Interview: David Essex, actor

By LEE RANDALL
Published on Tuesday 21 February 2012 00:00

David Essex is proud of his gypsy blood. And though he has become more than just a fairground attraction, he admits he will always be a bit of a wanderer

There was never anything resembling a plan. If anything, David Albert Cook, born in London’s East End in the summer of 1947, had his heart set on playing football. He deliberately failed his 11-plus exam to ensure he would go to the football-mad state school rather than the rugby-centric local grammar school. Aged 12, he was scouted for his favourite team, West Ham, and began training with his heroes.

But at 13, the freshly minted teenager discovered music, girls and motorcycles. His football gathered dust as he learned to play drums and explored London’s thriving club scene, catching live jazz at the 100 Club, the Marquee and the Flamingo. The staff at specialist music shop Dobells, on Charing Cross Road, knew him well.

When he was 15, the Cooks moved to Essex, pursuing the better life suburbia seemed to promise. David left school and became an apprentice to an electrical engineer. After work, he and his band, the Everons, played pubs and weddings. He even wrote the odd tune now and again.

Then Derek Bowman entered his life. Bowman was 15 years older and light years more sophisticated. Thanks to his career as a show-business writer and critic, his friends included everyone from Peter O’Toole and Lionel Bart to Ian McShane and Vidal Sassoon, all of whom he dragged out to an East End boozer called the Eagle to hear the Everons play. Bowman rang the changes, rechristening them The China Plates and kitting them out on Carnaby Street. But soon he admitted he saw a future only for the band’s 17-year-old drummer.

Decades later, that drummer has become one of Britain’s most successful, enduring entertainers. Right now he’s on tour with the play he co-wrote and stars in, All the Fun of the Fair, so we’re sipping tea in a dressing room backstage at Nottingham’s Theatre Royal – a glorious layer cake of green and gold swirls. As well as several of his number one hits, the show also draws on his experience of working at a fairground and his mum’s traveller lineage.

The story of his unexpected rise to stardom is recounted in Over the Moon, his second memoir, written with Ian Gittens, which makes clear that where David Essex is concerned, all roads lead back to Derek Bowman, who was his manager until his death in 1995. I feel a bit Mrs Merton asking, but what does he think Bowman spotted in his blue-eyed, floppy-haired self? Did he even know Essex could sing? He lets out the first of many crackling little laughs and says, “I was doing some singing, reluctantly. I was forced to because the guitarist said, ‘Listen man, I can’t play lead guitar and sing at the same time.’ I think Derek and various people he brought down to this little pub in East London just thought the boy on the drums was interesting. He seems to have been proved right, because it has worked out, but it was a surprise to me to even be a singer. I just wanted to play the drums and be a little bit anonymous, really.”

Bowman comes across as a benign Svengali, a man of indeterminate sexuality – Essex says he never saw him with a partner – and considerable erudition, who insisted that his protégé train in all aspects of light entertainment. Essex took tap-dancing lessons, studied with an opera coach and another specialising in elocution, and spent two weeks on a RADA course learning Shakespeare. The result was a lifetime’s work. “Derek and I, we didn’t know what was going on. I remember on various trips to America, people saying, ‘What a blueprint for a career. This is incredible.’ But it was an accident, really. The great gift he gave me was an education. What he did was to open up a longevity for me. If I’d said, ‘No, that’s not blues music, I don’t want to do that crap,’ then I wouldn’t be sitting here with you now.”

British musicians of a certain age inevitably revere American R&B and blues. Can Essex explain why that genre, and not some other, made such a phenomenal impact on him, and on peers such as the Rolling Stones and the Beatles? “It’s difficult to define,” he replies, “but I think it was the mystique and the distance.

“We were in the UK during a pretty bland pop scene. We started to find out about Howling Wolf, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and all these people. It was music we had never heard and couldn’t get enough of, but it wasn’t on the radio at the time. So the fact that it was mystical, black and fairly unobtainable, with the parallels that it was phenomenally raw, energised and great-sounding – it was too fascinating not to get involved with.”

Again it was Bowman, a massive Sinatra fan, who opened his musical vistas. “I admit I was kind of blinkered and snobby. If it wasn’t black and obscure, I didn’t want to know. It was only Derek’s influence that slowly started to open my mind.”

On the jazz front, Essex loved people like Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk. “In the late 1950s and early 1960s, though it was little before I started to go on adventures, there was quite a healthy live music scene in London with jazz. A lot of trad jazz, which I couldn’t stand: vegetarians in sandals. But at the same time there was be-bop and modern jazz. You had the Lighthouse, Ronnie Scott’s club, where truly magnificent musicians would come, and Johnny Dankworth had a club. There was the 100 Club, which would alternate between blues, R&B and jazz. It was all there if you had the inclination to find it, which I did.”

After binning his apprenticeship, Essex took a lot of jobs to pay the bills. He drove a mini cab, cleaned windows, painted factories and worked the assembly line, clerked in a hardware store and peeled spuds at a fish and chip shop. He joined another band, for the camaraderie, gigging on a club circuit that included youngsters such as David Jones – not yet Bowie – and Bluesology, whose singer, Reg Dwight, became Elton John. Bowman also encouraged him to join a repertory company to gain theatrical experience.

By 1971, he was working steadily and decided to buy a house with his girlfriend Maureen. They married when she realised she was pregnant with their daughter, Verity, and Essex, feeling the pressure of impending responsibility, began combing the small ads and thinking about more traditional employment. He was saved from the nine-to-five by Godspell, the controversial musical about Jesus Christ, which was coming to London after success off-Broadway. Essex won the lead role, prompting headlines such as ‘Docker’s son to play Jesus as red-nosed clown’. Godspell opened at the Roundhouse in November 1971 and was a roaring success: reviews compared Essex to Laurence Olivier. When it transferred to Wyndham’s theatre, Essex entered the record books as the first man to play Jesus on the West End stage.

As he puts it, “My career had crossed the Rubicon.” He won the lead in That’ll be the Day, a film about the rock scene in 1950s London, getting a chance to act alongside Ringo Starr, Keith Moon, Billy Fury, and the as yet unknown Robert Lindsay. And one day, inspired by an implicit dare in the script, that “only Americans can write rock songs”, Essex scribbled down the first lyrics of a tune he called Rock On.

The film opened in April 1973 – the year Essex went viral – pleasing audiences and critics alike. He’d returned to Godspell, which continued to break box office records. With the release of Rock On, which went to number one on both sides of the Atlantic, he became the ‘it’ boy of the moment. It didn’t hurt that he oozed sex appeal and sent libidos racing. He might have gone off the deep end, but insists that Verity’s presence acted as a “police force”, because he never wanted to lose her respect.

But she was only wee at the time, I tease. He grins. “Fundamentally, I’ve always wanted to be aware of what I’m doing, so getting out of my box is not what I want to do. With drink and everything, I’ve always said, ‘That’ll do; that’s enough.’

“Maybe if I was just doing music and concerts, I wouldn’t have the discipline, but in the theatre, to work eight shows a week and play a substantial role, as I’ve done over the years, you have to be quite disciplined. The films I’ve done, I’ve played quite major parts. You’ve got to know what you’re doing. And writing my own shows. You can’t be gaga. I suppose that early discipline is inbuilt.”

He has been performing in All the Fun of the Fair for three years, on and off, and really warms up when he tells me how fond he is of the show, sounding almost as if he wasn’t its author. “There’s a family feeling about it that radiates to the audience. The father and son relationship at its heart really, really touches me. I’ve got three sons [one with Maureen, and twins with his second wife, Carlotta]. I know what it’s like.”

He wrote a speech for one of the characters, describing that moment when children realise their dad is not a hero. “And you resent that, up until you get sensible, around 22 or 23.

“You can feel the men in the audience going, ‘Yeah, I know that’. So apart from having a few number ones in, the storyline and the relationships make it quite a special little show.”

Essex is proud of his traveller blood and is a past patron of the Gypsy Council. He definitely dislikes confined spaces, whether physical or intellectual, and is one of the few to speak fondly about having been a latch-key kid.

Unlike a lot of celebrities, desperate for a 24/7 audience, he loves being alone. “It's a chance to observe. Selfishly, it’s being able to do exactly what you want to do.” He adds, “I’m not bad at compromising, don’t get me wrong.”

It’s funny which questions provoke the biggest reactions. He crosses his legs and arms, as if to contain himself even further. He laughs when I point it out. “I think there are more adventures when you’re alone. I’ve always been lucky. I mean, I’ve had people try to shoot me, but nobody actually ever aimed correctly. So that was good. When you’re by yourself you can really get a complete picture of where you are without other influences.

“To be independent of other people is a good thing, isn’t it? I don’t think too deeply about it. I’m quite happy to wander around without an entourage – they become just a load of yes men and you lose any sense of what is going on in the world.”

What’s going on in Essex’s world is an incredible amount of work. There’s a film, Gajengi Boy, starring his son Bill, in which he plays a small role and for which he’s writing music. He’s hoping to film All the Fun of the Fair, and is working on an album of new material. “One of the things with me is that I’ve never savoured today’s success, it has always been in the way of tomorrow. I’ve always thought, ‘What’s next? What’s around the corner?’ I don’t live in the past and I don’t even live in today, I live in the future. Obviously I’ve got to change that. I’m 64 – I don’t know how many futures there are.”

Still, it doesn’t sound as though he feels his age, and he says that, inside, he’s still 23. Increasingly, however, the man in the mirror resembles his father. He’s cool about that. “I’ve seen myself on the telly, from all angles. I’ve kind of gotten used to where I am, physically. And amazingly people still think that’s attractive. Isn’t it weird? That’s one of the things I’ve never understood.”

Oh come on. Between wives one and two (he is married for a third time now), when he was single, famous and bedding women by the score, he must have known he was handsome and used that to his advantage? “Well, yeah. But I didn’t think of it as ‘David Essex’. At that period, having been the biggest thing, I was now probably the third-biggest thing, so in my mind that had floated away.”

Third or fourth is still pretty big. “Apparently, but it never dawned on me. Every night here, there are around 150 people [outside the stage door] asking me to sign things, but it’s in a different compartment.”

What if he walked out one night and no one was there? “Fine,” he says. “No problem at all.” n

• Over the Moon: My Autobiography, by David Essex, is published on 1 March, Virgin Books, £18.99. All the Fun of the Fair is at Glasgow’s King’s Theatre, 28 February to 3 March. Tickets cost £15 to £33 (0844 871 7648, www.atgtickets.com/glasgow)

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