Authors: David Essex
Possibly my most perilous encounter with out-of-control fans came when I was due to go into Radio One for an interview with breakfast show DJ Tony Blackburn. Blackburn had talked this up on his show, and as we were about to leave, my promotions man, Colin, received a call warning that an enormous crowd had gathered outside Broadcasting House.
The most sensible reaction would have been to postpone the appearance, but desperate not to lose this high-profile publicity opportunity, Colin had a bright idea. I had a blacked-out Mini, and Colin suggested that I went with Bev in that while Colin travelled in the limo with one of CBS’s promotional cardboard cut-outs of me. The theory was that the fans would mob the limo, leaving Bev and I to scuttle into Radio One unmolested.
It’s hard to believe now that we agreed to this ridiculous plan, but we did. Arriving in convoy at Portland Place, we found thousands of girls waiting. Fans may be many things but they are not stupid and they paid little attention to the limo, instead converging on my poor little Mini as soon as they saw it appear.
In no time there were so many girls on top of the car that we thought the roof would give way. The weight broke the back springs. It was scary, and possibly the only time that I ever saw Bev panic. ‘Stay here, I’ll go for help!’ he said and forced his way out of the Mini as I locked the door behind him.
I was now on my own, trapped in my poor battered Mini and engulfed in a sea of shrieking girls. Twenty or so faces pressed against the car’s windscreen and windows, and fans
fought
behind them to get to the front. I was terrified, and at the same time – ridiculous as it sounds – I had no idea how to react.
What was the protocol? Should I smile at the girls? Frown at them? Ask them to get off my car? I settled for staring vaguely into the middle distance as if I were somehow oblivious to the carnage around me. But I couldn’t help catching the eye of a black girl with her face squashed against the windscreen, who helpfully explained their motivation in this scene: ‘You know why, don’t you? It’s because we f****** love you!’
Tony Blackburn was not to get his scoop interview. Bev fought his way back through the crowd, scrambled into the Mini and explained that the BBC commissionaires’ response to his plea for help had been to tell him: ‘Don’t you bring him in here!’ The good news was that the police were on their way. By the time they arrived, half of the West End seemed locked down.
It was yet more evidence that as 1974 ended and the dust settled on my chaotic first tour, I was arguably the most successful pop star and performing artist in Britain. For the first time, I became grateful for the years of failure and obscurity that I had endured when only Derek had any faith in me, because those hard-knock days of rejections were helping me to stay grounded.
I might have been enjoying number-one records, selling out venues and entertaining thousands of besotted fans, but I knew I was still the same East End boy who had driven mini cabs, trod the boards in rep and made up the numbers in pantomimes. No matter what
Jackie
magazine might think, I hadn’t turned into a god.
It was ironic that America, the country that I had idolised as a teenager and whose music had first inspired me, had a far more measured and level-headed reaction to me. That was just what I felt I needed then, so when CBS returned to us still wanting US dates, I was ready.
There was only one place to kick off: New York. Our show at the legendary Bottom Line venue was packed, with people such as Rod Stewart in the audience, and I loved the fact that we could hear ourselves think during the show and the audience actually listened to the music.
Around the same time in New York City I attended the Grammy Awards at the Uris Theatre on Broadway. I was nominated for a Grammy for best new artist and also presented an award and sang a duet to a TV audience of millions with jazz legend Sarah Vaughan, which put Derek into seventh heaven.
The Grammies is a very stiff and formal ceremony that seems to last for days and after a couple of hours I was pretty bored of hanging around the venue booted and suited. I had lost Derek and had no security with me but decided to stretch my legs and have a fag, so I wandered out through the theatre’s front door – and was immediately besieged by 500 autograph hunters.
I was trying to sign something for everyone but it was all getting a bit overwhelming when a black limousine suddenly pulled up alongside me, a window lowered and a voice emerged: ‘David, get in here!’ I had no idea who it was, but opened the door and hopped in, to find myself sitting next to John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
We had a short chat as we cruised the New York streets. John asked me, ‘Are you going to the after-show party?’ I don’t think
so,
I told him. It’s not really my thing. ‘No, me neither,’ he concurred, and after some more amiable chitchat they dropped me back at my hotel and headed off to the Dakota Building.
Back on the road, my States tour was short but memorable. In St Louis we played to 28,000 people in a vast stadium, supported by US soft rockers Journey. They had overrun their slot by twenty minutes and showed no signs of stopping when Derek, losing his rag, pulled out the main plug and plunged the stage into darkness.
Georgia yielded rock ’n’ roll antics when a band member – no name, no pack drill – decided to pee into the hotel’s ice-making machine. The management didn’t take kindly to this, and we had to make a run for it into the woods around the hotel as the local sheriffs fired their guns over our heads.
In Los Angeles we played the Roxy on Sunset Strip. Led Zeppelin came down to see us, and when we hung out with them after the show, Zep told us that FBI agents were guarding their apartments and remained very diligent about protecting famous people after the Manson Family murders.
Well, that had been five years ago and nothing untoward was about to happen to us now, right? Wrong. Taking my leave of Zep, I returned to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where Maureen and Verity had already gone to bed. Slipping between the sheets next to Maureen, I was drifting off when I saw a figure by the bed.
‘Verity?’ I asked, sitting up. No: we had a burglar. Maureen also woke up and took a swing at the intruder with her handbag as he bolted from the end of the bed. She succeeded only in smashing me full in the face as he ran from the room.
We then went into slapstick mode. I jumped out of bed to give chase, but was naked, and so grabbed what I thought were my jeans. Wrong again. They were Maureen’s, and as I hopped around trying to get them on and then off, I crashed my toe against the leg of the bed. Eventually I stumbled to Verity’s room, where she and her nanny, Shirley, were safe and sound.
Zeppelin’s talk of the Manson murders was still echoing in my head as I nervously opened the door to the suite’s lounge, half-expecting to see naked hippies waving knives. It was empty, but immediately the phone rang. It was the LAPD, telling me they had apprehended two men running down the fire escape from our suite.
I met the police officer in the lobby and he quickly proved that the LAPD hadn’t made any gains in the humour or people-skills departments since I had met them on Sunset Strip a few months earlier. First, he insisted I had to identify the two intruders. I explained that this would be hard as I had only seen one of them, in silhouette in the dark, but I would have a go.
The cop led me to his patrol car where two men were sitting in cuffs in the back. I peered in the window, which one of them promptly spat on. The officer then produced a small packet of brown powder. The thieves had dropped it as they ran away, he told me. It was heroin: as I was a rock star, he assumed it was mine?
I hastily assured the cop that I had never seen heroin before and had no idea what it even looked like, adding that Maureen and I would like to locate our missing cash and credit cards, if possible. I wished I’d never spoken, as the officer then insisted on me accompanying him on a painstaking search of the entire hotel.
We took the lift to every single floor. The officer would spring out, his gun levelled in classic LAPD style, survey the scene then nod to me that the coast was clear, at which point we rooted around each corridor, including emptying the sand buckets. We never found a thing – but there again, we never searched the cop.
Outside of this unwanted encounter with the LA criminal underworld and a bone-headed cop, the US tour had been an unqualified success. Yet I never repeated it: it was to be my sole tour of America.
It’s hard to say why, exactly. I had always loved the idea and the ideal of the country, and I’m aware that most artists regard breaking America, with the global fame that ensues, as the entertainment industry’s Holy Grail. I guess with my three-headed music, film and theatre career I always seemed to be busy with projects in Britain, and after hassling Derek and me for a while for a return visit, the record label just got bored and stopped asking.
So why didn’t I try harder to conquer the States? I suspect the answer is extremely prosaic: at heart, I am very, very English.
AT LEAST ONE
good thing came out of my Los Angeles trip. While in the City of Angels, another song had come to me from nowhere, almost fully formed: a simple, upbeat little number called ‘Hold Me Close’, further proof of my theory that the catchiest, most successful tunes arrive via inspiration, not perspiration.
It got me off to another good start with the writing of my third album. The 1970s were the days when record companies expected their main artists to produce an album every year, not one every two or three years as is the case nowadays, and CBS were keen to move quickly to capitalise on the success of
David Essex
and its three hit singles.
For the concept behind the album, I went back to the future – to the lure of the fairground, and my gypsy roots. Travelling fairs have always excited me, ever since I worked on the funfair in Canning Town in my early teens, and I guess
That’ll Be the Day
had brought that lifestyle to the front of my mind again.
Even as a kid, I was aware that fairs had a unique glamour and sense of danger. I loved the way that the fun and frivolity of the rides and candyfloss were delivered with an edginess that hinted at an undercurrent of violence in the rough-and-ready
workers
and the loud rock ’n’ roll music. Even the smell of fairs had a unique, heady allure.
The album was to be called
All the Fun of the Fair
, and the opening track, of the same name, set the scene:
Roll on up, see the main attraction
,
Get your money ready to step inside…
Unusually, I was able fully to concentrate on
All the Fun of the Fair
without having to juggle the commitments of a film or a theatre production at the same time, and the album was a joy to record. Jeff and I were on the same wavelength, the band were tight from spending months playing together, and we brought in Liverpool soul band the Real Thing to add some rich, honeyed backing vocals.
Jeff and I might have loved making the album but we were not working as quickly as CBS wanted and their delivery dead-line passed. Eventually the record company lost patience and fixed a date for the playback for executives who were flown in from all corners of the globe.
It’s a sign of how tardy we were that we had to keep the CBS big cheeses waiting in the studio reception for an hour and a half as we finished off the last track, ‘Hold Me Close’. I only had time for two vocal takes and Jeff had to speed-mix it in thirty minutes, so it was kind of ironic that it went on to be such a big hit for me.
Record-label album playbacks are always fraught affairs, with all the yes-men and lesser executives trying to gauge the
mood
of the big boss man before deciding how to react themselves. The CBS head honcho enjoyed hearing
All the Fun of the Fair
so we were good to go. Against their better instincts, they even let us persuade them to release ‘Rolling Stone’ as the lead single.
I was keen to push the fairground theme further when we took the album on tour that autumn and suggested to Derek and Mel Bush that we used a funfair for the stage set, with a Big Wheel as the centrepiece.
All the Fun of the Fair
was the first tour that ventured outside Britain and America and it was a lot of fun.
We played some great European dates, with the French reliably enthusiastic and not just for ‘
America, ca, ca
’, and Holland and Scandinavia really welcoming us. As we rocked Stockholm, I vaguely wondered how my old flame Beth was, and if she even knew what had happened to me in recent years.
I’ve never gone down great in Germany, and I didn’t make the situation any better on our first night, in Frankfurt, when I muttered a dumb aside to the band about ‘Don’t mention the war’. The crowd picked up on it, and booed. It wasn’t my finest moment.
The levels of hysteria at the UK dates had not diminished, though, and Bev Bush became a master at spiriting me out of the venues after shows via increasingly torturous routes to avoid me being lovingly torn to pieces. For my part, I remained both flattered and, mostly, flummoxed by this bizarre adulation. Creeping through back exits and down corridors, I felt more like a member of the SAS than a pop singer.
Driving to a gig one Tuesday lunchtime, with Johnnie Walker unveiling the new singles chart on Radio One, we learned that ‘Hold Me Close’ had gone to number one. If you had a single out, Tuesday was always the day you learned about its performance. If a song had leapt from number fifteen to number three, say, I could expect congratulatory Tuesday morning phone calls from Derek, Steve Colyer and a host of other people. If I had to call them for news, I could safely assume things had gone less well.
The highlight of the British autumn ’75 dates was a week at Hammersmith Odeon in London. To mark the occasion, Mel commissioned an enormous billboard painting of me to cover the entire front of the theatre. He needn’t have bothered: Hammersmith council ordered us to take it down after one day in case the drivers on the adjacent flyover were distracted by a fifty-foot man looming over them.