'Ev': remembering Kenny Everett
One-off manic performer would have been 80 on Christmas Day
Let me take you back to a sunny Sunday afternoon in 1973. A young lad is listening to Kenny Everett on the radio in his family’s Hertfordshire garden, having heard the previous show by Noel Edmonds. He’s intrigued by the gear change in style to what he’ll later learn is termed ‘manic’. Everett’s manipulation of sounds – echo, layering, pitch and speed bending and more – opens up a multiverse of possibilities, along with his accents and characterisations.
It’s an impossibly enticing experience but it’s over in an hour or two. The rest of the week – whether the reality of going back to school the following day, or even the following radio show – falls flat by comparison.
The kid was me of course, and if the programme ended prematurely, so too did the life of its presenter.
Born Maurice Cole a few miles from central Liverpool on December 25th 1944, Kenny died of an AIDS-related illness on April 4th 1995. He was 50.
Had things turned out differently he could have been celebrating his 80th birthday a few days ago while the nation was watching Gavin and Stacey. Everett’s life was the very embodiment of the showbiz maxim ‘leave them wanting more’.
Some BBC radio shows aired over the festive season may remind you what you’re missing if you’re quick – there’s a one-off here and a three-parter here. They’re available for less than a month as I write.
‘Radio with a gimmick’: TV calls
Fast-forward to 1987 and the Kenny Everett I’m talking to looks a bit ‘little boy lost’. (Forgive the #namedrop – it’s an occupational hazard.😳) By then I was working as a BBC TV sound engineer and I was rostered that day and for the rest of the series on a pop science gameshow called Brainstorm, with Kenny as the quizmaster.
I should immediately caveat that ‘lost’ look as possibly largely or solely being a function of the fact that he wasn’t performing, and it was the first time I’d spoken to him. So it was equally a consequence of him not knowing who the hell I was – or a psychologist might even say it was a projection of my own floundering! He was sitting in the audience rostrum in rehearsal in front of his dresser, the man looking after his clothes for the show and his on-air style.
I needed a quick chat to Kenny about what he was going to wear that evening as it would affect how I would attach a personal mic to him. In the event, he referred me to the man from ‘wardrobe’ behind him. He obviously didn’t ‘do’ clothes.
A Channel 4 documentary When Freddie Mercury met Kenny Everett pointed to Class A shenanigans between the two, and Everett’s former wife Lee described Mercury as having been turned by cocaine into a big monster, while Everett was a little coke monster
A radio artist in a TV world
In fact that wasn’t the first time I’d worked on one of Kenny’s TV shows. The previous year I was delighted to be scheduled to work with my childhood idol on the imaginatively titled The Kenny Everett Television Show. This was the BBC’s answer to Thames TV’s The Kenny Everett Video Show.
Of the two series I worked with him on, Kenny seemed less comfortable on the sketch- and character-based show. For the Television Show I was on the boom – operating a mic on a telescopic arm from an elevated platform – and I noticed with Kenny, more than with any other artist I had to mic up in that way in over a decade, that his delivery could be at times scattergun. That is, he would be delivering lines with his head turning unpredictably left and right, so much so that I stopped second-guessing which direction the next line would come out in! I felt obliged to slacken off and work further away from him to average out the extremes – regretfully, because that leads to a less focused, more reverberant ‘swimming-pool’-ish sound. But it was the lesser of two evils, rather than being caught out 180 degrees the wrong side of where his mouth was with my directional mic.
Another indication that he wasn’t as at home in a TV studio was his lack of familiarity with the terminology. When the floor manager asked him to move further upstage he queried which was direction was up- and which downstage. Actors have it in their blood that upstage is further away from the audience, a term dating from when some stages were actually sloped to improve sightlines for the audience.
I say this not as a great criticism of Everett, but as evidence that a radio studio to him was his real professional home, and not a TV studio. Having said that he seemed genuinely much happier on Brainstorm, I think because the gameshow format required and encouraged him to ad lib, and to project a persona much closer to his radio style of presentation.
The dark side
Back to my boyhood I remember being bereft when, having moved from the BBC to the new commercial kid on the block Capital Radio to eventually host the breakfast show, Kenny suddenly disappeared from the airwaves. The early to mid ’70s were far from today’s information age, and I heard nothing for ages, and then was faced by Kenny’s frighteningly haunted face staring out at me from the front page of my dad’s London Evening Standard newspaper.
Only much later was I to read in Kenny’s larger-than-life autobiography, The Custard Stops at Hatfield, that he’d over-indulged in Mandrax sleeping pills and had to be rushed to hospital.
That was the legit stuff he admitted to doing. A Channel 4 documentary When Freddie Mercury met Kenny Everett pointed to Class A shenanigans between the two, and Everett’s former wife Lee described Mercury as having been turned by cocaine into a big monster while her then husband became a little coke monster.
Everett belatedly came out as gay. No surprise he didn’t do so earlier as there was even more persecution in previous times, though some raised an eyebrow that he could find an ideological home in the Conservative party when it was behind the infamous section 28 banning the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality.
But I can’t help wondering if, as well as his initially suppressed sexuality there might have been some unspoken of demons in his past. I’m possibly adding up 2 + 2 and making 5, but something about his manic delivery hints to me at possible bipolar disorder, and that together with the escapism of his persona and acquiring a new identity with a stage name, plus the chasing of drug transcendence and perhaps risky sex would be consistent with an attempt to shut out something very painful from when he was younger.
He made some overtures to pursuing the priesthood at one point, and while we are now sadly over-familiar with hearing about abuse in religious institutions, people kept more tight-lipped about it in Kenny’s lifetime.
I'll float that then as a ‘case not proven’.
Happy memories
What’s incontrovertible is Kenny’s technical and artistic aptitude in his favourite medium. Heaven knows what he could have achieved with digital multi-track recording in place of his two or three chunky tape machines.
And his facility with language was spot on. Another sunny Sunday in the garden of my youth has me listening to Everett not wanting to wait for the official release date to be able to play Wings’ Bond theme for Live and Let Die.
I vividly remember him saying ‘I squeezed Apple [McCartney’s record label] and they de-“cider”-ed to let me have a copy’.
A terrible and wonderful pun that remains with me more than half a century later.
Anyone who thinks Everett’s work was disposable can stick that on their turntable and give it a spin.