David Cassidy on the Web
Culture: Daydreamer takes showbiz reins again
June 19, 2005
The Sunday Times - Scotland
David Cassidy has taken time off from his horse breeding to return to the stage, finds Rachel Devine
David Cassidy was the teenybop idol with a dark side. While Donny and Marie Osmond were trading paper roses, Cassidy was swapping Partridge Family values for a life of sex, drugs and adult-oriented rock.
For a spell in the early 1970s he was one of the world's biggest heart-throbs, but then it went depressingly wrong.
His memoir C'mon, Get Happy: Fear and Loathing on the Partridge Family Bus revealed how he suffered from depression brought on by fading fame and his bitterness over the money he felt he should have earned while his star was at its brightest.
Now, after two decades of relative obscurity, he is bringing back that clean-cut image for a 1970s revivalist tour with the Osmonds, the Bay City Rollers and David Essex.
His former disciples will be glad to hear his musical style has not changed.
"I have shown loyalty to my fans and they have shown the same back to me," he says.
"I'm often asked how I can still enjoy singing a song like I Think I Love You after all this time, but these are the songs my fans want to hear. And as long as they want to hear them I will want to sing them.
"I have done so much creatively over the past 30 years. I've been a producer, a writer, an actor and a singer.
"I have kept at it when things were not looking so good and I have been rewarded."
This loyalty extends to consulting his fans over which songs should make his concert set list via polls on his website.
Those who turn up to see him perform at the SECC can rest easy in the knowledge that songs such as Cherish, How Can I Be Sure and Daydreamer will almost certainly be given an airing.
They might even get a peek of Cassidy's 14-year-old son Beau who, says Cassidy, is preparing to join his father for a few numbers.
"He is a very gifted musician, perhaps the most gifted I've ever known at his age," he says. "When he is ready I'm going to get him up on stage."
While Cassidy is happy to enthuse about the talents of his teenage son, he has always maintained a resolute silence when it comes to Katie, his 19-year-old daughter. An aspiring singer and model, she is the child he had with the former model Sherry Benedon, with whom Cassidy had an on-off relationship in the 1980s. He is privately thought to be disappointed she chose to follow him into show business at a similarly young age.
Cassidy was still a teenager when he joined the cast of the hit American television show The Partridge Family in 1970. He left the show four years later, already a huge international star, to pursue a pop career. By then his fan club was the largest in the history of the music industry, eclipsing even the Beatles and Elvis Presley.
When his pop career came to an end in the late 1970s he was broke and his acting career was in decline. As he shunted from one television show to the next (although the short-lived David Cassidy: Man Undercover was rumoured to be the inspiration for 21 Jump Street), Cassidy realised his suave talents were ideally suited to musical theatre.
In the 1980s he landed roles in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Jesus Christ Superstar before he was cast as Mickey Johnston in the Broadway production of Blood Brothers.
Two failed marriages later, his toothy smile and permatan were back in fashion and he was reborn in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand, where he opened the £40m show EFX in 1996, a high-tech orgy of special effects, light shows and big chorus pop songs. Like Cirque du Soleil, it is now a Las Vegas institution.
"The Vegas years were great because I could spend time at home with my family rather than be off touring," says Cassidy, who left EFX to move to Fort Lauderdale in Florida in 2003.
"It gave me a break from performing concerts, too. I didn't tour for more than a decade, so I wasn't singing those songs over and over until I was sick of them."
He now spends much of his time on his ranch. An admired horse breeder ("It's nice to be respected for my achievements on the field and not just because I'm David Cassidy the pop singer"), he dreams of rearing a Kentucky Derby winner; he has already had success with Mayan King.
He says he is more proud of his career as a breeder than his numerous platinum-selling hits, adding that it gives him a much-needed sense of balance.
"When I return to the live circuit I still have hunger, I still love performing those songs," he says. "Now I take breaks from performing so it never gets stale."
These days it's even fair game to mention the Partridge Family. The role of all-singing, all-dancing young hunk Keith Partridge that was the source of so much reported anguish to Cassidy in the difficult years after his pop career took a nose dive, is now something he looks back on with some fondness. Or so he claims.
"I just got the DVD of the first series and, you know, I was planning to sit down and watch it but there was just so much other stuff to do that weekend," he says with what sounds like sincerity.
"I'll get around to it some day real soon."
David Cassidy will perform at the Once in a Lifetime tour at the SECC on July 2
