Authors: David Essex
An upcoming young actor, Robert Lindsay, played Terry, Jim MacLaine’s best friend at school who studied hard, took his exams and went off to university while Jim was frittering his life away. Robert was a nice guy, but we didn’t get too close, largely I think because there was a tension between our screen characters that being too buddy-buddy could have removed.
Ringo, Keith and I enjoyed some very lively evenings after filming but I tried to keep a lid on my own behaviour. The film was a big deal for me – I knew its success or failure largely rested on my character – and it wouldn’t help if I was turning up with a raging hangover every day, so most nights I retreated back to Maureen, Verity and our cottage.
Not every night, though. American singer Harry Nilsson was staying in the main cast hotel, partly because Ray Connolly had taken some inspiration for the script from one of his songs, ‘1941’, but mostly because he was friends with Ringo. A few evenings degenerated into early-hours all-star jamming sessions: with Ringo, Keith and me, we had no shortage of drummers. The hotel just gave up and left us to it. Once or twice, I found myself creeping on to the set at 5 a.m. after a riotous all-nighter.
The Isle of Wight was a blast from start to finish and it remains a special place for me. Verity even took her first steps on the island. After seven weeks there, filming on
That’ll Be the Day
continued at Pinewood Studios, north of London. It was while I was kicking my heels, as usual, in the dressing room there one day that I took the quantum leap that was to empower me as a songwriter and define my career from that moment.
In
That’ll Be the Day
, Ringo’s character, Mike, had the line: ‘Only Americans can write rock songs.’ I didn’t believe that but it made me reflect on the extraordinary, pervasive influence that America and its iconography exerted over Britain’s infant, impressionable youth culture. I sat down to write ‘Rock On’. The first words came easy:
Hey, did you rock and roll?
Rock on, ooh, my soul
Hey did ya boogie too, did ya?
Then images of Americana and its 1950s totems of hip poured out of me and into the song: ‘
Summertime blues … blue suede shoes … blue jeans … Jimmy Dean
.’ Even as I scribbled the words down, the melody began to form in my head. ‘Rock On’ was one of the quickest songs that I ever wrote and it was to change my life.
Incidentally, it’s long been one of the minor banes of my life that people have always got the ‘Rock On’ lyrics wrong. The sheet music for the song mistakenly had them as being ‘
Hey, kid, rock and roll
’ and that version understandably stuck. But ‘
Hey, did you rock and roll
?’ was what I wrote.
With
That’ll Be the Day
in the can, it was time for me to return to Wyndham’s and
Godspell
. While I had already spent a long time playing Jesus, I felt fresh after the break and it was good to see my fellow cast members again. Crucially, it was also my chance to reunite with Jeff Wayne and get serious about music.
After one of our Sunday-band get-togethers, I mentioned to Jeff that I had started writing my own songs and wanted to make an album. When he asked to hear one, I sang a number I had just finished called ‘On and On’, which he liked. A light bulb came on over my head and I made Jeff an offer: ‘You work in the studio. Why don’t you produce the album and I’ll write it?’
Jeff seemed keen on the idea, and carried away with enthusiasm, I improved my offer: ‘You can publish the songs, as well.’ I didn’t really understand what publishing rights were, and if I am honest I still don’t, but Jeff was a far cannier music business operative than me and accepted eagerly. Derek was horrified when he heard what I had done, but a deal is a deal and I never attempted to back out of it, even if it would turn out to mean forfeiting countless thousands of pounds in earnings.
Jeff and I initially went into Advision Studios in Soho to record two songs: ‘Rock On’ and ‘On and On’. Jeff had an extensive contacts book and with a few phone calls was able to gather an extraordinary collection of musicians. As a first-session band, guitarist Chris Spedding, bassist Herbie Flowers, drummer Barry DeSouza and percussionist Ray Cooper were peerless, and they were to contribute to my sound for years.
As the session unfolded, I felt grateful that my tender, fledgling songs were in Jeff’s skilled hands. I sang ‘On and On’ with the rhythm section, leaving it to Jeff to organise the orchestra that would flesh out the song so fulsomely a few days later. Then we turned our attention to ‘Rock On’.
We had arrived in Advision with little more than a lyric and a spindly melody but in these talented musicians’ hands, my
baby
began to come to life. Herbie got the ball rolling, pulling out of the air the malevolent pulse of a bassline that began to define the song.
Something was happening here. I suggested that we add a 1950s Buddy Holly-style tape echo on my voice to the deliberately spartan, eerie-sounding track. Then when we reconvened in the studio the following week to finish the number, we piled on the weirdness.
Jeff had recruited a string section for this session, and we asked them to detune their instruments to give the track an even more skewed, foreboding air. They demurred, so we hit on Plan B: we would detune the classical players themselves by getting a few glasses of wine down them. In no time, they were sounding like an Indian mantra.
We were keen to make ‘Rock On’ sound more portentous yet so Jeff called up a multi-instrumentalist called Derek Wadsworth who played the didgeridoo. Derek arrived with it tied to the top of his station wagon and set up as Jeff and I eagerly awaited the alien noise that would add layers of mystery and mystique to the song. He blew into it. It sounded like a bull-elephant farting.
Once Jeff and I had picked ourselves off the ground and wiped the tears from our eyes, we explained to Derek that we didn’t need his flatulent didgeridoo, but he supplanted it with an electric trombone that had a rather more sombre timbre. The studio engineer, Gary Martin, added layers of echoes and special effects. By now, ‘Rock On’ sounded alien, mesmerising and out of this world.
It was too far out for David Puttnam. When I offered him ‘Rock On’ to use in
That’ll Be the Day
, he turned it down, explaining that he felt it was ‘too weird’ for the film. He did, however, include it on the soundtrack album that accompanied the movie.
Not that the movie needed any help from my song. When
That’ll Be the Day
opened on 12 April 1973, its reception and reviews rivalled those that had been afforded to
Godspell
. The critics admired its edginess, teenagers loved its brooding angst and authenticity, and suddenly it was topping box-office charts as the hottest British film around.
When you have both the lead in a smash-hit musical and the star part in a number-one film, you are not going to remain anonymous. The first half of 1973 was when my previously low-key life was turned upside-down and I went from being a struggling bit-part performer to becoming some kind of phenomenon: what would today be known as a celebrity. It was quite a shock to the system.
The trend had been building slowly during my first stint in
Godspell
. There were increasing numbers of people, normally girls, waiting at the Wyndham’s stage door after performances: there were more and more autographs to sign. It was tolerable, even nice, but after
That’ll Be the Day
it went into overdrive.
For the first time, it became news if I walked down the street. People would do a double take; girls would stop me, wanting a chat or a photograph; drivers would beep their horns and wave furiously, or even screech to a halt. Despite being naturally shy, I had to get used to being public property.
This was a life-changing and curious side effect to my success and, without wanting to sound churlish, not something that I had ever remotely craved. I had never wanted to be famous. Even when I first set eyes on Georgie Fame in the Flamingo, I longed to be not the spotlit singer but the drummer, anonymous at the back of the stage. My ideal would have been a career hidden behind the cymbals, smoking a cheroot in a black polo-necked sweater.
This was something else entirely. The reception for
That’ll Be the Day
also propelled the soundtrack album, including ‘Rock On’, to number one in the albums chart, where it lodged for weeks. I am not sure that even Derek, with his seemingly bottomless reservoir of faith in me, had ever envisaged success on quite this scale.
My newfound fame also had a knock-on effect on
Godspell
, and not only at the stage door. Where the audiences had previously been the sort of refined theatre-goers that I first saw at shows with Derek, now there was an influx of younger, excitable fans who wanted to see
That’ll Be the Day
’s David Essex and probably couldn’t have cared less about the teachings of Christ.
One casualty was the
Godspell
interval in which we invited the audience to come on stage for a glass of rosé and a chat with the cast. Whereas I used to be asked my views on theology and divinity, suddenly I was deluged with scores of fans asking me to sign photos as the rest of the actors milled around, ignored. Jesus spent the interval signing autographs, which seemed rather contrary to the message of the play.
It’s a tremendous testament to the
Godspell
cast that they never seemed jealous of this imbalance of attention but remained
fiercely
loyal and protective of me. One night, Jeremy Irons and I had an after-show plate of pasta at Luigi’s and he lugubriously reflected on his own obscurity next to my burgeoning fame. Yet I knew it would also happen for him: he was too good an actor to stay unknown.
Maureen was naturally delighted that I had become an overnight success after a mere ten years of slogging away, and thankfully it put an end to any financial worries. We were able to move from Seven Kings to a town house in Chigwell Row, Essex. I could even buy myself a £1,750 second-hand convertible Mercedes, as well as a Renault for Maureen to chauffeur Verity around in.
The upside of fame was that suddenly record companies were falling over themselves to release my music. Now I had some sort of name, labels that had never even returned Derek’s calls before were locked in a bidding war for me. Eventually, after many transatlantic phone calls, Derek, Jeff and I signed a five-album deal with CBS Records.
CBS soon learned that they had signed a very stubborn artist. The label’s executives felt that ‘Rock On’ was too avant-garde and, as David Puttnam had said, ‘weird’ to be my debut single for them. They preferred the more conventional ‘On and On’ to be the A-side, but I saw ‘Rock On’ as a statement of intent and was determined to get my own way.
However, once they had agreed to release it, the company pushed the boat out with ‘Rock On’. Fashion and celebrity photographer David Bailey did the cover photo shoot, but I found the experience all a bit overblown and have never liked the photo on the sleeve of ‘Rock On’.
CBS also hired the ballroom of Quaglino’s restaurant in Soho to celebrate their signing of me and to launch the single. The room was packed with the great and the good of the music biz and the event could have got a little overwhelming, but luckily I had a good excuse to slip away – I had a
Godspell
show to do.
The reviews for ‘Rock On’ were mostly favourable. One critic waxed fairly lyrical: ‘More than just a pretty face, more than a slender waist, this man has the guts to put out a positively thirst-quenching hit 45 – a rumble of bass, a voice laced in reverb and glance back to blue jeans, baby queens and James Dean. A feat of subtleties – it will mess with your head.’ However, it was the promotional appearances that showed me how big ‘Rock On’ was about to be – and how my life was set to change for ever.
CBS had arranged signing sessions at a handful of London record shops. I anticipated fairly low-key events but could not have been more wrong, as became clear when Derek and I turned up at the first store in Streatham, which resembled a war zone – if wars were fought solely by screaming teenage girls.
It was absolute mayhem. The record store had also clearly under-estimated how many people would show up and their low-key security staff were hopelessly overwhelmed. I spent an hour trapped behind a desk signing singles and photos as girls sobbed and told me they loved me, then a lot longer waiting for the crowd outside to disperse so I could get out in one piece.
There were similarly chaotic scenes in Bond Street, where a thousand-plus crowd actually stopped the traffic in Oxford Street, and at a signing in Lewisham in south London, another occasion when the store’s security consisted of a little old man who was no match for hundreds of shrieking, oestrogen-driven girls.
With his premises besieged by more than 2,000 delirious fans, the Lewisham record shop owner had no choice but to lock me in the storeroom for my safety and call the police. Even the boys in blue were unable to clear a way through the sea of teenagers. I was due in the West End for
Godspell
, and the situation looked desperate until my CBS plugger, Steve Colyer, had a brainwave.
Steve toured a few local premises’ back yards and returned with a pile of dustbin lids. Wielding them as shields against the hordes like King Arthur’s knights, we fought our way through the squealing mob to the car. Everybody was trying to grab at me and the dents in the battered dustbin lids told of the strength of their desire but somehow we made it, arriving at Wyndham’s with ten minutes to spare.
How did it feel suddenly to be at the centre of this madness? It was exciting, of course, and an exhilarating adrenaline rush, but my main emotions were bemusement and embarrassment. Two years earlier, I had been signing on the dole and applying for van-driving jobs. Where had this come from? What did it mean?
I guess the years of failure that had preceded these days of success helped me to cope with it. I had spent enough time broke, unemployed, understudying and playing gigs to two men and not even a dog that I was grounded enough not to let this adulation go to my head. Or, at least, that was what I hoped. The truth was, it was hard to make any sense of such hysteria.