Over the Moon Page 12

  Nevertheless, one memory burns bright even today. I will never forget the moment that our yellow cab from JFK swung on to Brooklyn Bridge and I saw the skyscrapers of Manhattan for the first time. Like so many people, I fell in love with New York the second I set eyes on it, and it still feels to me like the ultimate city.

  I realised on that trip that the American media had a different perception of me from their British counterparts. At home, the teenage fans and what were perceived as my heartthrob pop-idol looks were already leading some critics to perceive me as just a piece of fluff. It didn’t matter that I wrote all of my own songs: for some people, I would always be a lightweight.

  The best example of this, incidentally, came in the attitude of the most determinedly cutting-edge UK paper, the New Musical Express. When I first broke through, the NME plastered me on its cover and raved about me. As soon as the screaming girls appeared, they didn’t want to know. One of their most august critics, Charles Shaar Murray, even dismissed me as singing like ‘a constipated stoat’ (which, frankly, I’d love to hear).

  The US journalists took a less snobby and dismissive approach to me and I was granted an interview with the printed talisman of their counter-culture, Rolling Stone. Their extremely earnest, John Lennon-lookalike interviewer was particularly taken with the lyric that straddled the bridge section of ‘Rock On’:

  And where do we go from here?

  Which is the way that’s clear?

  He clearly felt this was a particularly profound encapsulation of the existential dilemmas facing modern Western society. Was it a depiction of the post-Vietnam generation, craving direction and moral purpose, he asked me? He may have been somewhat disappointed by my candid reply: ‘No, it just rhymed.’

  There again, he was even more aghast when our two-hour interview drew to a close and he discovered his tape machine had failed to record it. ‘Could we do it again?’ he pleaded. With my schedule, there could only be one answer: ‘No.’

  I also took a trip to Japan to meet the bigwigs at CBS there. It was a distinctly surreal visit. Their HQ was over sixteen floors of a skyscraper and the executives took me into a lift with them. On every single floor they stopped the lift and the workers on that floor, waiting eagerly outside the lift, applauded me frantically for three or four minutes as soon as the doors opened. This bizarre meet-and-greet exercise probably lasted nearly an hour.

  Back in Britain, my relentless work schedule continued apace in November as CBS released Rock On and a second single off the album, ‘Lamplight’. For whatever reason, Jeff and I were still looking to push back the sonic boundaries, and on ‘Lamplight’ we booked a blacksmith from Leyton to come in and play his anvil. Like the farting didgeridoo, it didn’t work out, and I ended up bashing out the part on a fire extinguisher.

  My newfound fame led to me picking up a couple of awards, and it really was a case of from the sublime to the ridiculous. The Royal Variety Club named me Most Promising Newcomer, which I gratefully accepted with a speech at their ceremony. I was less bothered about being named Rear of the Year a few days later. I didn’t even turn up to collect that one. Maybe I was being arsey.

  It was flattering to be asked to play Pete Townshend’s part in a live concert version of Tommy, Pete’s new rock opera for the Who. It was also a good chance to catch up with my old mucker Keith Moon. My main memory of our sole performance, at the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park, north London, was that the theatre was so cold that the string section were wearing gloves.

  That year, 1973, had been a whirlwind for me. As the year ended, the Rock On album was in the Top Ten, as was the ‘Lamplight’ single; That’ll Be the Day was still hanging around the album chart; and across the Atlantic, ‘Rock On’ was climbing the Billboard 100. Maureen, Verity and I bunkered down for a desperately needed quiet family Christmas in Essex. It was just as well we did – because the next year was going to be even more mental.

  10

  A SPRINKLING OF STARDUST

  THE SUCCESS OF That’ll Be the Day meant that David Puttnam had inevitably exercised the option in my contract obliging me also to appear in its sequel. Stardust – which originally had the working title of Sooner or Later – continued the story of Jim MacLaine but for me it was a far more emotionally punishing experience than its predecessor.

  That’ll Be the Day had ended with Jim walking out on his wife and child, buying a guitar and setting off on a mission to find musical fame and fortune. Stardust bore the tagline ‘Show Me a Boy Who Never Wanted to Be a Rock Star and I’ll Show You a Liar’, but this could just as easily have read ‘Be Careful What You Wish For – It Might Come True’.

  Ray Connolly had once again written the script, and as soon as I read it, I had serious misgivings. They were concerned not with the quality of the writing, which was again very strong, but with the narrative of the story. To be honest, my reservations were so troubling that I’m not sure I would have made the film had I not been contractually obliged to.

  In Stardust, Ray depicted Jim MacLaine becoming an overnight sensation rock star and teen idol, and reacting by turning into a bloated egomaniac, drug addict and recluse, completely out of touch with reality. It portrayed the damaging and deleterious effects of fame very starkly, and given that I was currently at the heart of a storm that the media had recently dubbed ESSEX MANIA, it was a little too close to home.

  I wasn’t the only one to feel that way. Ringo Starr, who had of course enjoyed and endured levels of celebrity way beyond my comprehension as part of the biggest band in history, didn’t feel able to make Stardust, believing it would be too painful to be part of a fictionalised re-enactment of what his life had turned into in the Beatles. Adam Faith replaced him as Mike.

  Before filming began in February ’74 I made a quick trip to Los Angeles for a premiere of That’ll Be the Day. California is very beautiful in parts but I found LA true to its stereotype of La-La Land, where everybody is trying to live the dream and it is hard to believe a word anyone says. Give me New York and the East Coast any time.

  Maureen, Verity and I also snatched a short holiday in Mexico, where I doubtless impressed my family by going paragliding behind a speedboat, crash-landing into a tree and dangling from its branches like a doughnut. Otherwise, it was a relaxing break and, given the gruelling few months I had coming up, very necessary.

  My LA trip had given me the idea for a song, ‘America’, and back in Britain, I went into the studio with Jeff and recorded the bare bones of the tune, the follow-up to ‘Lamplight’. I had to leave Jeff to finish it as I headed off to begin filming Stardust.

  Michael Apted had taken over as director from That’ll Be the Day’s Claude Whatham and we began shooting in Manchester. I mostly enjoyed making the early part of the film, which showed Jim MacLaine enjoying life in his group the Stray Cats with band mates Paul Nicholas (another ex-Jesus, of course), Keith Moon, Dave Edmunds, Karl Howman and Peter Duncan.

  The fact that Adam, Keith, Dave and myself were all musicians, and Ray had chronicled the rise of the Beatles as a Liverpool music journalist, meant that we were able to bring realism to our subject matter. Yet even such experienced, hard-bitten rock stars as Keith and Dave were gobsmacked by the scenes we encountered when the Stray Cats played Belle Vue.

  The producers had booked this massive Manchester gig venue to film the band playing a show on their ascent to fame. They had invited David Essex fans to make up the audience, and as I had not yet toured since Essex Mania had broken, it was the first chance any of them had had to see me play live.

  The first inkling of the levels of hysteria inside Belle Vue came before the Stray Cats came on. Cocooned in the dressing room waiting for the cameras to roll, we could hear thousands of girls chanting: ‘We want David! We want David!’ Stardust first assistant Garth Thomas begged them to yell ‘We want Jim!’ instead, but he didn’t get very far with that one.

  When we took the stage, pandemonium broke out. Everywhere I looked, girls were screaming, faint
ing, sobbing. In waves, they tried to rush the stage as the venue security men were hopelessly overrun. The noise was shrill and deafening. I couldn’t hear a word I was singing, or the band was playing. All I could think was: is it supposed to be like this?

  My main reaction, as ever, was shock and embarrassment. I had no idea how to process what was going on mentally, but the unadulterated frenzy provided some of the most powerful footage in the whole of Stardust and captured vividly what it was like to be the focus of such delirium. It was also something I was going to have to get used to.

  It helped to relieve the pressure on me that Keith Moon was on his traditional hell-raising form as we filmed Stardust. Alcohol was invariably involved. One all-night shoot at Belle Vue degenerated into a fistfight between Keith and Ray Connolly. It was hardly Ali v Frazier, and the comedy value was enhanced by the camp, overwrought make-up man next to them jumping up and down and pleading with Ray: ‘Not his face: please don’t hit his face!’

  We adjourned to the complex’s ten-pin bowling alley, where Keith lost his footing as he attempted to deliver his first ball at 4 a.m. and slid all the way down the lane with his fingers still trapped in the ball, cartoon-style, demolishing the skittles and disappearing into the ten-pin mechanism. When we rescued Keith, his sole priority was claiming a strike.

  Keith was also extremely fond of terrorising the Mancunian populace by means of a hidden speaker and microphone that his roadie had rigged up inside his car. He would pull up at a zebra crossing, wait politely for pedestrians, then scare them out of their wits with a booming roar of ‘Get out of the road!’

  Yet the increasing parallels between my life and that of Jim MacLaine were inescapable. For months ‘Rock On’ had been inexorably climbing up the US Cashbox singles chart, and one morning at four Keith and I returned to the Midland Hotel from yet another late-night shoot to find that Derek had phoned and left a message for me at the reception desk: ‘Congratulations: you’re number one in America.’

  Many people would have been punching the air at this news but I’ve always been phlegmatic by nature, knowing from my years of rejection that fame and success are transient phenomena and not to be trusted, so my reaction was kind of understated. This was not the case with Keith Moon. ‘Champagne!’ he yelled as I showed him the note. ‘You lucky sod! The Who have never had a number one.’ The rest of the night became a bit of a blur.

  Even Keith was a model of restraint, though, next to the US record label promotional guys who called up the next day and screamed down the phone as if my topping the Cashbox chart was the most significant historical event since the moon landing. Luckily, I always had problems taking that kind of call too seriously.

  Jim MacLaine was growing ever more wayward, degenerate and sex-crazed in Stardust. Shooting a three-in-a-bed orgy with two girls was mortifying. I was terrified, made sure that I kept my pants on, and felt even more embarrassed when I looked up at the end of the scene to see an electrician looming over the bed, flexing his bicep and miming ‘Phwoargh!’ at me.

  From Manchester, the filming moved on to Granada in southern Spain. Maureen and Verity travelled out with me, although their stay was to prove fraught and very unlike our idyllic time in Shanklin filming That’ll Be the Day. Our accommodation in a tiny village near Guadix was little more than a hovel, and a livid Maureen confronted Michael Apted after a rat ran across Verity as she lay asleep in bed. Michael was apologetic but made a fair point: the location was so remote that there were no alternatives.

  The remoteness was largely the point. At the end of Stardust Jim MacLaine, destroyed and driven mad by fame, buys a castle in Andalucia and holes up with his loyal sidekick and road manager Mike, becoming a recluse. The location for this was a remote Moorish castle, or alcazaba, in Guadix.

  I found the film’s closing scenes, where an embittered Jim feeds LSD to Mike’s dog, suffers a nervous breakdown, goes insane and finally ODs, extremely harrowing to shoot. My upbringing and the fact I had a young family meant that I hadn’t reacted to fame as Jim did by spiralling off into casual sex and drug abuse, but it wasn’t hard to see how it could happen. Suddenly, I could see why Ringo couldn’t face making this movie.

  Maybe Adam Faith and I were getting too Stanislavski and method-acting about our roles, because Adam started making enquiries about actually buying the alcazaba. He was serious about it, and was only put off by the revelation that in buying the castle, you also became responsible for some troglodyte-like local people living in the caves beneath it.

  There again, Adam, or Terry as his real name was, was always keen on buying property. When Stardust’s filming reverted to England, he took me to see another place he was contemplating purchasing. It was like something from a film set. As we pulled into a long driveway leading to a Hammer Horror-style Gothic mansion, a sudden thunderclap and flash of lightning rent the skies above it, adding to the melodrama.

  Adam was considering buying a psychiatric hospital not unlike the one I had taken Michael to in my mini-cab days. After the sale, the inmates would be moved, but they were currently still in situ. As we walked in, a patient welcomed us by smearing baked beans all over his face, but driven by sheer enthusiasm, Adam was oblivious to the confused souls surrounding us as he strode around the building, pointing out where the snooker room and the master bedroom would be.

  We finished off the Stardust filming in Los Angeles, where the Jim MacLaine/David Essex parallels became even more direct. In the film, US entertainment mogul Porter Lee Austin, played by Larry Hagman (who went on to enjoy huge success as J R Ewing in Dallas), brashly muscles in on Jim’s rocketing career, persuading him to dump his British managers.

  As we arrived in California, ‘Rock On’ was still number one in the US, which meant that a stream of similarly Machiavellian and opportunist operators came out of the woodwork trying to sign me up. Thankfully, I wasn’t even remotely tempted. Derek had done far too much for me to deserve such treachery.

  This trip to Los Angeles was memorable for yielding an encounter with the LAPD. One evening Ray Connolly, French Stardust actress Ines Des Longchamps and I were speeding down Sunset Boulevard, living out some daft American fantasy. The police pulled us over, and the shades-sporting officer’s first enquiry to us was: ‘Do you have any guns on you tonight?’

  This struck me as a particularly preposterous question and I burst out laughing. The LAPD are not renowned for their sense of humour and in an instant the officer had me banged up against a nearby wall, my arms behind my back. Sadly, this reaction had the opposite effect to what he intended, and I quickly became near hysterical with mirth.

  The situation wasn’t helped when Ines, taking exception to this assault and with the French’s traditional lack of respect for both authority and America, waded in and began belting the LAPD man with her handbag. He retaliated by making us walk in a straight line to ascertain that we weren’t drunk, then finally gave up, deciding we were just goddamn eccentric Europeans and letting us go.

  Away from the Stardust set, Larry Hagman was a larger-than-life Texan and a pretty mean Keith Moon-style party animal. At a riotous party at his beach house in Malibu, he proudly showed me his powerful telescope for stargazing and a bed whose party pieces included vibrating at speed. Keith decided to test the latter out and came near to breaking the thing, earning Larry’s wrath, before we all disappeared into the ocean skinny-dipping.

  It was moments like this that made me realise I had come a long way from Canning Town, very quickly, and I was in uncharted territory. If ever there was a time in my life when I could have done a Jim MacLaine and succumbed to sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, this was it, and I guess Stardust was a salutary tale of how things could easily have played out if I had let them.

  Having said that, I don’t think Stardust was as truthful a film as That’ll Be the Day. The latter had been a very British film, whereas I think with Stardust the producers had an eye on doing well in America, which may have been partly why we went to film ther
e. It was a good movie, but it ended up being a little bit mid-Atlantic.

  Nevertheless, for a few surreal weeks, shooting this troubling film, it was difficult for me to know where Jim MacLaine ended and David Essex began. That tension, plus the work-hard, play-hard attitude that suffused the set, meant that I ended the filming of Stardust exhausted.

  Nobody knows you like your mum. Back in Essex, I drove over to visit my parents and my mum was horrified at my exhausted demeanour, gaunt face and dead eyes. Stardust had taken it out of me, in every way.

  Hungry for more success, CBS were now on at me for a new album and single but I knew I needed a break or, at the very least, a working holiday. I booked a villa in the south of France and jetted out with Maureen and Verity for a few weeks’ escape from the goldfish bowl of fame while I wrote my second album.

  My record label plugger, Steve Colyer, joined us for part of the trip and inadvertently helped give birth to one of my biggest songs. As we sat around the pool on a sunny lunchtime, Steve strummed a sequence of chords. From nowhere, a tune popped into my head, followed by an opening lyric:

  Oh, is he more, too much more

  Than a pretty face?

  ‘Gonna Make You a Star’ was born that easily and simply, and that has always been my experience of songwriting. The best tunes tend to fall out of the ether, naturally and organically. When you have to struggle and sweat over tracks, they tend not to be so special or successful.

  While I was in France, ‘America’ was out as a single, and while it hadn’t done much in Britain, the French couldn’t get enough of it and it spent weeks at number one. I was flattered and puzzled by this until a French record executive explained it. It seemed the song’s chorus ‘America, America, ca, ca’ translated into French as ‘America, America, poo, poo’. This appealed to the people of France who, as I had seen from Ines, have never been big fans of the US. Maybe they thought the song was a work of biting satire.