Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography

by Baker, Danny

  A truer description of what was happening was to be found in another popular concept that took flight: the idea of chaos. Chaos soon became employed to describe the methods of punk, but it actually betokens what the ‘movement’ could have collapsed into at any moment – with the result it would simply have become another marginalized music trend.

  The chance moment that lifted punk rock out of the fanzines and into history happened on 1 December 1976 when, because the pop band originally booked to appear on Thames Television’s Today show had pulled out, the Sex Pistols were asked to step in at the last minute. The resulting notorious, if mumbled, swear-fest acted upon the nation like an anvil dropped on to a greenhouse. I didn’t actually see it. I don’t know where I was, but I didn’t catch up with the Pistolson-TV clip until about 1985. I felt it, however. Suddenly, in the face of the media maelstrom unleashed, there was a rallying point, a cause, a purpose to it all – there was Punk. Only very rarely across the generations does a youth movement get lucky enough that the whole of society comes out against it, and here we were. It was in those few turbulent weeks following the Sex Pistols swearing on TV that entire philosophies were formed about what punk was about, who our targets might be and what we were going to do once we came to power. We were nihilist, anarchist and out of control. Apparently. Groucho Marx had put it best in a song from the 1932 film Horse Feathers.

  I don’t care what you’ve got to say

  It makes no difference anyway

  Whatever it is – I’m against it!

  Punks became, or were cornered into becoming, political, philosophical and deep. It was a reaction to the government. To unemployment. To apathy. To society. To Teddy boys. To Pink Floyd. To that bloke over there. There wasn’t a reporter’s microphone into which something provocative couldn’t be spouted, all nicely seasoned with the right amount of random invective about any number of institutions. I know that I gave several hollow outbursts to goggle-eyed journos railing against the government or the rich and invoking images of starving pensioners in this so-called land of plenty. I had no idea what I was talking about. I can recall one outburst in which I pretended to feel disgusted that Zandra Rhodes’ latest ‘punk’ dress collection cost thousands of pounds. Seriously, what did I care about haute couture? A year earlier I’d been saying ‘Hello, dear!’ to Robert Forrest of megabucks Brown’s, but expensive frocks seemed typical of something and all parties were happy with my sound bite. The game was afoot.

  In every documentary made about punk since 1976 images of the groups and followers are always intercut with the state of the nation at that point – usually union unrest, three-day weeks and London swamped in piles of rubbish and unburied dead. Well, I have no real recollection of that, and not once, not ever, did I hear anyone among us talk about what was happening being a reaction to the political situation. God forbid we should do something about it, like the hippies did in 1968 when rioting broke out in cities all over the world. You certainly won’t find any politics in Sniffin’ Glue, nor nine out of ten punk records. Those that do will crowbar in a few slogans, but it’s all a bit perfunctory and second hand. The Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’? It’s a rock record, a commercial hard-rock record with lyrics specifically designed to provoke. It may as well have been called ‘Lock Up Your Daughters’. Their first 45, ‘Anarchy in the UK’ is a more honest reflection of what was going on in Johnny Rotten’s head. The song is a naked manifesto for fame at any price.

  We were all first and foremost music geeks. Record buyers who simply wanted to get in on the action before it spiralled away. That’s why the targets in period interviews are chiefly other pop artists. Not once did anyone truly let on that we were actually and quite suddenly having the raucous time of our lives. This was the most tremendous fun, but in order to exploit much of the polemic being churned out to explain punk we had to play along and act as though we’d been planning this coup for some time. I think we even convinced ourselves of it. Plus, there always remained the option of when in doubt, pull a face.

  Punk had arrived quite literally overnight and the whole nation was talking about it. Whether it would have happened had that group originally booked to appear on the teatime Today show not broken their commitment is anyone’s guess. You won’t be surprised to learn that that group was Queen. It really is such a shame I can’t stand the racket they make – I owe them so much.

  Street-Fighting Man

  Two images from the early pre-Pistols days of my life as a punk rocker endure – and both of them are suitably mundane. The first takes place in my oldest friend Stephen Micalef’s bedroom. Steve still lived a couple of doors along at Debnams Rd and his personal lair therein occupied the same tiny space as my sister’s room at number 11. This was the smallest berth in the house, but Steve’s made Sharon’s seem like the interior of the Tardis. Today I suspect Steve’s room would be on one of those TV shows called Help – I Can’t Throw Anything Away! in which nobody, not the subjects, the makers or the viewers come away from the project with any dignity. It was however a quite magnificent space where, in terms of importance, his single bed and thin wardrobe seemed to lag way behind piles upon piles of old Melody Maker and Sounds music weeklies, hundreds of experimental German LPs stacked up into tottering towers, and various chemistry sets, musical instruments, fish tanks and Romanian folk masks. It was in this claustrophobic retreat that he and I had made a batch of laughing gas a few years previously, simply to find out if the stuff was a myth perpetuated by the Beano and TV’s campy Batman show. The first two attempts to cook up the gas didn’t work, but the third brew sent us straight on to the tiny section of floor space available where we exhausted ourselves in mystifying fits. We later learned it could have killed us, but I must say I have never known such a freaky sensation.

  Anyway, Steve had joined forces with Mark Perry on Sniffin’ Glue around issue three and his exotic looks, unapologetic long hair and absolutely eccentric attitude to anything approaching conventional thought rather wrong-footed most punks and made him kind of fascinating. I remember calling round one day to find some of this new crowd had already squashed themselves into his bedroom. It must have been September ’76. Somehow there were five of us in there, cheek by jowl and getting on like a house on fire playing tracks by Hawkwind, Amon Düül and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. I could tell these must be part of Mark’s punk mob though, because a couple had very short hair, one a revolting old belted mac that just HAD to be ironic, and another had had a go with some eye make-up. They were Chris, Ray and Dave. Collectively they made up three-quarters of The Damned and amazingly, in a couple of days, they were going to make the very first proper UK punk rock record – an actual record – for sale in shops and everything! They seemed as surprised as we were that such an unlikely thing could be about to happen, but naturally any disbelief and joy at the giddy prospect would be keenly hidden to the outside world. Remember, these were soldiers on the front line of a modern music movement and thus they knew exactly what they were doing . . . sort of.

  I do however remember the gales of (naturally induced) laughter that afternoon in Steve’s bedroom as all of us thrilled at the sheer liberty that crashing the rock establishment with our little game entailed. Why, The Damned even had some anti-showbiz alter egos on the go. Outside of Steve’s cave, Chris was Rat Scabies, Ray became Captain Sensible and Dave, rather half-heartedly I always thought, merely swapped his surname Letts for Vanian – which meant nothing to most of us. He did though work up a vampire/voodoo shtick in his appearance that both saluted Jay Hawkins and Lord Sutch while prefiguring the coming Goth craze. He still does – and good for Dave.

  The other keen memory stems from probably that same week. The punk scene now had about enough groups to stage a festival. Not a full-blown Reading or Glastonbury mind, but a couple of consecutive nights in the bijou 100 Club in London’s Oxford Street. The bill included the Pistols, the Clash, The Damned, Buzzcocks, Subway Sect and also Siouxsie and the Banshees – a ramshackle
gaggle of a ‘group’ who had only been together about twenty minutes and had just two songs, one of which was a half-hour caterwauling version of the Lord’s Prayer. There was also Stinky Toys from France and the Vibrators (who everyone suspected, but was too scared to point out, seemed to be already in their forties). These two nights of punk were going to be the first proper roll call of who was now on board and who was as yet unaware of the hottest game in town. All present under the low smoky ceiling of the bubbling 100 Club that Monday and Tuesday knew, in terms of sheer happening vibes, that they were the little aniseed right at the centre of London’s cultural gobstopper.

  Two things. I can clearly recall the disgusting moment when somebody hurled a glass toward the stage but it struck a supporting column instead and shattered into a girl’s face, blinding her in one eye. I can hear the accusations and lamentations that followed her screams as the music stopped and everyone tried to figure out what had happened. I can remember the blue strobe of the ambulance light flashing on the stairway minutes later and of someone leaning into the club repeatedly calling out that it was here. I can also see the girl herself being cradled by friends and sobbing heavily, towels and bar mats being proffered to staunch her cuts. Happy days.

  The actual gig itself – and I have never EVER felt comfortable with the word ‘gig’ – has become a thing of legend and a badge of punk authenticity. ‘Did you see the Pistols at the 100 Club?’ ask wide-eyed young – well, early forties – types who want to know what it was like To Be There. My answer is a genuine fudge in that it is Yes and No. Yes I saw the Pistols at the 100 Club, but NO, I didn’t really see them play.

  Here’s how. The Sex Pistols, like all other bands, would stand around in a venue drinking with, if not exactly the audience, then their own crowd, before they fought their way to the stage and went on. You would perhaps find yourself at some point standing in the reeking toilets next to Pistols’ guitarist Steve Jones.

  ‘How’s it going?’ you might say.

  To which he would reply, ‘Not bad. Better now I’ve had this slash.’

  It was this sort of exchange that gave the Algonquin Round Table a run for its money. Anyway, on this night in which legend was created I saw the band take the stage, as usual to a mixture of sparse cheers and obliterated heckles, but before they could even launch into the first song a hand grabbed my elbow.

  ‘Danny – Seymour Stein. We met at One Stop. John works for me in New York now.’

  Hooray! I’ve always liked Americans and Seymour was a really good one. As he said, he owned Sire Records in New York and we had had many a meeting, even a few drinks, when I was at the shop.

  I was surprised to see him in town, but he said he had to check out what he’d been hearing back in New York about British punk. We began to chat intensely. And then the Pistols started up. Well, we gave our conversation a go but couldn’t hear a thing so adjourned outside to stand on Oxford Street and catch up and gossip about all sorts of things. One or two others eventually joined us – it was about two million degrees down in the club – and as often happens with these things, before long, the real action was happening away from the main event. I’m sure we all eventually went back inside to catcall the encores, but I have no memory of that. Seeing the Sex Pistols again was not going to be difficult – I thought – so detaching myself away from just another performance was no big deal. I expect any deserters at the battle of Waterloo had the same view of historic events; nobody tells you when you’re there.

  One area where I could tell I was going to have a problem with punk rock was in the advertised dress code. Flying in the face of sophisticated thought, I’ve always found any uniform associated with a youth movement absolutely degrading. I may have peacocked a little during the glam years, but that was probably a happy coincidence and I certainly didn’t sparkle as a lifestyle. Anything overtly and rigidly mod or hippy or punk seems to me hopelessly empty; exhausting, too, I should imagine. On top of this there is the matter of cost. Punk was supposed to be all about do-it-yourself and make do and mend – even if you had to rip your jacket up first in order to mend it. However the people that professed this philosophy had actually been to art school or else owned happening clothes shops in the King’s Road. It was always a fine line between a daring, radical statement of street style and looking like you really did have the arse hanging out of your trousers. Nobody I knew wanted to look like they had the arse out of their trousers, and yet that’s how it would appear whenever we ‘dressed down’.

  One particular disaster I had was with an olive green nylon boiler suit purchased from Jay’s, the Surrey Docks working-man’s outfitters, that I intended to personalize with slogans the way the Clash did. Naturally I had no idea that Clash bassist Paul Simonon was a gifted art student and that most of their crowd were up-and-coming style geniuses. I really thought the lads had knocked these out on their back porch while waiting for their tea. Taking a spray can I’d bought from the car spares place on the corner of Debnams Road, I took aim at the rear of the boiler suit and set about writing a slogan I’d seen on a thirty-pound shirt in Seditionaries, Malcolm McLaren’s top-dollar store up West. ‘Other Hands Will Take Up The Weapons’ it had said, and I obviously thought there was some spin on the ball there because I was about to nick it wholesale and thus extend the scavenger punk ethic. But have you ever tried to spray-paint anything on to a narrow nylon boiler suit? Or a forty-foot brick wall, come to that. The nozzle tends to send its cargo out over a radius of about eight inches, making any attempt at subtlety, nuance, and indeed legibility, laughable. I didn’t know that, but it became clear as soon as I tried to plant the initial O of the slogan on one shoulder and all I got was this dreadful giant blob that looked like I’d been hit by a balloon filled with gravy. Worse, the paint was too thin. It gathered in a pool and started running all over the nylon. I stared at this mess for a few moments and decided that if I did enough of these splurges perhaps it would pass as a bit of pop art, possibly a tribute to Jackson Pollock himself. Madly I started squirting paint at it in something of a frenzy. When I stopped, it just looked absolutely disgusting – and not in a good punk way but more in a sort of leaned-against-a-newly-painted-wall-like-an-idiot way. Also, the colour I’d chosen was supposed to be red, but it turned out to be more a dirty rust hue that, now smeared over the bottle green, made you want to be sick. The thing clearly was not going to dry out any time before the twenty-first century either.

  I also tried tearing the shoulder out of an old black jacket and then securing the rip with six safety pins. Mark Perry had done this and had totally gotten away with it. My first mistake was to rip the jacket – which, to be fair, still had a lot of wear left in it – before determining whether we actually had six safety pins in the house. I asked my mother.

  ‘Safety pins? Where d’you think I keep loads of safety pins? Might have two, but I need those, they’re handy. What the bleeding hell you up to anyway? Don’t start going barmy on us – I ain’t up to it today.’

  Sometime later I managed to rustle up about four pins, but they were all different sizes and three of them kept unpinning and digging through to my flesh. Simply left ripped, I looked, as my Dad best put it, like a soapy old down-and-out.

  Shoes were another nightmare. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but the shoes on leading punk rock groups of that period are quietly expensive or otherwise generally not the sort of scuffed up Saxone-brand generics you might have thought. Customized high Dr Martens boots in unique colours, and co-opted Teddy boy loafers were the market leaders, but elsewhere all sorts of wing-tips, chains and unusual fabrics came into play below the de rigueur narrow trousers. (While we’re here, does anyone recall one of Joe Strummer’s celebrated quotes of the time? Asked why punks hated flares he said, ‘Like trousers, like mind.’ I never understood what he meant there and thought it could only be construed that hippies were broad-minded, whereas punks were narrow minded. Obviously one of Joe’s famous scowls stopped any journalists ask
ing the embarrassing follow-up: ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’)

  I could never get the punk look right or even figure out what it was supposed to be. In photographs from 1976 I seem to be half-heartedly having a go, but really I never knew how to put any kind of ‘look’ together. Then again, the idea of Mohican-haired, razor-bladed aliens in bin liners is straight out of a Two Ronnies sketch and only became a reality a generation or two down the line. Look at any picture of an early punk concert crowd and try and drag your eyes away from the one or two show-boaters present. There are always plenty of mullets, tank tops and even beards among the pogo-ing throng. I know this because a lot of my friends came with me to the Roxy and the Vortex, and their concessions to the style revolution made me look like some sort of Leigh Bowery figure. Nobody minded, nobody laughed and nobody picked on them for being old school. Of course, it probably helped that most of my mates were clearly quite ‘handy’, as they used to say of blokes who relished a punch-up. And here I may as well bring you a story that, chronologically, I should be placing fifteen months hence but, as we’re just yakking, here goes.

  On New Year’s Eve 1977 the Ramones played a triumphant date at the Rainbow Theatre, Finsbury Park. It was a three-line whip of the by now considerable punky hordes. Quite a few of my friends went and I had heard that Elton John was giving a party upstairs at the venue after the final encore. I hadn’t been in touch with the old South Molton Street crowd for a bit and had no real ‘in’ to this rather incongruous shindig, but I tried to get a message to Elton anyway via the grim security guards posted on the stairs. They were having none of it, and by the time my three mates and I decided the plan was a bust, much of the crowd had gone. As we left the theatre, there standing against the roadside barrier was Sid Vicious, holding drunken court to a handful of astounded admirers. Sid saw us coming out and decided, very unwisely, to stage a spectacular for his fans.