Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive

for rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The program was originally broadcast

in 1988, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

There can be few people who've been asked to play Jesus Christ, Lord Byron and Che Guevara

during their stage careers. My cast away this week is perhaps the only one. He's the sort

of man for whom Desert Islands were made, eternally youthful in looks and always romantic

in approach. He's written and sung 160 songs, many of them hits, and sung and acted his

way through several musicals, including his own. But Stardom cannot disguise the fact that

he is the London lad with the Husky voice and the twinkling eyes. He is David Essex.

Welcome to the Castaways' couch. Thank you. Has the voice always been Husky?

I think it probably has. It wasn't really helped because I decided when I was about

10 to buy this packet of it. It used to be called Waits. I don't know if they still exist,

and smoked them all very quickly, and then felt really sick on a railway bridge in Canningtown.

But I think it was probably singing the blues a little bit later that permanently wrecked the voice,

yes. Why didn't it buy that? It's been a rather successful wrecked voice, if that's the case.

What about the looks? Have they always been boyish?

There was a time when my mum used to take me in the shops, and they'd say,

what does a little girl want? Because I had these big long eyelashes, and all my mates big sisters

always said, oh, when you got lovely eyelashes, my mum caught me in the bathroom once with

a pair of scissors, it's just about to cut them off. So I hated that, of course.

I see now, when people write about you, they talk about the evergreen David Essex,

and they start talking about the few grey hairs around the temples or the years. Do you mind age?

...