Over the Moon Read online

  We had arrived in Advision with little more than a lyric and a spindly melody but in these talented musicians’ hands, my baby began to come to life. Herbie got the ball rolling, pulling out of the air the malevolent pulse of a bassline that began to define the song.

  Something was happening here. I suggested that we add a 1950s Buddy Holly-style tape echo on my voice to the deliberately spartan, eerie-sounding track. Then when we reconvened in the studio the following week to finish the number, we piled on the weirdness.

  Jeff had recruited a string section for this session, and we asked them to detune their instruments to give the track an even more skewed, foreboding air. They demurred, so we hit on Plan B: we would detune the classical players themselves by getting a few glasses of wine down them. In no time, they were sounding like an Indian mantra.

  We were keen to make ‘Rock On’ sound more portentous yet so Jeff called up a multi-instrumentalist called Derek Wadsworth who played the didgeridoo. Derek arrived with it tied to the top of his station wagon and set up as Jeff and I eagerly awaited the alien noise that would add layers of mystery and mystique to the song. He blew into it. It sounded like a bull-elephant farting.

  Once Jeff and I had picked ourselves off the ground and wiped the tears from our eyes, we explained to Derek that we didn’t need his flatulent didgeridoo, but he supplanted it with an electric trombone that had a rather more sombre timbre. The studio engineer, Gary Martin, added layers of echoes and special effects. By now, ‘Rock On’ sounded alien, mesmerising and out of this world.

  It was too far out for David Puttnam. When I offered him ‘Rock On’ to use in That’ll Be the Day, he turned it down, explaining that he felt it was ‘too weird’ for the film. He did, however, include it on the soundtrack album that accompanied the movie.

  Not that the movie needed any help from my song. When That’ll Be the Day opened on 12 April 1973, its reception and reviews rivalled those that had been afforded to Godspell. The critics admired its edginess, teenagers loved its brooding angst and authenticity, and suddenly it was topping box-office charts as the hottest British film around.

  When you have both the lead in a smash-hit musical and the star part in a number-one film, you are not going to remain anonymous. The first half of 1973 was when my previously low-key life was turned upside-down and I went from being a struggling bit-part performer to becoming some kind of phenomenon: what would today be known as a celebrity. It was quite a shock to the system.

  The trend had been building slowly during my first stint in Godspell. There were increasing numbers of people, normally girls, waiting at the Wyndham’s stage door after performances: there were more and more autographs to sign. It was tolerable, even nice, but after That’ll Be the Day it went into overdrive.

  For the first time, it became news if I walked down the street. People would do a double take; girls would stop me, wanting a chat or a photograph; drivers would beep their horns and wave furiously, or even screech to a halt. Despite being naturally shy, I had to get used to being public property.

  This was a life-changing and curious side effect to my success and, without wanting to sound churlish, not something that I had ever remotely craved. I had never wanted to be famous. Even when I first set eyes on Georgie Fame in the Flamingo, I longed to be not the spotlit singer but the drummer, anonymous at the back of the stage. My ideal would have been a career hidden behind the cymbals, smoking a cheroot in a black polo-necked sweater.

  This was something else entirely. The reception for That’ll Be the Day also propelled the soundtrack album, including ‘Rock On’, to number one in the albums chart, where it lodged for weeks. I am not sure that even Derek, with his seemingly bottomless reservoir of faith in me, had ever envisaged success on quite this scale.

  My newfound fame also had a knock-on effect on Godspell, and not only at the stage door. Where the audiences had previously been the sort of refined theatre-goers that I first saw at shows with Derek, now there was an influx of younger, excitable fans who wanted to see That’ll Be the Day’s David Essex and probably couldn’t have cared less about the teachings of Christ.

  One casualty was the Godspell interval in which we invited the audience to come on stage for a glass of rosé and a chat with the cast. Whereas I used to be asked my views on theology and divinity, suddenly I was deluged with scores of fans asking me to sign photos as the rest of the actors milled around, ignored. Jesus spent the interval signing autographs, which seemed rather contrary to the message of the play.

  It’s a tremendous testament to the Godspell cast that they never seemed jealous of this imbalance of attention but remained fiercely loyal and protective of me. One night, Jeremy Irons and I had an after-show plate of pasta at Luigi’s and he lugubriously reflected on his own obscurity next to my burgeoning fame. Yet I knew it would also happen for him: he was too good an actor to stay unknown.

  Maureen was naturally delighted that I had become an overnight success after a mere ten years of slogging away, and thankfully it put an end to any financial worries. We were able to move from Seven Kings to a town house in Chigwell Row, Essex. I could even buy myself a £1,750 second-hand convertible Mercedes, as well as a Renault for Maureen to chauffeur Verity around in.

  The upside of fame was that suddenly record companies were falling over themselves to release my music. Now I had some sort of name, labels that had never even returned Derek’s calls before were locked in a bidding war for me. Eventually, after many transatlantic phone calls, Derek, Jeff and I signed a five-album deal with CBS Records.

  CBS soon learned that they had signed a very stubborn artist. The label’s executives felt that ‘Rock On’ was too avant-garde and, as David Puttnam had said, ‘weird’ to be my debut single for them. They preferred the more conventional ‘On and On’ to be the A-side, but I saw ‘Rock On’ as a statement of intent and was determined to get my own way.

  However, once they had agreed to release it, the company pushed the boat out with ‘Rock On’. Fashion and celebrity photographer David Bailey did the cover photo shoot, but I found the experience all a bit overblown and have never liked the photo on the sleeve of ‘Rock On’.

  CBS also hired the ballroom of Quaglino’s restaurant in Soho to celebrate their signing of me and to launch the single. The room was packed with the great and the good of the music biz and the event could have got a little overwhelming, but luckily I had a good excuse to slip away – I had a Godspell show to do.

  The reviews for ‘Rock On’ were mostly favourable. One critic waxed fairly lyrical: ‘More than just a pretty face, more than a slender waist, this man has the guts to put out a positively thirst-quenching hit 45 – a rumble of bass, a voice laced in reverb and glance back to blue jeans, baby queens and James Dean. A feat of subtleties – it will mess with your head.’ However, it was the promotional appearances that showed me how big ‘Rock On’ was about to be – and how my life was set to change for ever.

  CBS had arranged signing sessions at a handful of London record shops. I anticipated fairly low-key events but could not have been more wrong, as became clear when Derek and I turned up at the first store in Streatham, which resembled a war zone – if wars were fought solely by screaming teenage girls.

  It was absolute mayhem. The record store had also clearly under-estimated how many people would show up and their low-key security staff were hopelessly overwhelmed. I spent an hour trapped behind a desk signing singles and photos as girls sobbed and told me they loved me, then a lot longer waiting for the crowd outside to disperse so I could get out in one piece.

  There were similarly chaotic scenes in Bond Street, where a thousand-plus crowd actually stopped the traffic in Oxford Street, and at a signing in Lewisham in south London, another occasion when the store’s security consisted of a little old man who was no match for hundreds of shrieking, oestrogen-driven girls.

  With his premises besieged by more than 2,000 delirious fans, the Lewisham record shop owner had no choice but
to lock me in the storeroom for my safety and call the police. Even the boys in blue were unable to clear a way through the sea of teenagers. I was due in the West End for Godspell, and the situation looked desperate until my CBS plugger, Steve Colyer, had a brainwave.

  Steve toured a few local premises’ back yards and returned with a pile of dustbin lids. Wielding them as shields against the hordes like King Arthur’s knights, we fought our way through the squealing mob to the car. Everybody was trying to grab at me and the dents in the battered dustbin lids told of the strength of their desire but somehow we made it, arriving at Wyndham’s with ten minutes to spare.

  How did it feel suddenly to be at the centre of this madness? It was exciting, of course, and an exhilarating adrenaline rush, but my main emotions were bemusement and embarrassment. Two years earlier, I had been signing on the dole and applying for van-driving jobs. Where had this come from? What did it mean?

  I guess the years of failure that had preceded these days of success helped me to cope with it. I had spent enough time broke, unemployed, understudying and playing gigs to two men and not even a dog that I was grounded enough not to let this adulation go to my head. Or, at least, that was what I hoped. The truth was, it was hard to make any sense of such hysteria.

  Godspell had made me but as my time on the show neared its end a few of the performances began to drag. A lot of Jesus’s perorations began with ‘I tell you this…’ and once or twice I proclaimed those words then gaped at Julie Covington open-mouthed, my mind full of tumbleweed, until the helpful whisper of the prompter got my thought process back on track.

  As my last night in the show – 15 September 1973 – neared, my life was pandemonium. Tickets for my final performance were changing hands for absurdly inflated sums. That’ll Be the Day had taken up residency in cinemas up and down the land. And to top it all, ‘Rock On’ had reached number three in the BBC’s Top Forty – and number one in the NME singles chart.

  At the heart of the mayhem, I was concentrating on keeping my head together and getting through each day, but looking back, it is extraordinary to remember how my theatre, cinema and music careers had all come together at exactly the same time. I’m not sure that any artist has repeated that achievement, even to this day. So maybe Derek was right – I was an all-rounder, after all.

  The Godspell producers had hired my That’ll Be the Day co-star Robert Lindsay to replace me as Jesus, after I recommended him to them. It was clearly time to move on, but even so my departure from Godspell was hugely affecting.

  In my two years on the show, the cast had grown spectacularly close. My last night as Jesus was charged with emotion, and as the clown disciples said their goodbyes to me in their individual ways during the Last Supper, I thought I would break down in tears. From such unpromising beginnings, directing ourselves when no theatre would touch us, we had been through so much. I even tried to capture the exhilaration and sadness of that last night in a song on my first album, Rock On, called ‘September 15th’.

  Normally when productions end, actors lavishly swap promises to keep in touch like people who have met on holiday and then go off on their merry way, never to meet again. It is testament to the extraordinary closeness of the Godspell cast that we still hold regular get-togethers more than thirty years on. It was a unique experience in all our lives.

  They say Jesus saves: he had certainly saved me. Godspell had transported me from anonymity to fame and fortune and given my career the kick-start I had feared it wouldn’t get. One thing was patently obvious: my life would never be the same again.

  9

  THE ONLY WAY IS ESSEX

  WITH GODSPELL FINALLY over, I was desperate to focus on my musical career. Theatre and cinema were great but, as ever, a big part of me still longed to sing the blues. I knew that I only had a short window to get things moving: before That’ll Be the Day, I had signed a two-film deal with David Puttnam and shooting on the sequel, Stardust, was to begin early in 1974.

  Firstly, though, it was time to re-jig Team Essex. Ever since he became my manager, Derek had been tremendous, but now the rules of engagement had changed. Almost overnight his charge had gone from being a hapless wannabe to a bona fide star, and every day he was swamped with requests for TV appearances, newspaper interviews and photo sessions. He needed help.

  Derek had until then been a one-man band running my career from his spare room in Harlow in Essex, but now we set up an office in a mews building in St John’s Wood, near the famous Abbey Road Studios. We also recruited a lovely and gracious lady named Madge Godwin, who had been working for Godspell producer Binky Beaumont, to be my PA. (Had somebody told me two years earlier that I would need a PA, I would have given a bitter laugh and gone back to signing on.)

  For some reason, magazines seemed to have an insatiable desire for fresh photographs of me. Photo shoots were one of my least favourite activities, especially after the awkward David Bailey experience, but I got around that by doing a few sessions with an old mate, Colin Davey.

  Colin had been at Plessey’s with me, and unlike me had actually finished his apprenticeship to be an electrical engineer before leaving to become a photographer. These sessions, which thanks to magazines like Jackie finished up on bedroom walls all over the country, were basically two old mates having a laugh and trying to keep a straight face. We shot a lot of them in a studio in Leytonstone down the road from my old manor, until the local kids got wind that I was there and besieged the building.

  Jeff and I were using every spare second we could find to record my debut album, which was also to be called Rock On. After the success of ‘Rock On’ and ‘On and On’ we kept the same team of musicians, and slowly but surely a record was unfolding that I would be very proud of.

  That’ll Be the Day was meanwhile being released around the world, and I became no stranger to the inside of aeroplanes as I was bounced off to various European cities to promote it. It was exciting to visit new countries and often pleasantly bizarre. On French TV shows, for some inexplicable reason, I always seemed to be preceded by a puppeteer or a juggler.

  I was also called upon to attend a few continental premieres, but the possible boredom factor of seeing That’ll Be the Day again and again was alleviated at the screenings where the local film distributors had over-dubbed the film in their own language, meaning that this Shipman County graduate could enjoy watching himself discoursing in fluent German or Spanish.

  Nearer to home, the steady progression of ‘Rock On’ up the singles chart led to an invite to go on Top of the Pops. This was obviously a huge deal. Like every music fan I watched the show virtually every week and its guaranteed massive viewing figures and subsequent record sales meant it was hugely powerful.

  Despite this, Top of the Pops was not to prove an easy experience. Archaic Musicians’ Union rules intended to protect the rights of session musicians meant that artists who went on the show had to either re-record the track in a BBC studio the day before, or else play it live on the show with the Top of the Pops orchestra.

  This second option didn’t really work for Jeff and me because we used such unusual instrumentation. It was unlikely the BBC orchestra would possess an electric trombone like Derek Wadsworth’s. So we re-recorded ‘Rock On’ the day before, trying to persuade the BBC’s bored, jobsworth studio producer in his shaggy beard and brown coat to add the layers of dub and echo that made the track so unique.

  We had further problems on the day. I turned up at Television Centre in my normal gear of black jeans and a black sleeveless T-shirt, and was halfway through my rehearsal of ‘Rock On’, singing live to the re-recorded backing track, when the show’s moustachioed, autocratic producer, Robin Nash, came wafting down from the gallery.

  ‘What are you wearing, David?’ he asked, a distinct note of reprimand in his voice. ‘I’m afraid you will disappear into the background, dear!’ (This being the mighty Top of the Pops, there was obviously no question of altering the background to suit the artist’s requ
irements.) ‘Have you nothing white?’

  I didn’t have many white clothes, as it happened, but into my mind came a rarely worn cream suit hanging in the back of my wardrobe. I phoned Maureen, and a BBC car was dispatched to Essex to pick it up. I accessorised it with a carnation in the lapel, it looked OK on the screen, and I went on to wear that outfit so many times that it became part of my image.

  With my career progressing so well on all fronts, I was finally making some decent money, and Maureen, Verity and I moved again. We bought a lovely house deep in the Essex countryside in a rather grand-sounding place named Havering-Atte-Bower, near to the less grand-sounding Romford. The estate agent told us it contained elements of Henry VIII’s hunting lodge. More pertinent to us was that it would give us more privacy than the gaff in Chigwell Row.

  Maureen, Verity and I had happy times in that house, although for now we weren’t having enough of them. Now that everyone suddenly wanted a piece of me, my relentless schedule meant I was away a lot more than was ideal. I missed them, and looking back now, it can’t have been easy for them either.

  My next trip was to be even further afield: America. That’ll Be the Day and ‘Rock On’ had come out there simultaneously and while the lack of a general release had hampered the movie, the single was taking off. Derek and I embarked on a whistle-stop promotional tour of eleven US cities in fourteen days.

  For me, this was the big one. America had always loomed large in my life and imagination, from the blues music I devoured to the films, fashions and iconography I loved. The United States always seemed like the centre of the world to me, so distant and so glamorous, and here was my chance to see it at first hand.

  Sadly, the trip was a little bit of a disappointment. I had such an inhumanly crammed promotional schedule that Derek and I saw little in two weeks apart from hotel rooms, TV studios and radio stations. I spent a fortnight having the same conversation every day with different journalists in different cities.