Free Over the Moon by David Essex Page A

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