DAVID ESSEX: A Rock 'n' Roll Dropout Finds His Way Home

It was called the Everons, David Essex says with a helpless laugh, speaking of the blues band he led in the early 60s. “Names are always embarrassing, ’cause they’re so much of an era. They’re so trendy at the time and in a year they become silly, like all those psychedelic names. Yeah, many gigs we’d go and we’d play and the man would come up and plead with us to play something by the Shadows, or something lively, and we’d say ‘No, man, blues is where it’s at,’ and he’d chuck us out, when we’d driven like 50 miles to get to the gig, for no money. But I think we quite liked starving for the sake of the music. I think it was the classic ‘artist in the attic’ image. But then after two years you can have enough of that. It wears off.”

So when the archetypal man with the big cigar offered to make him a star, Essex jumped from his drum stool at the chance. But that whole experience turned out to be even more disillusioning than starving in a van, and finally occasioned his retreat from music altogether. **It sounded like quite a good idea to me,” he recalls. “So I went off and they were all in Rolls Royces, and I had like lived in a council house — the work house — when I was a kid. I had nothing. So I thought ‘Well, they must know what they’re doing.’ They’d come up with a song and I’d sing it and it’d come out and riot do a thing. And I always thought it was me. Now I don’t think it was me, actually. I think it was the choice of stuff. I’d do other people’s songs, and they didn’t have an identity or anything. And I didn’t have the confidence to say ‘Bullshit! What I really want to do is this.’ I should have really known that I might be the best judge of what I should do. You always think that the record producers know better than you, when in fact in a lot of cases they don’t. That’s why ‘Rock On’ was so good — because for the first time it was the kind of sound that I wanted to do.”

The actual switch from recording to acting was a matter of doctor’s orders. The rigors of touring had taken their physical toll, and Essex was told to get into something a bit more steady. “I went off into rep and auditioned and they went crazy. ‘Oh, a natural, a natural!’ So there I was, off on the stage. I didn’t know anything about it. I’d never seen a play.

“I don’t really enjoy it as much as music, no. I find it fulfilling, because you can get the character and shape it and mold it and finish it off and make an entity, so that’s alright. But I don’t enjoy learning lines, and I especially don’t like rehearsals. Rehearsal’s reallv strange. Everybody’s trying to prove themselves, and that upsets me. But once it’s on and the audience is reacting to it, then it becomes good. But music has more joy for me than acting. I don’t find it very interesting. I’m just glad that they both worked out so well for me. It’s a bit of a fluke.” Fluke or no, Essex found that the

theatre enabled him to pay the rent. He toured England with the repertory company, played the lead in The Fantasticks then hit it big in the role of roles, J.D. in the London production of Godspell. His first film is That’ll Be the Day, which tied James Bond for box office honors in England and is presently in America(the distributor has been holding off its release here until the single peaks). Besides Essex’ portrayal of Jamie McLaine, a rotten but appealing lad driven on by the insidious demon of rock ’n’ roll, That’ll Be the Day features a pompadoured Ringo Starr, Keith Moon as a greasy, gap-toothed drummer, and blond bombshell Billy Fury as a rock ’n’ roll singer on the small-time circuit.

Almost by reflex, the film has been compared to American Graffiti, but Essex sees it as something much more significant than an oldies film. The English perspective is enlightening: “We didn’t want it to be a nostalgia piece. What we wanted it to be was a valid document of a period of time in England that was very important. It was the time when the sort of workingclass hero started to find some kind of character. We wanted to make a film of what it was like to live in the 50s, when in England you had completely American influences — all the songs and everything had to be American. And then all of a sudden the kind of character that I play happened — the person that went on to be John Lennon-or David Bailey or someone like that. The slogan for the film is ‘It started when we wanted to be different,’ which sounds a little bit trite, but that’s what it is, because before that there wasn’t a character, there wasn’t a kind of cult figure. Like I say to Keith

Moon in the film, ‘Why don’t you write your own songs?’ And he says ‘Well I can’t write. You got to be American to write the words.’ That was the mentality. So it’s basically about the emergence of an English identity.”

“The actual switch from recording to acting was a matter of doctor’s orders. ”

Essex had continued to fool around and write songs, though he had completely divorced himself from the music scene and business. “When Godspell happened,” he says, "all the magazines and stuff started to pick up on me. They were all saying ‘Well you got to make a record, quick! Do like one of those old ballads.’ And I said ‘No, no, never again!’ I was sickened by whathad gone on before, when I was like a can of beans and, it was ‘Quick, let’s record a song that’s like a song that’s in the hit parade and it should be a hit. Because he looks good, doesn’t he?’ ” But when the producer of That’ll Be the Day, David Putnam, asked him to write a song for the film, Essex at last saw the opportunity to do some music his own way. He wrote “Rock On” and went into the studio with his close friend Jeff Wayne as producer.

“We were two nobodies, and we’ve like conquered the world in England, man. I mean Paul McCartney and everybody is talking to Jeff about producing and stuff. So anyway, we went in and did it and presented it proudly to the film producer. ‘Rock On’ at the end of the film — great. There’s a freeze where I buy a guitar and you know I’m going into music. He said no, it’s too weird. I freaked, we shouted, and we walked off with our record under our arm. My appetite had gotten whetted. I really think it’s good, and Jeff said ‘Well it’s the best record I’ve ever heard.’ So we went around to some record companies, and a couple thought ‘This is the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard,’ but a couple thought it was the best they’d heard for a long time. One of them was, Columbia, and we did a deal with them and they were all excited and brought it out and it shot to number one in the NME. Now they’ve put it in the film for America. Walter Reade even wanted to call the film ‘,Rock On.’ Things change, you know.

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DAVID ESSEX

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“I like to get a sound,” he continues, laying down the Essex singles aesthetic. “I think we’ve got our sound now. It’s a sound that we’ve definitely got that isn’t like anybody else’s, which is nice to have. I think atmospherics is the thing that I like on a single. I think ‘Rock On’ has an atmosphere — it’s not just people playing, it’s not just somebody singing a song. There’s a smell about it, you know what I mean? That’s what we go for. If I can smell the single, then for me it’s a good thing. ‘Rock On’ was basically 50s lyrics, and a 70s sound. If we’d just done a straight rock ’n’ roll ‘Rock On,’ I don’t think it really would have meant much.”

And where do we go from here?

1974 is booked solid for David Essex. He’ll star in a sequel to That’ll. Be the Day called Stardust, in which Jamie becomes the center of some Beatlemania-style hysteria (which is one reason Ringo won’t be in it — “If I had to go through all that Beatlemania carrying-on again I’d go crazy.” Adam Faith will play his part, and Tony Curtis will be 'Jamie’s manager), then retreats to a Spanish castle where he wraps himself in the music of the 30s — hence the film’s title. Then Essex wants to do a movie about North Country people called Josh (to be directed by Sarah Miles’ brother, Christopher), then into the studio for the next album, then performing tours of England and America. He says he could fill up 1975 now if he wanted to.

At 26, does David Essex, on the verge of becoming both teen idol and highly regarded artist (the rarest of combinations), find rock ’n’ roll as exciting as it was in the days when he was starving and bashing out blues in East End clubs? His answer is a blunt, resigned no.

“I mean I’ve gotten older since then. I think you can hear it with the records. The records reflect me quite a lot. I’m very sort of relaxed,or I give the impression that I’m very relaxed. I’m a slow person, and the production we use is very laid back and easy. They’re not 100 decibels, like Slade smashing along. I used to do that, and that’s when I found rock ’n’ roll really exciting. But now I think I’ve mellowed. Not like Sinatra, in the September of my years, but I think there’s probably a roundness. I’ve done gigs and I’ve done it for a long time, and I’ve crashed out and gone berserk.

“Youth is it I think inexperience, experiencing things for the first time, is where you get that excitement. When you’ve not experienced things, and you don’t, quite know very much what you’re doing, you’re just crashing things — wheh I was playing drums in the early days I was probably one of the worst drummers, but I loved it, and when I was a semi-professional musician it was all such a new world, and it could have gone anywhere.

“David Bowie was working in bands around that time. And Gary Glitter — he used to be called Paul Raven. Paul has been around for ages, before myself, before David Bowie. But it’s great now in England, because all the old boys have come back to the front. It’s like a revival of the early 60s, the early 60s nobodies.”