Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography

by Baker, Danny

  Whenever Elton was tied up with the more mundane business of, say, an American tour, he would have a runner from his London office come in weekly to make sure there wouldn’t be any holes in his collection. This task usually fell to a blond kid from Orpington about the same age as me called Gary Farrow. We both seemed to tacitly acknowledge that we had fallen on our feet amidst a very sweet racket indeed. Gary had also worked at One Stop, though later he thoroughly disgraced the old brand by turning out to be the leading PR agent in Britain, steering not only Elton’s career but those of David Bowie, George Michael, Jonathan Ross, Sharon Osbourne and Gordon Ramsey. To his credit, he also advised Robbie Williams to quit show business when Robbie originally left Take That.

  One day Mick Jagger came in. He was surprisingly small and slight, although his head appeared to be built from a much grander blueprint. Altogether, this made him look like one of those novelty figures you sometimes see bobbling about in the back windows of people’s cars. He was after a copy of Dobie Gray’s Drift Away album. In fact, he told me so.

  ‘Av y-oo got. Aee copay . . . of the Doh-bee Gra-ee reckoord – Drift-t Aw-way-hee?’ he drawled.

  I let him know we were the only place that had it and I slapped it down on the counter. ‘Two ninety-nine that is,’ I informed him. Mick then treated me to a personal piece of theatre. Half-turning to an enormous black chap who was obviously his minder, he held out a long spidery arm. The minder took out a fat wallet and removed a crisp five-pound note that he then placed in Mick’s lilywhite hand. In a single balletic motion, MJ then arced his arm all the way through 180 degrees and very delicately placed the fiver down on the counter. He tap-tapped it by way of punctuation. During the entire movement he had not looked at either me or the minder. I handed him the LP in one of our bags and then proffered the change. Mick didn’t acknowledge it. The big fellow stepped forward and took it from me instead. Then, with a grand sigh, Mick fixed me with a huge knowing smile that seemed to dare me to find him preposterous. ‘Cheers,’ he said, making the word break into two descending notes before sashaying out of the shop. Puffed up? Not a bit. I thought the exchange had been terrific. That’s how I like my stars. Starry. Over two decades later I recalled this grand visitation when I encountered Mick a second time, on this occasion a Rolling Stones filming job in Chicago. As I pantomimed for him his actions that day, hands clasped between his thighs he doubled up with laughter. ‘Did I do that?’ he roared. ‘Oh dear. Yes, well you see I am basically very shy . . .’

  Demis Roussos ambled in once and stood in the centre of the shop looking around him as though it was a hotel suite that particularly displeased him. Next he walked to the R section of displayed LP sleeves and, removing the few albums by him that we stocked, he proceeded to shove them with some force into the front of the A section at the beginning of the browsers. Then he nodded truculently at us and walked out.

  Vivian Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band would often wander in drunk as a lord and attempt to engage both customers and staff – there was only John and me – in rambling conversation. For me, Stanshall was then, and remains to this day, among the top band of human beings who ever drew breath, but these were bad times for him. The stink of serious drink spun around Viv like the rings of Saturn; it was enough to fry your eyebrows. On one of the occasions he visited us he had a light bulb taped atop his shaven head. On another it was fuzzy felt shapes of different countries, so his dome became a map of the world. Later he sported the most impressive plaited Pharaoh-like red beard. ‘I’ll tell you what I want, old cork,’ he’d say, leaning on the counter and beckoning me in with crooked finger. ‘I want everything. The whole lot.’ He’d wave his arm about as if indicating an expansive plot of land. ‘What’ll it cost me?’ I’d tell him a couple of grand should secure it. ‘A grapple of canned? Shame. I was thinking more in the region of fourpence. New pence, no rubbish.’ This babble would trail off into a high-pitch boozy giggle, as if to let us know he too knew how silly and tragic it all was. Then, with a swig from the brandy bottle, he’d lurch away to stick his head into a listening booth, startling its occupant.

  Good though I was with our Olympian clientele, I confess the first time Marc Bolan came in I thought I was going to go off like a rocket and sit sizzling in the rafters. As already described, the shop was a small space and people just bounced straight in off the street to be presented in front of you like the next hopeful to be auditioned on our well-lit stage. When that someone is Marc Bolan and it’s 1973, you have only a few seconds to think, ‘Okay, okay. Got it. That’s Marc Bolan. And this is me. He is looking right at me and in precisely two more footsteps’ time he is going to talk to me. I, me, will be engaging with Marc Bolan. Don’t be loopy. Don’t do what you did with Michael Caine and shout, “Whoa, Michael Caine – top customer ahoy!” ’

  I didn’t. I said, ‘Ha! Marc Bolan! There’s something!’ I may have even loudly warned him to have a care as we employed several store detectives – always a favoured joke of mine to shout in a shop barely the size of most people’s front rooms.

  ‘Hi, darling, is John about?’ he said in a bouncy Bolan-esque style, not unlike Marc Bolan.

  John appeared immediately with a playfully caustic, ‘Well. Hello, stranger. Where the fuck have you been? This is Danny. He’s in love with you, so careful he doesn’t leap on you or something.’

  There was some truth in this. When first taken on and informed, ‘They all come in here, so get over it,’ I had asked, possibly breathlessly, whether Marc Bolan or David Bowie could be included in that number. Ian had answered, ‘Bowie might do – did a bit before he tarted himself up – but Marc’s in and out all the time. Call him Mary: he loves it.’

  I was not going to call him Mary. As far as I know, nobody ever called Marc Bolan Mary, but I did come to know many of Elton’s crowd by their feminine handles.

  Marc and John disappeared into the small back area and gossiped over tea. I had to stay out and man the counter. I didn’t mind that – in showbiz, pretending to be professional and cool is one of the most cool and professional bluffs you can master. However, by now, I was brooding over something.

  How did John know everyone? Pushing the philosophy further, I wondered how, in fact, everyone seemed to know everyone. I had often watched This Is Your Life and asked myself the same question. In theatrical circles, everyone seemed to have known everyone else for ever. They were all mates. How did that happen? I can understand that you might cross paths with a couple of subsequent celebrities on the struggle upwards, but how was it possible that entire legions of the famous charged into the spotlight en masse and linking arms?

  I didn’t know anyone. Nobody in my family or army of friends knew anyone either. You’d have thought that we’d know at least someone, but no. I had never once been round a mate’s house and when the phone rang somebody answered it and said, ‘Joyce! Harry Secombe on the phone for ya.’ It just didn’t happen. And that’s Harry Secombe! You can imagine the remoteness of a John Lennon or even Kiki Dee. Yes, I had pretended to be David Essex’s brother, but it was precisely because nobody had a clue how an anomaly like that could exist and behave that I got away with such flapdoodle. And remember: not David Essex. His brother.

  Now here I was. I knew Elton John. I’d made Long John Baldry a cup of tea. Run after Rod Stewart when he’d left his Access card in the machine (calling him a dozy git into the bargain), and now Marc Bolan – who Bernard Sibley and I had once imagined kidnapping and making him tell us all about the real meaning of Tyrannosaurus Rex lyrics – had just called me darling. He was sitting three feet behind me – behind me. When I’d paid to see him at the Lyceum Theatre I had battled and sweated for every inch that I could get closer to him onstage. Now he was less than a guitar case away and here I was, turning my back and doing a terrific impression of a man reading the NME. What on earth was going on?

  After a short while Marc emerged past me again – I confess I took a whiff of what he smelled like as he inched by
(Sweet Musk) – and began sorting out a few albums from the racks that he wanted to take with him. His browsing style indicated that in terms of having a finger on the pulse, he was no Elton John; he would hold up LP sleeves and shout, ‘John – what’s this? Any good?’ To which John would reply either, ‘Yeah, you’ll like that,’ or ‘Oh, please! Fucking dreadful.’ I was on the verge of also giving my opinion to Marc, but was sadly too busy not reading the paper.

  Sneaking direct looks at him, I now noticed he was wearing The Greatest Shirt Ever Made. Between the open buttons of his full-length bottle-green coat, I could see it was of the palest peach silk and had Warhol-like prints in various bold colours of Chuck Berry doing the duck walk. This was a shirt that, if taken at the flood, might lead to greatness. As he came to the counter with an armload of covers I let him know. ‘Mary,’ I said (though instead of Mary I said ‘Mr Bolan’), ‘that is the greatest shirt I have ever seen on a person. Where’s it from?’

  ‘Oh, this? Um . . . I got it in New York. Funky, innit? You can’t get it though, this is the only one.’

  I gave a regretful response while inwardly quite giddy with the notion that Marc Bolan actually thought, had the piece not been unique, I might shoot over to the States and buy a couple. I began sorting out his purchases and bagging them up. Marc went off to talk with John.

  When he returned, he had done the single most magnificent and starry thing I have ever known. He had taken the shirt off and was now handing it to me.

  ‘There you go, babes. I don’t wear things more than once, so knock yourself out . . . Listen, John, I’ll call you, okay. Give Ian and Jake my love, talk soon.’

  And with that he tripped out of the shop on his built-up Annello & Davide heels, his green coat now worn over a bare chest. I don’t think I even said thank you. As far as I recall, I was too busy standing there open-mouthed and thunderstruck. John looked at me and laughed. ‘She is something isn’t she? That is a STAR. It’s a great shirt, by the way.’

  I just stood there, holding this saintly relic still warm from the Bolan body. I tried to respond to John but could only manage a noise like the death throes of a seagull.

  It’s fair to say that, whereas Marc professed to wear a thing only once, I could make no such claim. I didn’t leave the shirt off for a fortnight. Everyone in the pubs of Bermondsey asked where did I get that shirt, and I would say, ‘This shirt? Marc fucking Bolan gave it to me.’ In return, I would ask where they got their shirt, and they would say a shop like Take 6 or Lord John, and then I would ask them to ask me once more where I got my shirt and when they did I would say, ‘Marc fucking Bolan gave it to me’ again.

  So where is that shirt now? Why isn’t it in the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame or currently on eBay for ONE MILLION pounds?

  Because my mother washed it. In our banging, boiling Bendix washing machine. Probably along with some of my brother’s rotten pants and last week’s football socks. In short, she had taken a recklessly cavalier approach to the ‘DRY-CLEAN ONLY’ warning on the shirt label. I can hear her defence even now:

  ‘Well, how was I to know? A shirt! Who the pissing hell dry-cleans a shirt? If it can’t take a wash, what’s the point in having it? Blimey, we’d go skint overnight if we had to dry-clean all the shirts in this house! Now buck your ideas up, because I’m busy.’

  I was crushed, sickened by this act of wanton philistinism. But, as she further pointed out, ‘If it was so bleedin’ precious, what was it doing laying all over y’bedroom floor?’ She rather had me there.

  For the record, when I found it, it was in our airing cupboard, sans any silken lustre, with the remnants of Chuck’s duck walk now barely discernible and suddenly of a size that might just about fit a ventriloquist’s doll.

  Whenever Marc came into the shop after this he would always say, ‘How’s the shirt, D? Still loving it?’ And I would say, ‘Had it on last night!’ I lived in mortal fear he would one day ask for it back.

  But, of course, real stars don’t do that.

  The story about Marc Bolan’s shirt and my mother’s attitude to same might be seen as a neat metaphor for the two disparate worlds I was starting to juggle. I had gone from schoolboy to butterfly in barely a season, but how was I adapting psychologically to this sudden change in altitude? Most work days I would finish at the shop by five, give an air-kiss and a wave to my chums in Mayfair and then get the number 1 bus from Oxford Street all the way back across the Thames to a Mum-cooked tea of cod balls and beans before going out to glug pints of Harp lager in one of Bermondsey’s countless old boozers that really oughtn’t to have been serving us at all. My two lives on either side of the river would seldom collide because they really had so little in common.

  Of course I’d tell mates things like ‘I met that Mickie Most today’, and they would ask what he was like and I might say he was really nice – or a bit of a ponce – before we moved on to more pressing local matters such as who was shagging who, how Bloke A was going to ‘glass’ bloke B when he saw him, and what were the odds of Millwall escaping relegation. On occasion though, a good pal like big Irish John Hannon would note my new red-and-yellow stack-heel shoes and ask, ‘Where the fuckin’ hell do you get shoes like that?’ When I told him I had had them made in Carnaby Street, he would look furtively above the hand of cards he might be holding and mutter, ‘Made? You must be on a right old fiddle up there . . .’ And he was right. It was upon this notion that I would build a dubious bridge between the two lifestyles.

  Though I had thankfully been steered away from outright proactive criminality thanks to the Great Potato Robbery (Failed) of 1964, I soon yielded to the outrageous temptations laid before any backstreet teen that suddenly has to handle money all day. Initially, however, far more enticing than the cold hard cash stream was the bunce. When being interviewed for the record shop, keen and dazzled as I was by the prospect of working among the very things I loved most, I can’t deny that there was a part of me thinking, ‘Aye aye – that’s us all sorted for LPs from now on.’ And unlike my friend Tony, who had a sluggish line in malt vinegar from working at Sarson’s local factory, I immediately realized hot pop platters were always going to be an enormous source of sideways income.

  Within six weeks of starting my job, it became apparent that 11 Debnams plc was soon going to need some sort of revolving door, what with the carrier bags of popular titles I was piling up in my room and the copious trays of fruit and veg my brother brought home from his job in the Borough Market – in those days purely a pre-dawn distribution centre for the trade – not to mention the continuing carousel of varied stock that the old man tirelessly reprieved from overseas export. I particularly remember at one point in 1975 most rooms in the house were crammed full of duvets (then called continental quilts). Singles were kept in the front room, doubles up in the bedrooms, and king-sized in the passage and in the downstairs toilet. The duvets were one of my dad’s best-ever sellers and all sorts of people used to knock at all hours to buy two or three at a time. Late one night a huge pantechnicon lorry reversed down our little turning and ‘delivered’ about a hundred of the things. When my mum said there was no room to get past them and up the stairs to bed, Dad said, ‘’Salright, shut your row up, they’ll be gone in an hour.’ And they were. All I know is another bloke knocked, there was some low conversation, and Micky and I, who had fallen asleep in the one small space left in the living room, had to help load them into another lorry. Two weeks later the flat was full of Hine brandy that, in every sense, was another very fluid item.

  Anyone shocked by this casual racketeering really must understand how such dealings were the norm on inner-city estates back then. findeed, when Only Fools and Horses first arrived on TV most people I knew thought it was a documentary. Similarly, in the 1966 version of Alfie, I’ve always thought it a brilliant example of authentic period dialogue when Michael Caine advises one of his more mousey conquests, played by Julia Foster, about her finances:

  Caine: Here, innit about
time you started playin’ the piano on the till down that café where you work?

  She: Oh, I couldn’t do that, Alfie, they’re like family to me.

  Caine: Well, there’s all the more reason to do ’em! I’ve told ya, a little fiddle on the side gives you an interest in your work. Blimey, that must be the only till in London that ain’t bent!

  At first my own efforts at urban smuggling were restricted to one or two special orders for mates sneaked out among my own discounted purchases. From this I would make an extra couple of quid. Soon though, and on the nights when I was left to lock up the shop, I was taking home boxes of the things to knock out in dockland pubs. If I walked into the Wellington, Old Kent Road, with twenty copies of the new Stylistics album I could leave less than ten minutes later with twenty one-pound notes. At the time my official wages came to only £15.58 a week. Then there was the traditional shop worker’s practice of under-ringing – or, as Alfie described it, ‘playing the piano on the till’.

  Because One Stop was one of the few places that imported US dance records it was an essential resource for discotheque owners and DJs who came from far and wide to buy enormous amounts of 45s so they could keep abreast of the scene. Hardly a day would pass without some Greek or Lebanese type striding up to the counter and saying, ‘Latest hits! Latest sounds! Yes?’ They would then point to their watch and say, ‘I come back at four. Four! Yes? I need everything new, the best, all you have.’ And then they would place a hundred, sometimes two hundred pounds in cash on the counter and walk out, possibly to buy dozens of chest medallions in Bond Street. On my first day in South Molton Street I’d noticed that the till – and remember this was almost two decades before today’s central stock bar-coded computers – was set back in a recess where nobody could actually see what keys you were depressing to register a sale. Clearly this positioning was not an accident. Thus if you sold a £3.99 LP, you would ring up £2.99 and trouser the phantom pound like some kind of tip. For a £200 cash sale you might be looking at up to thirty quid materializing in your cavernous bin. It is of no surprise then that on days when there would be three of us behind the counter we learned how to sniff the jackpot scent of an approaching club owner’s cologne from several streets away and would almost fist-fight each other for the privilege of attending to his nightclub’s needs.