Authors: David Essex
In quick succession, I met a classical actor type named Roy who had a bald head, glasses and an immaculate speaking voice; a posh, miserable young actress called Susanne; two nice, friendly character actors; a female musical director; a black-clad, ginger-haired female stage manager and a very white girl who looked as if she lived under a toadstool. Only one cast member really stood out: a huge, imposing Zulu called Dambuza.
The company tended to learn three or four productions and take them out on tour, and Zack ran us through our schedule. Over the next three weeks we were to rehearse the first show, a long-running Broadway musical called
The Fantasticks
, to performance levels before learning two other offerings on the road.
The musical director, a petite American girl in her thirties with glasses and a lot of hair, played us the score to
The Fanta-sticks
, in which I was to play the juvenile lead, Matt. There were elements of
West Side Story
in its plot of two star-crossed young lovers from warring families and it had some good songs, with ‘Soon It’s Gonna Rain’ and ‘Try to Remember’ standing out.
Oh, Kay!
was also a musical, a George and Ira Gershwin offering that in truth I thought was a load of bollocks, and in which I was hopelessly miscast as a duke. The repertoire was completed by a drama,
To Dorothy a Son
, in which I was to have the happily non-onerous role of an off-stage phone voice.
I crammed my part in
The Fantasticks
at home and on the long tube journeys from Newbury Park to Bayswater, and was pleased to discover that learning lines came pretty easily to me. Zack even gave me some drumming to do when he learned of my musical background. We began our tour in Paignton in Devon and on the first night I didn’t feel at all nervous until I heard the audience applaud the overture.
That was when the adrenaline kicked in. There was a slight out-of-body air to my stage debut, with my mind racing and the action appearing at times to be in slow motion. Was this really happening? Was it going well? Happily, the audience appeared to think so, giving us a generous ovation at the final curtain. Derek, who had travelled down for the opening night, seemed very pleased and also gave me a few useful tips.
We quickly settled into a routine of seaside digs and end-of-the-pier theatre shows, learning the other plays as we went along. I even got to make use of my tap dancing in
Oh, Kay!
, although for obvious reasons I didn’t feel terribly convincing as a blue-blooded aristocrat.
I normally roomed with Dambuza, who was a fascinating man. He had fled South Africa during the apartheid regime, playing the lead role of a boxer in a West End show named
King Kong
and then securing asylum to stay in Britain. We would talk for hours into the night and I would sit transfixed as Dambuza regaled me in his rich baritone with tales of Africa and his fight for freedom.
The company was fairly closely knit but while it was a bit more civilised than sleeping in a pool of petrol in Mood Indigo’s
van,
there were similarities. The same attitude prevailed of what happens on the road stays on the road, and I had flings with both the ginger-haired stage manager (I wore her down) and the American musical director (she wore me down). Zack, for his part, tried his luck with any female around.
As Derek had predicted, I learned a lot from my first repertory tour, but as it drew to an end I was hankering to return to music, as usual. Fortunately Derek had been busy on that score, securing the interest of Mike Leander, an upcoming record producer who had been working with a singer called Paul Raven (who, incidentally, was later to become Gary Glitter).
We met up and Mike suggested that I should record a cover of ‘She’s Leaving Home’, a song that he had arranged on the album of the moment, the Beatles’
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
. Due to a deal that Mike had with a label called Uni Records, an offshoot of Universal Pictures, my version would be released in America only.
I was impressed with Mike, a confident and flamboyant figure who, unlike Bunny, seemed music industry through and through and was the epitome of a top record producer. In the studio, I was taken with his foppish air, his meticulous professionalism and, most of all, his orange suit as we tackled ‘She’s Leaving Home’ and a song that Mike had written for the B-side, ‘He’s a Better Man Than Me’.
Mike told me to sing the latter song in a very English accent, as the Beatles and the British invasion meant that Americans could not get enough of swinging London. His idea was vindicated. When the single was released in the States in summer 1967,
DJs
flipped it over and played ‘He’s a Better Man Than Me’. It even squeezed into the Billboard chart at number seventy-eight.
In truth, I was underwhelmed by this chart placing but Derek and Mike were delighted and Mike volunteered to produce a follow-up, to be released on both sides of the Atlantic. We settled on a song by US songwriter Randy Newman, which suited me: I liked his sarcastic slant on everything, and the fact that he can hardly sing.
Newman’s ‘Love Story’ was a typically quirky little number and one of the first times I felt as if I was singing in my own voice, rather than trying to impersonate a black American blues belter. Released in May 1968, it failed to chart but had the distinction of being the first and last record of mine to be played by the BBC’s arbiter-of-hip DJ, John Peel. But Mike Leander expected success, so that was the end of our relationship.
Another experiment saw me twinned with a black girl called Rozaa by a three-man songwriting team called Arnold, Martin and Morrow. We recorded a duet with the catchy title of ‘You Are the Spark that Lights the Flame’, but while Rozaa was a nice girl, our flame remained resolutely unlit and I had another non-hit under my belt.
Derek also put me in touch with a composer and producer called Tony Macaulay and we recorded a number called ‘Just for Tonight’, which didn’t do anything. Tony then asked me to sing another tune he had written, ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’, but I turned it down out of hand, without even hearing the song. ‘It’s a stupid title,’ I told Derek. ‘It sounds like something you might sing to a cow.’ Undeterred by my rejection, Tony recorded it with
the
Foundations, who took it to number two in Britain and number three in America. Thinking back, that wasn’t my best snap decision.
Derek was still arranging a few live appearances and showcase gigs to get my name around and earn a bit of money. I did a couple of jazz-club gigs, singing standards with the Dudley Moore Trio. Dudley was friendly enough: he was working with Peter Cook, but wasn’t yet the huge name he later became.
I also sang a residency at the Valbonne Club, a painfully hip venue in the West End with an inside swimming pool and a vast fish tank by the bandstand. It didn’t work out. The loud music killed off the poor fish and when the band messed up the filter system by leaping into the pool fully clothed, our residency was terminated.
Somewhat more foreboding was a show at the El Morocco club in Soho owned by the legendary East End twins and villains, Reggie and Ronnie Kray. I was apprehensive but the show went well, and Derek and I were relaxing afterwards when the summons came back: ‘Ronnie Would Like a Word.’
The stocky, impassive figure awaiting me certainly had an aura about him. Ignoring Derek standing next to me, he cut straight to the chase: ‘Do you want a manager?’
‘I’ve got one, thanks,’ I told him.
‘Is he any good?’ Ronnie asked me.
‘Yeah, he’s great.’
‘Well, if you need any help, son, you know where to come,’ he concluded, indicating that the conversation was over. Derek suggested that it might be a good time to leave.
Even if the offer of being managed by a legendary gangster had appealed to me – which it didn’t – I wouldn’t have jettisoned Derek. His belief in me remained immense and passionate and even when things were going badly, like now, I was still grateful for his efforts.
My faith in him could easily have been slightly shaken by my next booking, though. After an audition during which I sang a Mood Indigo song that I had written, ‘Any Day Now’, I secured the juvenile lead of Prince Zelim in a Christmas show – to all intents and purposes, a pantomime – called
The Magic Carpet
in Guildford.
This was a bizarre experience.
The Magic Carpet
cast were a bunch of overwrought thespians and the director was a luvvie determined to eradicate any trace of an East End accent from his Prince Zelim. As his withering admonishment ‘Vowel sounds, David!’ echoed around the rehearsal studio for the fiftieth time, I knew how Eliza Doolittle must have felt.
My time on stage was mostly spent wearing a turban and acting opposite a thirty-foot dragon. It was a bit of a slog, although I did enjoy the night that the principal dancer, reacting against the boredom and banality of it all, danced his big solo with a paper bag over his head.
Socially, I was seeing a lot of Frank. We went on holiday with a couple of other mates to a chalet in Leysdown in Kent. It was a typical English holiday in that it rained all week. The sole highlight was Frank, trying to impress a girl, tearing around the campsite in his souped-up Mini with go-faster stripes, losing control and demolishing the front wall of our chalet, coming to
rest
by the sink, where I was washing up. ‘Cup of tea, Frank?’ I asked him.
Frank was still running El Grotto, and on a night off from my Prince Zelim turban I went down and spotted Maureen, the girl who had caught my eye on a previous visit, and her friend Kath. I commented on them to Frank. ‘I’m sure they’re lesbians,’ he assured me. ‘They never dance with blokes – only each other.’
Thankfully, Frank’s instincts were as off-target as his sexual politics (but give him a break, it was the sixties). Maureen and Kath came over to the bar next to me to buy a drink, and Kath greeted me: ‘Haven’t seen you for ages.’
‘No, I’ve been working,’ I said. ‘Let me buy you a drink.’ I was chatting away to Kath, but it was Maureen that I was really interested in. She quickly joined in the conversation and was just as outgoing as Kath: beautiful, vivacious and with a winning line in funny banter. They were quite the double act.
We began to hang out and slowly but surely Maureen and I began a proper old-fashioned courtship. At first I was still very focused on my career, or lack of it, but Maureen was fantastic fun and great company. She was also very switched on and with it, which I liked, and ahead of all the latest trends from working in boutiques on the King’s Road and in Carnaby Street.
She was the daughter of an East End car dealer, Alfie, and I got on well with him, her Irish mother, Rita, and her brother Ronnie. I was puzzled by an early trip to a Wimpy Bar where Maureen refused to eat anything and just sipped at a frothy coffee. She later confessed she was too embarrassed to eat in front of me in case she got messy. We were having a great time, and after a few weeks I realised this was something special.
Despite this, our relationship was a bit of a slow-burner at first, partly because we were both still living with our parents. They had always been great but I felt ready to move out, and began renting a bedsit in Earl’s Court. I was a child of my time: the décor was all Che Guevara and Jimi Hendrix posters and joss sticks. Well, it made sense back then.
With my music career enduring another hiatus, Derek wanted to skew things back towards the acting side and decided that I needed an agent. We started at the very top when Derek secured a meeting with Leslie Grade, who together with his brothers Lew Grade and Bernard Delfont seemed to run British showbiz at the time.
The Grades’ empire covered variety, film and theatre, and in between puffs on his giant cigar, the elderly, larger-than-life Leslie magnanimously agreed to represent me for 10 per cent of my earnings. He dispatched me to audition to be an understudy for an American musical called
Your Own Thing
that was due to open at the Comedy Theatre. I got the job, but the show closed before I got a chance to appear.
I auditioned for hippy musical
Hair
at the Shaftesbury Theatre and the producers wanted to use me but Leslie had other ideas. ‘Taking your clothes off and running around in the nude? You don’t want to do that!’ he advised me. In truth, I also had reservations about that aspect, so that was that.
Derek also secured me a few very minor film roles. This was a new experience and I enjoyed the filming but I think my fleeting appearances were too short even to count as cameos. I wore a brown suit and had a couple of lines in a film called
Smashing Time
. It was fun, but to this day I haven’t seen the film.
In a movie called
Assault
, I played a young man who goes into a chemist’s shop that is promptly blown up. The star was Frank Finlay, who took an avuncular interest in me and brought me a cup of tea in the canteen. Our paths were to cross again years later.
I spent a long boring day hanging around a wedding in a suit as an extra on
All Coppers Are
, whose title was changed to
In the Devil’s Garden
for America. I even dipped my toe into the saucy, uniquely British milieu of the
Carry On
films, although sadly my contribution was never to see the light of day.
Set in the court of Henry VIII,
Carry On Henry
was a typical lewd romp starring the
Carry On
A-team of Sid James, Kenneth Williams, Barbara Windsor, Charles Hawtrey, Joan Sims and Kenneth Connor. As a lowly extra, I had no dealings with these luminaries, and in fact was existing on a different plane entirely: I was so broke that I had to return a pile of empty bottles to afford the petrol to get to the set.
After hanging around for a couple of days in Tudor dress, my big moment came during a serfs’ meeting addressed by Kenneth Connor, when I had to shout: ‘What about the workers?’ I was pleased with how it went, but this cinematic land-mark was destined to hit the cutting-room floor. Like the failure of ‘Thigh High’, maybe it was for the best.