Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography

by Baker, Danny

  The first girl I ever kissed was Jane Pascoe. I do hope her husband of today won’t reach for his pistol upon reading that. We both knew it was coming because I’d walked her home the previous night and bottled it. I’d stood there on her doorstep, the tip of my nose touching hers, and simply lost my nerve. Turning away, I said, ‘I know what you want me to do, but I just can’t.’ And I said it in a way that made it seem I was putting her honour and reputation above the forces of lust. What a guy, what a knight. What a terrific piece of business. She seemed disappointed though and I actually saw her hair, which she was wearing up in a loose bun, deflate a little bit. ‘Okay, maybe tomorrow then,’ she said sadly. At this I knew the event was on. Nothing bolsters you for kissing a girl like having an appointment.

  The next evening, a long warm summer’s gift in 1970, I bought a packet of Parma Violets and ate them all speedily, crunch, crunch, crunch. Cupping my hand to my mouth afterwards I found my breath could now in no way be confused with the Stink Hole, my darkest fear about the whole thing.

  There were about ten of us in the square that night and as Jane got up from the boat and said, ‘Well, I better be getting indoors now . . .’ I rose too. ‘Shall I walk you again, Jane?’ I trilled with some tremolo in the timbre. ‘Okay,’ she said lightly, as if it were simply a question of companionship and nothing more.

  Ten minutes later we were kissing. And kissing.

  Her mouth tasted of Juicy Fruit gum and I tried to retain its thrilling exotic trace right to the moment I fell asleep that night. Parma Violets and Juicy Fruit – man, could this union be any more perfect?

  Okay, here’s a shocking story and at this point I must ask my three children to do what Daddy says and skip this and move right on to the chapter called ‘A Trio of Little Sunbeams That Have Brought Me So Much Joy’.

  A couple of years after that first kiss I was going out with a girl who we shall call Lulu. Lulu lived nearby and our families were very good friends. In fact, everyone thought Lulu and I would wind up together – estate kids tended to marry estate kids – but she ended up legging it from me to go out with the Saturday boy from the Co-Op. I could gloat over that and say she let a right catch slip through her fingers there, but another part of me isn’t entirely sure that the Saturday Co-Op boy didn’t grow up to be Alan Sugar. Or that I was, in fact, much of a ‘catch’.

  Anyway, the thing is that my nan was going away to Cockfosters for a week to stay with my mum’s sister Joan. This was always terrific news for me because it meant that I would be given the job of going round to my nan’s flat to maintain her fish and budgerigar. Furthermore, there was only one spare key to the place and that would be turned over to me for the entire week. Even better, this particular stay coincided with the half-term holiday at local schools! Needless to say, upon hearing of my duties, Lulu and I exchanged a glance.

  Well, one morning there we were the pair of us in my grandmother’s bed, naked and messing about. Both fish and budgerigar remained resolutely unfed as yet and were doubtless damning our gyrations with disapproving glares from accusing and waterlogged eyes.

  Then there came a noise from the hall. You know, the hall where the street door was. Well, don’t panic kids, it could just be someone bumping by outside or a card through the letterbox from some new mini-cab company. Except this particular noise sounded exactly like a key being inserted into, and then smartly turning, a lock. But how could it be? There was only one spare key to my nan’s flat, I knew that much.

  Actually, when I say ‘knew’ I should perhaps more accurately say ‘assumed’.

  Street door opened, street door closed. Now somebody was inside the flat with us (us being me, Lulu, Patch the Goldfish and Lifebuoy the budgerigar).

  Brazenly, this person had taken off their coat, set their bag down in the hall and was now in the front room humming my mum’s favourite song. My mind raced through possible suspects. Who on earth would have cloned a key to my mum’s mum’s flat, was aping the brisk way Mum walked, and even knew her current favourite song?

  Now they were filling up a kettle in the kitchen. Another thing my mother would typically have done. Man, this person had researched her character brilliantly in order not to raise suspicion.

  Meantime Lulu and I had frozen, she pulling the bedclothes up to her chin and now repeating quietly, ‘Oh God, Oh God, Oh God.’

  As indeed she ought to be. We were two young teenagers, naked in my sixty-eight-year-old grandmother’s bed, having just had it off beneath two big photographs of my late step-granddad and my own mother as a child. It is about the most revolting thing anyone can think of.

  Silently, I mimed to Lulu that we should get up and begin to dress. I did a tiptoeing manoeuvre like walking across wet dynamite to the door and slipped the lock on. Lulu reached for her drawers, I for my jeans – which, call me hasty, still had the underwear in a figure eight inside them.

  That’s when the bedroom door handle turned. Then again. And once more this time accompanied by a shove. The door held fast, thank God, with Lulu and me frozen like the mayor and mayoress of Pompeii, she one leg in her pants, me with trousers hitched up only as far as the knees. ‘Who’s there?’ came a voice – again brilliantly mimicking my mum. ‘Who’s in there? Is someone in there? Danny?’

  I looked at Lulu and mouthed: Don’t. Move. A. Muscle.

  And that’s when my mother’s face appeared in the window above the door frame. How she had so swiftly found something to stand on baffles me to this day. Had she gone to fetch a chair from the kitchen, Lulu and I might have used the few seconds to jump out the window. An unlikely escape, I’ll grant you – especially as my nan lived on the first floor, but who among us at fourteen wouldn’t rather appear broken and bloody in front of total strangers than naked and still partially aroused in front of Mum?

  Anyway now she was literally looking down on us and we, helplessly, back up at her. This staring match seemed to me to go on for about eighteen months. I, at half-mast in various ways, mouth open, seemingly on the verge of saying something that might explain the whole dreadful tableau. And Lulu from the flats – little Lulu, Mum’s mate Rose’s girl – with her bum out and everything. Crucially, there was also nan’s bed all unmade and half on the floor. This didn’t require Poirot, did it?

  Meanwhile up at the glass above the door, my mother’s face, framed like a BBC newsreader, continued to exhibit a shocked reaction that even the Chuckle Brothers might have judged a bit broad. At least, she did up until she fell off whatever she was standing on.

  Then it was like Old Mother Riley in full flood. ‘Oh my gawd! Oh my good gawd! What have we come to! What have I seen! Oh, I’ve gone blind! Oh, I feel ill! Oh, and in me mother’s bed too!’

  This chicken coop flurry was topped by another moment of ominous quiet while she gathered her wits, and then: ‘You get home NOW, you dirty little bastard! I’m telling your father right away! And yours, Lulu!’

  The slamming of the front door reverberated through the entire sordid flat. Then utter silence.

  Uh-oh.

  Lulu, numb, pale and trembling finally spoke:

  ‘You know my dad is gonna have you murdered, don’t you?’

  He will, I thought, but first he’ll have to find which part of the moon I’m on after my dad has kicked me that hard up the arse.

  You know I’ve often wondered why condemned men, on the morning of their hanging, bother to shave and get dressed. After all, they’re only going up the corridor to be topped. This then was the mood as Lulu and I gathered ourselves, pulled my nan’s bed together and, at long last, dutifully ended the famine for Patch and Lifebuoy. At least we could point to that.

  With dragging bodies and unseeing eyes we made our way to Deptford Park. Southwark Park was nearer, but that would be the first place the hounds would make for. We slumped on to a bench. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. We were still there at five p.m.

  Eventually I decided I would go to a phone box and call home. As I listen
ed to the ring tone I wanted to faint. When my mother answered, I could barely summon up the strength to push in the coin and connect.

  ‘Hello, Mum. It’s me.’

  Nothing.

  ‘I said it’s me. What should I do?’

  ‘Well,’ she spat with barely suppressed fury, ‘you should get back here. Now. Your father wants to see you. Now.’

  ‘What about Lulu?’

  ‘Tell her she can get indoors too. But I haven’t said anything to Rose. I daresn’t!’ Mum always said ‘daresn’t’ rather than daren’t. ‘I daresn’t! If I did, Ronnie would have your guts for garters, and I think y’father’s gonna be doing that in any case. Now – home!’

  Leaving the phone box, I told Lulu the good/bad news. She seemed relieved. ‘So I’m all right? Brilliant. Tell you what, I’m never doing anything like that ever again.’

  So. More good news.

  When we arrived back at the flats Lulu skipped off home a few doors down to have her tea – ‘I’m really starving now,’ she’d said on the way home – while I bent to the letterbox, to nervously call the dog to let me in.2

  I tried to keep my calls to Blackie to a low rasp so as not to trigger the apocalypse immediately. My plan was to creep in, leg it up to my room and, in the few moments that remained to me, put my affairs in order. This I managed, but within a couple of minutes Mum called up the stairs, her voice still in the flinty tones that had barbed her timbre since the morning’s exposure.

  ‘Danny? Is that you up there? Right, y’father’s coming up. He wants a word with you.’

  Well, this was it. Clump, clump clump . . . he seemed to be taking each step up to my room like a thud upon a Roman Legion’s war drum. Until there he stood. I braced myself. My old man had NEVER hit me, but if he did now I thought, y’know, fair enough.

  ‘Your mother,’ he began at furniture-rattling volume, ‘your mother, has been downstairs – crying all day long – because she fucking tells me . . .’ and into it he went, describing what she’d seen while adding that I’d reduced my own nan’s house to the status of ‘a fucking knocking shop’. But amid all the sound and fury and the raising of the back of his hand as if to strike . . . something was wrong, something was a bit off. After about thirty seconds of the tirade, and expecting the blow to fall any second, I suddenly figured out what it was. I had seen the old man livid many, many times, but this time . . . well, his heart really didn’t seem in it. The expression in his eyes seemed to say, I’m going through the motions here, boy. This is all for your mother’s benefit.

  Sure enough, midway through a rant about how I was only fucking fourteen and who did I think I fucking was, Jimi Hendrix?, he paused and made a move with his hands like a boxing referee does when pronouncing a fight to be over. He then shrugged and on his face appeared an expression of ‘What can you do?’

  I was confused. He went on a bit longer with the Sturm und Drang, but then broke cover completely. Quickly, and in a conspiratorial tone, he leaned toward me and growled, ‘Take no notice, son. She’s the one. She can’t fathom it out. I was the same at your age.’ Then he put his hand on my shoulder as if to say, ‘Having it off, eh? That’s my boy!’

  There was about two more minutes of the faux thunder even after this and then he turned to leave. ‘And you can go to bed fucking hungry tonight!’ came the explosive finish. ‘Fuck your tea! And fuck you going out for the rest of half-term!’ But before he went he smiled, winked, and hissed in a stage whisper, ‘Just make sure her Ronnie don’t find out.’ And exit. The performance was over. I sat on my bed, completely relieved but totally stunned.

  Twenty minutes later, my mum, feeling justice had been properly done but nonetheless now a bit sorry for me, frostily brought up sausages, mash and beans, plus a cup of tea with three biscuits on the side. The next day I went out at ten o’clock as usual. And nothing was ever said about the affair again.

  Meantime, should my elder sister have arrived home even ten minutes later than her ten o’clock curfew that night – particularly from a rendezvous with Poor Sod White Plimsolls (as the Navajo might call him) – the pyrotechnics would have been all too real and the ramifications lasting.

  Boys, eh?

  What Are You Gonna Do?

  I left school in March 1973. The only reason I know this is because I remember taking my copy of Blue Oyster Cult’s Tyranny and Mutation – released in late February ’73 – into class 5AE and refusing to lend it to anyone because I wasn’t coming back after the upcoming break. This classic album release date system is, I realize, how I measure most events in my life up until 1982 when, on turning twenty-five, something terrible seemed to happen to music.

  I do know the teachers at West Greenwich urged me to stay on a little longer to take my CSE exams – the final hurdle before actual O levels – but recklessly I decided that I didn’t want to do any of the jobs that required I first provide a low-grade generic certificate. The thinking from the school was that, if I hung it out a few months, as the boy traditionally first in year, I could almost guarantee getting a junior job in the local Nat West bank or possibly at the town hall in some lowly capacity. The option of further education was never presented to me and, to be fair, the very idea would’ve given me the creeps. I wanted some non-academic hip(py) action to dive straight into, though Lord knows how that was going to happen. What I do recall is the terrific rush I felt on suddenly deciding to abandon everything early, just to see what would result.

  Outrageously, a few days before I was to leave school and dwell in the void, the first in a long line of dream jobs fell into my lap. It was a twist of fate I was going to become strangely used to.

  My best friend Tommy Hodges worked at London’s number one coolest record shop for those in the know on the contemporary music scene: One Stop, 97–99 Dean Street, Soho. Then out of the blue, Tom, one year older than me, had accepted a new job in the prop and scenic department at the Old Vic, something he hadn’t told me about when I made my decision to leave. He was going on to another pretty sweet gig, to be sure, though at the time I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to depart the dimly lit, incense-burning, cutting-edge cultural cauldron of One Stop.‘You should have my job,’ he said.

  Oh, I should, I should . . .

  I could think of no greater work – work! – than getting the number 1 bus up to Soho each day and playing, talking and dealing in records. Rock music was all-absorbing for me throughout the seventies and it embodied who I felt I really was. To a large extent it still does, given that it was such an extraordinary time in musical terms. Even from this distance, it seems staggering to me that the period between Woodstock and the Sex Pistols was a mere seven years. During that time I experienced the birth – not the warping or co-opting of but the birth of heavy rock, prog rock, glam rock, country rock, soft rock, Kraut rock, punk rock, dub, funk music, disco music, blue-eyed soul, the second wave of reggae led by Bob Marley, and the resurgence of Motown. All genres that were seemingly pulled from the air. This dizzying fulcrum then was the early to mid-seventies – a period you still hear lazy dolts say punk rescued music from.

  Well, thank you, punk, but we were doing just fine. Over there you had James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, Randy Newman, The Band, Judee Sill, Zappa and Beefheart, Neil Young, Alice Cooper, Tom Waits and Steely Dan. Over here you had David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Nick Drake, Roxy Music, Black Sabbath, Lennon AND McCartney, Hawkwind, Alex Harvey, Yes, Traffic, John Martyn and King Crimson. And outside of everything there was Can, Neu! and Kraftwerk. In all, there were hundreds upon hundreds of curious young people all creating something exciting, new and important – and all of them completely off the radar of mainstream society. Eighty-five per cent of people you spoke to had never heard of most of the records in your huge, disparate collection boasting exotic, evocative labels like Vertigo, Harvest, Island, Asylum, Deram and Transatlantic. The really happening stuff, which all seems so obvious today, was so rarely on TV as to be invisible, never ever in
the daily newspapers and not even in the same universe as advertisers. Also, good luck with buying so much as a T-shirt with your favourite artist’s name on, even if they had a number one album. It was covert, underground, a counterculture – and one that was happening, growing and moving fast. One Stop was one of its key focus points and I was now a heartbeat away from being part of that. And I was fifteen! Yikes.

  It’s worth remembering too that these were the days before chain record outlets and mega-stores. Most suburban record shops did not stock the records that One Stop did. Our stock-in-trade was the imported disc, flown in from America weekly, way ahead of the UK release date. It’s hard to believe now, but even albums like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book were available in America weeks, sometimes months, before officially going on sale here. There were very, very few places in the British Isles where you might get an early copy, but One Stop Records was one such super groovy outlet. The only other comparable store for serious heads was Musicland, which was just around the corner in Berwick Street. It was there that Elton John had worked until a few years previously, scrounging time off to nip out and earn a little cash in hand by recording thin cover versions of current pop hits for the cut-price Top Pops label. During Elton’s time there, Musicland had been managed by two ultra savvy and hip gay guys, Ian Brown and John Gillespie. This same duo now ran One Stop in Dean Street. They were to become my absolute mentors and idols for the next few years.

  Actually there was one other record shop nearby. To get to it you had to know it was actually there. It was across the road on London’s trashy retail mess of Oxford Street and access to it was via Shelley’s shoe shop, then through a curtain at the back and up some dimly lit stairs. Once on the first floor it was a tiny, fairly ramshackle space with threadbare carpet and covers of deeply underground LPs pinned to the walls as well as the one thing its rivals couldn’t sell: illicit bootleg recordings of groups like Crosby, Stills and Nash (Wooden Nickel) Led Zeppelin (Blueberry Hill) and Deep Purple (H-Bomb). Hirsute old heads sat about under humungous headphones and the air was thick with cigarette smoke of dubious legality. This then was the newly opened Virgin Records; the scruffy runt of the early seventies Hip Vinyl Retail Triangle. Years later Richard Branson purchased the entire block of Oxford Street that his original crusty old emporium had traded from and pointedly opened the gleaming three-storey bootleg-free Virgin flagship on the site. Hey, capitalism works sometimes, kids. I have subsequently talked with Richard about his humble starter shack and its booming black market stock and he remains adamant that Virgin never would have sold bootlegs, no sir, no way. Oh, but it did, Richard, it did. Good ones too.