Authors: David Essex
We smiled at each other. Subconsciously, I thought: to be continued.
First, though, I had to kickstart my international music career. The Everons headed down to the audition that Brian’s dad had arranged for us. The club consisted of a giant circus tent with a stage holding the resident band’s gear, which luckily included a drum kit.
We set to tuning our borrowed equipment and hit the genial club manager with two of our best shots: the Motown hit ‘Money’ and the Isley Brothers/Beatles song ‘Twist and Shout’. He seemed impressed, and we were hired to play a forty-five-minute set the following night, after a magician’s turn but before the resident band’s headline show.
It was hardly the Beatles in Hamburg but we were all elated at this success and, possibly getting ahead of ourselves, spent the hotel-buffet dinner discussing learning Italian and maybe even emigrating en masse to Italy. Yet a thought was distracting me: I wondered if Margarita would like to witness the Everons’ triumph?
After eating, I slipped away from the rest of the party and went back to her café. She was frothing up cappuccinos and waiting tables and I ordered and worked my way through three Pepsis before gathering the courage to talk to her. Did she like music?
‘
Si, molto!
’ she said, smiling. It was a promising start, but my halting attempts to invite her to see the band foundered on the language barrier, and our ‘conversation’ was going nowhere fast until a waiter who spoke a bit of English interceded. It turned out he wasn’t just a waiter: he was also Margarita’s older brother.
The brother did a bit of rudimentary translation between us and then firmly informed me that Margarita was allowed neither to go to clubs nor to miss a night at work. Eventually, however, we reached a compromise: she could meet me after the bar closed at 11.30 the next night.
‘Great!’ I said.
‘I come too,’ added the brother. ‘Chaperone.’
So there were to be three people in this relationship! Even so, I smiled my agreement and arranged to return the next night. Back at the hotel, I lay in bed full of anticipation but also wondering what I was playing at, and feeling guilty about Carol.
We spent the next day on the beach, where Dad continued to fume at the extortionate umbrella-rental system and I played football with the locals. I was delighted when my shaggy hair and ball skills led them to christen me George Best, but less so at ending the day with typical English-abroad lobster-red shoulders.
The evening brought our debut gig, with the Everons under strict instructions to start up once the magician had finished his plate-spinning trick. As the conjuror wandered off, the compère
nodded
at us: ‘Ladeez and gentlemen, all the way from Engerland – the Everons!’
Our opening shot, Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B. Goode’, triggered some dancing but also some pained expressions, and the compère appeared behind my shoulder, ordering us to turn the volume down. Otherwise, the gig went well, and at the end the manager confirmed our booking for the rest of our holiday.
There were jubilant scenes backstage, but I once again made my excuses and left, heading off with a spring in my step – and butterflies in my stomach – for my bizarre three-way date. I had no idea how it would work, but we took a stroll along the beach and her brother allowed Margarita and I to go ahead as he kept a wary eye from a polite distance.
Margarita was shy and pretty and I was flushed and tongue-tied, and the lack of a shared language was a definite hindrance. But it was thrilling to be holding hands and walking by the crashing sea under the starry night sky, and I ended our enchanting evening with a kiss on the cheek for Margarita, a handshake for her brother, and a promise to do it all again the next evening.
What a night! I had played a cool rock ’n’ roll gig and wooed a beautiful stranger in a glamorous land. As I wandered back to the hotel through Cattolica’s dark and deserted streets, I felt like the star of my own private, dramatic European movie.
The holiday played out in the same vein. The days were fun, the gigs went well, and after our third date, Margarita’s brother decided I could be trusted and abandoned his chaperone post. On our last night, she and I swapped kisses and addresses and I wondered if our holiday romance would survive any longer.
I had told Margarita I had a girlfriend in England but had not been sure she had understood: I think she might have thought I was saying I had a sister. On the plane home, I pondered the problem of her and Carol and quietly worried over what would happen next.
The answer was a development that I certainly hadn’t predicted. Arriving home, I went straight round to Carol’s to tell her most – but not all – of my holiday adventures. I knocked on her door, she opened it and I took an involuntary sharp intake of breath. Carol had a yellow head.
‘Do you like it?’ she asked me.
‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘I think so.’ It seemed that while I was away, Carol had resolved to follow my suggestion about dying her hair blonde, but I hadn’t envisaged it turning out such a grisly shade of orangey-yellow. I decided to keep quiet and hope it would grow on me, or, better, grow out.
I gave Carol and her parents my judiciously edited version of the Italian holiday. Over the next few weeks, she and I looked to fall back into our set routine, but something had changed, and to me, her orange hair seemed to symbolise the problems that were besetting our relationship.
We started seeing less of each other, and arguing more. When she also got a job at Plessey’s, it made our periodic bouts of not talking to each other decidedly awkward. Nevertheless, she was still my girlfriend, I wasn’t trying to ditch her, and when I caught her on the factory roof, snogging the face off another of the apprentices, I was deeply hurt and upset. Although, in the circumstances, I suppose I had no right to be.
Margarita and I had become pen pals, but her letters – clearly written with the heavy assistance of an English/Italian dictionary – were difficult to decipher, and eventually the lira dropped for both of us that our holiday fling would go no further. As the months passed the letters dwindled, then stopped completely.
So both of my romantic interests had exited stage left and I was stuck ticking over in my dead-end job, desperate to forward my musical career without the first idea of how to do it. I was badly in need of some guidance. Luckily, it was just about to arrive.
SOME PEOPLE IN
show business see artist managers as essentially exploitative figures. If things are going well, they are parasites creaming off 10 per cent of their earnings for doing very little; if they are going badly, they’re the natural scapegoat. I don’t doubt that rogues like that exist, but a good manager is worth his weight in gold, and I reckon I owe almost everything to the visionary who took the reins of my career – and life – in 1964.
Ted was doing his best, and to give credit to Brian and Sandra’s dad, he had got the Everons a fair few bookings and even helped us to conquer Italy (!) but we were hitting the wall. If the band was ever to progress from weddings and pub residencies, we felt we needed a manager.
Brian had a day job as a cooper and his boss in the barrel world was a man called Stan Murray. Stan’s son, Martin, had been in the original line-up of the Honeycombs, who had had a number-one hit earlier that year with ‘Have I the Right?’ and this tenuous connection was enough for Brian to ask Stan to manage us.
Stan freely admitted that he didn’t know enough about the pop world to be of much help – but he knew a man who did.
He
was friends with a show business writer and critic named Derek Bowman, and he agreed to bring him down to watch the Everons rehearse in a pub called the Eagle in Stratford.
Stan and Derek turned up the following Wednesday night. Stan was a small, friendly guy with a passing resemblance to Sid James, but Derek cut a more sophisticated figure, standing out a mile in the rough-edged East End boozer. Dapper in a grey mohair suit and smoking Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes, he looked every inch the part of a sharp, worldly-wise band manager.
Fondly imagining that this audition could be our passage to the big time, the band were all extremely nervous. After attempting some awkward small talk in the bar downstairs, we invited Derek and Stan up to hear us do our thing.
We had decided to play a mix of our usual covers and a song or two that I had written. This was a fairly new development, and although I didn’t really know what I was doing, I figured it was important for the Everons that we developed our own identity rather than just rehashing more successful bands’ stuff.
The first song I had written had been distinctly autobiographical and was called ‘Carol-Anne’. It was basically a white East End teenager trying to write a heartbroken Mississippi blues classic: the chorus proclaimed, ‘
Oh Carol-Anne, the day that you leave me, girl, I’ll be a dying man
.’ It had been rather overtaken by recent events in my life that had proven it to be both misguided and, well, wrong.
The hall over the Eagle was poky and smelled of stale beer but we had carefully laid out a table and two chairs in front of the stage for Derek and Stan, and John made a short speech
before
we fired into a Memphis Slim song. The rock ’n’ roll soon got rid of our nerves and by the third song we were even smiling (except for Sandra, who never smiled, but that was cool in itself).
Derek was scrutinising us very intently and clearly liked what he saw and heard, because after we had run through our set, he and Stan agreed to manage us. Stan would finance us, because he had a few bob, and Derek would make use of his knowledge of the entertainment scene to plot our masterplan for world domination. The Everons had managers and we could not have been more delighted.
There could be no doubt that Derek was well connected because over the next few weeks he brought a string of showbiz A-listers down to the Eagle to show them his new charges and try to get a word-of-mouth thing going. The saloon-bar regulars must have been utterly gobsmacked to see Peter O’Toole, Lionel Bart, Ian McShane, Vidal Sassoon and Susan Hampshire swanning through the pub and up the stairs.
They were a stellar crew, but our celebrity guests didn’t mean a lot to me. A shy, typical teenager who found it hard to string a sentence together, I mostly hid behind my drums as Derek’s famous friends came to have a butchers at us. I spoke to Mary Quant, who was very posh and wide-eyed and, well, quaint, but often I simply had no idea who our star visitors were. If Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters had come down, it would have been a different matter.
We were very grateful for Derek’s efforts and had a lot of faith in him but a few of his ideas had us scratching our heads. He was keen to emphasise our East End roots and kept asking
us
to play an instrumental version of ‘Limehouse Blues’. In a similar vein, he insisted we change our name from the Everons to the China Plates – Cockney rhyming slang for mates. I was fairly horrified by this but we went along with it.
After a trip to Carnaby Street, where Stan’s cash kitted the China Plates out in matching white tab-collar shirts, sky-blue jackets and Cuban-heel boots, came a symbolic leap forward – our first recording session.
The venue was a fleapit studio in Leytonstone, run by a fat man with a beard who looked as if he slept under the production console. He was also the engineer, and painfully led us through the complexities of headphones and vocal booths. At first we found it intimidating, but we managed to commit two of my songs – ‘Carol-Anne’ and ‘Got to Work’ – to tape, as well as a Memphis Slim track. The China Plates had made their first recording.
This was heady stuff and I began to suspect that my dream of being a professional musician could even become a reality – but there was one major problem. I was still clocking on every day as an apprentice electrical engineer at Plessey’s and, what was worse, I had signed a five-year contract. If I was really going to live the dream, I would have to escape this arrangement.
I met up with Derek at a Soho hangout called the Arts Theatre Club and told him my intention. He gave me a timely reality check, assuring me that he felt I was talented but also cautioning that only a tiny percentage of the people who tried to make it in show business actually succeeded. We agreed I should have a chat with my parents before taking the plunge.
Mum and Dad said the usual parental things about it being good to have ‘a trade to fall back on’ but were reliably supportive and ultimately left the decision to me. I was seventeen, and knew that if I saw my contract through at Plessey’s I would be twenty-one by the time I left, which sounded ancient and far too old to crack the rock ’n’ roll world.
Plessey’s personnel manager was an avuncular soul named Mr Baker, who agreed to a meeting. I knew that he was entitled to hold me to my contract if he so wished, and I felt nervous as I explained that electrical engineering wasn’t really for me and I wanted to be a musician. Mr Baker sat, listened and weighed me up through a cloud of pipe smoke.
‘Well, son,’ he eventually said, ‘if you want to leave, there is not much point in staying, is there?’ He sent me on my way with his best wishes, even saying I could always come back if things didn’t go well. I was grateful for the kind words but suspected and hoped that I had set my last lathe.
I had made the break but initially it looked as if my decision had been about as inspired as my brainwave about drawing Popeye. It was becoming clear that things weren’t really working out for the China Plates. Derek had taken our studio demo on a tour of record companies but nobody was biting and we remained distinctly unsigned.
Stan was getting tired of seeing no prospect of any return on his investment in the band and when Derek asked me to meet him at the Arts Theatre Club again as he had news, I was expecting the worst. It duly arrived: Derek informed me that Stan had given up and was withdrawing his financial backing.
Yet there was more. Derek went on to tell me that the reason he had agreed to manage the band when he first came to see us at the Eagle was that he had recognised potential in me. He added that a lot of the people he had brought down to see us had also singled me out as something special. I was flattered, but also nonplussed – what did this mean, exactly?