Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography

by Baker, Danny

  For my interview at One Stop I wore clothes bought from Miss Selfridge that perfectly suited a kid in the thrall of the then unfolding glam rock boom. All pink satin, sheer nylon and powder blue Oxford bags. I never quite pulled it off, I fancy. To commit totally, you needed to step over the gender line into actual make-up or at least a little nail varnish. I think I might have gone in that direction but for two things: one, my father, no matter from which angle I viewed him, was not Bryan Ferry; and two, I wanted to continue to live.

  That said, the old wars over my brother’s Donovan hat were long over and my stack heels and bracelets breezed through the front door at Debnams Road as easily as a pinstripe suit. I may have even got a few laughs from my parents, which was fair enough, this gear was supposed to be preposterous fun.

  During the very light grilling to secure the job, I told Ian that I liked Todd Rundgren and John Martyn – two suitably obscure artists at the time whom he seemed unimpressed by – and that I also loved what Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye were doing over at reborn Motown. This really got his attention. Of course it didn’t hurt that I was a pretty-looking thing at the time and that, webbed up with a fairly heavy cockney accent and Miss Selfridge attire, might have made him think I’d be a good ornament to flourish in front of his own crowd who swung by the shop often to stock up on the kind of funky 45s that later exploded into the disco scene. (One Stop was VERY big on US black music.) Whatever it was, I got the job and from that moment on everything in my life turned from warm Technicolor into vibrant dayglo.

  The very first day I showed up for work there was a huge queue outside the shop that snaked around the block. They were all waiting for emergency-relief import copies of Dark Side of the Moon that were due to arrive from Heathrow. My first duty as a member of staff was to go along this line asking how many copies of the mystical disc each person wanted. When I had ticked off 100 – our incoming allocation – I had to tell all those still in line that they might as well go home. Now some of these shivering heads were big gruff old hippies, very much anti-glam and veterans of many be-ins, sit-ins, occupations of unis and quite possibly hardened throwers of flour bombs on live TV.

  I was little more than two weeks out of my comprehensive school uniform.

  When I broke the news to two gargantuan long-hairs in greatcoats that they were going to be out of luck, they started accusing several people further up in the queue of pushing in or of holding places for a few giddy old stoners that had been late arriving. ‘We should be numbers 92 and 93, man, with your glib satin and surface pop-trip bullshit,’ they said. ‘And those slippery bastards there ought to be made to get up the back! So fuck you!’ Suddenly lots of people wanted to know what I intended to do about it with my glib satin and surface pop-trip bullshit. I told them I was new here. Scuffles then started at several points in the line and were getting quite nasty when a fellow in a bowler hat with a feather glued to it ran around the corner and said that Musicland was getting some in too. There was a desperate hammering of clogs on pavement and the angry mob disappeared.

  After I’d been in the job about a month I had a day off and chose to spend it back at my old school. Most recent leavers did this. Going back to the old place entitled you to a fantastically trumped-up sense of maturity and it was all you could do not to affect a cigarette holder and grow a pencil moustache on the spot. You’d swagger in wearing ostentatious civvies and smiling smugly at the poor saps still trapped inside their fusty old uniforms. You’d swank. You’d stroll wistfully about the corridors as if returning after several decades instead of barely twenty-three school days. You’d find the sound of the change-of-lessons bell both nostalgic and faintly amusing. One would linger in the dinner hall, trying to recall the trace of something in the air. The last word in this newly acquired sophistication would arrive when, in theory, you were allowed to call your former masters by their first names. ‘Hi, Bill! Are those new glasses?’ ‘Tim – are you still pushing that old Cortina around?’ ‘Mike – don’t take no lip from these punks.’ Sadly, this took a degree of nerve that I could never quite muster. Even today I don’t think I could ever call Mr Bullock ‘Pete’ or Mr Seamen ‘Reginald’, any more than I would call Prince Charles ‘Chas’. Sir they were and sir they will forever remain. There was an exception to this, though.

  There was one teacher at our school who I’d always fancied. Indeed, everyone fancied her. She was a thirty-something Kohl-eyed hippy-leaning stunner who I better not describe too fully lest she now be the sedate headmistress in a private academy somewhere like Beccles, pushing sixty-five and looking like she’d never owned a Lou Reed album in her life. On a later occasion when I went back to check in on my pals in the fifth year – oh, I dropped in on the old peasants quite regularly – I visited her class and hung around even after the home-time bell had sounded. We had always had an easy rapport, especially when agreeing about music, and she seemed impressed that I was now part of the scene at One Stop and how I could be quite blasé about selling copies of David Ackles’ American Gothic to students from St Martin’s College of Art. After about half an hour of drifting chat, she said she would have to scoot because she was planning to go to the pictures that night. She wasn’t going with anyone but . . . but . . . well hey, actually, if I wasn’t doing anything . . . why didn’t I come along too? So we went. In her peppy little sports car that nobody quite knew how she could afford. After the film she asked if I was hungry and, what with it being the 1970s and nowhere being open, drove me to her flat and put on some candles and said she would fix me something to eat. Now, firstly, saying she’d ‘fix me’ something to eat seemed impossibly chic. Not ‘do me’ something; ‘fix me’. Secondly, in my world, when anyone said they were about to rustle up some grub it would be swiftly followed by the clonk of a frying pan coming down on a gas ring. There would be beans involved. Possibly some tinned spaghetti. I have never been known to send back an egg sandwich, even if the bread was stale and freckled green. But this was to be, for me, a whole new horizon in modern cuisine.

  After vanishing for but a few moments – leaving me to absorb the mystery of why we had candles on when there wasn’t a power cut – she materialized again with a plate of bread, cheese and apple. Now bread, cheese and apple was a combination I had never come across in my entire life until that point. I couldn’t make head nor tail of it and wasn’t entirely sure if it was dinner and dessert on the same plate. It was a big chunk of granary bread, too; again, something of an alien landscape for me. I knew about white bread and crusty bread, but this seemed to be made of dark solid porridge entwined with selected pickings from the three bears’ Hoover bag. And was there to be no sauce with this dish? Every meal I had ever eaten required either red or brown sauce somewhere on the plate. In our house, even Sunday dinner came with loads of mint sauce, whether it was lamb or not. Without sauce, food never achieved true lift-off, so what was this in front of me? Bread, cheese and apple. It seemed to be some sort of snack in kit form.

  In an attempt to make a recognizable sandwich from the arrangement, I hollowed out the lump of bread and then stuffed the cheese into the hole, pressing it in with my thumb. I had planned to have the apple after but when, once the unwieldy chunk had disappeared, she asked me why I hadn’t touched the Granny Smith, I felt hopelessly gauche and made the deathless situation worse by saying I hadn’t ‘noticed’ it.

  Neither of us spoke for a bit and then she lit up a joint. I knew about dope, of course; I could identify its peculiar exotic smell, and I was certainly of the culture where it was supposed to be commonplace. Except it wasn’t. Nobody I knew smoked dope at all. Nobody. On the estate you heard about people being ‘pilled up’, but in the main drugs were still completely in the realm of the rock-star life. We would often talk casually about them, chuckle whenever we saw references to someone being ‘out of it’ and generally assume ourselves to be au fait with all manner of substances. But nobody was. We drank beer and spirits and a few of us occasionally bought into faddish thi
ngs like asthma tablets that, when gulped with cider, were supposed to send you whizzing about like a leaf in October; plus there was always a lot of assumed power attached to ‘slimming pills’ – but really, properly, habitually? No.

  The main obstacle for any of us who might be curious about getting aboard the Keith Richards kick was where and how would you actually get your ‘stuff’? Whither our connection, our pusher, our man? On what corner did you have to lurk, into which basement dive did you descend with hat pulled down and collar turned up? Besides, we had no credentials for such a life. Nobody among us was at college, nobody was in a band, nobody lived in Notting Hill, nobody squatted or had their own ‘pad’, nobody had progressive parents, nobody was middle class, nobody liked jazz. Not a soul in the sizeable crowd I knew at that time took drugs in any shape or form. It seems like science fiction forty years on, but Bermondsey then was a tight borough run according to the ways and morals of the post-war working class. It could be criminal, violent, reactionary and dangerous. But druggy? Not a chance. There was little going on in our neighbourhood of which Frank Sinatra wouldn’t have approved.

  Had I been born a few years later I suppose people would have been putting free bags of hash through our letterbox along with the fliers for pizza shops and mini-cab companies, because during the 1980s dope smoking and all manner of inner firework displays truly infiltrated the, by then besieged, working class. Thus today, even more than the astronomical house prices of twenty-first-century Bermondsey, the smell of dope smoke at Millwall matches jarringly brings home to me the passing decades and how the habits of my teenage world have now utterly vanished. Moreover, to this day I have never smoked dope in my life. Some people find that completely unbelievable; they bridle at the claim, almost as if I’d told them I was thinking of voting Nazi at the next election. ‘But, but you worked at the NME!’ they splutter. ‘You toured with rock bands! You’re in show business! You hung out with Michael Aspel, for God’s sake – one of the most notorious bong-hoggers since Louis Armstrong!’

  It really does seem to enrage and fascinate the legions of hopheads I have known and it’s clearly one of the more curious facts about my entire existence. True, I took speed quite a bit when I was a punk rocker; a possibly unnecessary supplement for an already incessant talker, and one that almost caused my teeth to turn molten and dribble down my chin. However, marijuana, hemp, hashish, reefer? Never. Not once. Not out of curiosity, by mistake or even, like Bill Clinton, while refusing to inhale. Against this, I of course maintain my world-famous cocaine habit that has enabled me to write this entire book in just under ninety minutes.

  So when my ever-more-relaxing hot school ma’am proffered me her blunt to draw on that mid-seventies evening I waved it away in a manner I hoped would convey that, while I was totally hip to the trip, I was actually trying to cut back on the stuff.

  And then this Forbidden Orchard of Further Education began to get even more awkward.

  As the candles flickered and the mood quietened, a kind of seductive inevitability descended in the room. My response to this was to listen over-intently to the album she had placed on the turntable – something appropriately mellow and sensitive, possibly Cat Stevens, possibly Nick Drake – while pretending to be totally absorbed in the album’s cover. She seemed similarly faux-engrossed in a copy of Time Out magazine and had eased herself down to lie full length with it on the adjacent sofa. Looking over and about to say something thunderingly dull about the sparing use of strings on this particular track, I actually found I had lost the ability to speak. The reason for this was that, in reclining, she had also parted her knees and, naïve waif though I was, I couldn’t help but notice she must have slipped out of the old bloomers at some point.

  What’s more, I was clearly required to notice this.

  Uh-oh. My eyes swiftly returned to the record sleeve and I began to acquire an intense interest in the information that Island Records had their covers printed by E.J. Day & Company. The clock ticked. I think we remained frozen like this for about five days. I was, as they say, bottling it, and I had no idea how to retrieve this heavily pregnant situation. As zippy as my reputation was with girls, there lay the rub. They were girls, every bit as giddy and gauche as I was. This was a woman; what’s more, an experienced, proper grown-up woman, who would probably expect amazing and great things from any night at the sexual theatre. I think she had even been married once. To a man! An actual bloke, not some skinny kid who tried to make a builder’s cheese roll out of his high-end ploughman’s.

  There was little else for it. With a deep inward breath I decided to make my move. Literally.

  ‘I’m going to have to go now,’ I said in a wavering voice. ‘I said I’d be there to let me brother in. The dog’s hurt his leg, see?’

  She fixed me with a look somewhere between shock and outright rage. Then she got up and, without a word, swept by me into the little kitchen next door. Swallowing something hard and jagged I took this as a good moment to skedaddle and tiptoed toward the front door.

  ‘See ya,’ I offered from the doormat inside her front door. Then a little louder, ‘See ya!’

  Hesitating to catch any response, I heard the distinct sound of choked sobbing. God, she must have felt lousy. Possibly ancient too, but the whole surrender had been my fault and simply a chronic failure of nerve. Colours well and truly lowered, I let myself out into the night and went home to bed thinking long and hard about how much braver I might have been.

  It was all academic anyhow, because it was about then that I started telling everyone that I was, in fact, homosexual.

  The Jean Genie

  Life at One Stop Records could not have been more gay. This did not reveal itself immediately, but as soon as the Dean Street manager John and I moved stores to take over the Mayfair branch at 40 South Molton Street my social life became, to employ a cliché, outrageous. In 1973 South Molton Street was a hot, busy centre of contact as well as a high-visibility employer of queer men. Almost overnight I stopped greeting regular customers in greatcoats with ‘Hi – how’s it going?’ to a sing-song salute of those in blouson tops with ‘Hello, dear!’ Being around gay men all day was fun. Tremendous fun. Their jokes, their attitudes, their slightly off-kilter reading of the everyday energized and inspired me. There was nothing outwardly camp in either John or his partner Ian, and for the first few days working with them I actually thought their unabashed conversations about who was trying to fuck who was some sort of extended high-concept joke. Ian particularly fitted no gay stereotype I had been raised on. He was a wiry, shaggy-bearded, fast-talking cockney who looked like he might have been a member of The Band and seemed to barrel through each day with the reckless brio of a born hustler. He knew absolutely everyone and would noisily arrive at work, speeding, direct from some dive or casino with his boxer dog Jake panting at his heel. Jake was even more popular around the West End than Ian, particularly with our superstar customers – another phenomenon of One Stop I would have to get used to quickly. It is Jake – immortalized as ‘Jungle-faced Jake’ – who pops up in Marc Bolan’s hit ‘Telegram Sam’. Occasionally over the decades rock historians have attempted to identify the characters in Bolan’s songs and I’ve seen Jungle-faced Jake explained as everything from a New York drug dealer to Mick Jagger. Let me assure you, Professor: Jungle-faced Jake was a battle-scarred old boxer dog who liked several saveloys at a sitting. I know this because Marc Bolan told me so himself. I also witnessed Marc rubbing Jake’s ears and saying, ‘You’re my lovely old Jakey, yes you are, you’re gonna be like Elvis, yes you are, Jungly old Jakey, you are, a big pop star, yes you are, yes you are . . .’ Continue in that vein for about ten minutes and you have the conversation verbatim. True, it’s not like revealing Watergate’s Deep Throat after all these years, but it’s about time a rock’n’roll dog got his due.

  The most wonderful thing about the gay scene I had fallen into was its fantastic sense of freedom. The record shop crowd were the first real gay people I h
ad encountered – not TV gay, comical gay or tabloid gay, but a bunch of people who, far from being on the outside of society, seemed to be really in on something.

  These men were not seeking legitimacy or approval and certainly not skulking around living any kind of a lie. As I had always understood it, gayness was something that had to be detected in people or, worse, that the very idea was an accusation. Yet here was an entire network of fizzing, crackling, happening types who hid nothing and seemed to be at the forefront of most things considered ‘going on’.

  I wanted to be part of all that.

  The only stumbling block was that I wasn’t gay. I think that from a very early age I had always known I was heterosexual and now it was becoming obvious. So I hid it. I began living a lie. Of course, straight kids today feel no such pressure, but it was a different world back then. In this new world I found myself inhabiting, I just wanted to fit in and have a boyfriend like everyone else but I knew it was ultimately impossible. I might as well have wanted to be black – though God knows I’ve met enough ludicrous Caucasian wretches over the years who have given that hangdog hybrid a shot. In 1973, however, I was plain straight and I was stuck with it.