A biography for David Essexhasn’t been written yet.
“Change is a stimulant for me.”
“I thought if I played the drums I could at least hide behind the cymbals if I was no good.”
“I write in the garden room, on my terrace at home in Covent Garden.”
“I was always quite shy so I became a drummer.”
“I lived in a workhouse with my mum. Our room was a curtained cubicle and my dad lived in another wing.”
“I first started going to Kent from the East End, where I was brought up, when I was a very small boy, going with my family to pick hops on working holidays. That was the first time I'd ever seen the countryside. Kent has a special place in my heart.”
“The media attention doesn't faze me. I'm always writing and performing somewhere, so I never feel like I've been totally out of things although to the public I may have disappeared.”
“I had a furious row with a certain man in charge about the way they wanted to market me in America. They wanted to go very heavily on the teen-idol aspect. I was bemused by that kind of bedroom-poster image, but it was the last thing I wanted to promote.”
“I came from music really.”
“I hate pretension.”
“My East End secondary school was a horror show. We didn't study art, music or anything creative, and a bleak mood of edgy indifference permeated the school.”
“I've always been embarrassed by that side of my reputation, my focus has always been the music or piece of theatre or film that I'd doing. It's never been the good look department.”
“As a kid, my family used to go to a holiday camp in either Clacton-on-Sea or the Isle of Sheppey, on the other side of the Thames Estuary. We'd stay in a caravan or a chalet, and it was very family-orientated.”
“Brian Wilson's writing and production techniques were landmarks and 'God Only Knows' has to be one of my top 10 recordings.”
“When I was about 16, I spent a couple of months playing at clubs in Italy with a blues band. I'll never forget stepping off the plane because Italy just smelt so different - a combination of warmth and coffee.”
“Love and friendship are really the key, I believe, to a relationship - although I can't claim to be an expert!”
“It's not that I have any general aversion to technology but online banking just seems to be asking for trouble. You can have enough problems offline, so why increase the risk?”
“I have to confess that I am not a big book reader.”
“I tend to enjoy wherever I am, but in the Seventies I had a hairy time in a town just outside Nashville. Someone from our band had misbehaved and the local sheriff turned up waving a gun, so we had to crawl out of the hotel window to make a dash for it.”