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.”