Over the Moon Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Introduction: From Jesus to Eddie Moon

  1. You Can Take the Boy Out of the East End…

  2. Getting in Trouble and Blowing Bubbles

  3. Sex, Drums and Rock ’n’ Roll

  4. The Smashing of the China Plates

  5. Oh My, Thigh High, Dig Dem Dimples on Dem Knees

  6. Luvvies, Gangsters and Snogging Brown Bears

  7. ‘Don’t You Mean Gospel?’

  8. That Was the Day That Was

  9. The Only Way is Essex

  10. A Sprinkling of Stardust

  11. ‘It’s Because We F****** Love You’

  12. Fairground Attractions

  13. The Che Must Go On

  14. Back on the Bike

  15. My Life as an International Drug Smuggler

  16. The World Is My Lobster

  17. It’s Up to You, New York

  18. What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailboat?

  19. Two Heads are Better Than One

  20. A Lot of Work for Charydee

  21. It’s Always About the Family

  22. Was That My Life?

  23. Old Big ’Ead Takes a Rest

  24. The Tinker Comes to Town

  25. You Can Put the Boy into the East End…

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  ‘You get a few – very few – moments in your life when suddenly something happens and you know immediately that things will never be the same again. I had such an epiphany. I was thirteen on an undercover schoolboy mission to explore Soho, when we heard some killer music coming out of a club. What I found in there altered everything I felt and knew about myself, and about my future. It rearranged my very DNA.

  The band playing on stage completely blew me away. The atmosphere and energy were just incredible. I would never have thought it possible, but suddenly I couldn’t care less about the West Ham youth team or becoming a footballer.

  This was rhythm blues as it should be played: rich and strong and loud and powerful. It seemed to touch my very soul. I wanted to be a part of it. Yes – the drums. They were the foundation, the rock for this thrilling, explosive racket. That was my future settled, then: I was going to be a blues drummer…’

  Well, that’s how it all started. But the future held crazy, unimaginable fame and undreamt of adventure for David Essex. From Godspell to EastEnders, it’s been an amazing life. And here is the full, incredible story – in his own words.

  INTRODUCTION

  FROM JESUS TO EDDIE MOON

  The writer F Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives. I guess I must be lucky I’m British, then, as I reckon by now I have been through acts two, three, four and five and must be on the encore.

  I recently spent five months on EastEnders playing that lovable rogue with a dark past, Eddie Moon. It was a privilege to be part of one of the biggest shows on British TV and I had a fantastic time making it. People seemed to take to Eddie, and I guess for a lot of people under thirty, that will be what they think when they see me now: Eddie Moon.

  For people a little older than that, however, it is a different story entirely. They may well focus on one of my many incarnations in the past. Maybe they will remember me as Jesus, or at least his human form on earth, when I first emerged from obscurity in the musical Godspell all those years ago.

  They might, however, prefer to think of David Essex the singer and songwriter, the pop star with the mop of gypsy curls who enjoyed a string of chart-topping hits and who for a while seemed to be on the front cover of Jackie magazine every week. I know for some folk, I will forever be the smiling waif who sang ‘Rock On’ and ‘Hold Me Close’.

  Maybe others will always see me as Jim MacLaine, the angst-ridden anti-hero of the movies That’ll Be the Day and Stardust, the working-class boy who longed to be a rock star and found fame and fortune only for them to destroy him. Jim seemed to leave a mark on a lot of people: he certainly left one on me.

  I’ve been told by some people they will always think of me as the iconic revolutionary, Che Guevara, who had so much impact when I played him on stage in Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita. And for a few, I will always be the amiable lock-keeper with a dodgy past from TV show The River.

  I think I have had quite a life – or quite a few lives – to date. I have written West End musicals, scored ballets and even (don’t laugh) starred in a ninja action movie. And that’s before we even mention the pantomimes, a novelty single and a Carry On film (yes, really) in my early years.

  So a lot happened before I spent a while as Eddie Moon, and now feels like the time to reflect and tell my life story. I think it’s a fairly extraordinary tale, and it began in a post-war East End district that was every bit as poor as Walford: a place called Canning Town.

  1

  YOU CAN TAKE THE BOY OUT OF THE EAST END…

  OVER THE YEARS, people have made a lot of my relatively poor background and impoverished upbringing, but it never felt bad to me. As a kid, what you know is all you know, and my life always seemed fine and dandy. I could not have had two more loving parents, and when I think back, I remember a very happy childhood.

  I wasn’t quite a war baby but I wasn’t far off. I made my first appearance on 23 July 1947, at a maternity hospital in West Ham in the heart of the East End. Forceps were involved. I was a bit on the light side, at six pounds four ounces, and was yellow with jaundice, so I can’t have looked all that good.

  I wasn’t David Essex in those days, of course. I was born David Albert Cook, to my two loving parents, Albert and Olive – not that anybody ever called her that. My mum was a petite woman, very beautiful and full of life, who looked a bit like a doll and so went by the nickname Dolly, and that was what everyone knew her as.

  The three of us were very lucky to be around. My parents had an eventful war. My dad, who worked on the docks when London’s Docklands really was docklands, had been conscripted into the Royal Artillery when hostilities broke out. He was stationed on the big guns in Dover, and got posted up to Sunderland for a while.

  My dad had to get a twenty-four-hour pass to marry my mum and it was the luckiest thing he ever did, in more ways than one. He turned up at the church on the back of his brother George’s motorbike as my mum waited for him in her BHS wedding dress. My dad’s battalion set sail for Norway without him: they got blown out of the water, with no survivors.

  This wasn’t the only close call my dad experienced: the Germans scored a direct hit on his gun nest once, but he escaped with just a burn. As for my mum, living in the East End, she was exposed to the full horrors of the Blitz. One of the many times that the sirens sounded, she and her sister ran to a local school. They were turned away because the basement was full and fled to the tube station. The bombers scored a direct hit on the school.

  Another time, Mum was walking in a country lane in Kent with her sister and niece when a Messerschmitt appeared in the sky and started machine-gunning them. They tried to escape down a manhole but couldn’t get the cover off so ran to a nearby house and banged on the door, screaming, with the pilot still firing at them. How can a human being do that: try to blow up two women and a little girl? Luckily, he gave up and flew off.

  Remarkably, Albert and Dolly came out of the war in one piece, except for a bit of damage to my mum’s hearing, and set up home in a rented one-bedroom flat in Redriff Road, Plaistow. They were keen to start a family as soon as possible. Mum says she always knew she would have a boy and she was always going to call him David: maybe her gypsy roots gave her this inkling.

  My mum was one of seven kids and her dad, Tom Kemp, was a gypsy. On her wedding
certificate, it gave his job as ‘Travelling Tinker’. When he first came over from Ireland, he moved around the country and made saucepans. Sadly, I never met him: he died before I was born.

  Tom had been married before, to a gypsy woman. When she died and Tom married my nan, Olive, his first wife’s mother came over from Ireland and stood outside Nan’s house, cursing her. Dressed all in black, she waved a silver sovereign necklace at her door and said she would never have a penny in the world. Co-incidence or not, that’s just how Olive senior’s life worked out.

  From my parents’ accounts, I was a happy baby and toddler and spent my time pouring my food over my head and falling over. The problem was that our Plaistow landlord didn’t allow children in his flat, so Mum and Dad decided to move out and put our names down for one of the high-rise council flats that were replacing the bombed terraces of the East End.

  This left us with nowhere to live in the short term, so we went to stay with my mum’s sister, Aunt Ellen, her husband Uncle Bob and my cousin Rose in Canning Town. Their council house had a small garden and they were gracious hosts but it was cramped with all of us there, and even though I was only two years old, I think I sensed we were in the way.

  My dad was back on the docks by now, and every day my mum would take me out in my second-hand pushchair to get us out from under Aunt Ellen’s feet. We’d walk around Rath-bone Street Market in Canning Town, a hubbub of stallholders and shoppers that felt like the most exciting place in the world, or take our ration book to the butcher’s to get a few scrag-ends of meat.

  This routine went on for a year, with the council showing no interest in offering us a home, so my parents tried to force their hand. After a brief family conference, it was agreed that Ellen and Bob would ‘order’ us to leave, and my dad would tell the authorities that we were homeless.

  This plan backfired in a major way: the council put us into a workhouse.

  I say workhouse, but a lot of people would call it a nuthouse. Forest House in James Lane, Whipps Cross was an institution for the homeless and the mentally ill. There was no room there for my dad, so he had to stay with his sister, Ivy, in Barking and pay the eighteen-bob-a-week rent for Mum and me to share a poky, curtained cubicle with a single bed and a cupboard.

  Forest House was full of women and kids in the same desperate situation as us, crammed into tiny living units and all sharing one kitchen. Sixty years on, I can still picture the pink roses on the cubicle curtains, and remember the harsh smell of hospital antiseptic that lingered around its long cream corridors.

  Forest House seemed massive to me, and as a wide-eyed kid I found it fascinating. It had a surreal, almost fairy-tale air. Troubled inmates trudged the corridors, singing to themselves. I got to know a few of them. One man asked me one morning if I would like some conkers, and returned that evening with a coal sack of them.

  Another man asked Dad during one of his nightly evening visits if he would like him to fix his broken watch. He took it away and returned it in a hundred pieces, confessing that he ‘didn’t know how to fix them ones’. Yet Forest House had its dark side: I can remember one thrashing inmate being restrained as he had an epileptic fit.

  My mum and I would have breakfast every morning at seven and clear out for the day. We’d walk around nearby Wanstead Flats or get the bus over to my nan in Stratford. These journeys could be a problem. As a toddler, I had blond ringlets, and Mum and I couldn’t go anywhere without some old lady stopping us to coo over how ‘sweet’ I was. A shy kid, I hated this attention and normally reacted by bursting into tears.

  Our six months in Forest House were an adventure for me, but I could sense sadness in my parents, and that period was awful for them. Once we had left, we never discussed it. The one time that we did, my mum confessed she had thought of jumping off the fire escape by our cubicle and ending it all. She said she would have done, if she hadn’t had me.

  It was just as bad for my dad. He was a proud man, and felt he had let us down. He came from an even bigger family than Mum as the youngest of thirteen. His father, a stern Victorian Scotsman from Glasgow, never called him by his real name, Albert: he called him ‘One Too Many’. What a great ego boost that must have been!

  Dad was a very smart man – if he hadn’t come from such a poor family, I reckon he would have gone to university – and beneath his East End bravado and bluster, he was sensitive. His torment came to an end in the spring of 1951 when the council finally kept their word and gave us a prefab in Hooper Road, Custom House. It even had a garden.

  Our new abode might have looked like a Nissan hut but to us it was paradise. Mum and Dad painted and decorated the inside, Dad turfed the garden, and at three years old I finally had my own bedroom. The docks were at the end of the street, and I loved gazing up at the ocean-going liners that towered over the terraced houses.

  My dad vanished to that mysterious place every day. Now and then he’d take me along and his burly workmates would ruffle my hair and ask me, ‘You all right, son? I can tell you’re a little Cooky!’ It made me feel ten feet tall. I watched them unloading cargoes of New Zealand lamb, smelled the oils and spices and gawped at the Indian and Chinese sailors walking around. It all felt so alien and exotic and I always assumed that I would work there one day.

  Dad was my best friend and my hero and I couldn’t have been happier in Hooper Road. The day’s highlight was Dad coming home from work and, after we’d had tea, taking me out on the crossbar of his bike. We’d pedal for miles around the East End, soaking in the sights and sounds, me always urging him to go faster.

  My world fell apart at Christmas 1951 when Dad contracted tuberculosis. He had been getting weaker for a while and had become less keen to take me out on the bike, telling me he was tired, but on New Year’s Eve he gave in to my pleadings and we set off. We hadn’t gone far when he had a violent coughing fit and turned back. By the time we got home, he was coughing up blood.

  As the ambulance took my dad away, I felt as if my life was ending. He was twenty-eight and a doctor told him he was going to die. He didn’t, but he spent three long months convalescing at the Victoria Chest Hospital in Hertfordshire. The house felt empty without him.

  It used to take Mum and me a whole day to get to Hertfordshire and back to visit him, on the days she wasn’t working as a pub cleaner. When we got there, we couldn’t go near him because TB is so contagious. I can still picture the big photo of me that Dad had by his bed. I used to envy the photo, and wish that I were sitting there instead.

  While Dad was still away I began my school career, at a nursery in Canning Town called Dockland Settlement nursery school. On my first day, as Mum let go of my hand and said goodbye, I felt nervous and intimidated. As an only child I hadn’t been around other kids, and suddenly there were thirty of them chasing around, screaming and snatching toys off each other. I held back, stayed quiet and watched the chaos around me, but after a couple of weeks as an awkward outsider, I made a few friends.

  The main distinguishing feature of Dockland Settlement was that its headmaster was the Reverend David Sheppard, the former England cricket captain who went on to be the Bishop of Liverpool. Reverend Sheppard was a lovely man who took an interest in me, mainly because he thought I might be decent at sport. He always told my mum he thought I was a bit special, which she obviously loved – but when he said I was good at football or cricket, I wished that Dad were there to hear it.

  Dad finally came home from Hertfordshire and it was wonderful to have him back, although the tuberculosis had left its mark. He didn’t have the strength and energy that he had before and he looked older. He wasn’t well enough to go straight back to work so spent the first few weeks convalescing.

  This change was hard on Mum. She was a vivacious, vibrant woman who loved dancing but now Dad couldn’t join in and had to just sit and watch if they went out. The TB also put paid to any prospect of me having a brother or sister. I was OK with this, having never known anything different, but Mum would have lik
ed more kids.

  The good news was that we were about to go up in the world – literally. The council gave us a new flat on the third floor of a Canning Town low-rise, Avondale Court. Compared with the prefab, this was luxury. It had two bedrooms, a lounge and a kitchen, and a balcony that overlooked a playground. I would play football down there, and if I scored a goal, I could look up to the balcony for Dad’s thumbs-up acknowledgement.

  I lived in a lot of different places as a nipper but Avondale Court was the one that really felt like home. I used to love gazing out from the balcony and seeing the Docklands cranes – sadly, now all gone – and two massive milk-bottle-shaped chimneys on the horizon, belching out white smoke. Dad told me it was the local power station, but secretly, and poetically, I figured they were cloud-making machines.

  Every Sunday my nan, Olive, would get the 69 bus over from Stratford to see us. I used to love her visits. She’d swear like a trooper and roll her own cigarettes and she always brought me sweets. I had to sing for my supper, though: she’d say, ‘Come on Dave, do a show!’ and I’d sing stuff like, ‘What a mouth, what a mouth, what a north-and-south.’

  Back in the world of education, I ended my innings at Reverend Sheppard’s nursery and graduated to my first proper school – Star Lane Primary. If my arrival at Docklands Settlement had fazed me, Star Lane gave me no problems at all. On my first day, as terrified infants sobbed around me, I bade my mum a cheery farewell and marched straight in.

  Maybe I sensed that I would be blissfully happy there. Star Lane was a typical massive old three-floor redbrick Victorian school, with two playgrounds and, importantly for me, a huge playing field for sports. I loved the place from the second I set eyes on it until the day I left.

  I guess a school is only as good as its teachers and Star Lane had some excellent ones. The headmistress, Miss Hood, was an inspirational figure. All the kids loved her. She saw something in me and was always very supportive, and in turn I always wanted to do well to impress her.