David Essex

Unknown Contributor Role: David Essex.David Essex's second album was recorded less than a year after his first, yet his forward momentum was so powerful that already he had left much of the earlier set's sound and energies behind, a point that becomes apparent from the opening song, the U.K. smash "Gonna Make You a Star." An examination of the entire star-making machine seen from the point of view of an artist who himself was widely perceived as a machine-made star, it marries a buoyantly hook-laden melody with a lyric that swings between cynicism and bitterness, and hangs on the savage denouement, "Is he more than a pretty face?/I don't think so." Of course, Essex was far more than that, as he had already proved with his roles in the movies That'll Be the Day and Stardust. The main theme to the latter closes David Essex no less effectively than "Star" opens it, as a superlative Essex lyric, a foreboding heartbeat rhythm, and a scintillating Chris Spedding guitar solo come together to