Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography

by Baker, Danny

  I had the most fabulous time during this period, particularly during the famously hot summer of ’76 when, for a couple of months, I lived in a series of holiday camps on the Kent coast. This perfect positioning for the record temperatures was achieved because a couple of friends of mine had secured jobs as maintenance men in a ‘resort’ at St Margaret’s Bay. As soon as they were designated a chalet from which to operate, they called the rest of us in London and we all piled down there to kip on the floor. At one time, the chalet – suitably out of the way and unobserved – had eleven blokes staying in its two tiny bedrooms. During the day we would avail ourselves of all the facilities that the site had to offer, though these were typically British and quite meagre: a heavily chlorined, cold and slightly shabby pool, a flaking crazy-golf course and, best of all, the bike hire shop. We would all zip up and down the hills and through the overgrown fields around the centre going from one pub to another in nothing but shorts and plimsolls. There are few times in your life when you know in the moment that this is as fantastic and vital as all existence can be and though I have had many, many contenders for this state of paramount awareness over the years, when the very daylight seems to shoot through you and a joyous energy seems to pour from your eyes in rays, making you gulp and gasp, I feel those totally carefree weeks careering about Kent in record-breaking sunshine alongside every single one of my best friends was the real pinnacle.

  There was one supreme moment on what turned out to be the champion hot day among these scorching July statistics. Ten of us arrived at a little pub at the foot of a hill and decamped into the beer garden at the back. There were no other customers. The sky was a completely uniform piercing blue and the sun had somehow burned through its golden phase and now blazed platinum directly above. As we babbled and barked over each other among the high flowers, everything we said seemed light, right, idiotic and hilarious. It was one of those magnificent open-ended sessions where it takes two or more of you to do a drinks run, and even then there seems a constant relay of good friends walking toward you with trays laden with cold beer. After about an hour of this bliss, the governor of the pub came out to us and, rather than ask us if we might keep it down a bit, said, ‘Listen, lads, there’s an old tap at the back of the hedge there and loads of buckets. If you want to start slinging water around, I don’t mind – you’re spending enough money!’ Oh, it was wonderful. Wonderful. For the next hour or so all we did was pour water over each other in as many forceful, ridiculous and inventive ways as we could think of. So hot was the day that any time a fresh assailant singled you out for another drenching you’d welcome it literally with open arms. You’d be bone dry again in minutes. I can still so clearly feel the sheer joy I was experiencing while standing at that garden tap, weak with laughter, impatient for my bucket to fill so that I could get back into the childish fray. It is this silly and simple memory that in my jam-packed gallery of good times simply stands alone.

  When the overcrowding at our maintenance chums’ chalet was eventually unmasked, they were asked to leave. Pooling our resources, we moved on to the next place and, sending in two of us to rent another chalet for a week, all piled in the back window once they had taken possession.

  Where did we get our money from? Well, we’d all been planning to take the summer off for a while and had stockpiled a bit of spare to explode. It’s amazing how much free time you can rustle up to live wonderfully if you never commit to a ‘career’. And not one of us had a career – only jobs. My mates had saved a few quid from their time on building sites, window-cleaning rounds and such; I had begun seriously selling off my record collection; and families would always chip in if they knew it was for something essential like living for pleasure alone. Even as little as sixty quid could easily see you across a month of busy-doing-nothing under those endless azure skies.

  Given that being aimlessly out of work was my family’s greatest sin, you may wonder why the old man didn’t blow up like Krakatoa over this. Well, I think mainly because he hardly ever saw me and figured I must be getting by somehow. Initially he insisted that I ‘sign on’ at the gloomy old labour exchange in Brunel Road every fortnight, warning me that anyone who didn’t could be summonsed for ‘failure to maintain yourself’ – a wonderfully curlicued faux-legal phrase that I’m sure he invented on the spot. I did this for a short time; indeed, everyone did this, whether they had a job or not. The queues in Brunel Road would be seething with impatient, busy people who had their cabs, window-cleaning vans and cars full of chums going to Kempton Park races blocking up the roads outside.

  It must have been on one of the rare mornings when my social diary was less than full that my mother came into my bedroom and woke me. ‘Oi! Get up, y’lazy git. Your mate’s at the door.’

  ‘Mate, what mate?’

  ‘Not one of your pub lot, one you was at school with.’

  ‘School? School?’

  I pulled on a pair of jeans and went down. Standing at the door was an old schoolfriend of mine: Mark Perry. We had been pretty good friends; both in the school football first XI, both fans of Zappa and Roxy Music (I still have Mark’s copy of ‘Virginia Plain’ with his handwritten With M. Perry: Tambourine on the label). That said, he had always been a quiet, underpowered member of the West Greenwich troupe and we had not really kept in touch since leaving. My greeting to him betrayed as much.

  ‘Yeah look, I can’t stop, I’m working today,’ he began in his light feathery voice and I noted his sober, if cheapish, suit. I’m also sure I felt my mother’s eyes snap accusingly toward me at the mention of his job. ‘But look, you always knew about music. I’ve done this . . .’

  He held out what appeared to be the kind of cod magazine project kids collate as a game on long wet days during half-term; jokey efforts full of silly articles about family and friends and wrinkled with the glue applied to pictures torn from colour brochures.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, totally perplexed.

  ‘It’s a fanzine. Sort of a newsletter thing. Up at Rock On [a record stall in Soho] they do one about concerts and stuff, so I’ve done one about new records and that.’

  He handed me the twelve or so A4 pages held together by a staple in the corner. He had called his strange ragged pamphlet Sniffin’ Glue & Other Rock’n’Roll Habits For Punks – this legend scrawled amateurishly in felt-tip at the head of the cover.

  My very first thought was that the title must be a reference to the Lenny Bruce sketch, ‘Kids Sniffing Aeroplane Glue’, which had been where I’d first heard about the cheap tacky high supposedly being jumped on by American teens in the late fifties.

  ‘The name of it’s a song by the Ramones,’ rattled Mark, seeing me trying to make sense of the thing. ‘Have you heard of them?’

  For a moment I stared at the name of the band emblazoned all over the first page.

  Boom. ‘Oh, the Ramones! I’ve had it months, Mark – I didn’t think anyone else had this. Brilliant! It’s a great album. My mate works for them in New York.’

  My response somewhat pooped his vim. ‘Knew you’d say something like that. It’s only been out ten days, that’s typical of you. Anyway, have a look at what I’ve done there. I’d be interested in what you thought. I’ve done fifty of ’em. Run ’em off up at my bank when no one’s looking. I thought you could put some on the counter of your record shop.’

  When I clued him in about my current state of employment, he just shrugged.

  ‘Well, I might be joining ya soon. Fucking working at Nat West, Dan, I can’t stand it. But me mum and that will go mad if I jack it in now. I’m hoping this might lead to something. You reckon?’

  I looked again at the ridiculous DIY job he was punting a future on and murmured something about how promising it all seemed.

  Once Mark had toddled off to his dreary desk job I leafed through his barely legible rag. It soon became clear I would never be able to tell him my opinion of it – because I hated it. I was embarrassed for him. I thought it was a pointless r
ank-amateur exercise in desperate thick-ear doggerel. What was this shit? What did he mean about ‘punk’? Punk was a minor genre that had flourished in the States for a few years in the sixties. It was the name given to a certain type of cheap, snotty loser-rock that wore insolence and failure as a badge of honour. It was camp and fun and had been best collated on a tremendous double album called Nuggets, compiled by future Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye and released in 1972. Nuggets had been a big seller at One Stop, and one track in particular, ‘Moulty’ by The Barbarians – a song which told the true story of how the band’s drummer came to have only one arm – had been a major favourite of John the manager. But punk seemed so niche, passé even, by 1976. And what was the deal with having the Blue Oyster Cult written in large letters on the cover? Blue Oyster Cult weren’t punk by any stretch of the imagination. There was even a piece about Kiss, for God’s sake! What was Mark thinking? And who were all these unknown pub bands he was apparently name-checking? I’d never heard of any of them, and if I hadn’t heard . . .

  With a shudder, I could imagine Mark sending a copy to the New Musical Express for their opinion too. This would be too much. The NME was my weekly channel into everything I considered vital, the absolute last word in creating and cementing the zeitgeist. Indeed, the only reason I knew the word zeitgeist was because the NME used it so often that I eventually had to give in and look it up. What would they, the writers, my heroes in these matters, make of this Sniffin’ Glue? I knew what they’d make of it: they would guffaw and sneer and rip the piss out of it. They would read sections out loud to each other in gormless voices and adopt parts of its deathless syntax as injokes in some of their reviews. Why should I worry about that? Well, I had long held a fantasy that one day I might somehow meet one of these Gods from the World’s Biggest-Selling Music Paper – a Charles Shaar Murray, a Nick Kent, an Ian MacDonald – and this thing could scupper the whole carefully worked-out mise en scène that I had long ago formed in my head, should such a magical moment arrive.

  I might be doing really well amid these infallible and razor-minded writers, holding my own while dropping good references like Lowell George, Fred Neil and Annette Peacock – Nuggets, even! – and then one of them, let’s say a troublemaker like Max Bell, suddenly says, ‘Hold on, I don’t for a moment suppose you know that dreadful crumb Mark Perry, do you? Oh dear God, you do! Then you MUST be partially responsible for that calamitous explosion of balderdash Sniffin’ Glue! Come on, chaps, let’s de-bag the perisher!’ That’s what would happen.

  There would be no time to tell them that this boss-eyed hopeless aberration only came about because my friend – well, actually more of an acquaintance really, barely an outer satellite of my true circle – all of whom really know their stuff, by the way. I mean, some of them even went to that Weather Report gig recently! – was probably dropped on his head as a baby and also had malaria once, which makes him do the most bizarre and silly things. No. As I attempted to tell them that I wasn’t like him at all and really did know my sixties sub-genres, they would simply point to the door and eye me with silent disgust as I slunk out, now sans trousers, to a life in unhip ignominious Squaresville. Yeah, thanks a lot, Mark.

  Of course, what really REALLY deep down worried me was that the exact opposite scenario would unfold. That this rough-and-ready two-bob enterprise was actually new, clever and radical enough to find favour with some of the rock writing elite and it would be Mark, and not me, who would squeeze through a gap in the cultural door and out into the glorious uncharted land beyond. How dare he know about the Ramones? This usurping of my assumed role of maverick trailblazer among my friends truly unnerved me and so I sat down to go through his – what did he call it? – fanzine again.

  About half an hour later, having read for the second time every word and weighed each bawling sentiment Mark had Xeroxed – I decided Sniffin’ Glue was actually worse than I had initially believed and contemptuously chucked it under my bed. By way of centring myself, I put on Steely Dan’s The Royal Scam LP and felt pretty secure once I was washed over with its stylish and ordered groove. Steely Dan – to this day my favourite band in the world after the Beatles – were named in reference to the giant sex toy which appears briefly in William Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch. See, that was smart, subversive even. And now there was poor old Mark, needing a similar joke childishly spelled out for him by some noisy pub group called Sex Pistols. Lots o’ luck with that, fellas!

  What nagged at me in the coming days though was what fun it would actually be to write about records, even for a flimsy 10p supplement that would only be circulated among the queue up at the Marquee Club. For a fact I could write better than Mark Perry, and even he acknowledged that I had a better record collection than anyone else we knew. It was just that I hadn’t got a clue what was really going on, or to be more precise, what a global avalanche Mark and a tiny collection of like-minded misfits were about to call down.

  I was given a sudden, shocking and extraordinary crash course in these new ideas barely three weeks later when the Sex Pistols played, or rather, attacked the Screen on the Green cinema in far-off Islington. By this time Mark had a second edition of his fanzine out and because of the speed with which this new phenomenon was gathering pace, there was to be no room this time for anything like previously established acts in its revolutionary pages. Seeing the jagged and apocalyptic fashions in the crowd that night, feeling that cackle in the air signalling everything was about to be turned on its head and, most of all, hearing the smashing, crashing anti-matter noise of the groups on the bill – Pistols, Clash, Buzzcocks – suddenly Sniffin’ Glue made absolute perfect sense. I’m still not sure whether Mark was a maverick genius ahead of the curve or had simply lucked into a sensation that brilliantly dovetailed with his meagre methods and budget, but what was very clear was that his stark, cheap and ugly creation fitted this cultural explosion better than any copy of the NME. It was Mark Perry, not Nick Kent, that was now surfing the zeitgeist. It’s always the quiet ones, eh?

  The whole history of punk rock in Britain has since become so mythologized and romanced that, when I try and tell people who weren’t even born in 1976 what it was like to live through and how it affected the country, they invariably dispute it and inform me that I am wrong in recalling even my own thoughts and emotions.

  Chroniclers and scholars of the period would have you believe that punk was some sort of bomb that went off to wake up the nation. They tend to kaleidoscope everything that happened over almost three years into a series of seismic weekends where the nation trembled before the voice of youth reborn. Well, don’t you believe it. If any kind of violent imagery might be invoked then I would suggest rather than a bomb, it should be a gas that slowly and invisibly came to creep across the nation, bringing about a very gradual change in fashion, attitudes and art. For a short time it even threatened to be a popular music as well, but punk was always too narrow, too tuneless and hard on the ear to truly find a place in the heart of the charts.

  Another entirely bogus piece of received wisdom has it that punk came along to rescue poor old pop music after it had been hijacked by progressive rock bands foisting five-disc concept albums on us all. This is an out-and-out fallacy. I never met a single soul who ever said they were involved with punk because they were tired of their prog rock record collection. Prog rock – never a massive movement anyway – was long over by then and, frankly, it takes an awful lot of juggling with the dates to place groups like Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes and Jethro Tull at the heart of what was happening in the mainstream of 1976. Instead it was the airless studio-desk-bound tinkerings of acts like Queen, ELO and Abba that chiefly caused those who sought far cheaper thrills to revolt. But nobody wants to hear that. Glossy turns like Queen, ELO and Abba have all long since been given a free pass amid the punk-plot revisionism and now have entire feel-good industries behind them to convince people that their high-end production and corny showbiz styles were as welcome back then as they ar
e aboard the pop nostalgia bus today. For my own part, I can clearly recall just how revolting I found reports that Freddie Mercury had stood onstage at Wembley and, taking a breather from whatever overheated and complex aria Queen were stolidly clanging through, toasted the packed-in peasants with, ‘May you all have champagne for breakfast, darlings!’ How everyone applauded while Freddie drained his glass. It was this, as lovable and retro-gifted as Freddie has become, that rock had bloated into, and it was this growing distance from the lives of all those who paid to be thus patronized that really lit the fuses in a thousand dirty little clubs.

  Beyond a general disgruntlement with Moët-swigging, be-leotarded Sun Kings, it had also been a few months since the latest musical genre had been conjured up to distract us all and quite rightly we obsessives were getting hungry for something fresh. Think about it. It had been only seven years since Woodstock and yet in that time contemporary music had literally pulled from the air brand-new genres such as heavy metal, glam rock, country rock, folk rock, Kraut rock, prog rock, jazz rock, pub rock, fusion, bubblegum, the rebirth of Motown with Marvin and Stevie, funk, P-Funk, the thunderous rise of reggae and dub, the singer-songwriter phenomenon, disco, the computer future courtesy of Kraftwerk, plus whatever it was David Bowie had decided to create and become this week. Not bad for seven years – particularly when you look at the pop decades since. No wonder then, that with no fresh musical innovations since Christmas, we all now professed to be ‘bored’.

  ‘Bored’ soon became the mantra, but nobody really was. Bored and boring simply existed as the buzz words they always are in new movements, designed to frostily condemn anyone who isn’t onside while, at a sweep, declaring what you are doing, no matter how vague and unfocused, to be new, radical and brave.