Over the Moon (30 page)

Yes, that was what he would want. I would finish the matinee and play the evening performance. ‘I’m going to carry on and do the shows and I’ll be round straight after,’ I told Mum. ‘OK,’ she said. I don’t think she knew what was going on.

I put the phone down and stared at myself in the dressing-room mirror. Had that call really happened? I turned up the tannoy linking the room to the stage and heard Sir Donald Sinden booming his lines. It was nearly my cue. In a daze, I watched myself walk to the stage and finish the performance.

I didn’t tell the rest of the cast because I didn’t want sympathy. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry…’ I couldn’t bear that. I was sorry enough. I told the company manager after the matinee and he said I should go home, but I told him I would do the evening performance.

Between the shows I walked through the streets of Soho. I am not sure what I did but I seem to remember buying a coffee and being asked for an autograph and signing it like a man who was not really there. I don’t think that I was.

I was back at the Queen’s Theatre by the ‘half’, which is theatre slang for thirty-five minutes before the curtain goes up. As the evening show neared, I felt a power, an energy and a brightness inside of me. I can’t begin to explain what happened and I am not going to: I just knew that it was the strongest performance I had ever given. I felt my dad connecting with me. He was telling me I had done the right thing.

After the show I changed quickly and drove to Essex. Heading through the dark streets and country lanes, I was suffused with sadness, but I knew I had to focus on my mum. She had lost the one man in her life: her lover and companion for more than fifty years.

When she opened the door, I hugged her. She looked so girlish and so lost. Dad had died aged seventy-five, which I guess was quite an achievement when his TB had so nearly taken him at twenty-eight. We sat up until the early hours, talking and sharing memories of him. We cried a lot; we laughed a lot, too.

I couldn’t bear to leave Mum on her own in the house full of memories of Dad, and the next morning I suggested she pack a bag and come to stay with us for a while. She moved in with us at our new place in Long Ditton, Surrey and I’m glad to say she never moved out again. We behaved like a proper family should.

Few women would welcome the mother-in-law coming to live with them but Carlotta could not have been kinder and it was good for Kit and Bill to have Mum with us. They had reached a lively age, were often fighting, and would ignore me trying to calm them down. When their granny said ‘Oi!’ they knew she meant business.

All of my dad’s surviving family and friends came to his funeral in the East End. I gave an address, but I honestly cannot to this day remember a word that I said. A choir of children from my primary school, Star Lane, sang a hymn as his coffin was carried through the church, and he was laid to rest in the East London Cemetery. I was proud that the day was as dignified as my dad had always been.

LOSING YOUR PARENTS
may be one of those rites of passage in life that everybody has to go through but it is not easy. The wounds heal very slowly. The hardest part is the eerie moments when you forget they have gone and suddenly remember the awful truth with a jolt, like aftershocks of the initial seismic shift. I had a lot of those in the months after my dad’s death.

Living with me and Carlotta, Mum slowly and bravely began to rebuild her life. She was only sixty-nine but like many of her generation there was no question of her ever meeting anybody else, or even trying to: that was it, for her. But I think being around Bill and Kit’s youthful energy certainly helped her to recover.

For my part, I was still labouring through
She Stoops to Conquer
at the Queen’s and had a very bizarre experience a few days after my dad’s funeral. Pulling into the nearby Soho Square to look for a parking place, I became aware of a spooky silence then saw two men crawling on the pavement in suits and ties.

From nowhere, a man jumped in front of my car, pointed a gun at me and ordered me to get out. I later learned that he had snatched somebody’s bag and when the police had cornered him
in
Soho Square, he had produced a gun. I had blundered into the middle of a standoff.

I was in no mood to surrender my car to him and so pointed it at him and hit the accelerator. I was trying to move him out of the way, not knock him down him, but the wing clipped him on the leg. As I pulled away he fired a shot at the car, and then another. I swerved quickly down a side-road and as I swung around and returned near to the theatre to try to park, I saw my assailant again. This time he was running, with a noticeable limp.

At the interval of that evening’s performance I had to go to the stage door to talk to two plain-clothes policemen. I told them all that I knew and played the incident down to the hordes of journalists that were also crowding the stage door, although this didn’t stop a rash of POP STAR’S HIJACK DRAMA headlines the next day. The police arrested and charged the gunman a few days later.

She Stoops to Conquer
ended its run shortly afterwards and I was not sorry to see it go. It had not been the happiest of times and the drudgery of doing one show for so long made me loath to take on any more long theatre runs. I decided that, for now at least, a few weeks of
The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
each Christmas would do me fine.

This didn’t mean I wasn’t still open to new work avenues and experiences, and in the mid-nineties Mel commissioned me to write the music for a Russian ice ballet company production of
Beauty and the Beast
that he was staging at the Royal Albert Hall. The writer, David Wood, had supplied a storyline that I would flesh out with songs and a score.

This venture hadn’t got off to the most auspicious start as its launch press conference and photo-shoot had coincided with my spell in the Hospital for Tropical Diseases recovering from the Tick Typhus fever that I had picked up in Malawi. Nevertheless, I had been determined not to let Mel down and had defied doctors’ orders to lurch groggily into the limo that turned up at the hospital to pick me up.

The launch was at an ice rink in central London, and I have a vague memory of smiling wanly for photographers and even managing to complete a few circuits of the rink with some Amazonian Russian skaters before the limo returned me to my feverish sickbed. Maybe those doctors had had a point.

The ballet was finally staged in 1995 and Ian Wherry helped me to produce and arrange the soundtrack. This involved lengthy conversations with artistic director and choreographer Tatiana Tarasova, an animated and autocratic Russian who possibly felt a pop musician was a little beneath her.

Tatiana’s English was exactly as fluent as our Russian, which meant that our meetings were conducted via a somewhat mousy, browbeaten female interpreter. ‘What kind of music would Tatiana like for this scene?’ I would ask the interpreter, and after much shouting and gesticulating from Ms Tarasova, an answer would come back: ‘She say she want monkey-up-a-rope music.’

My suggestion of appointing a director to give some shape and organisation to the production was overruled, and composing the music was a fraught process as the dance scenes constantly lengthened and shortened at Tatiana’s whim. Nevertheless I was proud of the score, which I think features some of
my
strongest ever songs, and with Olympic gold-medal skaters whizzing around the ice,
Beauty and the Beast
was a gorgeous spectacle.

The night of the Albert Hall grand charity gala opening came round far too quickly, and with our monkey-up-a-rope music still in a state of flux, Ian and I got virtually no sleep in the week leading up to it. On the big night my fatigue battled with nerves, not least because the troublesome portable ice rink had lately developed a habit of melting in rehearsals, nearly submerging the skaters.

Thankfully, the ice remained frozen, the skaters were poetry in motion and the score seemed to go down well. A Russian TV crew even compared it to Tchaikovsky. The reception at the end was tremendous and Tatiana and I were ushered out on a red carpet on the rink to take a bow, which is apparently the normal etiquette in ballet circles.

The deafening applause ran its course and then for no obvious reason rose in intensity again, augmented with whooped cheers, which baffled me. I glanced behind me and was perturbed to see TV host Michael Aspel stepping gingerly over the ice towards me carrying a big red book.

I knew what he was going to say before he said it: ‘David Essex –
This Is Your Life
.’

I had always told Derek and Mel that I did not want to be the subject of this programme, in the unlikely event that I was ever asked, but my managers had clearly overruled me and now there was nothing I could do about it. The die was cast. Feeling mildly delirious from sleep deprivation, I was whisked to a
waiting
car and on to BBC Television Centre, where I was locked in a dressing room.

As midnight passed and I sat secluded in this bare cell, the thought occurred that it was not unlike being taken prisoner. My wait ended after a couple of hours when a make-up lady arrived to hide the lines and bags under my eyes and I was led to the studio.

As I walked into the brightly lit room, the experience was akin to my whole life flashing before my eyes in one shifting mosaic. My family and friends were arranged all around the studio, including some people I had not seen for years. I might have always been sceptical about this programme but clearly this was going to be quite a night.

The first people on were my mum, Verity, Dan and Carlotta, which was how it should be. My old West Ham youth team pal Frank Lampard was one of the next guests up. He recalled our kickabouts under Avondale Court and said that he reckoned I could have made it as a professional footballer had rock ’n’ roll not come along. I was far from convinced but it was a lovely compliment.

Michael Aspel slickly led the studio audience through my life and career, with Sir David Puttnam appearing on video to reminisce about
That’ll Be the Day
and
Stardust
. I got a goodly selection of knights of the realm, with Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber praising my performance in
Evita
. Even good old Sir Peter Hall put in an appearance.

Yet the night’s highlight by far was a surprise piece of film footage. Following in their father’s footsteps, Kit and Bill had
recently
joined the West Ham academy, and the
This Is Your Life
producers had filmed them nutmegging Rio Ferdinand and skinning Frank Lampard Junior before Billy curled the ball around goalie Lud
ě
k Mikloško and into the top corner of the net. It was so cool, and I had the world’s broadest beam at the end of the show when Kit and Bill appeared in the studio on the shoulders of World Cup-winning former Hammer Geoff Hurst.

There was one major omission from the show. Derek Bowman, the mentor who had shown such faith in me right from the days when I was the wet-behind-the-ears drummer in an East End pub band called the Everons, and who had opened my eyes to the infinite possibilities of show business, was not there.

Derek had been spasmodically ill for quite some time, suffering from high blood pressure and a range of other ailments, and was in hospital, where his dignity counselled against sending
This Is Your Life
a video message from his sickbed. He was not to leave that bed. On 1 June 1995, he died.

Derek and I were alone in his hospital room in the early hours as he passed away. As he left me, I softly sang the words of a song I had written for him many years previously called ‘Friends’:

Friends, you and I we are friends
,

Friends right up to the end

We are friends, friend

Friends, right through the thick and thin

If we are out or in

We are friends, friend

And every road you walk along

I’ll be by your side

Every dream you dream

I’ll try to materialise the vision in your eyes

A dream, you and I had a dream

But so many dreams we’ve seen

We’ve seen fade, fade

But there’s someone, he really cares

Someone that’s been so true

I love you, friend

I thought of the day he had told me in the Arts Theatre Club in Soho that he thought I could be a solo star, and of the evening he turned up to meet my parents, a contract under his arm. He had given me all he had and my career would not have happened without him. Quite literally, I owed him everything.

I spoke at Derek’s burial a few days later and it reminded me again what a selfless man he had been. Having dedicated his life to his mother, his sister and me, there were no descendants, no children or grandchildren gathered in the church; just a snatch of distant relatives such as his cousin, the actor Ron Moody.

It was a hugely upsetting experience and I couldn’t get through my eulogy without breaking down. I knew one thing: there had been too many deaths of dearly loved ones around here lately.

I DON’T KNOW
if it was partly an unconscious reaction to my mentor and guiding light Derek passing away, but in the mid-nineties I began for the first time to think about the possibility of retirement, or at least semi-retirement. Certainly I think that losing both my dad and Derek in such a relatively short space of time made me more aware of my own mortality.

For a while it seemed to me that I had done most of the things I had wanted to: films, theatre, albums, huge concert tours. It felt like time to take a break and I was having such a brilliant time hanging out with Carlotta, Bill and Kit, watching my boys play football and being part of their lives 24/7, that I pulled back a bit from the frenzy of showbiz.