Authors: David Essex
Godspell
had made me but as my time on the show neared its end a few of the performances began to drag. A lot of Jesus’s perorations began with ‘I tell you this…’ and once or twice I
proclaimed
those words then gaped at Julie Covington open-mouthed, my mind full of tumbleweed, until the helpful whisper of the prompter got my thought process back on track.
As my last night in the show – 15 September 1973 – neared, my life was pandemonium. Tickets for my final performance were changing hands for absurdly inflated sums.
That’ll Be the Day
had taken up residency in cinemas up and down the land. And to top it all, ‘Rock On’ had reached number three in the BBC’s Top Forty – and number one in the
NME
singles chart.
At the heart of the mayhem, I was concentrating on keeping my head together and getting through each day, but looking back, it is extraordinary to remember how my theatre, cinema and music careers had all come together at exactly the same time. I’m not sure that any artist has repeated that achievement, even to this day. So maybe Derek was right – I was an all-rounder, after all.
The
Godspell
producers had hired my
That’ll Be the Day
co-star Robert Lindsay to replace me as Jesus, after I recommended him to them. It was clearly time to move on, but even so my departure from
Godspell
was hugely affecting.
In my two years on the show, the cast had grown spectacularly close. My last night as Jesus was charged with emotion, and as the clown disciples said their goodbyes to me in their individual ways during the Last Supper, I thought I would break down in tears. From such unpromising beginnings, directing ourselves when no theatre would touch us, we had been through so much. I even tried to capture the exhilaration and sadness of that last night in a song on my first album,
Rock On
, called ‘September 15th’.
Normally when productions end, actors lavishly swap promises to keep in touch like people who have met on holiday and then go off on their merry way, never to meet again. It is testament to the extraordinary closeness of the
Godspell
cast that we still hold regular get-togethers more than thirty years on. It was a unique experience in all our lives.
They say Jesus saves: he had certainly saved me.
Godspell
had transported me from anonymity to fame and fortune and given my career the kick-start I had feared it wouldn’t get. One thing was patently obvious: my life would never be the same again.
WITH
GODSPELL
FINALLY
over, I was desperate to focus on my musical career. Theatre and cinema were great but, as ever, a big part of me still longed to sing the blues. I knew that I only had a short window to get things moving: before
That’ll Be the Day
, I had signed a two-film deal with David Puttnam and shooting on the sequel,
Stardust
, was to begin early in 1974.
Firstly, though, it was time to re-jig Team Essex. Ever since he became my manager, Derek had been tremendous, but now the rules of engagement had changed. Almost overnight his charge had gone from being a hapless wannabe to a bona fide star, and every day he was swamped with requests for TV appearances, newspaper interviews and photo sessions. He needed help.
Derek had until then been a one-man band running my career from his spare room in Harlow in Essex, but now we set up an office in a mews building in St John’s Wood, near the famous Abbey Road Studios. We also recruited a lovely and gracious lady named Madge Godwin, who had been working for
Godspell
producer Binky Beaumont, to be my PA. (Had somebody told me two years earlier that I would need a PA, I would have given a bitter laugh and gone back to signing on.)
For some reason, magazines seemed to have an insatiable desire for fresh photographs of me. Photo shoots were one of my least favourite activities, especially after the awkward David Bailey experience, but I got around that by doing a few sessions with an old mate, Colin Davey.
Colin had been at Plessey’s with me, and unlike me had actually finished his apprenticeship to be an electrical engineer before leaving to become a photographer. These sessions, which thanks to magazines like
Jackie
finished up on bedroom walls all over the country, were basically two old mates having a laugh and trying to keep a straight face. We shot a lot of them in a studio in Leytonstone down the road from my old manor, until the local kids got wind that I was there and besieged the building.
Jeff and I were using every spare second we could find to record my debut album, which was also to be called
Rock On
. After the success of ‘Rock On’ and ‘On and On’ we kept the same team of musicians, and slowly but surely a record was unfolding that I would be very proud of.
That’ll Be the Day
was meanwhile being released around the world, and I became no stranger to the inside of aeroplanes as I was bounced off to various European cities to promote it. It was exciting to visit new countries and often pleasantly bizarre. On French TV shows, for some inexplicable reason, I always seemed to be preceded by a puppeteer or a juggler.
I was also called upon to attend a few continental premieres, but the possible boredom factor of seeing
That’ll Be the Day
again and again was alleviated at the screenings where the local film distributors had over-dubbed the film in their own language,
meaning
that this Shipman County graduate could enjoy watching himself discoursing in fluent German or Spanish.
Nearer to home, the steady progression of ‘Rock On’ up the singles chart led to an invite to go on
Top of the Pops
. This was obviously a huge deal. Like every music fan I watched the show virtually every week and its guaranteed massive viewing figures and subsequent record sales meant it was hugely powerful.
Despite this,
Top of the Pops
was not to prove an easy experience. Archaic Musicians’ Union rules intended to protect the rights of session musicians meant that artists who went on the show had to either re-record the track in a BBC studio the day before, or else play it live on the show with the
Top of the Pops
orchestra.
This second option didn’t really work for Jeff and me because we used such unusual instrumentation. It was unlikely the BBC orchestra would possess an electric trombone like Derek Wadsworth’s. So we re-recorded ‘Rock On’ the day before, trying to persuade the BBC’s bored, jobsworth studio producer in his shaggy beard and brown coat to add the layers of dub and echo that made the track so unique.
We had further problems on the day. I turned up at Television Centre in my normal gear of black jeans and a black sleeveless T-shirt, and was halfway through my rehearsal of ‘Rock On’, singing live to the re-recorded backing track, when the show’s moustachioed, autocratic producer, Robin Nash, came wafting down from the gallery.
‘What are you wearing, David?’ he asked, a distinct note of reprimand in his voice. ‘I’m afraid you will disappear into the
background,
dear!’ (This being the mighty
Top of the Pops
, there was obviously no question of altering the background to suit the artist’s requirements.) ‘Have you nothing white?’
I didn’t have many white clothes, as it happened, but into my mind came a rarely worn cream suit hanging in the back of my wardrobe. I phoned Maureen, and a BBC car was dispatched to Essex to pick it up. I accessorised it with a carnation in the lapel, it looked OK on the screen, and I went on to wear that outfit so many times that it became part of my image.
With my career progressing so well on all fronts, I was finally making some decent money, and Maureen, Verity and I moved again. We bought a lovely house deep in the Essex countryside in a rather grand-sounding place named Havering-Atte-Bower, near to the less grand-sounding Romford. The estate agent told us it contained elements of Henry VIII’s hunting lodge. More pertinent to us was that it would give us more privacy than the gaff in Chigwell Row.
Maureen, Verity and I had happy times in that house, although for now we weren’t having enough of them. Now that everyone suddenly wanted a piece of me, my relentless schedule meant I was away a lot more than was ideal. I missed them, and looking back now, it can’t have been easy for them either.
My next trip was to be even further afield: America.
That’ll Be the Day
and ‘Rock On’ had come out there simultaneously and while the lack of a general release had hampered the movie, the single was taking off. Derek and I embarked on a whistle-stop promotional tour of eleven US cities in fourteen days.
For me, this was the big one. America had always loomed large in my life and imagination, from the blues music I devoured
to
the films, fashions and iconography I loved. The United States always seemed like the centre of the world to me, so distant and so glamorous, and here was my chance to see it at first hand.
Sadly, the trip was a little bit of a disappointment. I had such an inhumanly crammed promotional schedule that Derek and I saw little in two weeks apart from hotel rooms, TV studios and radio stations. I spent a fortnight having the same conversation every day with different journalists in different cities.
Nevertheless, one memory burns bright even today. I will never forget the moment that our yellow cab from JFK swung on to Brooklyn Bridge and I saw the skyscrapers of Manhattan for the first time. Like so many people, I fell in love with New York the second I set eyes on it, and it still feels to me like the ultimate city.
I realised on that trip that the American media had a different perception of me from their British counterparts. At home, the teenage fans and what were perceived as my heartthrob pop-idol looks were already leading some critics to perceive me as just a piece of fluff. It didn’t matter that I wrote all of my own songs: for some people, I would always be a lightweight.
The best example of this, incidentally, came in the attitude of the most determinedly cutting-edge UK paper, the
New Musical Express
. When I first broke through, the
NME
plastered me on its cover and raved about me. As soon as the screaming girls appeared, they didn’t want to know. One of their most august critics, Charles Shaar Murray, even dismissed me as singing like ‘a constipated stoat’ (which, frankly, I’d love to hear).
The US journalists took a less snobby and dismissive approach to me and I was granted an interview with the printed talisman of
their
counter-culture,
Rolling Stone
. Their extremely earnest, John Lennon-lookalike interviewer was particularly taken with the lyric that straddled the bridge section of ‘Rock On’:
And where do we go from here?
Which is the way that’s clear?
He clearly felt this was a particularly profound encapsulation of the existential dilemmas facing modern Western society. Was it a depiction of the post-Vietnam generation, craving direction and moral purpose, he asked me? He may have been somewhat disappointed by my candid reply: ‘No, it just rhymed.’
There again, he was even more aghast when our two-hour interview drew to a close and he discovered his tape machine had failed to record it. ‘Could we do it again?’ he pleaded. With my schedule, there could only be one answer: ‘No.’
I also took a trip to Japan to meet the bigwigs at CBS there. It was a distinctly surreal visit. Their HQ was over sixteen floors of a skyscraper and the executives took me into a lift with them. On every single floor they stopped the lift and the workers on that floor, waiting eagerly outside the lift, applauded me frantically for three or four minutes as soon as the doors opened. This bizarre meet-and-greet exercise probably lasted nearly an hour.
Back in Britain, my relentless work schedule continued apace in November as CBS released
Rock On
and a second single off the album, ‘Lamplight’. For whatever reason, Jeff and I were still looking to push back the sonic boundaries, and on ‘Lamplight’ we booked a blacksmith from Leyton to come in and play his
anvil.
Like the farting didgeridoo, it didn’t work out, and I ended up bashing out the part on a fire extinguisher.
My newfound fame led to me picking up a couple of awards, and it really was a case of from the sublime to the ridiculous. The Royal Variety Club named me Most Promising Newcomer, which I gratefully accepted with a speech at their ceremony. I was less bothered about being named Rear of the Year a few days later. I didn’t even turn up to collect that one. Maybe I was being arsey.
It was flattering to be asked to play Pete Townshend’s part in a live concert version of
Tommy
, Pete’s new rock opera for the Who. It was also a good chance to catch up with my old mucker Keith Moon. My main memory of our sole performance, at the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park, north London, was that the theatre was so cold that the string section were wearing gloves.
That year, 1973, had been a whirlwind for me. As the year ended, the
Rock On
album was in the Top Ten, as was the ‘Lamplight’ single;
That’ll Be the Day
was still hanging around the album chart; and across the Atlantic, ‘Rock On’ was climbing the Billboard 100. Maureen, Verity and I bunkered down for a desperately needed quiet family Christmas in Essex. It was just as well we did – because the next year was going to be even more mental.
THE SUCCESS OF
That’ll Be the Day
meant that David Puttnam had inevitably exercised the option in my contract obliging me also to appear in its sequel.
Stardust
– which originally had the working title of
Sooner or Later
– continued the story of Jim MacLaine but for me it was a far more emotionally punishing experience than its predecessor.
That’ll Be the Day
had ended with Jim walking out on his wife and child, buying a guitar and setting off on a mission to find musical fame and fortune.
Stardust
bore the tagline ‘Show Me a Boy Who Never Wanted to Be a Rock Star and I’ll Show You a Liar’, but this could just as easily have read ‘Be Careful What You Wish For – It Might Come True’.