Authors: David Essex
‘You look tired, son,’ Dad told me. ‘Yeah, I didn’t sleep much last night,’ I replied. Too excited to hold back, I decided there was no time like the present: ‘Dad, you know I wanted to be a footballer? I think I’d actually like to be a drummer.’
This bombshell could have triggered a very negative response – on a practical level, the thin walls of our council flat were not a fitting setting for a budding Buddy Rich – but to my relief, Dad reacted with his usual sangfroid. He didn’t even quiz me about my bizarre change of heart: he said it sounded ‘a good idea’ and he’d have a word with Mum.
I had saved up a bit of money from a couple of part-time jobs I had been doing, selling evening newspapers and helping out on a weekend market stall, so I had enough for a basic snare drum, but I knew I could do nothing without Mum’s say-so. She was understandably sceptical at first, thinking my newfound love for drumming was a passing fad, and would say only: ‘We’ll see.’
For the next few days, I made a detour after school each evening to gaze at a snare in the window of a second-hand music shop in Barking Road, then carried on home to bash along to the radio on a makeshift drum kit of biscuit tins, cushions and ash-trays as my football lay ignored in the hallway. Then came some progress: ‘How much is this drum you want?’ Dad asked me.
I told him it was only a fiver and he suggested we head down to have a look at it. Once in Barking Road, I pointed it out in the window and we went in to what seemed like an Aladdin’s Cave to me: an intriguing, overwhelming mass of guitars, saxophones and drum kits.
The Johnny Cash-like cool-dude assistant fetched my desired snare from the window and gave me a pair of sticks to try it out. It sounded worse than Mum’s biscuit tin, and even Dad looked disappointed: ‘Is it supposed to sound like that?’ Johnny told us we couldn’t expect much for that money. When Dad asked him what else he had, he pointed us towards an impressive-looking snare and stand for £15: ‘Try this one.’
I did, and it sounded great: like a real drum. ‘Do you want that one instead?’ asked Dad. I could hardly believe it, and was even more made up and gobsmacked when we headed home not
just
with the drum but also sticks, brushes and a rubber practice pad. He couldn’t have made me any happier.
The little drummer boy had arrived, and now I finally had some kit, I threw myself into practising with a passion. Every day, as soon as I got home from school, I was banging away at the skins – within limits. Always fair-minded, my dad had no desire to piss off our neighbours, so decreed that I could only practise in my bedroom from 4.30 p.m. until six, and had to make maximum use of the rubber practice pads.
I loyally obeyed this dictum but even so my daily racket was too much for our downstairs neighbour, Mr Johnson, who was driven to distraction. He frequently banged on his ceiling as I crashed through my routines, threatened to ask the council to evict us, and one night decided to take direct action.
As usual, I was quietly honing my paradiddles in my bedroom when I heard shouting at the front door. Deciding to tackle the problem at source, Mr Johnson had come bounding upstairs to confront us, and had no time for my dad’s reasonable argument that I only ever practised for ninety minutes, as quietly as possible.
It would have been no more than a noisy standoff if Mr Johnson had not decided to emphasise his point by poking my dad in the chest. Big mistake. The two men squared up, and I emerged from my bedroom in time to see Dad take down his opponent with two left jabs and a killer right hook.
Dad was so supportive – to a fault, Mr Johnson might say – because he could see my love for the drums was genuine. As I edged into my early teens, I threw myself into music. It was jazz
drummers
that really moved me, and I thrilled to the exquisite technique and consummate playing of the likes of Art Blakey, Joe Morello and Phil Seamen.
My musical Mecca was a specialist record shop called Dobells in the Charing Cross Road and I made regular pilgrimages. In addition to my jazz idols, I would head home with records by venerable blues men such as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Memphis Slim. If it looked black and obscure, I would buy it.
The blues moved me far more than chart pop and the music on the radio such as the Beatles, which I looked down on in some snotty, intangible way: my thinking was that if girls screamed at it, it must be lightweight and worthless. But jazz and blues spoke to me, and despite my tender years, as often as I could I caught live gigs at the 100 Club, the Marquee, and back at the Flamingo.
Music and drumming had lent my life a new focus and direction but my parents were still concerned with my changes in attitude since going to Shipman County. They didn’t know about the Canning Town Boys but I think they sensed an incipient delinquency in me that helped to shape their decision to move out of the East End.
When east Londoners want a quieter, better quality of life, they invariably turn to Essex, and in 1962 my parents started looking into council-house exchanges. We would tootle off in our grey Ford Popular, a new acquisition, to look at gaffs around Grays and Romford. If I were lucky, Dad would let his fourteen-year-old son take the wheel in a quiet country lane.
I didn’t exactly repay Dad very well for this kind gesture. One fateful afternoon, taking a break from drumming, I ‘borrowed’
–
without asking – his James Captain motorbike and went for a ride around the block with Jimmy Anderson on the back. When we got to the A13 I couldn’t resist its wide-open spaces and opened up the throttle. This felt amazing! I was probably doing 60 m.p.h. in a 40 m.p.h. zone when the police car pulled me over. A friendly cop asked me if I knew I was speeding.
‘No,’ I replied in my deepest rum-and-black voice, hoping that the white scarf wrapped around my face would conceal the fact that I was underage. It didn’t. ‘How old are you?’ asked the policeman. ‘Fourteen,’ I admitted, and my breaking voice chose that moment to turn into a squeak, as if to emphasise my tender years. The policeman bundled Jimmy and me off the bike and into the squad car.
My dad was horrified and gave me a serious bollocking, not to mention a rare clip around the ear. Jimmy got even worse from his dad. I had to go to court, where I was fined £20 and given a six-month ban to come into effect from my sixteenth birthday, when I could legally hold a licence.
The incident probably cemented my parents’ decision to get me out of the East End and away from trouble as soon as possible, and we quickly moved out of Canning Town to a ground-floor flat in the more genteel, countrified surroundings of Chadwell Heath. I missed my mates but had to admit it was nice to be in a clean, green environment rather than the usual fog and dirt.
The best aspect of the move was that living on the ground floor meant no more Mr Johnson, and greater freedom to practise the drums. Saving up money from my part-time jobs, I had
added
more drums and cymbals to my kit, and Dad recognised my dogged commitment and asked if I wanted drumming lessons.
My new teacher was a dedicated and very clean-cut gentleman named Eddie Freeborn, who spent his evenings drumming in a dance band at the Grosvenor House hotel. Eddie introduced me to big band jazz and also helped me to work through a textbook of exercises by the king of drummers, Buddy Rich. Instructing me patiently in the fine art of bossa nova in my bedroom, Eddie was a fine teacher and gave me an invaluable grounding.
Despite our move to Chadwell Heath, I still had one foot in the East End. As I was to leave school in a year’s time, aged fifteen, we decided I would see out my non-education at Shipman County, rather than have the hassle of finding a new school. This meant two buses each morning and two each evening as I navigated the five-mile journey there and back.
Shipman hadn’t got any better, and it was hard to imagine a way it could get any worse. In my last year, I was handed the poisoned chalice of being made a prefect. It didn’t last long: when I tried to quieten down a kid on some stairs he hit me and I promptly thumped him back. Cue the end of my prefect badge.
The chances of a reprobate from Shipman County going on to have any kind of interesting or rewarding career were precisely nil, but nevertheless as my time at that rancid institution neared its end, the careers officer came calling. One by one we were called in to see this bored-looking individual to tell him what we would like to do with our lives.
I had no idea what to say to him. A few months ago the honest answer would have been a professional footballer, and
now
it would be an avant-garde jazz drummer, but I felt that either of those responses would evoke bafflement, contempt or outright derisive laughter. This did not look like a man disposed to urge idealistic youths to aim high and live their dreams.
So I told him I wanted to be an electrical engineer. I had no idea what this actually was, but my Uncle Alfie did it and I thought it sounded vaguely impressive. The careers adviser nodded and said he would arrange an entry exam for an apprenticeship in the summer holidays for me. Whatever. I thanked him, and left.
Yet it was still music that was firing my soul, and after a few months of Eddie Freeborn’s diligent tuition, I felt ready to play in a band. Scanning the small ads in our local rag, the
Ilford Recorder
, one advert caught my eye:
DRUMMER WANTED FOR TRIO
Phone Reg
My dad told me to give it a go so I gave Reg a ring. He was friendly and up for a meeting, so even though I was privately harbouring doubts that his trio would be fluent in my preferred style of post-Art Blakey beatnik bebop, Dad and I piled my drums into the car and headed off to Romford.
My instincts were correct. Appearance-wise, Reg didn’t suggest an Essex John Coltrane but a fifty-something cardigan-wearing accountant probably packing a pocket full of boiled sweets. As I set up my kit, he asked if I could play ballroom music such as waltzes and foxtrots.
The third trio member, clarinettist and saxophonist Eric, turned up in a flurry of finger jewellery and Old Spice and said ‘Hi’, a phrase I had only heard before in Hollywood films. Not to be fazed, I mumbled ‘Hi’ back. Eric produced his clarinet, which he preferred to call his ‘liquorice stick’, and off we went, Reg on piano and me swishing the skins with my brushes.
Reg and Eric liked what they were hearing, complimented me on my bossa nova, and told me I was in. The trio was complete. They showed me our upcoming gig schedule, which basically consisted of Thursday nights at a Conservative Club in Hackney and Saturdays at a Working Men’s Club in Dagenham. I guess at least we were covering both ends of the political spectrum.
It was nice to be playing live music and Reg and Eric were good guys but the trio was not to my musical taste. As a precocious teen in love with jazz and Delta blues, tickling the drums with brushes as two middle-aged band mates eased through cha-chas and Paso Dobles was not where I wanted to be. At least I could give my sticks some welly during the Gay Gordon, to Reg and Eric’s horror.
As I was making this deeply unpromising start to my musical career, almost as an afterthought I left Shipman County. I was fifteen years old, didn’t have one qualification to my name and had learned precisely nothing in my four years there. On my last day, the local police turned up to protect the staff from any last acts of retribution by departing pupils. It felt like a fitting farewell.
Now I no longer had to commute to school each day, I began to take stock of Chadwell Heath. It lacked the life and soul of the East End but I slowly began to fit in, and when a new friend,
Ronnie,
took me to a local youth-club night that descended into a mass brawl, it started to feel like home.
I had been out of Shipman County for less than a week when I learned that the careers officer had been true to his promise. A letter arrived from a company called Plessey’s inviting me to sit an exam for an apprenticeship in, yep, electrical engineering. My heart didn’t exactly leap with joy but I needed to earn some money, so I pitched up at their factory in Romford at the stipulated time the following week.
There were about thirty other teenage candidates, some of whom may even have actually known what an electrical engineer was. Turning over the paper, I managed not to sketch Olive Oyl or Bluto and instead set about tackling the fairly demanding maths, English and IQ questions. It helped that the boy next to me whispered his answers to himself as he wrote them down.
After the test, the supervisor took us on a tour of the factory that was one of the most bizarre and inexplicable experiences of my life. In recent weeks I had been having troubling dreams about being in a vast, cacophonous place full of pounding, monstrous machinery. We walked down to the shop floor and I froze. Here was the place I had been dreaming of: Plessey’s!
To this day I don’t understand that experience. Was it an omen? A coincidence? I had no idea, but made my way home to await the results of the exam, and meanwhile turned my mind to shifting my musical career up a notch from Reg and Eric.
Eileen, a cousin who has always been more like a sister to me, had heard of an audition. A Stratford-based rhythm and blues band, the Everons, were looking for a drummer, so I called
the
band’s leader, John. He sounded keen and we arranged to meet for a jam at his father’s pub in Leytonstone.
The Everons consisted of John on guitar and vocals, his friend Brian on rhythm guitar and Brian’s sister – and John’s girlfriend – Sandra on bass. This close inter-relationship meant they were also very tight musically, and I loved the audition and the fact that I could hammer away at my drums with sticks rather than the brushes favoured by dear old Reg and Eric. After an hour, I was in.
This felt like serious progress. I was delighted to be in a modern group that used amplifiers and were a lot nearer my age. We were playing mostly Chuck Berry covers and the occasional Beatles song rather than my beloved obscure Deep South blues, but as we set to rehearsing three nights a week in a church hall in Stratford, we quickly got pretty good and started picking up bookings. We even landed a residency, at the Bell pub in Ilford on Saturday and Sunday nights.