Fyne Times Gay and Lesbian Magazine, UK

Kenny Everett

Birth: 25th December 1944
Place of Birth: Seaforth, Liverpool, UK
Nationality: British
Job Title: DJ, Comedian
Partners: Lee Alkin, Nicolai Grishanovich, “Pepe”
Died: 4th April 1995, London, UK

There are few things more irritating than a fully grown adult showing signs of immaturity. How annoying is the attention seeking, over-active fool who is constantly trying to be the centre of attention? However, some of the most entertaining acts in history have been based solely on such immature, high energy antics. Just think of the television programmes, films or plays that have made you laugh and you are sure to find some element of childish behaviour in them. Fools may not be suffered gladly in the real world, but put them on screen, and it becomes a different matter. This month’s Gay Great tapped into our desire for childishness and managed to create a persona that was hyperactive, stupid and irreverent, yet at the same time innately lovable.

Kenny Everett was born Maurice Cole on Christmas day 1944, a welcome gift for his less than well off parents. With his father only a lowly tugboat man, the Coles lived a life of relative poverty in one of the poorest areas of Liverpool. Nevertheless, they all lived a happy existence and the young Everett developed a strong fun loving streak. His sense of humour served him well when his feeble stature and pale complexion was picked up on by the school bullies. Deflecting their attention with humour seemed easy. Even at this young age, he had discovered that being funny could be a vital life skill.

At around the same time, the young prankster was also developing a keen eye for technology and like so many young boys, was often taking household appliances apart. Fed up of buying new toasters, Everett’s father gave him a tape recorder to play with, hoping to divert his attention away from the kettle and table lamps. Instead of taking it to pieces as expected, Everett actually began to use it to produce his own radio shows.

Despite his growing interest in broadcasting, he decided to follow a personal calling instead and trained as a missionary. But this proved to be only a passing fancy. After two years of training, Everett decided that missionary work was in fact definitely not his bag. A zany and liberal hearted man, he found the world of a modern day apostle far too stuffy and conservative. Instead, he decided to start concentrating on a career as a DJ. He started recording his own homemade shows again whilst also working in a sausage roll factory to fund his exploits. It wasn’t long before one of the tapes found its way into the hands of the BBC. He was invited for an interview with The Light Programme, a forerunner of Radio 1. Sadly he was rejected in favour of a more conservative DJ.

Everett, however, was not worried by the rejection. Believing his experimental style of comedy was simply too far ahead of its time for national radio, he turned to the budding (and vastly more liberal) pirate radio sector. He was snapped up by one of the largest pirate radio stations of the sixties –Radio London, famous for developing cutting edge talent. Without a second thought, he packed his bags and headed out to join the crew of a decommissioned American minesweeper two miles off the coast on Britain, the home of Radio London.

Despite severe seasickness, Everett managed to concentrate on carving a niche for himself as part of a double act. His breakfast show slot, which he co-hosted with Dave Cash, was a huge hit. Never before had two presenters hosted the same show together and their creative humour, sketches and regular sections were highly innovative and technically brilliant. Unwittingly, the duo had created the definitive blueprint for double host radio shows, one that is still being followed today.

In 1965, after only six months into his job, Everett’s close to the bone humour brought about the first of his many infamous sackings. He cracked a risqué joke about Radio London’s weekly religious show, obviously unaware the programme in question was the highest earning slot for the station. He was made an example of and sacked. The infamous Radio Luxemburg snapped him up, but before long he had been sacked from there as well for smoking dope whilst on the air. However, all was not lost. The Radio London audience was screaming for Everett to be reinstated, and so he was, only six months after he was sacked by the station.

From a young age, Everett had experienced a strong sexual attraction to men. Now as an adult, he had adopted the recognisable characteristics of a tortured closet homosexual. He threw himself into his work and lived an austere life of celibacy. His Catholic upbringing cast a shadow over his true feelings, and Everett chose to channel all his energy into his work and social life. A keen lover of recreational drug use, a joint or LSD tab was never more than a few feet away from the mixing desk, and he would often attend raucous entertainment business parties.

It was at one such party that the Liverpool born DJ met four other local lads who were currently doing well in the entertainment industry. The Beatles took and instant shine to Everett and he was invited to join them on their 1966 tour. In the same year, he was also granted the exclusive first play of the Beatles new single, Strawberry Fields. His link to the fab four boosted his popularity considerably. He was now viewed not as an up and coming youngster, but a networking high-powered DJ.

Everett especially found favour with the Beatle’s manager, Brian Epstein, who was also a repressed homosexual obsessed with his work. Through Epstein, Everett met ‘Lady Lee’ Alkin, a medium who was at the time best known as the girlfriend of rock and roll artist Billy Fury. The two became close friends, Alkin seeing herself very much as Everett’s ‘fag-hag’. One night, the two slept together, totally changing both their relationship and Everett’s view of himself. Rumour has it that he got on the phone straight away after they made love to call his friends and tell them he was ‘cured’. Soon after, the couple were married. Although their relationship had to bear the inevitable strain of his latent homosexuality, the two were nevertheless the closest of companions.

The end to offshore pirate radio came in late 1967 with the introduction of the Marine Offences Act. Radio London was closed straight away, as were many other floating pirate stations. For the newly created BBC Radio One, the timing couldn’t have been better. Aiming to be the teenager’s station of choice, it took in the most popular refugees from the disbanded pirate stations. Naturally, Everett was offered a job.

However, his immature sense of fun soon caused trouble for him once again. After only a year at the new station, he was sacked for suggesting the wife of the Minister for Transport had bribed her driving examiner. Now the proud owner of a home studio, Everett continued to work freelance for the BBC, which he had now famously nicknamed ‘the Beeb’, keeping in work and on the airways. For Everett, this short spell of freelance work at the start of the 1970’s felt like wandering in the wilderness. Without a station and a show, he felt lost.

His time in the wilderness was ended when he eagerly accepted an offer from Capital Radio to headline their flagship breakfast show. It was whilst at Capital that he met Freddie Mercury. The two men were kindred spirits. They knew they were gay, but both were in a relationship with a woman. In return for Freddie’s friendship, Everett helped promote Queen’s music at every turn. He famously was the first to air Bohemian Rhapsody after a demo tape was sent to him with strict instructions from Freddie not to air it, but simply to give his opinion on it. Everett loved it and played it fourteen times over the space of one weekend, claiming to his boss on every play that ‘his finger slipped’. Through his cheeky disobedience, Everett helped to bring the most popular track of all time into the charts.

At the end of the 70s, Everett made the leap from radio to TV. Starting with a TV clip request show for London Weekend Television, the iconic style of the Everett show started to emerge. The idea moved through various shows and from channel to channel, and what emerged was a highly popular sketch show combining regular fictional characters interspersed with pop music. Similar to his radio shows (and using a few of the same characters such as Captain Kremlin, Sidney Snot and Brother Lee Love), the Kenny Everett Show was a massive hit and became the crowning glory of 1980s light entertainment. Throughout the decade, the various incarnations of Everett’s show were repeated (it is rumoured that the shows will hit national TV again in 2006). The shows propelled Everett from a faceless but popular DJ into a national darling. He was soon given the nickname ‘Cuddly Ken’ such was the public’s admiration.

In his personal life too, big changes were afoot. For much of their 17 year marriage, both Alkin and Everett were keenly aware that he was gay. The marriage had been ‘open’ for some time, but the breaking point came in the early eighties when Everett decided to leave and concentrate on a three way relationship with an ex Russian soldier and a Spanish waiter. In 1985, he divorced Alkin and publicly admitted that although the label ‘gay’ was not one he felt happy with, it was probably the best description of his sexuality. As he had portrayed himself for many years as highly camp and effeminate, the revelation came as no surprise to the British public.

During the mid 80’s, he also began to frequent gay nightspots in London, especially the famous nightclub Heaven. Many of these clubs at the time had a ‘club room’ or ‘dark room’ which was especially reserved for selected clientele. Everett and Freddie Mercury often frequented these rooms, not aware that they were putting themselves in danger from the new mystery killer illness. The reality of his lifestyle did not catch up with him until the late 80s when Nicolai Grishanovich, the Russian soldier in his ménage-a-trois announced that he had contracted HIV. Soon after, Everett was also diagnosed with the killer illness. Mercury was also secretly suffering with HIV. Grishanovich has since gone down in modern folklore as the kissing link between the two, the man who infected them both.

In the same year as his diagnosis, Everett decided to leave television and concentrate on his first love – radio. Although becoming more and more of a gay advocate, behind closed doors his unhappy relationship with his sexuality continued and he drifted between periods of depression and stability. In 1993 with his health starting to fail under the weight of fully blown AIDS, the time had come to announce his illness to the world. The news was accepted with the greatest of sympathy by the British press and public. Only a year later on 4th April 1994, he succumbed to an AIDS related illness and passed away.

Everett was technically brilliant, planning shows for several days as well as cutting, splicing and mixing his own skits. Artistically, he single-handedly created the pop music presentation styles still used today. However, his legacy was always of little importance to him. During his lifetime, he strived to create laughter and allow his audiences to join him in his immaturity and silliness, and he definitely succeeded. As a one man crusade against all things sensible and serious, Everett managed to offer a small space once a week for adults to enjoy the sort of tomfoolery usually reserved for children, sending a ripple of laughter across Britain every Saturday evening.