THROUGHOUT MY LIFE and career, people have always seen me as terminally laid-back. I remember once in the eighties turning on the TV and seeing an impressionist doing an impersonation of me. His routine consisted of saying ‘I’m David Essex … zzzzz!’ and slumping forward as if asleep or, more likely, comatose. It made me laugh and I can understand this reading of my nature but I don’t actually think it’s accurate at all. My body language and laconic speech rhythms may appear pretty laid-back but in actuality I have always been intense and driven to find new challenges and take myself out of my comfort zone, in work and in life. While I had been zooming back and forth between London and New York in 1983 and ’84, I had been working on an ambitious and fairly audacious new project. Being a writer of songs, and having appeared in a number of other people’s musicals, it seemed to me that the logical conclusion was to write a stage musical of my own. I didn’t have a subject matter in mind and vaguely wondered if I could translate some of the dark-hued, seductive Grimm’s Fairy Tales to this format.
