided there was nothing I could do. It was best to draw a line under the tragedy.
Carlotta was hugely supportive as I grieved for my mum, which says so much about her as a person because we had recently decided to split.
The two of us had now been together for more than twenty years and while we were still incredibly close, the spark of romance had died. With a sense of sadness but knowing it was the right thing to do, we began divorce proceedings and Carlotta returned to America. Kit went with her; Bill stayed in the UK.
With such intense upheaval in my personal life, it was a relief to have Aspects of Love to throw myself into. As he had at our initial meeting, Nikolai Foster hugely impressed me. Precise, imaginative and hugely dedicated, he was one of the best directors I had ever worked with.
Aspects of Love is quite risqué by Andrew Lloyd Webber standards, with everybody making love to everybody else. My character, George, was married and also had a mistress, but what I liked most about the production was playing somebody my age and being the drama’s elderly statesman figure rather than running around still trying to be a juvenile lead like mutton dressed as lamb. It was something new for me and as we toured the length of Britain for more than six months, I enjoyed it.
As the run came to an end, I realised that Boogie Nights 2 and Aspects had whetted my appetite for musical theatre again. Now, though, I wanted to do something with depth that had more meaning for me personally.
There are certain themes that have reappeared throughout my career and the singular allure of fairgrounds, with their juxtaposition of fun and imminent violence, is one of them. An idea took root: why not write a musical using my own songs that was rooted in this fertile ground?
After all, I already had a perfectly good title: All the Fun of the Fair. It had been ideal for my concept album back in 1975 and it worked just as well now. Gripped by the heady excitement of a compelling, self-generated new project, I set to work.
Boogie Nights writer Jon Conway shared my enthusiasm for the idea and quickly came on board as my co-writer. As we plotted out a storyline, I realised how adroitly my songs could weave into the narrative, and a script came together remarkably quickly.
I knew that All the Fun of the Fair would stand or fall on the strength of this script. I was fairly confident that people would relate to the songs, as they had done previously when they had made them hits, but we needed a strong backdrop and a good reason to sing them.
It was also important that the storyline was not horribly corny. I knew the pitfalls of the musical genre and how awful they can be when not done well. Abba’s Mamma Mia! has run forever in the West End and you can’t argue with success but the script is just a way of getting from hit to hit. We wanted to integrate the songs and story into one coherent, dramatic whole.
I decided to play the musical’s patriarch, a strong but stubborn fairground owner and widower whose wife had died in tragic circumstances. His tight-knit family of workers include his own headstrong son and a sexy fortune-telling gypsy, and while I will not spoil All the Fun of the Fair for anyone who still wants to see it, let’s just say it does not take the easy, fairytale-ending option. There is something dark at its core.
The first travelling man who had ever seized my imagination was my mum’s Uncle Levi, the twinkling-eyed gypsy and romantic philosopher who had transfixed me as a boy picking hops in Kent. I named my character Levi Lee in his honour.
Alan Darlow, a very good friend for nearly twenty years, agreed to be the producer and proved incredibly understanding. I had only one director in mind and once Jon and I were happy with the script, I showed it to Nikolai Foster. He loved it, and my All the Fun of the Fair dream team was in place. Now it was time to cast it.
Jon and I sat in on the auditions, although Nikolai made the final decisions. The wonderful Louise English blew us all away and was clearly perfect for the hot-blooded, Tarot-reading Gypsy Rosa. After beginning her career as a member of Pan’s People on Top of the Pops, Louise had since become a very renowned and respected West End leading lady.
I also took note of a very attractive Welsh actress called Susan Hallam-Wright who auditioned well and ended up playing the part of Sally.
Under Nikolai’s strong tutelage, the production came together quickly and excitingly, on a great dynamic fairground set that featured dodgem cars and even a wall of death. The dramatic plot worked, and Jon and I were relieved that the songs seemed to merge into the storyline naturally and organically.
We opened in September 2008 with a week at the Churchill Theatre in Bromley. The first-night nerves were jangling, as they should be, but the audience were hugely appreciative and I felt proud to see my conceptual vision become reality.
Queen guitarist Brian May came to the first night and was very complimentary afterwards. I was grateful, especially as I had seen their band musical, We Will Rock You, and while the music was unquestionably wonderful, I’d found the story a bit daft. There again, it has now been running for ten years, so what do I know?
We took All the Fun of the Fair out on tour and as we rolled through Darlington, Brighton and Manchester, the reviews were great everywhere we went as critics appreciated we were trying to do something different with the often-corny musical format.
Susan and I started as a friendship and fairly quickly became something more. I found Susan a caring and loving person who shares my opinion on the importance of friends and family in life. We hung out more and more and very soon became inseparable.
Of course, there is a big age difference between us – but that didn’t bother us, and never has. Age really is just a number and luckily Susan is wise and mature beyond her years. On most issues, I generally find she has an older head on her shoulders than I do.
Being together made touring All the Fun of the Fair even more enjoyable and we rolled on into summer 2009. I must have got a taste for life on the road again, because after it finished I went almost straight into a series of rock shows that we called The Secret Tour.
This led up to Christmas, which had even greater cause for celebration than usual as Susan and I got engaged. It’s true what they say: when you know, you know.
Spring 2010 saw the start of a six-month run of All the Fun of the Fair at the Garrick Theatre in the West End. With Nikolai Foster unavailable, a new director took over in David Gilmore, and the cast also underwent a bit of a reshuffle.
Susan auditioned before David for a bigger role in the production. I stayed well out of it because it was his decision and not really my business, but even so I was delighted and very proud when she got the part of Mary
, the lovelorn daughter of Louise English’s fiery Gypsy Rosa.
The notoriously hard-to-please London theatre critics are often very hard on musicals as a genre, but their pens left All the Fun of the Fair relatively unscathed, with the Daily Telegraph’s write-up being typical:
The show has that essential but often elusive quality for any musical – heart … it becomes genuinely touching, and it is a pleasure to watch a West End production that puts its faith in its performers rather than hi-tech special effects.
There is often a sense of anti-climax when a major show comes to an end but there was no danger of that when we reached the end of our Garrick run. I had plenty to look forward to. On 20 September 2010, Susan and I got married.
We did so in style and it was an absolutely wonderful day. We went up to Susan’s home area and held the wedding in a nineteenth-century Church of Wales church called St Cross in the tiny village of Tal-y-bont near Bangor. Susan’s Taid (grandfather) was once the Archdeacon of Bangor.
We had an evening reception at a hotel on Anglesey and while the setting was impressive, the event certainly wasn’t stuffy: our first dance as a married couple was a Hokey-Cokey. My best man and best friend Mick the Greek’s wedding speech was hilarious. Occasionally, it was even funny when he meant it to be.
Our honeymoon in the Seychelles was everything we could have hoped for and as 2011 dawned we seemed set fair for a nicely enjoyable and undemanding year. I felt there was scope to make All the Fun of the Fair better still and decided to take it out on another regional tour, with Nikolai Foster back in the director’s chair. And work-wise, that would be pretty much all that the year held for me. I could take it easy.