Back in the Seventies film producer David Puttnam asked me to go and see a young, hitherto unknown actor playing Jesus in the show Godspell, which was a surprise hit in London’s West End at the time. The actor’s name was David Essex, and he was, Puttnam was convinced, perfect for the film we were planning—That’ll Be The Day.
Although That’ll Be the Day is remembered now as a cult film about the birth of British rock music, it was also a rather edgy story about a school drop-out who scarcely does a decent thing in the entire story.
We’d been worried that our hero was so unsympathetic audiences wouldn’t empathise with him. And then we saw David Essex. Who wouldn’t love this good looking boy with a cheeky grin? He could get away with murder. Girls adored him and boys identified with him. When released the film was a huge hit for us all, as was its sequel Stardust.
An important storyline thread in That’ll Be The Day was set in a fairground, and now David Essex is heading back to the dodgems in All The Fun Of The Fair, a new stage musical he’ s co-written, which will include several David Essex hits, as well as some of his lesser known songs.
“Even before we did That’ll Be The Day I was always fascinated by funfairs,” he told me this week, the first time we’d met in decades. “I always thought there was an undercurrent of really tangible violence about fairs, while at the same time they were a great place to have a good time. I even worked on one for a couple of weeks when I was about fourteen.
“So a couple of years ago I sat down with writer Jon Conway, whose family had been in circuses, and we came up with the idea of a show set in a funfair. We didn’t want it to be a fluffy thing with girl dancers and it isn’t. It’s very earthy, a story that takes place in the underbelly of the funfair world. To me it’s like a play with music.”
We met in a private room in a West End hotel. Once he was thought of as a pretty boy, but now he’s become a solid, tougher looking man, his once luxuriant black hair sparse and white, a slight beard starting. But the eyes are still blue, the looks and charm are still there.
After the success of That’ll Be The Day and Stardust everyone connected with those films assumed that he would go on to be a very famous movie star. The camera loved him and he had a stillness on film which is rare.
But it didn’t happen. The British film industry shrank in the late Seventies and early Eighties, and the good parts weren’t offered. He could have gone to Hollywood, he says. The choice was there. But in the meantime he’d become a very big rock star in Britain.
“I don’t think any of my career was really planned,” he says. “It was more a case of reacting to what was happening day by day.”
What happened was that he became a juggler with his own career, one minute a rock star and songwriter, then suddenly appearing as Che in the original version of Evita, or Fletcher Christian in the first show he co-wrote, Mutiny!, based on the Mutiny on the Bounty.
“I’ve always liked doing different things, so I’ve always been thinking ‘what’s next?’. I try to satisfy myself and hope that what I do relates to a wider circle.”
Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t, the critical savaging he suffered for Mutiny! still remembered, although he wants me to know that the public enjoyed the show and it ran for a year and a half. “I think I listened to too many people then, thinking they must know better. They don’t always.”
Still the quietly spoken, low-key, self-contained and cautiously private person I first met all those years ago, there’s always been an inner-confidence about him, though his early life hardly seemed promising.
An only child, brought up in an East End prefab and then council flat, he left school at fifteen. “Actually I think it was more like 14. I never used to go. And when I did they’d just send me and Frankie Lampard (the famous father of Chelsea footballer Frank Lampard) off to play football. I played for West Ham Schoolboys. Frankie said I could have made it as a professional if I’d stuck at it, but I think he was just being kind.”
His first job was as an apprentice electrical engineer on a factory floor in Ilford. But then a man who wanted to get into pop management spotted him playing drums in a group.”
The man was called Derek Bowman, and he would spend the next thirty years single-mindedly devoting his life to shaping his protégé’s career, arranging for speech lessons to lose some of the Cockney in Essex’s voice, singing lessons to widen his range, and arranging introductions to anyone he thought might be able to help. Bowman died in 1995.
“He was my mentor. Without Derek I certainly wouldn’t have done what I’ve done. Derek introduced me to the theatre, which as a working class boy I’d never seen. He was the man who taught me what an avocado pear was, too. You’d never have seen me in Godspell if it hadn’t been for Derek.”
And was Bowman possibly in love with him?
“I don’t think so. He was like an older brother, and I’d been an only child. But there was never anything sexual. We never had those sort of discussions. It was just day to day work. And Derek was meticulous. Actually, I think he was asexual. But it was his insistence in persevering despite people’s indifference to me that motivated me and still motivates me.”
That indifference took years to overcome, with flop records, a walk-on moment in a Carry On film and understudying Tommy Steele in pantomime. When finally the part in Godspell arrived, Essex was already married to Maureen, a girl he’d met in the East End. With their daughter Verity on the way, he was unemployed and just about to take a job as a van driver, when the phone call came and in a moment his life was changed for ever.
Suddenly he was a star with the look of the moment. But it was difficult playing a rock star in Stardust, while his real life was mirroring his fictional life in the film. “I was never comfortable with all the hysteria around me,” he says. “The life of a rock star was difficult.”
By most standards, he was, however, a pretty well behaved one. “There were temptations, but drugs never really interested me. Thank God! I think my police force was Verity, and wanting her to respect her dad. I never wanted her to see anything about her dad that she wouldn’t be proud of. So in many ways I have to be grateful to her because I’m not a hundred per cent strong. I’m not perfect. I’m not a monk. But having her in the back of my mind at that time helped me.”
A son, Danny, followed before his first marriage ended. Various other girls came and went, about whom he resolutely won’t talk, before a second marriage in 1991 to American punk singer Carlotta Christy from the group Rash of Stabbings produced twin boys, Kit and Bill. That, too, has now broken up. He won’t say why.
At one point both Kit and Bill played for West Ham Schoolboys, too, but equally like him they gave up football to follow a life in music.
“I was angry at the time because they have so much flair and talent. They played cricket for Surrey schoolboys, as well. Then they hit fourteen and just stopped, like I did. They’re twenty now and building a studio where they live with their mother in Rhode Island. She and I are still good friends. I’ll make my next album there.”
He lives alone in a flat in London’s Covent Garden, although he also has a house in the south of France. It sounds like a lonely life for a grandfather of 61, but if he is lonely, he doesn’t admit it. “I’m very happy,” he insists. “I’m well off. I’ve got everything I need.”
And is he in love?
A hesitation and then. “Er, no!” And the file on his private life snaps shut once again.
The loss of his mother last year affected him badly. “She’d never been ill in her life, never even taken a Lemsip, but went into hospital because she had some swelling on her knee. I was on tour at the time so I wasn’t around as much as I’d like to have been, but when I got back to London I went to see her and discovered that she’d been moved to an isolation ward.
“I asked what was going on and a nurse told me she’d got MRSA. They gave her antibiotics, but then she got pneumonia. I went to see the consultant and I said, ‘This is outrageous. This is a hospital’. He just said: “’Very dangerous places, hospitals’.
“Then she died. It was unexpected and upsetting.”
As a star, though he’s been hugely successful, he’s never been easy to classify because he’s worked in so many different areas. He hasn’t mixed much with any fashionable sets in the theatre or rock music world either, and if he sometimes feels he hasn’t been taken as seriously as he might have, it would be understandable.
“I think it’s possible that when I was young the looks might have got in the way. At the time I didn’t really realise I was good looking, but now I look at old photographs and I can see that I was. Sometimes I’ve thought it might have been quite nice to have had pimples and a great big nose and then perhaps the music would have been taken more seriously.”
What the critical reaction to All The Fun Of The Fair will be he won’t know until after it opens, but this is a key moment in his career. He’ll be playing a middle aged man, with middle aged problems. The errant youth in the show will be his character’s son.
“When I remember the critical reaction to Mutiny! I sometimes think that maybe I was thought to have overstepped my place, in that only Noel Coward, Anthony Newley and I have appeared in West End musicals we’ve also written. So I hope I don’t get that reaction this time.
“It would be nice to do this and then, if the opportunity arose, to rebuild my film career. Actually, I think I’m more castable in films now than ever I was before. I’d like to be cast against type and maybe play someone like an East End gangster, no-one good. I’m not disappointed that I didn’t have a bigger film career, because I never motivated myself to look for it, and most of the parts I’ve been offered weren’t right. But if a good part came along I’d be very interested.”
Which, considering the heavy set middle aged man with the still twinkling eyes that he’s become, might just be a very, very good idea.
