CASSIDY-MANIA REMEMBERED: WHY THE YOUNG GIRLS( AND BOYS) JUST LOVED TEEN POP IDOL DAVID
Innocent days when romance lasted forever
In these days of cool music acts like Stormzy and The Weeknd, with their pointed views on politics and disdain for vowels, the late David Cassidy may seem like a quaint throwback to more innocent, cheesier times.
But the reality is, there’s a David Cassidy in every generation. And they follow a template.
A good voice, doe eyes, a lost-looking pout and abundant hair. Boyish and borderline androgynous.
Donny Osmond, Jason Donovan, George Michael, Justin Beiber, Bruno Mars, Harry Styles... you could fill a tour bus with the type.
David Cassidy wasn’t even the first. But for a long, long time he was undoubtedly the greatest. The undisputed poster boy of pop.
He came to prominence as Keith in The Partridge Family, the American sitcom about an ordinary, everyday, family who managed to fit in appearances at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas with the humdrum of Seventies suburban life, smart quips and music rehearsal in their garage.
But within a few short years ‘Keith’ had flown the Partridge nest for a real-life career as David Cassidy, global pop sensation, winging his way into millions of teenage hearts and on to millions of bedroom walls.
Cassidymania, as it was clumsily called, had arrived.
Our bedrooms in the 70s were papered with posters mostly culled from Jackie, the glossy mag which was as compulsory for girls back then as Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book was, contemporaneously, for the Politburo in Beijing.
(I once plastered my room with so many Jackie pictures of favoured stars that I had to take half of them down again on account of the uncomfortable feeling that there were eyes watching me from all angles.)
Given the hysteria, Cassidy was, needless to say, a Jackie stalwart.
The magazine’s readers loved him. Their circulation department must have adored him.
The songs that powered his career were inevitably international hits. Pop was less political back then. Cassidy sang about cherishing and daydreaming and thinking he loved me (teenage girls tend to take lyrics personally). Could it be forever?
Sadly nothing ever is, is it? Cassidy himself was said to be frustrated that he’d been shoehorned into the bubblegum pop category.
At one point, attempting to counter the saccharine image, he appeared naked (although with the picture coyly cropped) on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. Inside he talked drugs and wanton behaviour.
I have to say, I have no memory of this publication ever making it to south Derry.
On our school bus, David Cassidy remained a picture of innocence.
His centre-parted hair was still as unruffled as his cherubic image.
On our bus he kept his cheesecloth shirt on.
Cassidy’s acting career inevitably took second place to his singing — although down the years he’d appeared in shows as diverse as Bonanza and, more latterly, CSI.
But the mad frenzy of Cassidymania took its toll.
Like many a pop sensation who came after, he later admitted he found the hysteria, the attention, hard to handle.
At one of his sell-out concerts in London, a number of fans were injured in the crush.
Tragically one young girl, with an existing medical problem, died a few days later. Cassidy was understandably horrified. He said it would haunt him to his grave.
Back when he gave that controversial interview to Rolling Stone, the 21-year-old Cassidy had expressed his difficulty dealing with the pressures of a high-profile career.
He described how he could see himself five years in the future.
“I’m living on an island. The sky is blue, the sun is shining. And I’m smiling, I’m healthy, I’m a family man. I see my skin very brown and leathery, with a bit of growth on my face. My hair is really long, with a lot of grey...
“I have some grey hair already,” he added. Who was he trying to
kid?
The idea of David Cassidy growing old was as unthinkable as Mick Jagger getting a beer belly.
Even in later years he retained the boyish looks which had first catapulted him to stardom — and then cemented him within the pop mould.
True, the hairline eventually receded a bit and the waistline expanded a bit and the eyebrows did seem to have been raised a little. But Cassidy’s country of birth, you’d still have been tempted to suggest, was the Land of the Ever Young.
In recent times he’d campaigned to raise awareness of the dementia from which his mother had died.
Sadly, that same cruel condition also took his own life at the relatively early age of 67.
Actress Marlee Matlin summed up the sentiments of an entire generation when she tweeted: “To me and millions of us you were forever young.”
Marie Osmond tweeted her memories of those magazine posters we’d all once collected.
A heartthrob. That was what the magazines used to call him back then. An almost comical word.
And yet a legion of hearts right across the world surely would have skipped just a little this week at the sorrowful news of the death of David Cassidy.
As always, it’s not just the passing of the man himself that touches us, it’s also about the passage of our own lives — and of youth as fleeting and ephemeral as those faded old paper posters.
But yes, good memories to cherish too. Of daft fun, and great friends and girlish infatuation.
And innocent days when we really thought that it could be forever.