David Essex

From Canning Town to the Roundhouse

David Essex was born David Albert Cook on 23 July 1947 in Plaistow, in what is now the London Borough of Newham. His father worked the docks and his mother, an Irish Traveller, taught herself the piano. He grew up in Canning Town and made his first recording in 1965 for Fontana, years before anyone outside east London knew the name.

He did not set out to be a singer. In a Gold Radio interview first published in August 2022 he recalled joining his first band as its drummer, the youngest in the room, until the lead guitarist decided he could not play and sing at once and told the kid on the kit to take the vocals. When that group folded, his manager Derek Bowman, a theatre critic and academic, pushed him towards a solo career and, as it turned out, towards the stage.

The break came in 1971 when he was cast as Jesus in the London production of Godspell, a run that took in the Roundhouse and then the West End over two years. It was theatre, not a record deal, that made him a name, and that pattern of alternating the stage with the studio has held for the whole of the fifty-odd years since.

Rock On, Stardust and two number ones

In 1973 he starred as Jim MacLaine in That'll Be the Day, earning a BAFTA nomination, and released the self-written Rock On, a spare, echo-laden single that reached number five on the Billboard Hot 100, went gold in America and picked up a Grammy nomination. The sequel Stardust followed in 1974, the same year Gonna Make You a Star gave him his first UK number one. Hold Me Close, a second chart-topper, arrived in 1975.

He has been candid about what happened next in America. Rock On had opened the door, but he told Gold Radio he "couldn't be bothered to go there", preferring to keep working in England and keep his family at home. He called the decision "a bit suicidal, in a way" for his career, and the record bears that out: between 1973 and 1994 he logged nineteen UK Top 40 singles, including the two number ones, and sixteen Top 40 albums, while remaining largely unknown across the Atlantic. Promoters for the current tour round the tally up to twenty-three Top 30 British singles.

The catalogue runs from the Rock On album of 1973 through Cover Shot, which reached number three in 1993, to Reflections in 2013. Lamplight, A Winter's Tale, Silver Dream Machine and Oh What a Circus have stayed in the live set for decades.

Che, the Artilleryman and a long theatre habit

The theatre never let go. In 1978 he created the role of Che in the original London production of Evita, which brought an Olivier nomination and put Oh What a Circus at number three in the singles chart. The same year he voiced the Artilleryman on Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds, a part he revisited on stage at the Dominion Theatre in London in 2016. In 1985 he co-wrote and starred in Mutiny! as Fletcher Christian, and Tahiti from that score went Top 10.

Television came in waves: the sitcom The River in 1988, a Heartbeat guest turn in 2000, and a spell as Eddie Moon in EastEnders from June to October 2011. In 2013 he wrote the score for the film Traveller and appeared in it alongside his son. His autobiography, A Charmed Life, was a bestseller in 2002.

Outside the work, he was appointed OBE in 1999 for charitable services, particularly to Voluntary Service Overseas, for which he served as an ambassador. He has also been patron of Britain's National Gypsy Council, campaigning for the rights of Romani and Irish Traveller communities, a cause rooted in his mother's background. He married the Welsh actress Susan Hallam-Wright in 2010, his third marriage, and has five children.

Where he stands now

The current chapter was announced on his official site on 17 October 2025: a 21-date nationwide tour for September 2026 under the title Thanks for the Memories, billed as a celebration of his career. On 22 October 2025 Birmingham Symphony Hall was added as the opening night on 1 September, and on 28 October a separate summer date at the Historic Lavenham August Theatre was set for 15 August 2026. Before any of that he closed 2025 with Irish dates at the Millennium Forum in Derry on 8 November and the Helix in Dublin on 9 November.

Speaking to Gold Radio in a piece published on 13 November 2025, he hinted the tour may well be his last, without quite saying so. "When I play these concerts I'm always struck by how much warmth there is," he said. "It's like a celebration of a generation." He described his audience as mostly people in their fifties and sixties for whom the songs were the soundtrack of their late teens and early twenties, and said this run would carry a smattering more storytelling than previous tours, though the songs would still come first. In the same interview he told the story of John Lennon declaring himself a fan of Rock On and steering him away from autograph hunters in New York, and recalled supporting Jimi Hendrix in Britain before Hendrix broke through.

The commercial case for a big farewell-shaped tour is straightforward. Venue listings for the 2026 dates note that his previous two UK tours sold more than 65,000 tickets across 39 dates, including nights at the London Palladium and the Theatre Royal. This run again finishes at the Palladium, on 29 September 2026.

The show in September 2026

The tour is a seated theatre and concert-hall circuit rather than an arena run. After Birmingham it moves through Bristol Beacon on 7 September, Bournemouth Pavilion on the 8th and the Brighton Centre on the 9th, then Southend, Ipswich, Southampton, Nottingham, Bath, Plymouth, Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, Manchester Opera House, Halifax, Sheffield City Hall, York Barbican, Connexin Live in Hull on 25 September, Swansea, Oxford and finally the Palladium. Bournemouth tickets started from £45.25, and Brighton lists the show as seating only with under-14s to be accompanied.

The format is fixed across the venue timetables. Doors open at 6.30pm, the singer-songwriter Tim Newman plays a 25-minute opening set from 7.25pm, there is a 25-minute interval, and Essex takes the stage at 8.15pm for a set scheduled to run until 10pm, roughly an hour and three-quarters. Setlist.fm timings from the previous tour tell the same story: 8.30pm to 10pm at the Palladium on 23 September 2024, and 8.35pm to 9.55pm at Watford Colosseum on 26 September 2025.

The shape of the set is well documented from Watford, the last show reviewed before this run. The website Photogroupie, writing on 1 October 2025, described an opening with Beautiful Day, then Lamplight, Oh What a Circus, A Winter's Tale, Imperial Wizard and City Lights, with Rock On and Gonna Make You a Star in the closing stretch, an encore of It's Gonna Be Alright, Hold Me Close and a cover of The Kinks' You Really Got Me, and Missing You (Magic) to finish. Setlist.fm logs from the same show and the 2024 dates add If I Could, Me and My Girl (Night-Clubbing), Stardust, Father and Son and Silver Dream Machine, with Dangerous appearing at Belfast's Waterfront Hall on 11 December 2024.

The reviewer's verdict was that the voice remains "rich and unmistakable" and that a man in his seventies "can still rock on", backed by what they called a tight, well-rehearsed band. He moves less than he once did and makes a running joke of his "choreography". The crowd that night was largely people who had followed him since the early 1970s and sang every word, with Hold Me Close bringing the house down in a single mass singalong, though the review also noted younger faces in the room. No published reviews of the September 2026 dates had appeared by the second week of the tour.