Authors: David Essex
Susi concurred with my suggestion to change the title from
The Lock-Keeper
to
The River
and we cast fresh-faced and talented Scottish actress Kate Murphy as the leading lady and Davey’s love interest. I was also commissioned to write the theme tune to the series, and was sitting at my piano striving to do exactly that late at night on 19 May 1988 when the phone rang.
I never get late-night phone calls, so one thought flashed into my mind immediately: Carlotta! I was right. It was one of her Italian-American family – and I was in such a state of shock that I can’t remember which one – telling me that Carlotta had gone into labour a month prematurely and been admitted to a Rhode Island maternity hospital.
‘I’m on my way,’ I said. A sleepless night of worrying followed until I headed towards Heathrow Airport before the sun was even up. The first flight I could commandeer got me to Boston by five in the afternoon East Coast time.
A family friend called Jim met me at the airport and broke the momentous news. Carlotta had given birth around two hours earlier, while I was probably somewhere over Greenland. I was sorry to have missed the births, but this feeling was quickly lost in the overwhelming relief that Carlotta and the twins were OK.
The two-hour drive to the hospital seemed to last weeks and as soon as we got there I ran through the labyrinth of corridors
to
find Carlotta. She was looking a little the worse for wear and decidedly battered by what she had been through but she only had thoughts for the boys, who had both been whisked into an Intensive Care Unit. The words struck dread into me.
‘Can I see them?’ I asked, and a sympathetic nurse walked me through to the ICU, where medics were attending to seven or eight babies in respirators. She took me to the far end of the room and there they were: my two new sons, the elder weighing just three pounds fifteen ounces, and his younger sibling (by fifteen minutes) one ounce less.
They had drips and seemingly dozens of other leads and tubes attached to their tiny hands, feet and noses. They looked weak and helpless and as if they must be in pain from all the gadgets attached to them, and as I looked at the sweet little woollen hats on their heads to keep them warm, I felt as if my heart was breaking.
My voice trembled as I addressed a doctor who was standing by another ventilator nearby. ‘Will they be all right?’ I asked him. ‘It’s a little early to tell,’ he replied in a detached, professional manner: they were really not the words I needed to hear.
As I gazed at the twins, another nurse appeared and stuck yet another needle into one of my boys, who cried out in pain. I felt a huge instinctive rush of anger towards her but controlled my passions and repeated the question. She turned towards me and smiled.
‘Of course they will,’ she assured me. ‘It’s not unusual for twins to be premature and underweight. Now, don’t you worry!’ At which point, I felt the most extreme mood swing
towards
her imaginable, combined with a sense of intoxicating, exhilarating relief.
Carlotta and the twins were in hospital for two weeks as they recuperated and regained their strength and I visited every hour I was allowed. As I sat by her bedside we talked over names. Her family home in Rhode Island was on a former Native American reservation so we playfully worked our way through a few cowboy names and settled on Kit Carson and Billy the Kid. That was it, then: Kit and Bill it was to be.
The three of them were safely back in the arms of Carlotta’s doting family a week or two later when I flew back to London to begin filming
The River
. It was a wrench to leave them behind so soon, but on another level, I was used to such partings: it was what I had been doing my entire life.
The series was filmed at a village called Wootton Rivers near Marlborough in Wiltshire, which doubled as its fictional setting on Chumley-on-the-Water. A genuine picturesque lock-keeper’s cottage was the main location for shooting this sweet story of an unlikely romance flourishing in a village of British eccentrics.
The river looked gorgeous on the TV but was actually so rank and stagnant that Auntie Beeb issued the cast with a directive that if anybody were to jump in, they should ensure that every orifice was fully covered. The BBC didn’t make it clear exactly how this challenging task was to be achieved.
The River
was a hoot to film from start to finish, with a friendly cast and scenes that frequently broke down in gales of giggles. The scripts required Davey to own a cute little piglet, but as shooting progressed we had to recast this part three times
as
the piglets had an unfortunate habit of rapidly maturing into hulking great porkers.
The last episode of the six-part series ended with Katy and I sailing off into the sunset on the remains of an exploded narrow boat. Viewing figures had been healthy and there was talk of a second series but my heart was not in it – and my thoughts were elsewhere.
Flying back to America, I bought a house for Carlotta, Kit and Bill on the borders of Connecticut and Rhode Island, about an hour from her family and within striking distance of the sea. I spent months there with them in that beautifully rugged locale, only flying back to finish off the
Touching the Ghost
album. It was my first release on my own Lamplight Records label.
For the next year or two, I shuttled back and forth between Connecticut and London, juggling work and family. It seemed to work for all of us. During a visit to Los Angeles I met with some TV producers who offered me the lead role in an imminent science fiction series.
It was a tempting offer, and had it been for six months I would probably have done it, but the contract required me to relocate to LA
ad infinitum
, which simply didn’t fit my plans. American TV producers are not renowned for taking no for an answer, and eventually camped outside my Connecticut home offering me the world to reconsider. I did – and the answer was still ‘No’.
As the eighties wound to a close, I flew back to England to appear in the Royal Variety Performance. It was an honour, and I got to meet the Queen afterwards. She told me, ‘Well done,’ which I guess was an improvement on her sister’s comments at
Evita
. I was to meet the Queen again years later, in very special circumstances.
The Royal Variety Performance was slightly marred for me by the ego-driven backstage arguments about dressing rooms and running orders, and I have found similar problems when I have appeared on Children in Need. They are both excellent events to raise money for charity but too many artists seem only bothered about achieving maximum exposure and plugging their latest product.
I have always had mixed feelings about the celebrity-charity interface and generally prefer sending a private cheque to a good cause rather than taking part in mass organised profile-raising jamborees. There are exceptions to this rule, though, as I learned in 1990 when the Voluntary Services Overseas organisation asked me to be their Ambassador of the Year.
THE VOLUNTARY SERVICES
Organisation, or VSO, sends people to the developing world to pass on their particular skills to local people to help them to help themselves. It is a remarkable and honourable organisation, but I had to think long and hard about whether to get involved with them.
Their initial approach was a letter from a VSO official called Dick Rowe, whom I liked as soon as I met him. Dick talked me through the organisation’s laudable aims and
modus operandi
and I explained that while I felt honoured to be asked, I had severe misgivings about celebrities hijacking charitable causes just to enhance their own image.
Once Dick and the VSO chief, David Green, had made it clear to me that I could make a positive difference and not be merely a semi-famous name on their headed notepaper, I was in. I was to replace Lord Lichfield as the ambassador and the handover ceremony, held at his photographic studio in London, seemed to feature dignitaries from every developing country extant.
My first task was to meet some volunteers and observe their fieldwork at first hand and Dick decided that we should go to
Uganda.
It was a country that I knew little about save for the atrocities wreaked there by Idi Amin two decades earlier, but on the flight over Dick told me of its years of tribal conflict and civil war and its crippling Aids epidemic.
We were met in Kampala by a tremendous VSO field officer named John who drove us in a jeep through the bustling early evening streets of the capital. Cars, scooters, bikes and absurdly overloaded buses vied for road space as in India, while in the crowded markets women balanced impossibly precipitous loads on their heads.
As we drove to the VSO compound in the Kampala suburbs, I realised what a green, lush and verdant country Uganda was. It was severely crime-ridden, though: John told me that the last VSO field officer in the capital had been murdered for petrol in the very compound that we were heading for.
Over the next two weeks, we travelled across the country and I admired the sterling and inspirational work done by the team of volunteers. We visited a teacher training college in Nkozi, a ninety-minute drive from Kampala. The students were on holiday, but the principal walked me around the campus.
He showed me to the campus theatre, which was used by the college’s music and drama department. It was little more than a small tin-roofed building with a raised concrete stage. ‘Maybe you can come and teach here?’ he suggested. It seemed a great idea straight away.
There was a heart-rending trip to an orphanage for kids whose parents had been killed in civil strife or died from Aids. Some of them ran around the room seemingly happily while
many
others sat in corners, too traumatised to speak. A saintly volunteer named Mary and her two Ugandan helpers moved among these damaged children, teaching them how to play. One of the older boys took a shine to me as soon as I arrived and insisted that I gave him a piggyback for the duration of my visit.
In Kampala’s hectic central market I met an American girl who had left a high-flying finance job in New York to organise a group of local lepers into a co-operative. This admirable woman had transformed them from street beggars into traders selling small items for a stall and making a modest profit. They even had an office made from cardboard boxes and it was humbling to be invited in, shake their hands and – a very African protocol – sign their visitors’ book.
Equally impressive was the middle-aged ex-head teacher from Birmingham who tore around rural Uganda on a motorbike working for women’s rights and helping Aids victims. She was a formidable woman, and even her frequent bouts of malaria were unable to poleaxe her.
The mantra I heard from so many volunteers in Uganda was ‘We came to teach but we learned so much’ and as Dick Rowe and I boarded the flight home at Entebbe Airport he asked if I would like to return again one day. ‘I’d love to. Maybe I’ll take up that offer at Nkozi,’ I told him. He laughed, but I think both of us knew I was not joking.
A few months later the fantasy became reality. Dick informed me that Nkozi College had made a formal request for me to do some teaching there and I turned my thoughts to what lessons this very un-trained teacher could impart. In the meantime, I launched another VSO-related project.
I approached the body with the idea of producing a fund-raising album featuring musicians from many of the forty-eight countries in which it operated. Peter Gabriel and his Womad record label and another fine label Ace were also willing to help, and with the VSO’s enthusiastic support, I began to tackle the logistics of the idea.
We agreed that I would travel to Uganda, Belize and the Caribbean, visit volunteers and their projects and while there enquire about local musicians. If I liked what they were doing, I would try to find cheap local studios and record them out there.
It sounded an impossible project but came together remarkably adroitly. On the Caribbean island of St Lucia I found a man called Boo Hinkson singing calypso in a hotel and went to his home studio to record a track called ‘Calypso Classic’. I learned where he got his nickname from the day that a cat crossed our path and poor scared Boo literally jumped into my arms.
Back in Uganda the country’s biggest group, Afrigo Band, kindly came to record for me in a Kampala studio called Sunrise normally used for Christian programmes. Traditional musicians Dr Semke and Abolugana Kagalana were so keen to be involved that they turned up a day early and had to sleep in the studio overnight.
It is easy to become cynical in the music business but seeing the joy on these musicians’ faces as they heard their songs recorded and played back to them for the first time was wonderful. It made me think, in a strange way, of the first time I had heard myself singing ‘And the Tears Came Tumbling Down’ on a seven-inch single on my parents’ gramophone in Essex, almost thirty years earlier.
Although I was loath to intrude on the record myself, I figured it was worth it if it marginally increased its commercial appeal, so back in England I added a track called ‘Africa – You Shine’ with my keyboardist Ian Wherry, African guitarist Abdul Tee-Jay and some brilliant South African female singers, Shikisha. I called the finished album
Under Different Skies
and released it in 1991. Like all world music albums, it was hampered by the lack of radio and media outlets for such music in Britain, but it achieved its aim of raising some much-needed funds both for the impoverished musicians and for the VSO.
While I had been making the record the wheels had been set in motion for my return to Nkozi College and now I had decided what I would teach there. I resolved to direct the student teachers in a production of
Godspell
. I knew resources were tight, but even in my West End performances as Jesus the crucifixion props had been no more than a beer crate and two red ribbons.
Before flying out I got hold of a few little magic tricks for Jesus to perform and some T-shirts, and I also knew I would need a pianist. My keyboardist Ian Wherry couldn’t make it but a very talented musician called Helen Ireland agreed to come and spend two months in rural Uganda.