Over the Moon Page 6

  We were very grateful for Derek’s efforts and had a lot of faith in him but a few of his ideas had us scratching our heads. He was keen to emphasise our East End roots and kept asking us to play an instrumental version of ‘Limehouse Blues’. In a similar vein, he insisted we change our name from the Everons to the China Plates – Cockney rhyming slang for mates. I was fairly horrified by this but we went along with it.

  After a trip to Carnaby Street, where Stan’s cash kitted the China Plates out in matching white tab-collar shirts, sky-blue jackets and Cuban-heel boots, came a symbolic leap forward – our first recording session.

  The venue was a fleapit studio in Leytonstone, run by a fat man with a beard who looked as if he slept under the production console. He was also the engineer, and painfully led us through the complexities of headphones and vocal booths. At first we found it intimidating, but we managed to commit two of my songs – ‘Carol-Anne’ and ‘Got to Work’ – to tape, as well as a Memphis Slim track. The China Plates had made their first recording.

  This was heady stuff and I began to suspect that my dream of being a professional musician could even become a reality – but there was one major problem. I was still clocking on every day as an apprentice electrical engineer at Plessey’s and, what was worse, I had signed a five-year contract. If I was really going to live the dream, I would have to escape this arrangement.

  I met up with Derek at a Soho hangout called the Arts Theatre Club and told him my intention. He gave me a timely reality check, assuring me that he felt I was talented but also cautioning that only a tiny percentage of the people who tried to make it in show business actually succeeded. We agreed I should have a chat with my parents before taking the plunge.

  Mum and Dad said the usual parental things about it being good to have ‘a trade to fall back on’ but were reliably supportive and ultimately left the decision to me. I was seventeen, and knew that if I saw my contract through at Plessey’s I would be twenty-one by the time I left, which sounded ancient and far too old to crack the rock ’n’ roll world.

  Plessey’s personnel manager was an avuncular soul named Mr Baker, who agreed to a meeting. I knew that he was entitled to hold me to my contract if he so wished, and I felt nervous as I explained that electrical engineering wasn’t really for me and I wanted to be a musician. Mr Baker sat, listened and weighed me up through a cloud of pipe smoke.

  ‘Well, son,’ he eventually said, ‘if you want to leave, there is not much point in staying, is there?’ He sent me on my way with his best wishes, even saying I could always come back if things didn’t go well. I was grateful for the kind words but suspected and hoped that I had set my last lathe.

  I had made the break but initially it looked as if my decision had been about as inspired as my brainwave about drawing Popeye. It was becoming clear that things weren’t really working out for the China Plates. Derek had taken our studio demo on a tour of record companies but nobody was biting and we remained distinctly unsigned.

  Stan was getting tired of seeing no prospect of any return on his investment in the band and when Derek asked me to meet him at the Arts Theatre Club again as he had news, I was expecting the worst. It duly arrived: Derek informed me that Stan had given up and was withdrawing his financial backing.

  Yet there was more. Derek went on to tell me that the reason he had agreed to manage the band when he first came to see us at the Eagle was that he had recognised potential in me. He added that a lot of the people he had brought down to see us had also singled me out as something special. I was flattered, but also nonplussed – what did this mean, exactly?

  I soon found out. Derek went on to explain that he shared Stan’s misgivings about the China Plates’ future but he believed that I had the potential to make it big on my own. ‘Would you like to be a solo singer?’ he asked me.

  The question totally threw me. It was something I had never even remotely considered, or had the slightest interest in: I didn’t even like singing that much. I wanted to be a jazz drummer. Also, we were a close-knit group and I felt a fierce loyalty to the band. I didn’t want to betray them or walk out on them. ‘I don’t know,’ I told Derek honestly.

  We went our separate ways and as I mooched through Soho, a suffocating melancholy descended on me. The Everons/China Plates had played great gigs, wowed Cattolica, got management backing, made a recording: it had seemed that the world was opening up for us. Was it really to be over so quickly?

  Well, that was how it was looking. By the time we met for our next rehearsal, Derek had called John, Brian and Sandra and told them Stan had pulled out and he could not manage us without financial backing. The mood was sombre. We hardly played a note, and John even suggested breaking up the band.

  Brian was still bullish about making the China Plates work but John and Sandra seemed already resigned to failure and Derek’s suggestion of a solo career began to play on my mind. I hung in there but gigs and rehearsals became few and far between as the band lost its direction, and after a few weeks the China Plates just fizzled out.

  John and Sandra decided to get married and move to Australia. Talk about a clean break! Brian and I lost contact. I had no band and no job, and only one offer on the table. What had I got to lose? I reached a decision, and phoned Derek.

  ‘If you are serious about me going solo,’ I told him, ‘I’m in.’

  5

  OH MY, THIGH HIGH, DIG DEM DIMPLES ON DEM KNEES

  WHILE DEREK HAD been managing the China Plates, he had been a friendly and supportive but slightly distant figure, who tended mostly to deal with John because he was the leader of the band. Now that I was his solo charge, I started to learn exactly what he was about and what kind of man he was.

  After my fateful phone call, the first thing he did was to arrange to visit my parents to discuss my future. He arrived carrying a management contract and our meeting went on for hours as we weighed up the pros and cons of me trying to make it on my own. He wasn’t pushy, but left the contract for them to peruse.

  Derek made a good impression on my mum and dad and it was easy to see why. Tall, handsome and about fifteen years older than me, he was an Oxford graduate and academic who spoke eight languages. As a critic, he had an encyclopaedic knowledge of film and theatre and, as I’d already learned, a bulging contacts book.

  Looking back, it’s hard to discern exactly what embryonic talent Derek had spotted in a shy, self-conscious seventeen-year-old pub-band drummer, but whatever it was he was determined to nurture it. He was hugely positive about what I could go on to do, and it was his fervent, profound belief in me that impressed Mum and Dad most of all.

  Over the years, people have occasionally asked me about my relationship with Derek and whether he might have been a Brian Epstein-like figure infatuated with his young charge, but there was never any hint of that kind of tension between us. In fact I never knew him to have a partner and had no idea about his sexuality. He was more than merely my manager and mentor, though: he gradually became the older brother that I never had.

  Derek’s personal circumstances were difficult. His mother and his sister were both schizophrenic and he was heavily involved in their care, spending all the time that he wasn’t looking after me looking after them. It was clear he was one of life’s caring people and he just wanted the best for me.

  My parents could sense that, and after he had left, the three of us sat up into the early hours worrying over exactly what I should do, before going to bed with no decisions reached. The next day, however, I had another of those invaluable epiphanies that help to write your life’s script, and everything became clearer.

  One drawback with Derek’s plan was that I was not even sure I wanted to be a singer, but alone in the flat the next morning, I put a blues album on as usual. Instead of concentrating on the drums, as was my habit, I focused on the singers. Immediately a whole new world opened up.

  It was Buddy Guy who got me. I played ‘The First Time I Met the Blues’ and suddenly ther
e he was, at the heart of this vivid, incredible music, singing as if his voice was a wound and his passions an open book. He was singing of the inescapable pull of the blues and their hold over him: ‘Blues, you know you’ve done me all the harm that you could.’

  Yet it also sounded more universal than that: like all great blues singers, Buddy was lamenting life’s agonies, and cheating women, and good loving gone bad. It was powerful and human, and it moved me. Would I ever be able to convey a fraction of that emotion? Suddenly I knew that I wanted to try. I knew that I wanted to be a singer.

  When Mum and Dad came home from work that night, I told them as we ate tea that I had made my decision and wanted to throw in my lot with Derek. Despite their misgivings, they didn’t even quibble, but signed the contract there and then. The die had been cast.

  Derek was delighted that I had acquiesced to being his grand project and he was determined to hit the ground running. Over the next few weeks and months, he began honing my talents via a steep learning curve that didn’t have much to do with Mississippi blues but instead gave me an old-fashioned grounding in all aspects of light entertainment and show business.

  My first port of call was a church hall in Marylebone where an elderly black American named Buddy Bradley schooled me two evenings a week in the mysteries of – wait for it – tap dancing. It wasn’t something that I could imagine Lead Belly doing but it was fun and Buddy was the coolest guy I had ever met. He even declared that I was a natural. Maybe it was my drummer’s sense of rhythm.

  Derek would come to watch, as he did when I started singing lessons in Soho with a very correct chap named Eric Gilder who looked like a wise old owl. Before that, I had only sung into a microphone doing backing vocals with the Everons, using what I supposed was a generic blues voice that I had copycatted from American records.

  This was very different. Eric would play the piano while I sang standards and show tunes such as ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ and ‘Who Can I Turn To?’ He taught me classic techniques such as singing from the stomach and breath control and helped me to find my voice. We even ventured into opera, and some of the huge, resounding noises that I summoned up amazed me, not to mention Derek.

  Not content with turning me into a tap-dancing opera singer, Derek decided that the next discipline required in my all-round entertainment crash-course was acting. He packed me off to see an acting and voice coach called Robbie Ray, who gave me dramatic thespian speeches to read and worked at rubbing the rough edges off the harsh vowels and glottal stops of my East End accent.

  The climax of this acting training was a two-week course at the Royal Academy of the Dramatic Arts (RADA), where I had to declaim a Shakespearean soliloquy. I felt pretty sure I was the first ever Shipman County alumnus to do that. In truth, a lot of these new artistic endeavours felt pretty weird to me, but they were an adventure, and I trusted Derek, so I ploughed on with them.

  Derek’s aesthetic training for his new East End protégé also encompassed inviting me to the theatre as his guest when he wrote newspaper reviews. The first play he took me to was Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, a classic drama about a ne’er-do-well Irish family, but the plot made less of an impact on me than how polite and attentive the audience were. Unlike at the Everons’ gigs, nobody was chucking bottles at the cast or lurching drunkenly on to the stage. Maybe the theatre was OK after all.

  With my training complete, Derek started looking for work for me. I was pretty keen on this idea as well, as the money from both Plessey’s and the band had now obviously dried up and I was broke all the time. I wouldn’t get any acting jobs without being a member of the actors’ union, Equity, so Derek applied for me to join. Back came a message that they had a David Cook registered already. If I wanted to act, I needed a new name.

  You would think that a decision about what name you would be known by for your entire professional life would be traumatic and require much agonising over, but in actual fact it took less than a minute. Derek phoned me and suggested David Essex, as I was living there. I had no better ideas, so I said ‘OK’. David Essex it was. I always tell people now that I’m just grateful I wasn’t living in Middlesex. Or Northumberland.

  Although I was a willing pupil in the rigours of showbiz, Derek knew I was still hankering to make music and hadn’t neglected that side of things. He announced that he had found a record producer who might be interested in working with me, and we headed off to a flat in Knightsbridge to meet him.

  Bunny Lewis had produced four number-one singles and written songs for Helen Shapiro but was not at all the rock ’n’ roll figure I was expecting. A middle-aged, very English gent with a demeanour that was so stiff-upper-lip that it verged on the military, he had very pronounced front teeth, which I suspect had earned him his nickname.

  He was a lovely man, though, and had dug out a song he figured would be just right for me. An overwrought Walker Brothers-style big ballad called ‘And the Tears Came Tumbling Down’, it was a classic boy-meets-girl, girl-leaves-boy number.

  An arranger taught me the song as we crowded around Bunny’s piano. Bunny had the idea that I could pretend to cry as I sang it, which seemed pretty corny to me, but I belted it out, and Bunny was so enraptured that he presented us with a recording contract and a studio booking on the spot. Derek and I left delighted. This seemed like serious progress.

  I practised the song at home non-stop over the next few days so that even poor Mum and Dad knew it inside out, but this didn’t remotely prepare me for walking into Olympic Studios in Barnes. I was already nervous enough without finding a thirty-piece orchestra and professional backing singers waiting for me!

  Sensing my terror, Bunny hopped down from the production desk in the control room to give me some manly reassurance, and as I stood by the conductor on his podium and heard the orchestra run through the song, my nerves dissipated. I had never heard anything so powerful at close quarters and suddenly I wanted to be part of it.

  Bunny packed me off to the vocal booth where I emoted my way through ‘And the Tears Came Tumbling Down’, trying to sound both heartbroken and in tune. After three takes Bunny was satisfied, and with trepidation I headed to the control room to hear the results.

  My voice sounded thin and reedy to me but Bunny and Derek were delighted – although Bunny had more pressing things on his mind. ‘I told you that you could do it!’ he snapped. ‘Now do the other song – we lose the musicians in half an hour.’

  In those days the Musicians’ Union ruled the roost and their members played for the time they were booked for and not a minute more. I sang the B-side, ‘You Can’t Stop Me From Loving You’, in no time then repeated the playback experience – I was still dissatisfied with my vocal, but Bunny seemed chuffed.

  Despite my misgivings, I was incredibly excited when a box of advance promo singles arrived at home, with my new name on the label next to the famous blue and silver Fontana logo. Mum and Dad could not have been more proud; I could not believe it was actually my voice coming out of the gramophone at 45 r.p.m.

  Yet ‘And the Tears Came Tumbling Down’ sank without trace. I did a few promo press interviews and sang the song at a pirate radio-sponsored roadshow at the Lyceum, which I hated, but its only radio play was a couple of spins on crackly old Radio Luxembourg 208. I heard one of them, and honestly had no idea whether to run into the street waving my transistor radio or hide under the bed until it had finished.

  However, Bunny was not a man to give up easily and his next selection of song for me was a Solomon Burke blues track, ‘Can’t Nobody Love You’. This was more like it. I enjoyed recording it and it picked up a smidgeon more radio play and even managed to hit the dizzy heights of number seventeen in the pirate-radio charts. Record Mirror praised ‘a big-voiced newcomer who punches lyrics like a heavyweight’.

  This was still small beer, though, and I didn’t really feel like an all-singing, all-dancing entertainer. I was missing the life and camaraderie of being in a proper rock ’n’ roll ban
d. Unknown to Derek, I started scanning the musicians-wanted pages in Melody Maker, and when I saw an ad for a vocalist, asking anybody interested to call Pete, I did exactly that.

  Pete, who had a voice like he regularly gargled with gravel, told me he was a member of a five-piece rhythm-and-blues band named Mood Indigo who were based in Stevenage. He had vaguely heard of me and invited me to audition at a rehearsal at a warehouse in Hertfordshire in a couple of days’ time.

  Derek was initially disapproving when I confessed to this freelance activity but came round to the idea. On the appointed night, a friend called Frank Fairchild drove me to Stevenage. Frank, who liked to go as Fairs, was a good mate, a Georgie Fame lookalike and a bit of a wide boy I had met at a club he ran in Ilford called El Grotto, and over the years we had had a few misadventures together.

  Mood Indigo were a pretty hirsute bunch and looked the part of a jazzy R&B band. They had two saxophone players, an organist, a bass player and a drummer but no guitarist – an odd line-up, but it seemed to work. I was particularly impressed with the black baritone sax player, Paddy.

  We got on from the start and I loved their dextrous, powerful musicianship as we fired through a couple of songs, including Wilson Pickett’s ‘In the Midnight Hour’. I realised how much I’d missed being in a band. They were just as keen, and by the end of the audition, I was in Mood Indigo.

  To my delight, they were a proper gigging band, and once I had joined the ranks, I decided to pitch in and help out with life on the road. Mood Indigo had been renting vans for tours and I had passed my driving test as soon as my ban was lifted and was set to buy a car. I suggested that I buy a van instead and the band pay a small fee to use it, and they loved the idea.