Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography

by Baker, Danny

  ‘I’ve got shears pointed straight at mah chest-ah!’ he bawled.

  Shears! Not a knife, not an arrow – shears! Oh God, he was good. This wiry little runt naturally exuded all the belligerence and challenge that other punk front men grimly manufactured simply because the form required it.

  In ‘Repetition’, another slow-paced angular masterpiece, he wailed, ‘You are here assembled to learn the three Rs – the three Rs – repetition, repetition, repetition.’

  And the way he sang it. Somewhere between an insistent drunk and an air-raid siren with emphasis placed upon seemingly random words and embellished with what sounded like ‘Ha!’ welded on to the close of each brilliant, meandering phrase.

  There were about fifteen people in the hall.

  When it was over I burst backstage and located the steaming band. I tried to validate my effusive praise by tacking it to whatever credentials I could muster up. I did Sniffin’ Glue, I was about to work on Zig-Zag (a magazine roughly two notches above SG in stature), I knew Tony Parsons from the NME – hey, I’ve even got a record label if you want to put something out!

  The singer, Mark Smith, seemed to find my babbling enthusiasm funny. ‘Yeah, all right, okay, okay. But have you got any money to buy us a fookin’ drink?’

  I did have, and over the coming months would buy Mark plenty more, even having him come and see me in Bermondsey where we spent boozy afternoons in rough houses like the Southwark Park Tavern and the Raymouth. I can clearly remember assisting Mark into a mini-cab after he had literally become legless on lager. I told the driver to get him to Euston Station, paid the man, and went back inside the pub. My mates intimated that the lad, though likeable, simply couldn’t take the pace.

  I told everyone I could about The Fall, made sure one of the Sniffin’ Glue labels signed them and when I met up with John Walters, producer of the John Peel radio show, actually grabbed him by the lapels and said unless he got this group on the show the entire BBC might crumble through shame, regret and self-disgust. He followed up the lead and they consequently became the most regularly booked group ever to appear on Peel’s programme. A few years later, when at the NME, I had a grandiose running joke in my singles review columns about how I had discovered and given The Fall to the world ‘along with disco giants Shalamar’. One morning a letter arrived at the paper for me. Inside was some cardboard with a ten-pence piece sellotaped to it. Dear Dan, it said. Here’s 10p. Now we’re even. Shurrup will ya? Mark E. Smith. He remains a very funny and brilliant man.

  I think it was on this same Sham 69 trek around the country that Kevin Rowland – later of Dexys Midnight Runners – literally saved my life. I liked Sham a lot in the old days; they were direct and unaffected and above all tremendous fun to hang around with. Unlike The Clash, who could be hard work to relax among and with whom you always had to be careful that you didn’t get on the wrong side of whatever humbug manifesto their manager Bernie Rhodes had dictated that day, Sham were bustling, crowd-pleasing chancers who only later fell prey to cumbersome over-wrought political posturing that quickly suffocated the very spark that had made them a raucous night out. On that early tour, the band had already started to gather a reputation as something of a gang of tough nuts, although nothing could have been further from the truth. They projected a rough-and-ready vibe perhaps and singer Jimmy Pursey’s uber-cockney vocals certainly carried more than a whiff of the more intimidating parts of the football terraces, yet Sham 69 were, like 99 per cent of all the other groups, simply low-on-the-ladder music fans who had long dreamed of a romp in the big dressing-up box.

  Jimmy Pursey was no fighter, that’s for sure. He was barely a singer. But he was undoubtedly an experienced ducker and diver and gifted story-teller who would have made a terrific actor, had the opportunities come his way. As it turned out, his first major public role as the (cough) ‘spokesman’ for the (double cough) ‘kids’ would utterly consume him until he eventually became that unfortunate overweening character in his everyday life. Jim barely seems to have cracked a smile since about 1978, but wonderful mimicry and a crackling sense of humour were his greatest assets back then.

  Sadly, the night Sham 69 pulled into Birmingham to play the famously rowdy Barberella’s club he would need a lot more than a chipper personality to see him safely through. I first noticed things were going awry when the band’s little goodwill gift to their audience, a free one-sided single of one of their most popular songs, was quite literally thrown back in their faces. Pressed via the good offices of Dryden Chambers, I would help distribute this disc to the punters in the wait before Sham 69 took the stage. Almost universally it was well received and gratefully pocketed by all punks present. That night in Birmingham, however, several ugly shaven-headed cows’ sons aggressively grabbed at handfuls of the discs, some even throwing copies to the floor and stamping on them. I must say, this seemed odd behaviour for devotees of a band about to rattle through twenty of their best and loudest barely ten feet away.

  I met with Sham roadie Albie Slider who had also been on distribution duties. ‘Albie, I don’t know if you’ve noticed but—’ I got no further. ‘I know,’ he said nervously. ‘It’s bad. Apparently there’s a really big crew in here tonight who have come to kill the cockneys.’

  Oh, mother, why didn’t I take that bank job?

  Now Barberella’s was a compact little venue, not much grander than a pub back room. Artists – and let’s just agree on the word artist for now – once ensconced in the tiny dressing room to the right of the stage had no way of getting out of the premises other than to walk through the crowd. This arrangement proved to be particularly tiresome when, within thirty seconds of Sham 69 taking the stage, a mob of approximately sixty hooligans rushed at the group and tried to tear them limb from limb. Other than the four band members, there was only Albie and me in tow and soon all six of us had hastily retreated into this backstage Alamo, shoulders against a shuddering door that the assailants outside were vigorously attempting to reduce to toothpicks. We actually heard knives being thrust into the wood on the other side and bottles being smashed against it. Added to this, there seemed to be a sudden vocal consensus in the Midlands that we should all be dead and preferably in the next five minutes. I genuinely don’t think I have ever been so frightened in all my life as in the unending moments that Sham 69 and I stood there, wedged against that door, rebuffing each fresh charge, listening to a gang of strangers screaming their hatred and sharpening their shivs upon the frame. How had this come about? I couldn’t die now, not here. I’d only just got a video recorder, for God’s sake.

  There was no security at the club. Well, there may have been a couple of guys but they had presumably legged it that night as soon as the size of the job became apparent. They might have even been part of the claque clamouring for blood outside, but wherever they were they certainly weren’t about to restore order to the streets and reason to its throne.

  Suddenly there came a distinct lessening in the animal-like noises from without. This reduction in volume continued until only one voice could be heard. It was muffled, indistinct but also insistent and authoritative. Whoever it was obviously held some sway over these filth hounds of Hades that only seconds earlier had known no limit to their savagery. Then came a solo and more reasoned knocking at the door.

  ‘If you wanna come out, come out now,’ said a Brummie accent. ‘I’ve had a word and you’ll be okay to go – but do it now, right? Just fuck off.’

  Was it a trick?

  ‘I’m serious,’ came our saviour’s voice once more. ‘My name’s Kevin Rowland. I’m in the Killjoys, if you’ve heard of us. We’re just a band like you, from round here. They take notice of me and I’ve told them we’re all on the same side.’

  We released our pressure on the dressing-room door and let it swing open. All around and all through the tiny corridor that led to the stage were scowling thuggish types who, to paraphrase Wodehouse, appeared to be assembled as though God had intended to make a rh
inoceros but had changed His mind at the last moment. And there stood Kevin: serious, determined and with one hand pointing the way to freedom. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever had a religious experience, but I can tell you they really are like what you see in the movies. You hear ethereal choirs cooing, your body seems to rise off the floor, and the subject of your rapture gets enveloped in a sort of burning radiance. Kevin Rowland can walk on water as far as I’m concerned. Moreover, any society that ever wishes to progress beyond the level of a disused dog pound in Dar es Salaam could kickstart that process by giving Kevin Rowland his own stamp, statue and dedicated public park.

  I have met Kevin many, many times since that night he rode to our rescue, and I never fail to tell whoever is standing nearby that this man might be the genius behind Dexys with a solo career that continues to fascinate, but chiefly he is the bloke who saved my life. Kev always deflects the encomium sweetly and claims I’m exaggerating – but, Kevin, it’s the truth. I think that mob’s bloodlust was so high until you came along, they would have killed us.

  I will now pause while we all sing ‘Come On Eileen’ followed by three cheers for Saint Kevin Rowland. Hip hip . . .

  1977

  To the best of my knowledge, my first proper appearance on television – other than my much-praised walk-on cameo during the news coverage of my school’s food-poisoning outbreak – was in a sort of scout hut in Battersea sometime early in 1977. Punk rock was now so famous and gripping that most mobile film crews in Britain were kept busy interviewing groups of perfectly happy teenage bluffers about Why the Kids Are Angry. Mark and I had been summoned by one such documentary team and spent much of the time on the train over to Battersea engaged in the following circular dialogue.

  ‘What you gonna say?’

  ‘Dunno. What you gonna say?’

  ‘Dunno. What you think they’ll ask?’

  ‘Dunno. What you think they want?’

  ‘Dunno. What you gonna say?’

  Of course we strode into the location like two men who had a set, definite agenda and any interviewer better had better be on their mettle around us. The other thought in my head was that I must, above all else, be more entertaining than Mark. He had all the credibility and reputation on his side, but I had bags of twinkle in reserve. He knew this.

  ‘I bet I don’t get a flippin’ word in with you,’ he smiled, seconds before we arrived. One of Mark’s most endearing traits was his repeated use of the sweet expletive ‘flipping’.

  He was right, though. Whereas most punks found that a camera lens inches from their face morphed them into staccato, taciturn misery-guts, the same circumstance would see me fan out my personality like the thing was a mating ritual.

  Oh, I gave them plenty of seething attitude about our frustrated prospects in hellhole Britain, but I gave it in a rattling fandango of useable sound bites. I clearly recall ending many of the more explosive sections with an inner, ‘Bravo, Dan! That was good!’ even as the snarl still played on my lips. I came up with one particular matador move that I almost got up and applauded myself for. The question put to us was some dreadful blancmange of a thing along the lines of: ‘There’s a lot of talk about anarchy and anarchism being the engine driving punk forward – how would you define that in terms of what we’re seeing?’

  I heard Mark’s mind searching for the ejector seat, so I jerked forward and stabbed, ‘You see? That’s the problem. People like you are always trying to tie us down with terms of reference that will make it all seem like some process you’ve seen before. We don’t know and we don’t care what pickling jar you want to identify us via. As far as I’m concerned, the less information we give, the more we can keep the establishment on the back foot. Has it ever occurred to you that this might be something you’ve not come across? That won’t be pinned down like some fucking butterfly in a museum of politics? This is something new. The old terms are handy, but we know what we really mean and confusion is all part of that. Fuck it. YOU figure it out.’

  Well, really, talk about half an inch of meaning to every fifty feet of noise, what? There are much easier ways of saying ‘I have no idea what I’m talking about’, but I definitely saw a frisson of excitement run through the crew as they realized their plodding project might really be getting the goods here. They were going to keep my number all right.

  Many of these film crews and writers that sought us out seemed to have far greater scores to settle with society than we did, and often struck me as disgruntled old agitators from the sixties who saw us as a way of reviving their own agendas. The battered, bearded old director of the Battersea thing came up to me after we’d finished and gripped my arm. ‘I was like you once,’ he said emotionally. ‘Just the same. Don’t let them put your fire out.’ Oh Gawd.

  As I mentioned earlier, The Clash, though far and away the most dynamic group to experience live, and with whom I was once chased out of a pub in Derby by local yobs, could get a bit wrapped up in the bricks-and-barricades posturing themselves. A typical example of the year-zero earnestness that overpowered a number of these suddenly elevated punks happened one night when I was with the band in the Post House Hotel, Bristol. I was sitting in the bar with Mick Jones – today the nicest and most approachable gent imaginable – and the conversation among all present was, as usual, taut and terrified of anything too light. This may have been down to an amphetamine-induced paranoia, but whatever it was, it was certainly doing nothing for the happy flow of reason and exchange of soul. Suddenly Mick stiffened then leaned in toward me.

  ‘Danny – listen, right,’ he croaked in a low tone that suggested he was about to set off a bomb beneath the table. ‘I can tell you this, but keep it to yourself, yeah? I’m serious. Y’see that guy who just come in . . . the one in the beige jacket, right?’ I moved my eyes without turning my head and clocked the fellow. ‘Well, right, don’t fucking say a word to no one, but he used to be my fucking hero. Long time ago and that, but I can’t believe I’d ever be in the same room.’

  I took a closer look at the stocky middle-aged man in question. It was former Arsenal midfielder George Eastham. I exclaimed as much in a tone with possibly too much glee for the room.

  Mick snatched at my wrist. ‘Shut up! What ya trying to do? I’m not fucking going over there or nothing. I just thought you’d wanna know, you being into football and that. I useta, y’know, watch all that shit too.’ And his eyes continued to linger on the anonymous bloke with his foot on the bar rail, enjoying a half.

  Of course what Mick really wanted to do was go over there and gush, possibly get his guitar signed, but in those times there was an unbridgeable gap between music and football, and the always crippling concept of ‘cool’ allowed little fraternization between the two cultures.

  Mind you, Mick also once got a bit frosty when, round at the flat he shared with Generation X’s Tony James, I saw him, fresh out the shower, in just his pants and a towel wrapped around his hair. Feeling that perhaps this image revealed too much of his personal grooming habits, he pointed to the towel and said, ‘I had to wash me hair all right? Don’t let this get into your fucking magazine.’

  I didn’t. But today I will betray that sacred oath and tell the world outright: some members of The Clash liked to look good and Mick Jones, post shower, would wear his hair in a towel like America’s Next Top Model. I’ll now go further. I too often used to adopt this male towel-turban on exiting the bathroom. Against this, at the time of writing, both Mick and I are very bald indeed and can only dream longingly of such a utopian state of affairs.

  There were a few times though when the band allowed themselves to be a little playful. At the Post House with us was the revered American rock critic Lester Bangs, who was penning one of the more famous and weighty examinations of what was happening in Britain at that time. He couldn’t have looked less like a punk rocker. Tubby, moustachioed and dressed in a crumpled khaki jacket like some ageing putz who never left his apartment, Lester had nevertheless seen it all and had
written some of the defining articles in all of counterculture history. He was also a tremendous raconteur and monster consumer of the weed and the wine. These last two talents combined one night when, mid-story at our table in the bar, he schlumpfed off into a deep sleep. The Clash, a band he was about to elevate to mythic status in the upcoming 10,000-word piece that would emerge from his time with them, didn’t really have a lot of respect for this drawling old hippy, who I think might have even smoked a pipe. Taking advantage of his passing out, they began to dress the snoozing genius in the remnants of that night’s meal. As I recall, this consisted of lots of lettuce leaves, boiled eggs and rings of cucumber. There may have been a few triangles of leftover sandwich bread tucked into his breast pocket too. All the empty plates were then carefully stacked up in his lap. Once he was fully festooned, everyone went up to bed and left him there. The next morning we were all in reception, waiting to move on to the next town, when down the stairs came Lester still in the same rancid clothes but now sans any additions. Calling over to the front desk he said brightly, ‘Could you prepare my bill for me, I’m checking out. I’m room 242 and my name is Salad. Mr Egg Salad.’ Followed by, ‘Hi, guys – much happen after I left the party last night? By the way, nice prank – but you do realize I have been set on fire many times by Iggy Pop, don’t you?’ Lester plainly wasn’t about to be fazed by any bunch of UK kids.

  A few days later we were in Bournemouth. I had planned to hang around with The Clash for a few more dates – I wasn’t really doing anything major in terms of writing, you just sort of did it back then – and it was here that I finally buckled to the pressure of not having called home for a while. Having found a call box and explained to my mum that I was on the road with a really great group – something I’m sure meant absolutely nothing to her beyond it sounded like I was once more living for pleasure alone – she interrupted whatever I was babbling to her about Joe, Paul and Mick, and told me that Blackie, our beloved, wonderful, door-answering dog, had died. I sat on the floor of the phone box thoroughly numbed while she told me that he’d finally gotten so old he had simply packed up.