Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography

by Baker, Danny

  ‘Oi, you,’ he said to my tall, wiry pal John Hannon, who worked as a cable puller on various building sites. ‘Gimme fifty pence, ya cunt.’

  I promise you, ‘fifty pence’ was the ridiculous schoolyard sum he demanded.

  John, who we’d all called Reg ever since the song ‘Johnny Reggae’ had been in the charts, stopped dead.

  ‘What did you say?’ he smouldered. I knew John and tried to ease him on, saying Sid was obviously out of it.

  ‘I said, you wanker,’ drawled Vicious, now walking directly in front of Reg, ‘I want fifty pence from—’

  Pop! That was as far as he got. Reg simply hammered him square on the cheekbone, knocking the notorious rebel flat on to his leather-jacketed back. One of his boot-licking entourage screamed, ‘You can’t do that to Sid!’ but Reg was already strolling away, sweeping back his hair and eyeing the surroundings for any chip shop that might possibly still be open. There was to be no comeback other than a few shouts of ‘Wankers!’ once we were suitably far enough away. Since then I have had many other opportunities to observe that one of the biggest discrepancies between the entertainment world and the real world comes in what the former camp declares to be a ‘hard case’.

  Meanwhile, back in 1976, a greater cultural tidal wave was about to hit me with, for my money, ten times the power and possibilities of punk rock.

  Arriving at Hamish McAlpine’s place one day, he told me to sit down. Walking across to his, for the period, giant television set, he appeared to be fiddling with some sort of wooden suitcase. I thought it was maybe a way of playing sound from the TV through to his enormous Wharfdale speakers, each the size of an old-fashioned steamer trunk. I’d often wondered about that while watching The Old Grey Whistle Test.

  ‘Okay, Dan,’ he said in that uber-posh voice that would droop like an orchid. ‘What’s that TV programme you and I can, like, quote every line from? The Quentin Crisp thing . . .’

  ‘The Naked Civil Servant,’ I swiftly answered. It had been first on about nine months previously and we had both raved about John Hurt’s portrayal and resurrection of the grand old man. In fact, it had been repeated just that week.

  ‘Right answer. Wanna see it?’

  I was nonplussed. See it? Is that what this box was? Some sort of projector that would cause a screen to descend and then beam a movie out? That would be very cool, but how had Hamish, even with his connections, secured some reels of The Naked Civil Servant? He hunched over the machine again and seemed to punch at some large chrome buttons. Suddenly, there on his television screen was the Thames TV logo, followed by the opening titles of this magnificent drama. I must have reacted much the same way as audience members did when Jolson suddenly started talking from the screen. My mouth hung open, my eyes darted around for signs of some trickery and then I simply tried to compute what was happening. It was barely midday. Television didn’t start until at least four in the afternoon, and then it was only children’s programmes and local news. How could this, a major landmark piece, be on TV now? By what Satanic contract had Hamish managed to break one of British societies most sacred rules? I babbled a few disjointed syllables and my eyes must have betrayed total confusion.

  Smiling triumphantly, he broke the news: ‘It’s a video recorder. It can record the television and play it back as many times as you like. There’s only about a hundred in London. Costs a fortune, but I had to have one. Good, eh?’

  Good? GOOD? This was science fiction, the actual stuff of my dreams. How? How could something capture a television picture, collect it, let you put it on your shelves? Would it last? Did the pictures disintegrate after a few days? Did it do sound as well, or did you have to tape that separately? This simply couldn’t be.

  ‘Watch this,’ he purred. At the push of another button, the picture vanished and I could hear a metallic whirring noise. Another click from Hamish and the film was back, but now many scenes further on.

  ‘You can move it forward or back, or erase it altogether and tape something else if you want. It’s unbelievable.’

  It was. Totally unbelievable. And the next words he said really flipped my wig.

  ‘Do you want it? I just got this from a mate last month – it’s actually about a year old, and Sony do a better one now. I’m getting that tomorrow.’

  Stunned, I managed to say that if I had such a machine I could control the lives of millions of people, leastways a good part of South London. I would be like the BBC.

  ‘Great. It’s yours.’

  Mine?

  ‘Just give us, I dunno, two hundred quid. I’ll show you how to set it up.’

  Ah. Two hundred quid.

  I heard a noise in my head similar to that in a fairground when the dodgems get shut down for the night. I was back outside of Eden once more. Perhaps I should explain that £200 in 1976 was the equivalent of £175,000 today. Or at least it may as well have been for all the access I had to such a sum.

  ‘I don’t want it right away,’ he said. ‘Give it to me in a couple of months, if you like.’

  Yes! A couple of months! The lights in the fairground came on again. Of course I could have two hundred spare pounds in a couple of months. Why, I could get it from any number of current opportunities presenting themselves. That treasure map I intended to find in an old junk shop for example.

  ‘Hamish,’ I said, ‘I’ll take it!’

  I’ll never forget that after watching The Naked Civil Servant – even stopping it whenever we wanted to go to the toilet or get a beer! – Hamish unplugged, unhooked and then wrapped the monster machine in a heavy blanket and plonked it down in the hall. Suddenly it was all mine.

  ‘You gonna be all right getting home with it?’ he asked.

  I said I would, but it was probably the worst journey I’ve ever undertaken in my life. From the Fulham Road where Hamish lived it was at least an hour and a half by public transport to ill-served Rotherhithe. I took a cab to Westminster, which was as far as my money would allow, then a bus across the bridge. Next it was a long walk through Waterloo Station to the road near the Old Vic, before a considerable wait for the number 1 bus to Surrey Docks and the final leg home. All the while I was carrying this blanketed Philips N1500 video recorder that was roughly the size of an upright piano and weighed about eight tons. On the bus, people looked at me as if I was transporting a stolen light aircraft across town. What they made of the various mysterious wires hanging down, I have no idea, though I do remember the plug repeatedly banging against my ankle as I huffed and puffed through Waterloo, bow-legged and with sweat pouring off me.

  When I staggered indoors, Dad, who was home because it was a Saturday, watched me remove the blanket from the bulky wonder then rather predictably asked,

  ‘What the fucking hell is that?’

  ‘A video recorder. It records the telly!’ I proclaimed. I think my mum had already set about dusting it.

  ‘What y’talking about, records the telly? What’s the point of that?’

  To be fair, there was precious little on television that either of my parents valued enough to ever want to see more than once.

  ‘Well, it means you can watch them again, you know. Have them. Keep shows.’

  ‘Fucking size of it!’ he roared on. ‘Keep shows! Should think you could fucking stage a show on that. Where d’you get it? Is it knocked off?’

  I told him it was entirely legit and I’d bought it from Hamish. Then he asked me how much he’d ‘rushed me’ for it. I told him a tenner and looked away quickly.

  ‘Did you, bollocks!’ he laughed back. ‘I bet he’s tucked you up more like fifty for that. Where you get fifty quid from?’

  I busied myself fiddling with the wires.

  ‘Oi, don’t go fucking about back there. You’ll blow us all through the roof. Can’t even see the telly behind that fucking monstrosity – it’s bigger than the settee!’

  Ignoring all this, I ploughed on with the connections and soon believed I was in a position to dazzle the room w
ith a demonstration. Hamish had given me three tapes to go with the machine; one was The Naked Civil Servant, another was some Top of the Pops clips and a third was a recording he’d made of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Figuring the first two titles would be of little interest to the rest of the family, I manhandled Butch into the opening – the tapes were about the same size as a loaf of bread – and pressed play.

  ‘Everybody,’ I said in a smug tone. ‘Our house is now a cinema. Here’s today’s presentation: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.’

  The machine grinded and moaned a while and everyone leaned forward to see what would happen. Nothing happened. I looked from the machine to the TV and back again repeatedly. I licked my lips nervously as a few giggles came from my mum.

  ‘Good innit?’ she said.

  I began furiously taking out the electric leads and putting them back in again, I pressed stop and then play several times, I went through the three TV channels over and over but BBC’s Grandstand steadfastly refused to relocate to Utah in the 1890s.

  ‘Maybe it wants tuning in,’ said the old man drily.

  That’s exactly what it needed! Taking one of the short stubby channel locators that protruded from the set front, I started twisting endlessly through the frequencies with each fresh burst of empty white noise emphasizing how I was rapidly ‘losing the room’. People coughed. People yawned. The pressure on me was immense. Then – something! It was Paul Newman’s voice! I had located the Hole in the Wall Gang . . . or something. With one more delicate half-turn on the knob I secured a picture to go with my soundtrack, but it was some way from cinema quality. The bottom half of the screen sort of twitched nervously while the images in the top section slid right the way over towards one side. This was Butch Cassidy as a drunken dream, and play the tuning as much as I liked, there was no escaping that my wonder invention looked like it had caused our TV to have a stroke.

  ‘Yeah, lovely that,’ said my mum. ‘We’ll get two of those, eh, Fred?’ And everyone drifted out of the room, leaving me twisting, flipping banging and adjusting everything in sight.

  About twenty minutes later I found the little chrome tracking wheel on the player and managed, by degree, to stabilize the image. I called for everyone to come back. ‘There it is! There it is!’ I barked in triumph.

  Arms folded, the old man took it in for a few seconds. ‘All right. But say if we don’t want to watch Butch Cassidy, what else does it do?’

  What else? What else? Was nobody as thunderstruck as I at what was being presented here? The possibilities were mind blowing!

  ‘Well, you don’t have to have Butch Cassidy,’ I countered with a rising pitch in my voice. ‘You can tape anything – anything!’

  ‘Such as?’ said Dad.

  Oh, this was hopeless. Then it suddenly got worse as the scene on screen sort of vanished in a haze of psychedelic sparks, groaned a bit, then reassembled itself slowly again.

  ‘What happened there?’ said my mum.

  ‘It’s missed a bit out,’ said my sister. ‘They’re in Bolivia now, and that didn’t happen for ages in the film.’

  I knew what had happened. The Philips N1500 could only use tapes that lasted 60 minutes. The Quentin Crisp story had fitted perfectly, but Hamish had warned me that with proper feature films you had to cut out bits as you recorded in order to make them fit. Every time you did this, the image onscreen would have a sort of seizure. I had presumed that with everyone’s zeal for this modern wonder being at levels as high as my own, such details would be overlooked. They weren’t. Everyone got up and left again – leaving some pretty wounding comments about the future of video as they departed.

  Two. Hundred. Pounds. Now I was going to have to start flogging records I actually liked.

  There certainly wasn’t a single shilling coming in from the involvement I now had with Sniffin’ Glue. Though the fanzine’s reputation was sizzling nationwide and its sales were well up into the mid-thousands, it was sold so cheaply to vendors that any profit we did see would easily be snaffled up in a couple of nights out or some long trattoria lunch. Also, Mark had bought himself a guitar and was determined to start a band.

  ‘Can you actually play anything?’ I asked him.

  He shrugged, almost affronted by the idea. ‘No, not really. Well, guitar, you know, and trumpet.’

  This was astounding news. ‘Can you play guitar and trumpet?’ I pressed.

  ‘No. Nothing. But that’s not what it’s all about, is it? I’ve got the name. Alternative Television.’

  ‘But,’ I said, being the pernickety rock scholar again, ‘there’s already that American group called Television.’

  ‘Well, all right, Alternative TV then. ATV. But I don’t wanna be punk.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘No. I want it to be freer. Punk’s all over, anyway.’

  We exchanged a glance. All over? You sure? It only had about three records out. Some of us had just got here.

  Sniffin’ Glue had also just been given some actual premises to occupy. No longer would I have to borrow my sister’s typewriter from under her bed and tap away while sat up against my wardrobe. Mark had somehow hooked up with an American businessman called Miles Copeland who, sort of, kind of, had legitimate access to Dryden Chambers; a semi-derelict, cold and echoey Victorian office block that stood in a murky courtyard beyond a short alleyway running off Oxford Street. It was the same building that Glitterbest, the Sex Pistols’ company, operated from and they had two rooms directly below ours. It was on the stairs of Dryden Chambers one day that Sandra, the lovely woman who kept things running at Glitterbest, heard my hurtling footsteps and emerged with a cardboard box of seven-inch singles.

  ‘Danny!’ she cooed. ‘It’s the boys’ new record. Just got ’em.’ And she stretched her arm out to proffer the box through the stair railings. ‘Take a few,’ she said. ‘Give ’em out!’

  I took about ten. I examined one. ‘God Save the Queen’ by the Sex Pistols on the A&M label, a company they had recently signed with after their notoriety had got them the sack from EMI. I thanked her and left the records on a little table by the door as you walked into the otherwise bare, whitewashed Sniffin’ Glue rooms. Over the morning they all went. No big deal, I’d get mine later. Except I never did, and neither did very many others. Within days of the discs’ advance delivery the Pistols had been offloaded from A&M too and ‘God Save the Queen’ eventually saw release on Virgin Records. Today, a copy of the A&M version is perhaps the most valuable record in the world with prices reaching as high as £12,000 on eBay.

  Miles Copeland meanwhile was a man who had been around the music scene for some time and had early on got an idea that something hot and lucrative was afoot. He’d already managed a few bands – stolid old middle leaguers like the Chicago Climax Blues band – and his brother Stewart had been the drummer in Curved Air, an outfit that many of us young heads had now to pretend we’d never heard of, despite being secretly knocked out by this awesome connection. Most impressive of all, it was rumoured that Miles’ father was something big in the CIA. It was actually quite shocking when this turned out to be true.

  Miles had decided to bankroll the Sniffin’ Glue nous and reputation and launch a stable of new acts on a variety of small labels with the talent based upon the groups we all felt were hottest and happening. There were to be four new ‘companies’ in all – Deptford Fun City, Step Forward, Faulty and Illegal. In truth, they were all part of the same racket coming out of the same damp, bare-bulbed room in Dryden Chambers, but nobody ever claimed that the entertainment industry is built on anything other than almighty bullshit. After much consideration, and having weighed all the possibilities, Mark decided the first signing would be his own group, Alternative TV. The second was to be, by strange coincidence, the new group that Miles’ brother had formed called The Police. Another Deptford group, Squeeze, were soon added to the strength, along with the Cortinas, the Models and Chelsea. Everyone expected that Chelsea, led by the
charismatic Gene October, were going to be the breakthrough act, even though The Police got their record out first, complete with a cover photo showing Stewart Copeland, guitarist Henry Padovani and their bass player, simply called Sting, mugging like morons on the Dryden Chambers roof.

  In 2010, I arrived at my daily job for BBC London to find many of the office staff gathered about the corridors and around the on-air studio. This usually signifies that a major star is in the building and everyone wants to get a peep. I asked who it was.

  ‘It’s Sting doing Robert Elms’ show,’ I was told.

  ‘Ah, Gordon,’ I announced to the pop-eyed throng. ‘I gave him his first break in this industry, released his first record for him. Yes, I pretty much discovered The Police – and has he ever thanked me? In a pig’s eye, he has!’

  There was a bit of laughter because, frankly, I say this about most superstars. However when Sting emerged from his interview I bounded toward him. ‘Sting! Tell these people. Didn’t you used to work for me?’

  Sting, top showman that he is, played right along. ‘Dan, you know if I owe it all to anyone, I owe it all to you. The biggest mistake I ever made was leaving Dryden Chambers. How ya been?’

  Gets you a lot of admiring glances that stuff, you know.

  The only group I helped directly to sign was a galvanizing outfit from Manchester called The Fall. I first saw this radical and electrifying band at the Huddersfield Polytechnic, where I’d wound up after following Sham 69, another recent Step Forward signing, on their headlining tour. The Fall were on the bill for this one night only and were the opening act of three. Within a few seconds of their first song, ‘Bingo Masters Breakout’, it was apparent here was something very different indeed. As they lurched into their second, an extended tumbling, off-kilter piece called ‘Frightened’, I began to panic that this might be more than my heart could handle. The lead singer looked and acted like the noise he and his band were creating was a threshing machine designed to cull all those not up to some new and rigorous standards of behaviour.