Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography

by Baker, Danny

  This seemingly open invitation to help yourself was further cemented because, though the till had an internal roll to track the day’s incoming cash, it did not actually issue a receipt. If a customer wanted one, it would have to be written by hand. This whirlpool of dubious cashflow becomes even more murky when I tell you that, nine times out of ten, anyone who did ask for a receipt would then quietly ask you to bump up the total so that their boss would reimburse them for more than they had actually spent – a sum which, remember, had been even further eroded by the time it was eventually rung up on the till. Students of Britain’s economy in the seventies may like to factor this equation into any future thesis pondering how come the country was in such fiscal disarray back then.

  The oddest thing about this skimming and skulduggery was that we never once openly acknowledged to each other that it was going on. You simply knew and tried to be sensible about it by always keeping in mind that the official day’s takings on that inner record had to be kept at a credible amount. Therefore you could never strong it on slow days – which, as the quality of the hi-fi system in my bedroom could attest, were thankfully few.

  To completely round off this licence to privatize profits, the shop’s ultimate owners – who in part I seem to recall were the always trendy Island Records – actually allowed us, the staff, to do our own biannual stock checks. In all my time there, I don’t believe a single discrepancy was ever unearthed.

  So what did I do with all this free-and-easy disposable income? Well, I disposed of it. All my life I’ve had an attitude to money similar to the one my mother held towards shirts that belonged to Marc Bolan: I can knock it out with a quite astonishing brio. I burn through it frivolously and deliciously, and thank God that I have within me not a scintilla of fear about what the lack of it might bring. I have a low opinion of money and I find its suffocating power over people to be sinister bourgeois bullshit. I know this will make no sense to most people, but there it is.

  This is not the acquired philosophy of one who has grown soft and callous through years of fabulous income. I have been exactly the same since the moment I decided to blow off my O levels and take a job at fourteen. I am from totally non-moneyed roots, where the idea of having any savings was unimaginable – wasteful, even. Like the old man, I have always regarded even the most rudimentary financial planning as the dreary stamp of a sluggard. In our family you earned money, you got paid, you knocked it out. You spent it on your kids, on friends, on noisy nights and rollicking days. Most importantly, you went through it before anyone could ask for it back or produce something as sordid as a utility bill. When they did, you told them to fuck off until you had moved a few things about. My dad and his brothers all talked openly of being flush or being ‘pot-less’ – and with equal indifference.

  We were certainly not a materially fixated family. There was never any ambition to own a house and we never had a car. That said, we always had a good three-piece suite and good curtains in the front room. And on a night out, it would be, ‘Fuck the bus, Bet – we’re getting cabs there and back.’ Making things lively and giving that result- ant electricity ease was all that money was for. Our annual holidays may have been domestic and modest in their destination, but we always went first class by train and stayed in the best available chalets (seaside) or boats (Norfolk Broads). If my mum said, ‘Blimey, Fred, you sure? How we gonna pay for all this?’ Spud would respond with the most tremendous authority, ‘Never you mind about that, Bet. We’ll sort it all out on the morning.’ And he would. Because he had to.

  The only true sin in my family was to be idly unemployed. Getting a hand-out or aimlessly signing on was seen as an admission that somehow you had given up on your God-given Baker wits and had accepted the rules of the establishment. You were in their pay instead of your own – no matter how much ducking and diving that involved. The key was to be a forager and rely on nobody, least of all the government, nor any other strangers.

  At the record shop I would happily under-ring a discotheque bonanza without a qualm. Yet in the decades subsequent I never once submitted a routine expenses bill to an employer, even though I have coughed up for countless legitimate business meals, drinks and cab fares, both for myself and (often famous) others. Whatever few quid I hustled back at One Stop I have since poured back into the economy a million times over. It’s a bizarre and fractured code to live by, I’ll admit, but it’s consistent and I’ll argue vaguely noble. Nothing I have done in my career has ever been to amass wealth. Even today, I have no second or holiday home, no top-of-the-range car, less than ten grand in the bank – often much less. Yet I have stayed in the presidential suite at the Four Seasons New York, flown Concorde, and had lots of six-week holidays with people I love – and I have paid for it all myself. Every penny I have earned – and it has been millions – has been used to facilitate a wonderful series of experiences or otherwise to foot the bill for something extended, rash and marvellous. Some people will sit there and let you buy the drinks all night. I don’t care. That’s the way they live and this is the way I live. They are cheerless and constipated and I know I’m having way more fun with a lot more style. We have a great home and we live wonderfully. I genuinely have no clue as to whether any talent I have developed for writing and performing is innate and natural or simply forged through a burning necessity to keep the plates spinning for all who rely on me. It’s career and life as Swiss Army knife. Let the conservative suits in the City have their big bonuses. They can also have the long years toiling behind the office desks and the bonus heart attacks too.

  Is This the Real Life?

  To offset the idea that my life in the mid-seventies was some ever-spinning pandemonium of chatter and chance, I can tell you that the image from the period that I conjure up with most yearning is that of sitting alone, late at night in my bedroom, listening repeatedly to Mike Oldfield’s Ommadawn while reading for the first time The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. (Today that same mystical piece remains the most played item on my iPod, tripping through my headphones almost daily as I journey to and from the BBC. Scrabble on the Nintendo DS though, has replaced C.S. Lewis.)

  I had also discovered Lenny Bruce, and for a while became quite overwhelmed by his words and life story. Never one to burn with either righteous anger or social indignation, I can’t now fathom just why it was Lenny so obsessed me. True, my appetite for comedy had always been on a par with my crackpot absorption in rock music, twin vines snaking around my brain-stem with fresh wonders continually revealing themselves. Galton and Simpson, Norman Wisdom, Peanuts by Schulz, Mad magazine, Harvey Comics, Spike Milligan and Peter Cook – these were as much my sixties deities as the Beach Boys and Dusty Springfield. (Only the Beatles stood without equivalent peer.)

  In contrast to my music, I found possessing comedy, learning and examining it, much more difficult. It was never enough for me to just sit and watch Bob Hope, Will Hay, the Marx Brothers, or even Rising Damp whenever they came on to the TV. No, I would have to tape the show on to an audiocassette (video recordings still being a few years away yet). In fact, I remember having a dream one night about owning a machine that really could capture the TV picture and feeling lousy when I awoke and had to accept no such machine would ever or could ever exist. For now, the clumsy hand-held mic from my little Philips cassette recorder would have to do. This being the age of one television set per household, I would tell whoever else was in the room when I was taping that they had to be quiet throughout it. ‘Pissing cheek,’ my mum would protest. ‘We’ve all gotta be quiet again because of your bleedin’ Monty Whatsit programme.’ Even my dad would rumble, ‘Oh, if you’re going to balls about with that again, I’m going upstairs.’ Once our dog blew off during a taping of The Likely Lads and I had to furiously pantomime like an Edwardian actor-manager to stifle the extreme reactions of those in the room to this ghastly emission. The contract of total silence, strangely, did not extend to myself. I still have a small green BASF-brand cassette tape on to which
I preserved the Python ‘Spam’ sketch, complete with my own incoherent and high-pitched wails of helpless hysteria obliterating many of the key lines. At one point you can even hear my sister Sharon risking expulsion from the room by saying, ‘Are you all right? What’s so funny?’

  However, come ’75 it was Woody Allen, Neil Simon, Mel Brooks, but most of all Lenny Bruce – dead some nine years by then – that I felt the greatest comic bond to. And it was far and away Bruce who would be the hardest to sell to my circle. I could always find someone to go with me to the pictures for repeated viewings of gigantic masterpieces like Love and Death, Prisoner of Second Avenue and Young Frankenstein, and I once persuaded a whole group of us to sit through Peter Bogdanovich’s magnificent What’s Up Doc? three times in one day. Most friends were equally happy to loaf in my bedroom listening alongside me to my growing collection of TV tapes or new comedy LPs like Python’s Matching Tie and Handkerchief. But nobody seemed to ‘get’ or, more probably, have the patience for the dense pioneering shtick of Lenny Bruce. I couldn’t get enough. Though his recordings were deleted and rare, I tracked them all down. I bought the few books and biographies about him and even travelled to Brighton alone late one night to watch a midnight screening of the barely seen documentary Lenny Bruce Without Tears. One weekend I sat on my bed and wrote out in longhand every single word he uttered on the three disc set Live at the Curran Theatre. (I’d set out to do a similar tribute to Hope and Crosby some years earlier with my audiotape of Road to Morocco, but ran out of paper around reel three.) Perhaps my greatest act of devotion came when the Off-Broadway play Lenny, starring Marty Brill, arrived for a short season in the West End at the Criterion Theatre. I saw it fourteen times. Some nights there would be only myself and a thin smattering of other devotees peppering the barren stalls. Inevitably one evening I sneaked in my cassette player and recorded Marty’s entire gut-wrenching performance. It turned out to be an appalling, distorted and distant reproduction, but I listened to it over and over again.

  This mania for experiencing things repeatedly, to be part of it and learn each line and mannerism by rote, had manifested itself at an early age. Apparently, when I was five, following a seismic viewing of Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor at the Regal Old Kent Road, I sat bawling in my seat and refused to leave the theatre even after the lights had come back up again. My brother and sister threatened to leave me there, or call the police, arguing that we had to go because ‘the man’ wanted to lock up, but I was inconsolable. ‘There might be a bit more! It might come back on again!’ I didn’t know it for certain just then, but indeed it would ‘come back on again’. Up until the 1980s, films would show in ‘continuous performance’ and you could plonk yourself down in your seat at midday and watch a movie over and over again until the last bus beckoned. It was also completely normal to show up at your local fleapit and stroll in halfway through a film. Picking up the plot threads – or asking a nearby stranger what was going on – you would then watch the entire thing round again until you got to the bit where you had first walked in. I simply couldn’t count how many films of the period I’ve experienced, and enjoyed, despite having watched the last half first.

  I rarely saw anything I enjoyed less than a dozen times. The Jungle Book, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Butch Cassidy, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, A Clockwork Orange, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex – I willed myself to be part of them and hoped that by constantly showing up I would sooner or later be added to the closing credits. My record attendance for a film is American Graffiti, which I saw exactly twenty times. For a play it’s Jesus Christ Superstar which I sat through a total of twelve times, often fighting through the banner-waving Festival of Light protestors outside the Palace Theatre in order to take my regular seat.

  When it came to the relentless amount of rock concerts I attended, I was helpless to prolong any imagined involvement. When the last encore was over and the house lights would devastatingly rise, that was that. The mesmerizing communal spell cast on that single occasion would break and be gone forever with no DVD, no simulcast, no Internet forum on which to trade clips and prolong the discussion. Thank you and goodnight. Seeing a band back then was all lightning no bottle, all magic no daylight and it’s strange how having absolutely no record of something so personally precious is proving the only true way of keeping the sensations alive.

  Throughout all of these distractions, passions, obsessions and sideshows, the experience I seemed least interested in was any unfolding narrative of my own. I had absolutely no plan at all beyond working in the shop – and why would I? I was smack-dab in the flow of a buzzing scene and earning, one way or another, absolute bundles. Ah! Here comes Freddie Mercury!

  Is This Just Fantasy?

  I’ve never been fond of those stories in autobiographies that lead you through some yarn without ever telling you who the protagonist is until the very end, when they say ‘. . . one day our Saturday boy got the sack from the glue factory and told me he was going to try and make it in the movies instead. We all laughed and said he’d never amount to anything. Sometimes I wonder what became of him. By the way – his name was STEVEN SPIELBERG!’ I mistrust that style and, anyway, you are usually in no doubt who the big reveal is going to be from the moment the section starts. So let’s say up front that the group in this next bit is Queen.

  One quiet afternoon all four members of the group came tumbling into the shop, excited, babbling and I think a little drunk. Their record label EMI was about five minutes away from One Stop and they were holding advance test pressings of their very first LP that they had obviously just taken receipt of.

  ‘We want you to play our record in your shop. Constantly! You can be first!’

  I suppose it would have been Freddie leading the charge here, but I have no clear memory of it because, frankly, we had no idea who they were.

  The album was presented to me on two thick, one-sided acetates on to whose blank labels one of them, let’s say Roger Taylor, began helpfully copying down the track titles from a typed sheet with his biro. All the while the others were rattling off self-promoting phrases about how massive they were going to become. I, always the politest of audiences, made appropriate noises in return and congratulated the band on their anticipated global success. But manager John, who could be a frosty old wasp when he chose, drifted out from his office area and cut through the party with a loaded, ‘I’m sorry, can we help you?’

  ‘Yes, you can,’ briskly responded my presumed Freddie. ‘You can fucking play this and nothing else for the next six weeks. We’re Queen and when it’s released you won’t be able to fucking stock enough of this.’

  ‘Really?’ John drawled back in a tone plainly designed to hose down their raging brio. ‘Can I hear it?’ Taking one of the discs, he replaced what was already playing through the shop’s speakers – I’m guessing something by Al Green – and rather archly put the needle on to track one of this allegedly momentous debut. The opening song was called ‘Keep Yourself Alive’. It’s still one of the few Queen records I quite like. John responded less charitably. He let it play for about a minute, all the time staring intently at the floor as if in solemn judgement. Freddie Mercury lustily sang along to his own vocal in an attempt to clinch the decision. Then John calmly took the player’s arm back off the disc.

  ‘Hate it,’ he said, putting lots of breath into the H.

  ‘You’re fucking joking!’ said Freddie, or possibly Brian May.

  ‘Hate. It,’ repeated my manager and entered into a sullen stare-off with the group. Then another thrust. ‘You sound like Deep Purple or something. Can’t bear all that.’ Then he turned to me. ‘Danny, you like rock. Was that any good?’

  Oh, don’t do this to me, John.

  ‘I thought it was, y’know . . . rocky. Bit like Stray, and I like Stray.’

  ‘Stray!’ exploded presumed Freddie. ‘Stray! Stray are a fucking pub band! We are going to be bigger than fucking Led Zeppelin!’

  ‘F
uck you,’ said maybe John Deacon.

  ‘Well, fuck you,’ said John the Manager.

  Then everyone but me said Fuck you for a bit.

  Leaving their record on the counter, the group beat a swift and noisy retreat with one of them – I recall some blond hair here, so let’s say Roger – yanking a handful of sleeves from the racks and letting them spill all over our floor. In a final gesture, Freddie stood at the door and bellowed out into a bemused South Molton Street, ‘Attention, shoppers! If you have a scintilla of taste, you will never buy a thing in this dreadful shop!’ Then they were gone.

  John, who enjoyed both style and drama, turned to me with a pixie-ish smile lighting up his eyes. ‘Did you hear that? I like him. That was funny. Dreadful record though . . .’

  He wafted back to his lair and it was then that I noticed a carrier bag that the group must have abandoned in the furore. It contained three short black cotton kimonos with what seemed to be Japanese script printed in bright red on the arms and back. We kept them for a while, but nobody came to claim them and so I began to wear one most days in the shop. After a week or so, Robert Forrest, the soigné assistant manager of Brown’s, the most fashionable clothing store in London and located directly opposite One Stop, saw me in it. ‘Oh, Denise!’ he cooed – my name was usually feminized by John’s crowd into any girl’s name that began with a D – ‘you are getting so fucking bold, dear. Do you know what that says?’ I didn’t. ‘It’s just plastered with the word Queen, darling – I mean, it’s so obvious, I didn’t think you needed to advertise . . .’