David Essex

Pictures of David Essex in his heyday are still able to make women of a certain age go weak at the knees and these first three albums are an interesting insight into his late-starting music career and the musical trends of the mid-seventies. A kind of cooler Leo Sayer, Essex actually started his singing career ten years before the first of these albums was released. By the time of Rock On's arrival in 1973, Essex had put behind him his early rejections and found fame through musical theatre (playing Jesus in Godspell) and then the film That'll be The Day.

Suddenly the East End boy who dreamed of being a footballer as a kid had the chance to launch a successful chart career and for the rest of the decade Essex enjoyed impressive chart success. He had seven top ten hits and two number ones. Rock On saw him signed to producer Jeff Wayne's label and Wayne gave some of the standard pop tunes a more futuristic feel, the title track and first hit single being an example. By the end of the year Essex was winning polls for Best British Male Artist with Lamplight his second top ten hit. Elsewhere the album hints at experimentation, with Ocean Girl's Caribbean feel and the Wayne penned Bring In The Sun moving into prog-rock territory.

For the self-titled follow-up Essex was assembling an ever impressive list of musicians, with Ray Cooper adding percussion and Chris Spedding guitar, while Julie Covington features on backing vocals. The latter two would also appear alongside Essex on Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds a few years later and you can hear the influence of Wayne on the track Window, which bares a startling similarity to part of Wayne's epic concept album. This was the record that also featured his first number one, with the appropriately titled Gonna Make You A Star.

The second chart topper was Hold Me Close, which still sounds as terrific forty years on, and featured on his third album, All The Fun of The Fair. Something of a concept album, it took Essex back to the world of fairgrounds from the film That'll be The Day with tracks such as Circles and Coconut Ice evoking memories of dodgems and the big wheel. The single Rolling Stone is another example of experimentation and the extensive notes reveal how the music press challenged him at the time about it being a less commercial choice. And that shows how David Essex was an individual; he had a distinctive vocal, avoiding a trend to sound American (Elton John for example) and pursuing his own unique direction. These first three albums show that he perhaps deserves more credit for standing apart from the mainstream crowd. A national treasure for sure.