Jon English: a superstar on any stage

Jon English, who starred in rock music, theatre and TV, has died, aged 66.

Jon English promoting his new show, Rock Revolution Picture: Supplied

Judas was English. So was Christ. Even Simon Zealotes was a Yorkshireman.

The original cast for the Australian production of Jesus Christ Superstar, like the first waves of local pop stars, relied heavily on Arthur Calwell’s postwar migrant boom for its singers and artists.

Jon English (Judas) was born in London, Trevor White (Christ) was from Essex and former Easybeat Stevie Wright (Zealotes) started life in Leeds.

And it was English who best used the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice stage show as a springboard for theatre and television success while never abandoning his first calling — rock ’n’ roll.

English’s Judas Iscariot was a commanding presence, almost a shocking one. No one who saw Superstar between 1972 and 1974, first at Sydney’s Capitol Theatre and then Melbourne’s Palais, will forget English’s last moments on the mostly bare stage. Dressed in a black bodysuit with wide red arrows shooting up his long arms and another up to his neck, he looked like a blazing pitchfork as he rose from — or to — Hell.

It was a controversial show. Rice’s Christ was all too human, racked by doubts and, crucially, is not seen to have been resurrected. There was no third day in this show.

Conservative American and British critics thought the script dangerous. And it could be.

English once recalled that it flushed out “all the loonies” — and they were often in the audience. One of them, angry as Judas betrays Jesus once too often, threw thirty 20c pieces at English “and gave me five stitches over the eye”.

Jesus Christ Superstar was billed as a rock opera, not a musical. And every night it was English who put the rock into the show.

These days, restagings of Superstar are mostly dumbed down, sometimes missing the point. Judas is often a simple caricature of evil. But English’s Judas was confident, clever, snide and mocking — like the title of the show itself. His performances were a theatrical tour de force.

Rice, whose words English sang so well, visited Sydney to see the show and confirmed what local audiences took for granted: Australia’s Judas was the best in the world.

English never looked back.

Jon English: 1949-2016

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He arrived in Australia in 1961 aboard the RMS Orion along with his mother and siblings and 1686 others seeking a new life here. English’s father had been sent to Australia by his employer and the family settled in Cabramatta.

English had just turned 12. On the other side of the earth, four young men playing in a little known band that worked between Liverpool and Hamburg were about to revolutionise popular music and, in doing so, change the lives of many others they inspired to follow in their footsteps.

English’s conversion to this new religion took place in the winter of 1964 at Rushcutters Bay in the old Sydney Stadium, at one of six shows across three nights by the Beatles.

It suddenly seemed that every young man in Australia wanted to be in a band and English’s father, who played piano and a little guitar, had already bought one for his son.

The following year English sang Twist and Shout in a neighbour’s band, and by the end of that year was in group calling itself Zenith with fellow students from Cabramatta High School. Soon he was in another band called Gene Chandler and the Interns, where he met boys who were to play a substantial role in shaping his musical future, including guitarist Graham Ford and Peter Plavsic on bass.

Seven kilometres away in Villawood, another gang of migrant boys inspired by the Beatles’ tour also were forming a band that they would call the Easybeats.

The Interns became the Sebastian Hardie Blues Band with English on rhythm guitar and vocals.

At first it was a traditional R&B outfit, but after some changes it leaned more to pop and, for a time, backed Johnny O’Keefe before his Sunbury comeback.

The band’s mix of Beatles’ and Rolling Stones’ standards went over well, but English left after auditioning for Jesus Christ Superstar.

It is largely overlooked now, but English supervised the production of Sebastian Hardie’s groundbreaking 1975 symphonic rock masterpiece Four Moments, a prog-rock landmark commonly accepted as never being equalled before or since.

And his relationship with brilliant multi-instrumentalist Mario Millo, another Sebastian Hardie member, was to bear more fruit, not least of which was their joint soundtrack to the television miniseries Against the Wind.

A single from it, Six Ribbons, reached No 5 on the Australian charts, and three years later, when Against the Wind aired in Europe, the album and single would top Scandinavian charts.

The album’s worldwide sales topped a million.

After Superstar, English divided his time between acting and music. Starting with Wine Dark Sea in 1973 — a mix of mostly lesser known covers and promising originals — he released an album a year for the rest of the decade while working on stage and in television dramas, including Matlock Police and Homicide in which, he later commented wryly, he was often “a drug crazed, axe-murdering hippie”.

He enjoyed some solid hit singles — Hollywood Seven, Words are Not Enough, Get Your Love Right, Hot Town — and a greatest hits collection charted strongly.  His acclaimed performance in Against the Wind won him a Logie award for best new talent and that year — 1979 — won the TV Week-Countdown award for best male vocalist.

His performance as the Pirate King in the 1984 Victorian State Opera production of The Pirates of Penzance — alongside Marina Pryor, Simon Gallaher and June Bronhill — scored English the Melbourne Critics’ Green Room Award for most outstanding actor.

He starred in two other timelessly popular Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas — The Mikado and HMS Pinafore, and all three were made into films.

But his hundreds of shows as the Pirate King fixed that image in theatregoers’ minds, and his peers’ — he won a series of Mo awards starting in the mid-1980s.

English is also remembered for his role as Bobby Rivers in the long-running television comedy series All Together Now. Rivers was a faded, one-hit-wonder rock star with a late-in-life family, the versatile English handling the role with ease.

But long before, English’s imagination had been seized as his father read to him one of Robert Graves’s compendiums of mythology, probably the 1955 collection The Greek Myths.

He particularly fixed on the story of Paris of Troy who elopes with (or kidnaps) Helen, the beautiful queen of Sparta. The Greeks want their woman back and the Trojan Wars result.

The first manifestation of English’s obsession with the story came when the singer playfully wrote and recorded a song called Oh Paris in 1983 and wondered what lazy listeners might make of its lyrics about Troy’s legendary son.

He was interviewed on radio when it was released and later told a reporter: “The bloke played it, apparently was listening to it, and then came back on air and said ‘so, have you ever been to France, Jon?’ ”

Along with music producer David Mackay, English set out in the late 80s to write his own rock opera based on the tale — and the pair was thinking big.

When production companies had been nervous about staging Jesus Christ Superstar, Lloyd Webber and Rice convinced backers to finance the album first.

A single, the title track, was tentatively released by Decca and sold modestly. The album performed a little better and it gave backers the confidence to invest in the show.

English and Mackay hoped for the same and WEA invested heavily in recording the grand Paris project.

They worked in Britain, mostly with a who’s who of international music talent including the London Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonia Chorus.

Also on board were the singers John Parr, a notoriously reticent Harry Nilsson, Status Quo’s Francis Rossi, Demis Roussos, the Angels’ Doc Neeson and Barry Humphries.

When the double CD of Paris was released in 1990 it sold 50,000 copies and won the 1991 ARIA for best original soundtrack.

But English struggled to find a backer to stage the show. The album had taken three years, and much of English’s life was invested in seeing it performed live.

Apparently he had been reluctant to license the show to amateur companies, but with renewed interest in the music he relaxed and Paris was staged in two productions in NSW in 2003, by Rockdale’s Regals Music Society and Gosford’s Layock Street Theatre.

A cast of 55 alongside a 17-piece orchestra performed it in Melbourne the following year and there have been performances in Auckland, Adelaide and Brisbane, after which a German translation was performed in Austria.

English died yesterday, aged 66. He is survived by his four children, Jessamin, Josephine, Jonnie and Julian, his wife Carmen and partner Coralea Cameron.

His was an extraordinarily fulfilled life of varied achievement — but Paris remained unfinished business.

Obituary: Jon English. Musician and actor. Born London, March 26, 1949. Died Newcastle, March 10, aged 66.