Authors: David Essex
My first trip to Australia was a great way to round off the tour, and I’ll never forget until the day I die a wonderful Melbourne night when we played a vast tennis stadium. The crowd seemed to stretch to the horizon and my bass player, Mike Thorn, leaned over and whispered in my ear: ‘Is this a dream or is this real?’ I think, to be honest, I was asking myself that question every day.
Maureen and Verity were not accompanying me to nearly so many dates now, partly because Verity had started nursery and was nearing school age but also because I preferred it if they didn’t.
I had very good reasons for this. In Britain, some of my nuttier fans were jealous of Maureen, and I had enough to worry
about
at my shows without wondering if someone would take a swing at her. As a protective father, I also hated the thought of Verity being frightened by the madness of Essex Mania, or hurt in one of the baying crowds trying to get near to me.
I also had a deeper, more selfish reason. Given the lunacy of my day-to-day existence, I valued the privacy of family life with Maureen and Verity more than ever. They were my refuge and I was desperate to keep the two worlds separate. Yet Maureen was keen to be involved, and while she understood the pressure I was under, there were times that she felt excluded.
In three years, Maureen had seen her husband go from signing on and doing cash-in-hand odd jobs to being a pop star and a sex symbol. She trusted me and she could hardly have been more supportive, but human nature being what it is, she must have felt insecure on occasion. Tensions had crept in to our marriage.
Fame also exerted some pretty insane pressures on us. We had decided to move from Havering-Atte-Bower back into London and so bought a place in Primrose Hill. Somehow this became public knowledge, and when we turned up to move in, we found the whole street packed with teenage girls playing my hits on cassette players. We had to sell it without even living there.
Instead we bought a house near Abbey Road and built a big wall around it to stop people seeing in, but even so it was clear we would also need a place far from the madding crowds. In 1976 we purchased a farm down in Kent, and while Maureen, Verity and I didn’t do any hop picking, we had some idyllic times there.
By now, we had acquired two dogs: a mongrel named Scruff and also Rover, the LSD-scoffing hound from Jim MacLaine’s
alcazaba
in
Stardust
, whom I had adopted and brought home to be a family pet. For her part, Verity’s favourite down-on-the-farm pastime was dressing up to sing Top Forty hits to the cows.
I needed the respite that the farm gave me. After so long in the spotlight, I think that I was subconsciously craving anonymity, and I relished retiring to the backroom to produce albums by the Real Thing and my friend Steve Colyer. Possibly nostalgic for the camaraderie of the Everons and Mood Indigo, I was also keen to merge into the band a little more rather than always being David Essex, Solo Star.
Unfortunately this put me at odds with Jeff when we came to record the next album,
Out on the Street
. I was keen to use the same band I toured with and make a far harder-edged, rockier album. Jeff didn’t agree at all and we suffered our first fall-out over artistic differences.
Selfishly and stubbornly, I stuck to my guns and Jeff went along with my vision, despite the new friction between us. It made the recording sessions somewhat fraught at times. Jeff may have felt he was vindicated when
Out on the Street
sold less than my first three albums and stalled outside the Top Thirty, but I think it still stands up musically.
The first single from the album, ‘City Lights’, was more than five minutes long so didn’t get much radio play and only got to number twenty-four in the chart. This didn’t stop Paul McCartney hearing it. One evening in an Italian restaurant, I heard somebody crooning it and looked around to see Paul, at a nearby table with Linda, singing and beaming at me. Maybe he was stalking me.
The music world was changing in 1976 and 1977, with punk rock exploding on the scene with its scorched-earth policy of disdain towards everything that had gone before it. Punk was a bit of a cartoon but I had no problem with it, especially as Chris Spedding, the guitarist who had worked with me for years, was to become a pivotal part of the scene, producing the Sex Pistols’ first demos.
Punk struck me as a bit of a media hype but it was all about knocking the Establishment and I guess that was what I seemed like to them. The Clash gave an interview to
Melody Maker
in which they sneered that they were keeping it real and ‘not driving around in a white Rolls-Royce like David Essex’. This struck me as ironic, as I hadn’t been in one of those since Alfie sorted it out for us the day I married Maureen.
Mostly, though, the punks were nice enough to me if I bumped into them at a TV show or radio station. They might try hard to be aloof and angry when we met, but they generally sought me out in a quiet moment later to politely ask for an autograph.
There was very little that was punk rock about the extravaganza that I mounted at the London Palladium late in ’76. I had been very impressed by a club that I stumbled across in Paris called
L’Ange Bleu
, which obviously took its cue from the Marlene Dietrich film of the same name.
I loved the dark humour and theatricality of the 1920s Berlin cabaret that Dietrich had come to embody and decided to import a little of this decadent glamour to the West End. Its appeal to me was not a million miles from the allure of the fairground that I had celebrated in
All the Fun of the Fair
.
The Palladium show was magnificently over the top, with baby tigers, llamas, clowns, and a risqué dance troupe named Hot Gossip who were dressed as Tiller Girls. I had seen them in a club and booked them via their choreographer, a rising star named Arlene Phillips.
I had met Arlene before. A few years previously, Ken Russell had told me I was to play opposite Twiggy in a film called
The Boyfriend
and dispatched me for refresher tap-dancing lessons with Arlene. Ken then binned me in favour of a ballet dancer. When I saw his finished film, I could not have been more relieved at my lucky escape. Ken clearly didn’t rate me: he also asked me to sing ‘Pinball Wizard’ in his movie of the Who’s
Tommy
, then dropped me for Elton John.
The Palladium spectacular was magnificently bonkers, although the aura of twisted mystique was arguably sullied slightly by the llamas depositing great steaming piles of crap on the stage every night as I sang ‘If I Could’. There again, it was the same stage where I was French-kissed by a brown bear in
Dick Whittington
. Maybe I should have expected it.
Derek and I had made a conscious choice at this stage to step back a little from the promotional treadmill. I definitely felt in need of a little more downtime, and after the non-stop musicals, movies, albums and tours of the last few years, we also figured the public might need a break from wall-to-wall David Essex.
Although we were still resisting their entreaties to tour there, Derek and I headed back to the States for some high-profile TV shows. We did
The Johnny Carson Show
, although I never got to meet Heeeere’s Johnny! I did, however, get to sing a duet with
Cher
on
The Cher Show
, although the ‘comedy’ sketch I had to perform with Jerry Lewis was an absolute stinker. Ticking off the American icons, I also did
The Merv Griffin Show
a few times. It didn’t mean that much to me, but with his encyclopaedic knowledge of showbiz, Derek was in raptures that we were rubbing shoulders with these light-entertainment legends.
There was talk of me taking the lead role in a new musical film being shot in America called
Grease
. Producer Robert Stigwood met me to sound me out and shortly afterwards I bumped into the movie’s female lead, Olivia Newton-John, in London. She enthusiastically told me, ‘I really hope you do it – it would be great!’ but I never heard any more, and when the film finally appeared, John Travolta was clearly perfect for Danny.
My fifth studio album was to be the last of my contract with both CBS and Jeff Wayne Music. After the minor fallings-out and frosty relationship that had developed between Jeff and me on
Out on the Street
, I decided that I would produce the record myself. This was the direction I wanted to go, and also our friendship was too valuable to risk damaging it with work disagreements.
This also suited Jeff, who had his own epic project to occupy him. He asked me what I thought of him writing and recording a musical version of H G Wells’ classic sci-fi book,
The War of the Worlds
. I told him it was a fantastic idea, and he went off to begin work as I set about recording
Gold and Ivory
.
It was the first record I made outside of Jeff’s Advision base, and the band and I decamped to Richard Branson’s Manor Studios near Oxford. Working without Jeff felt a little like taking
the
stabilisers off a bike, but I had an experienced band and penned a couple of songs with Steve Colyer.
Producing my own record was a challenge as it is impossible to be objective about your own voice, and initially I found myself reverting to type and spending hours getting the drum sound exactly right. Nevertheless, making the album was a liberating and enjoyable experience.
The Manor complex housed some hidden secrets. Keyboardist Ronnie Leahy was convinced it was haunted, and I pooh-poohed him until the early hours of one morning, when I had just retired to my bedroom after a late-night recording session.
I had just fallen asleep about 2.30 a.m. when for some reason I woke up again and became instantly aware of the grey figure of a man in seventeenth-century clothing warming himself by an imaginary fire. Oddly enough I wasn’t scared at all as I lay and watched him rub his translucent hands together with his back to me. He did this for two or three minutes before dissolving into thin air.
Had this really happened? Was it a dream? I wasn’t sure until the next morning, when I related what I had seen to the band and the girls serving breakfast. As they dished up the bacon and eggs, the staff confirmed that, yep, guests saw this guy all the time. Ronnie looked vindicated.
I loved making
Gold and Ivory
and it sold respectably, making the album chart Top Thirty and going down well with my hardcore fans. At this point my records were not shifting the phenomenal amounts that they did during the height of Essex Mania, but I was happy with the music, and the upside was that I was able to live something that resembled a more normal life.
In any case, the lower sales were no deterrent to CBS, who were desperate to re-sign me to a new contract now that our five-album deal had expired. I had earned them unthinkable sums of money over the last few years and they pulled out all the stops, even getting world champion motorcycle rider Barry Sheene to present me with a Yamaha 250cc off-road bike as a sweetener.
Mel Bush was by now my co-manager, alongside Derek, and the two of them entered into intensive negotiations with CBS. They clearly did a good job, because they reported back to me that the company were offering a $1m advance for a new five-album agreement, and wanted to fly their top executives and lawyers in from the US for a face-to-face meeting to clinch the deal.
One million dollars! It sounded an absurd amount of money, and of course it was, but this headline figure was misleading. I was not living on caviar and bathing in asses’ milk at the end of the seventies. Government policies meant I was paying 98 per cent tax as, unlike most of my rock-star contemporaries, I had never spent months abroad each year to escape it. An accountant suggested a tax-avoiding bank account in Lichtenstein and for a while I toyed with the idea, but it felt wrong and in the end I bit the bullet and paid up.
Nevertheless, the CBS offer was obviously enticing, and Derek, Mel and I converged with their top men at their swanky new HQ in Soho Square, London. The meeting lasted hours. Eventually a deal seemed to be in place and the lawyers began to read aloud the contract that had been prepared for my signature.
It all sounded like legalese to my bored ears until one clause leapt out at me: that CBS would have ‘creative control’. What?!
I
queried this, and the American executives had a spectacular answer: they meant to make me bigger than Elvis in the States, but to do so they would need to exert creative control.
This reply set every alarm bell ringing in my head. Having just survived the ravages of Essex Mania in Britain, I was by no means certain that I wanted to be ‘bigger than Elvis’ and go through the whole thing to the power of a hundred in the US. And to hand over creative control of my career to faceless executives: surely this was a deal-breaker?
I retired with Derek, Mel and our lawyers to a side-room. The lawyers held the view that the sums on offer were so huge that we should sign the contract and fight the creative-control issue on a case-by-case basis. Derek, as ever, was more sensitive to my needs and understood the depth of my objection.
When we reconvened in the boardroom the Americans handed me the contract. I read the offending clause one last time then quietly gave my verdict: ‘I can’t sign this.’ Their looks of blank incomprehension seemed to require a further explanation, so I continued: ‘I can’t sell my soul. Now if you will excuse me, I have to go. I have a plane to catch.’
Three hours later, Maureen, Verity and I were high in the sky en route to another South of France getaway. As I gazed down at the Channel from 35,000 feet, I figured the best way to view the $1m I had just tossed away was to say that you can’t miss what you’ve never had.
Maureen and I always had a great time in France but this didn’t mean the underlying tensions between us had dissipated. Our occasional tiffs were becoming more frequent and more
intense
and like many couples before us, we eventually found ourselves pondering a trial separation. I loathed the nights that I bedded down alone in the Paddington mews house that held Derek and Mel’s office.