Over the Moon Page 10

  The hospital had no news by the early evening and so it was in to the second show of the day. It was impossible to define what I was feeling: I was nervous, excited, distant and running on adrenaline, all at the same time. Midway through the first act, my antennae sensed a change of mood on stage and the cast’s eyes all seemed to be on me.

  Julie Covington passed me a note under the wire fence. It read:

  You can be a father to a son, but you have to be a father to a daughter.

  A daughter! I had a daughter! My next line went clean out of my head as the actors all crowded around me, crying, kissing me and slapping me on the back, the script momentarily forgotten. What a moment! I would have loved to be there for the birth, but as I couldn’t, there was no better way to celebrate becoming a dad than with these friends to whom I had grown so close.

  The show over, I leapt back into the Mercedes and raced to the hospital, jumping a red light en route in my haste. A police car pulled me over and I admitted to the officer that I had not seen the light. I was about to explain why I was in such a hurry when he cut me short. ‘Well, Jesus wouldn’t lie, would he?’ he reasoned. ‘Off you go.’

  Maureen was waiting for me on the ward, our baby in her arms. Everything people say about becoming a parent is true. I had never seen anybody or anything so fragile and beautiful, never felt an emotion so profound. As I held our daughter for the first time, I realised exactly what life is about.

  Her name came to us fairly easily. We wanted to call her Verity, for Truth, because truth is so important in life. For her middle name, we went back to my mum’s maiden name, Lee, for all of its gypsy connotations, but we decided to spell it Leigh. Verity Leigh Cook.

  Having had a hard labour, Maureen stayed on the ward to recuperate for a few days as I saw off the last few pre-Christmas Godspell shows and readied the house for my family’s return. The three of us had a wonderful, special Christmas together in Seven Kings, punctuated by daily visits from Verity’s doting, delighted grandparents.

  The New Year brought the news that Godspell was to transfer from the Roundhouse to Wyndham’s Theatre on 25 January. I would, after all, become the first actor to play Jesus on the West End stage, but I also felt a small sadness at leaving Chalk Farm, where it had all happened for us.

  Every night I would take the fervent applause of the audience, transported by my crucifixion, then bid the crowds of well-wishers good night and head home at midnight to my new family. After a few words with Maureen I’d pause at Verity’s room to watch her breathe for a minute before going to bed.

  Exhausted, like any new mum, by a hard day’s childcare, Maureen would find it hard to get up for the 4 a.m. feed and nappy change so this became my task. It was always hard to drag myself out of bed, but being with Verity in the twilight hours was a joy. It felt as if we were the only two people in the world.

  It was probably good that Verity had come along to help keep me grounded because I could easily have been getting very bigheaded. Godspell’s switch to Wyndham’s went seamlessly and triggered another batch of reviews of the show by critics who would never have deigned to go to Chalk Farm.

  The fourth estate wasn’t the only institution to do a U-turn when Godspell got successful. The Church had initially viewed us with suspicion, wary of our motives, but when they realised our simplistic, childlike interpretations of the teachings of Christ were attracting 2,000 people a night, compared to the twenty or so scattered round the pews of their empty churches every Sunday morning, they also wanted a piece of the action.

  We were invited to perform a section of the show in the crypt at St Paul’s Cathedral. We did so, and the BBC came along and filmed it (rather badly, as it happened). It was a big deal to some of the cast members but, if I am honest, I viewed it as a bit of a nuisance.

  The Godspell phenomenon had been, if you’ll pardon the pun, a godsend to me, and with an eighteen-month contract I no longer had to worry about providing for Maureen and Verity, but there was still something itching at me: I was missing making music. A random encounter was to put that right.

  Liz Whiting, a Godspell understudy, had an American boyfriend named Jeff Wayne who had visited London with his dad to work on a musical, A Tale of Two Cities, fallen in love with the country and stayed. Jeff, who was a big fan of Godspell, now worked writing and producing music for TV adverts, and asked if I would like to sing on an ad.

  Even though it was only a TV jingle, I jumped at the chance, which I suppose showed how much I was missing making music. Jeff set to work to hymn the merits of Pledge furniture polish and I joined him in the studio to record the following immortal words for posterity: ‘Let the sun come into your life / Bring in the sun / Pledge.’ Another advert had me adopting an American accent to plug Chrysler cars: ‘Chrysler has the answer / Boo-boo-boom.’ For these half-day jobs, I was paid more than I would get for playing Jesus for two years. No wonder Jeff lived in a mews house off Baker Street.

  Jeff and I also formed a hobby band for a bit of fun: I sang, Jeff played keyboards, we recruited a couple of session musicians, and Marti Webb and Julie Covington sang backing vocals. We only played a couple of gigs, so it was sod’s law that when we did a half-empty show at the Revolution Club, Paul McCartney should be there, scrutinising us closely as we sang the Beatles’ ‘Long and Winding Road’. No pressure, then. Luckily, he clapped.

  Godspell also enjoyed a degree of musical success, with the cast album and a single from the show, ‘Day by Day’, both going Top Ten, but these were slim pickings. Increasingly, I knew that my aim was to release records under my own name – and to write my own songs.

  Yet this was for the future. For now, Godspell continued to dominate my career and my life. In fact our media profile went up a notch, if that was possible, when Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Jesus Christ Superstar opened down the road from us at the Palace Theatre, with Paul Nicholas as Jesus.

  There was very little similarity between the shows – Godspell was a sparse, simple affair while Jesus Christ Superstar was a huge, epic production – but this didn’t stop the media trying to fabricate rivalry between us. The BBC even staged a TV debate, Box Office Christ, but their hopes for friction between Tim Rice and I were dashed when we agreed on everything and got on like a house on fire, as we still do forty years later.

  As Godspell continued to sell out every night, there were more and more fans gathering at the stage door wanting photos and autographs, a new experience for me. I found it awkward to deal with, preferring the piss-taking banter of the porters in Covent Garden fruit and veg market, which would be springing into life as Jeremy Irons and I walked to an Italian restaurant, Luigi’s, for an after-show meal.

  Because we were dealing with sacred subject matter that was so important to many people, the cast tended to play Godspell very straight with no high jinks such as Cinderella’s Wellington boot in Manchester. There was one exception. One night, Jeremy materialised to baptise me at the start of the show, as usual. He had his back to the audience, his eyes were closed, and on his eyelids he had written a distinctly un-Christian message: ‘F*** Off’.

  I would love to report that I kept a straight face. But I didn’t.

  8

  THAT WAS THE DAY THAT WAS

  WITH GODSPELL MY career had crossed the Rubicon. The entire dynamic of my working life shifted. After years of poor Derek slogging away and hitting brick walls as he tried to interest people in his young actor and singer, his previously silent phone was suddenly ringing off the hook with offers of work and media interviews.

  Nevertheless, we tried to be selective. After all, I wasn’t just a hot new star with a big hit behind him: I was also a newlywed and a doting dad with a wife and baby to care for, and I wasn’t about to neglect them. Plus, of course, I was still doing eight shows a week of Godspell.

  It needed to be a pretty special offer for me to take on another major, non-musical project at that juncture – and it was. David Puttnam, who was then no more
than a little-known, upcoming film producer, phoned Derek to invite me for a screen test for a film he planned to make, called That’ll Be the Day.

  The film was to be about a working-class London lad, growing up in the fifties, who became obsessed with music and wanted to be a rock star. It resonated with me for obvious reasons. After a screen test on Hampstead Heath one afternoon with Puttnam, director Claude Whatham and an actress, David sent me the full script. I read it and was hooked straight away.

  It wasn’t just the story that excited me. The proposed cast was exceptional: former Beatle Ringo Starr, the Who drummer Keith Moon and rock ’n’ roll singer Billy Fury (this time without his unwanted sidekick, Freddie Starr) had all signed up already. When Puttnam offered me the lead role, I had no hesitation. I was in.

  Unfortunately, things were not that simple. Filming for That’ll Be the Day was to take place on the Isle of Wight that autumn, and I was less than six months into an eighteen-month contract on Godspell. If I were to make the movie, I would need a leave of absence from the hit show – and why would they give me that?

  Derek and I visited the office of Hugh ‘Binky’ Beaumont, the plummy and patriarchal impresario behind HM Tennant, the UK producers of Godspell. Binky (I wonder if he knew Bunny?) heard us out then hatched a possible plan. He would give me three months’ leave from the musical if I would agree to add six months to my contract on my return, which basically meant I would spend two years playing Jesus.

  Binky stressed that the scheme would need the agreement of Godspell’s American co-producers and promised to put it to them. Derek and I were in two minds, with Derek in particular feeling the deal had an element of blackmail to it, but when the US bosses agreed, we felt we had no choice but to go along with it.

  Ultimately I felt the sacrifice – if that was what it was – was worth it because That’ll Be the Day appealed to me on so many levels. The script was by a former Liverpool Daily Post and Evening Standard rock journalist named Ray Connolly, and was about teenagers growing up in the late fifties to a background of the first flush of youth culture and of rock ’n’ roll.

  The genius of Connolly’s script lay in locating the edgy glamour of Rebel Without a Cause-era James Dean and relocating it to a Britain where kids were growing up intuitively wanting more from life than the straitlaced, conventional existence that their parents’ generation had been forced to lead. It was a rock ’n’ roll movie that belonged in the John Osborne lineage of post-war working-class kids trying to escape a dreary destiny.

  Maureen, Verity and I bought a ticket to Ryde on 23 October 1972 and decamped to a little house in Shanklin for the seven-week shoot. It was the best of both worlds: we got a precious family holiday, plus I had a fantastic time working on a project that felt personally meaningful and very significant.

  The parallels between my life and that of my character, Jim MacLaine, were notable. Jim was a working-class suburban lad, restless and possessed of a visceral urge to find excitement in his life. A scene where he hurled his schoolbooks into a river and boycotted his exams vividly reminded me of scrawling Popeye all over my Eleven Plus paper.

  It was equally hard not to identify with the scenes where Jim eschewed a conventional career, working as a casual labourer on a travelling fair, then married and became a young father. It was probably my affection for him that made me able to portray him as a lovable rogue, even when he became a cheating sex maniac. The movie ended with Jim abandoning everything to pursue his rock ’n’ roll dream.

  Despite my Carry On cameo of a few years earlier, taking the lead role in a movie was a new experience for me and there was a lot to learn. The early starts were a shock to the system, after being used to evening Godspell performances, and not even my weeks of early-hours nappy sessions with Verity could prepare me for the jolt of 5 a.m. alarm calls.

  I learned to scale down my acting from the declamatory style of theatre – after all, if you raise an eyebrow on a cinema screen, it jumps twenty feet in the air – and I enjoyed the opportunity to give subtler, more nuanced performances. I also honed the crucial movie actor’s skill of being able to sit around in a caravan for hours on end waiting to be called without going mad with boredom.

  That’ll Be the Day was a joy to make both because of the high quality of the script and the camaraderie of the cast. Claude Whatham was a skilled and helpful director, and any advance nerves I may have had about working with one of the Beatles vanished when Ringo proved easy-going, funny and warm.

  Keith Moon’s hell-raising reputation preceded him and he did his best to live up to it. He made a textbook rock star entrance to the proceedings, arriving via a helicopter that alighted on the hotel roof, scattering the tablecloths that had been laid out to mark the landing area on to the beach below. Keith emerged from the chopper to announce: ‘The only way to travel, dear boy! I was in my front room in Chertsey twenty minutes ago and now I’m here. Where’s the bar?’

  Moon was aware that people expected him to be the life and soul of every party, swinging from chandeliers, so that was what he did. In private, though, I found him to be a decent, steady and very intelligent guy.

  An upcoming young actor, Robert Lindsay, played Terry, Jim MacLaine’s best friend at school who studied hard, took his exams and went off to university while Jim was frittering his life away. Robert was a nice guy, but we didn’t get too close, largely I think because there was a tension between our screen characters that being too buddy-buddy could have removed.

  Ringo, Keith and I enjoyed some very lively evenings after filming but I tried to keep a lid on my own behaviour. The film was a big deal for me – I knew its success or failure largely rested on my character – and it wouldn’t help if I was turning up with a raging hangover every day, so most nights I retreated back to Maureen, Verity and our cottage.

  Not every night, though. American singer Harry Nilsson was staying in the main cast hotel, partly because Ray Connolly had taken some inspiration for the script from one of his songs, ‘1941’, but mostly because he was friends with Ringo. A few evenings degenerated into early-hours all-star jamming sessions: with Ringo, Keith and me, we had no shortage of drummers. The hotel just gave up and left us to it. Once or twice, I found myself creeping on to the set at 5 a.m. after a riotous all-nighter.

  The Isle of Wight was a blast from start to finish and it remains a special place for me. Verity even took her first steps on the island. After seven weeks there, filming on That’ll Be the Day continued at Pinewood Studios, north of London. It was while I was kicking my heels, as usual, in the dressing room there one day that I took the quantum leap that was to empower me as a songwriter and define my career from that moment.

  In That’ll Be the Day, Ringo’s character, Mike, had the line: ‘Only Americans can write rock songs.’ I didn’t believe that but it made me reflect on the extraordinary, pervasive influence that America and its iconography exerted over Britain’s infant, impressionable youth culture. I sat down to write ‘Rock On’. The first words came easy:

  Hey, did you rock and roll?

  Rock on, ooh, my soul

  Hey did ya boogie too, did ya?

  Then images of Americana and its 1950s totems of hip poured out of me and into the song: ‘Summertime blues … blue suede shoes … blue jeans … Jimmy Dean.’ Even as I scribbled the words down, the melody began to form in my head. ‘Rock On’ was one of the quickest songs that I ever wrote and it was to change my life.

  Incidentally, it’s long been one of the minor banes of my life that people have always got the ‘Rock On’ lyrics wrong. The sheet music for the song mistakenly had them as being ‘Hey, kid, rock and roll’ and that version understandably stuck. But ‘Hey, did you rock and roll?’ was what I wrote.

  With That’ll Be the Day in the can, it was time for me to return to Wyndham’s and Godspell. While I had already spent a long time playing Jesus, I felt fresh after the break and it was good to see my fellow cast members again. Crucially, it was also my chance to
reunite with Jeff Wayne and get serious about music.

  After one of our Sunday-band get-togethers, I mentioned to Jeff that I had started writing my own songs and wanted to make an album. When he asked to hear one, I sang a number I had just finished called ‘On and On’, which he liked. A light bulb came on over my head and I made Jeff an offer: ‘You work in the studio. Why don’t you produce the album and I’ll write it?’

  Jeff seemed keen on the idea, and carried away with enthusiasm, I improved my offer: ‘You can publish the songs, as well.’ I didn’t really understand what publishing rights were, and if I am honest I still don’t, but Jeff was a far cannier music business operative than me and accepted eagerly. Derek was horrified when he heard what I had done, but a deal is a deal and I never attempted to back out of it, even if it would turn out to mean forfeiting countless thousands of pounds in earnings.

  Jeff and I initially went into Advision Studios in Soho to record two songs: ‘Rock On’ and ‘On and On’. Jeff had an extensive contacts book and with a few phone calls was able to gather an extraordinary collection of musicians. As a first-session band, guitarist Chris Spedding, bassist Herbie Flowers, drummer Barry DeSouza and percussionist Ray Cooper were peerless, and they were to contribute to my sound for years.

  As the session unfolded, I felt grateful that my tender, fledgling songs were in Jeff’s skilled hands. I sang ‘On and On’ with the rhythm section, leaving it to Jeff to organise the orchestra that would flesh out the song so fulsomely a few days later. Then we turned our attention to ‘Rock On’.