Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography

by Baker, Danny

  I felt rotten. This was no time to be tearing it up with a rock group, but I had no money with which to make it back to London. By a stroke of luck, Bernie Rhodes, the group’s manager, was driving back to town that day. Bernie was a pop-eyed, bespectacled, round-faced hustler of the first water – and if you think I can talk fast then you really should’ve heard Bernard back in the day. On our journey from the coast he came up with more non-stop straight-faced flim-flam, hoo-har and horse shit than anybody since Phil Silvers’ Sergeant Bilko. Even I started to believe that punk was a pre-planned situationist coup designed to take over the world. He also played, at terrific volume, a series of cassettes he’d made that were unlike anything I’d ever heard before. The music on them was totally eclectic, sometimes consisting of a mere ten seconds of something, other tracks played at strange speeds, and the whole soundscape was cut up and interspersed with all manner of random dialogue laid across tunes, snatches of radio ads and TV shows. The whole sounded brilliant, if a little jarring, and very much prefigured what was to happen a couple of years later with scratching and hip hop. So maybe the old rogue really did know a thing or two.

  I arrived home to a downbeat Debnams Road, heavy with the kind of sudden space and lack of everyday pace that haunts any home when a dog disappears from the scene. My dad was sat glumly in the front room and, while not actually in tears, could only manage to pull a tight resigned smile of greeting to me. After a horribly silent few minutes he said, ‘I won’t get another one. I wouldn’t have another one after him.’ And he never did.

  I had never known our house and family to be so wounded by anything. Even neighbours came by to see how we were doing. And then all the stories about Blackie started. The time it was snowing and he was chasing a football out in the square. The square had four concrete bollards across the entrance to the cul-de-sac to stop any cars driving in and these were set at the foot of a small incline. Blackie, going at full speed after the ball, noticed these too late. He immediately put the brakes on, but the combination of the icy ground, the incline and his impetus saw him slide at great speed toward the pillars. I promise you, as he did so, he gave a hapless look round to all of us, identical to the one Wile E. Coyote displays when he’s chasing the Road Runner and runs out of cliff. Clattering into the concrete, he knocked himself spark out and we carried him indoors on an R. Whites lemonade advertising board.

  On another occasion he got an abscessed tooth and had to be taken to the vet’s some twenty minutes away in Southwark Park Road. The vet had warned my mother he would be groggy afterwards and might need assisting with the journey home, so my mother took a baby’s pushchair along. Sure enough, after the extraction he was groggy, boss-eyed and rubber-legged and in no fit state to go anywhere under his own steam, so into the pram he went. My mother says the ensuing walk home was just about the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to her, with people astounded at the pampered treatment this mongrel was getting and many of the women openly pitying this poor cow who, obviously having no children of her own, was reduced to going through the motions with a dog. It didn’t help when, hoping to clarify the bizarre situation, she found herself saying, ‘It’s all right. I’ve just taken him to the dentist.’

  Perhaps the most extraordinary thing he ever did was following one Sunday dinner when only my brother, my sister and I remained at the kitchen table. Sharon and Michael got into a furious argument over one of the more rarefied subjects ever to divide siblings – the exact positions in which people had frozen after the volcano eruption at Pompeii. It all started happily enough with the pair of them coming up with various postures and saying, ‘Some people died like this,’ or ‘Some people died like that.’ I can remember giggling like crazy as my brother and sister struck attitudes similar to those Madonna would re-invent as ‘vogueing’ a quarter of a century down the line. It began to turn ugly though when Mike got up from the table, bent over, held his ankles, looked back at us through his legs and said, ‘Some people died like this.’ Sharon said they couldn’t have and that he wasn’t taking the game seriously. Michael replied that he’d seen it in a history book and that they might have been tying their shoelaces when they heard the explosion and became engulfed while looking back to see what it was. Other explanations for such a pose are available, of course, but it was the 1960s and we were all quite young. Anyway, Sharon pointed out that people didn’t have shoelaces then and Mike changed his argument to cover sandal-like footwear in general, and suddenly the noise of Vesuvius was as nothing compared to the racket under way in our kitchen (or scullery, as it was usually called). All this time Blackie had been sitting in the doorway, waiting for any titbits from the Sunday roast to be put his way. As the volume reached near hysterical levels, the dog stood, got up on to his back legs, reached the open door handle with one paw and then slowly walked backwards into the passage outside. He had simply heard enough and had closed the door on us. He had never done this before and never did it again, but the absolute disdain with which he backed out of the room, closing that door behind him, killed the argument stone dead and, yes, froze everyone as solidly as the ancient Pompeians.

  Now he was gone and we spent much of that sad day rooting through old boxes and handbags, trying to find any photos we had that included him. To be fair, we actually had very few photos of anybody at all and I am always both amazed and a little jealous of anybody that has a proper visual record of their childhood. In all, I calculate there are perhaps twenty family photographs at most covering the five Baker family members from 1950 to 1970. There are none of me as a baby and only three of me before the age of five – one of these taken by the school. Then there’s another gap and I’m not sighted again till the age of about eleven. Images of family members are far outnumbered by poor and baffling photos of windmills and fields and streams and sheep and church spires. And water. Looking back through the few bundles of 1960s pictures I have been able to locate, it is as if there isn’t a river bend in the Norfolk Broads that Dad didn’t document. Not once did it ever occur to us to stand in the foreground. Perhaps, like the Beatles, I was sporting a splendid moustache in 1967 – there is absolutely no solid evidence one way or the other.

  After moping around the house all day, I caught the bus up to the West End to see if anything was going on at Sniffin’ Glue. When I arrived, I found the place was crawling with Americans – and happening ones, too. Their top-grade leather jackets, shirts of outlandish and striking design and even patterned sneakers spoke of New York in the best possible terms. On top of this, I couldn’t help but notice that one of them was probably the most stunning woman I had ever laid eyes on. During our introductions, I suddenly figured out who these people were – I had their terrific first record – and now I felt like I had just emerged from a manhole in the floor with a straw between my teeth. They were Blondie, they said, in town for some UK dates, and they had actually sought us out to get the drop on what was happening.

  Hearing this, Mark and I exchanged a glance. This could be tricky. London punk was not like New York. Over there, the scene seemed to be driven by a focused, literate, arty crowd who networked through a series of ultra-cool loft spaces and vital nightclubs, exchanging heated views on what was happening in terms of both form and context before disseminating the results out on to the streets in brilliantly designed newspapers edited by Andy Warhol. I could only really offer the news that the London scene was a bit quiet at the minute because my dog had just died. They wanted to know where the Pistols were. We said we didn’t know. Sandra downstairs might know, but she had had a cold on Friday and so might not be coming in. Were The Clash likely to drop by? No. Okay, so where was cool to hang out during the day? Again something of a grey area, given that we usually sat around Dryden Chambers reading the NME. If someone had a couple of quid we might go to the café in St Anne’s Court for egg and chips, or possibly a pint in the Nellie Dean. You could wait until the Vortex Club opened at nine, but all the groups scheduled to appear there that evening
were really terrible – hello Bethnal, Menace and Bernie Torme! – and there’d usually be a fight in any case.

  Blondie received all these hot bulletins with the appropriate excitement. Then Chris Stein asked, ‘You’re Danny, right?’ Whoa! He’d taken my name on board. ‘Yeah, uh, Seymour Stein and John Gillespie said to say hi.’ Once more the old record shop connections had come through. A few months earlier I had met another New York band, Talking Heads, and I now played that card. Turned out they knew Lester Bangs too. So now we had a little rapport going. I remember it was a very crisp and sunny day outside, and after a while Debbie Harry asked where she could get some good shoes. I felt like saying, ‘Look at me, Debbie. If I knew where to get good anything would I be dressed like this?’ But instead I told her that South Molton Street was always a good start and offered to show her the way.

  Thus, within forty-eight hours I had jumped off a Clash tour, buried my genius dog and was now shoe-shopping with a very chatty Debbie Harry. She bought me a bacon sandwich too. Before they left to rehearse their act, the whole band signed a copy of their album for me, complete with goofy doodles and vampire teeth additions. That night I used it as a goalpost during a kick-about with my mates up on Blackheath and when the game ended left it by accident in a nearby pub called the Hare and Billet. Today, whenever a Blondie song comes on the radio or they feature in some TV clip show, my first thought is who has that annotated LP now.

  In the retelling, all of this possibly sounds like a pretty jumping couple of days for me and yet my immediate reaction is that it was Blackie the Genius Dog who was far and away the most memorable of the protagonists. It’s only as the legends of the principal players grow that these incidents parlay up into something worthwhile. The best example I can give you of this comes via a question that I love to have people ask me. In fact, I will insist they put it to me, because the answer is so delicious. Here goes: if you ever bump into me, do tug my coat and ask if I’ve ever met Madonna. My answer? I don’t know. I think so. I love being able to say that.

  The reason I can is because in the very early 1980s I was in New York and Seymour Stein held a big company dinner at a Chinese restaurant somewhere near Gramercy Park. It seemed like most of the people on Sire Records were there, one of whom was almost certainly the new Sire signing Madonna Ciccone. I might have even sat opposite her, but who knew she would soon become the Dorothy Squires of the blank generation? Doubtless I chatted to her about the NME, and there’s every likelihood that I passed her some beef in oyster sauce at some point, but can I be 100 per cent sure? Not really. That said, can her future biographers get by without my noodle-sharing bombshells? Well, they are pretty obsessive, these people . . .

  Seemingly uneventful as I believed life was in 1977, it was still fun and reckless and was working beautifully as a distraction before any of us had to look down the cannon-barrel of proper employment. The shove forward in my own momentum came in two separate kicks up the bum, courtesy of a pair of established champions of punk rock.

  The first was Janet Street Porter. Janet has a deserved reputation for noisily cheerleading any new movement that has a chance of annoying the rest of her peers, and from 1976–77 she wrote countless articles and made many TV shows in order to catapult punk into the faces of what she considered to be the sleeping slug-like masses. When it came Sniffin’ Glue’s turn to stand in front of her cameras, I once again hurtled down the lens like a howitzer shell. I had absolutely no idea that that performance would be in any way helpful to me beyond the thirty-pound fee Mark and I were given for our time.

  The other boost came in an almost casual aside from Tony Parsons of the New Musical Express. We were on tour in the West Country with, I think, the US bands Television and Talking Heads. Between several ferocious, eye-watering lines of speed, Tony asked me if I had ever thought about writing for the NME. Thought about it? I’d been standing there theatrically coughing and pointing to my chest every time I’d met anyone even remotely connected with the paper. I could think of nothing I’d rather do with my life. So, of course, now that the opportunity was being laid before me, I bottled right out.

  ‘Nah, I wouldn’t fit in there, Tone,’ I said, hoping he’d argue otherwise. ‘They want proper writing up there. Ours is more guerrilla stuff, independent. I couldn’t fit in a big system like that, y’know.’

  I think he saw right through the jittery bluff. ‘Well, we’ve just moved to Carnaby Street and I know we need someone proper on reception – not a secretary type but someone cool to deal with all the nutcases we get in off the street. I think they’d bite your hand off. Street cred and all that. You could still write for Glue . . .’

  That sounded very plausible. To be at the NME, to be part of the NME, to observe the NME but not have to deliver anything that might expose me to the NME. Oh I could see that, all right. I told him to float the idea to his editor. At that exact same time, way over in Los Angeles, Michael Jackson was busy preparing his album Off the Wall, a record that would truly unleash his legend on the world. And somewhere in the zeitgeist, both of our lifelines suddenly leaned toward each other in a barely discernible twitch.

  However there were still a few more punk-rock battles to be waged before I would move on to that magical phase. Very soon after my talk with Tony, despite the impressive odds against such a thing happening again, I once again found myself in a nightclub where the half-crazed punters wanted to kill me.

  All Shook Up

  The second time that a baying mob got together and demanded my head on a pike it might be argued that I brought it upon myself. Halfway through the night at the Vortex, during one of the seemingly endless number of reggae twelve-inches that punk DJs always insisted on bombarding their punters with – something that has acted like aversion therapy on me about the music ever since – the dub abruptly stopped and an unexpectedly chirpy voice boomed out through the PA. ‘Just to let you know everyone. Just heard that Elvis Presley is dead!’ And the whole place cheered. Cheered! And cheered in such a yowling, slack-jawed cauliflower-minded lynch mob way that I knew I was done with this pin-headed punk rock forever. Cheering the death of Elvis Presley, which by any calculation was a terrific shock, simply because you’d read somewhere that punks ‘don’t like nuffing, like’ struck me as false force-fed bullshit right out of the top drawer. As the giggling thick-headed drunks and weedy misfit bozos asininely clinked beer glasses in celebration of their own retarded world view, I made my way toward the empty stage like a locomotive.

  I grabbed the mic and began to harangue the assembled boneheads in a way that I fancy even a punk rock crowd weren’t used to hearing. I called them all Neanderthals, drones and wankers. I accused them all of being bandwagon-jumping, kneejerk shit-for-brains who had bought into cookie-cutter cartoon nihilism the same way the Daily Mirror had ordered it. Any name you can conjure up, I was firing at them. And I was still warming to this theme when the first bottle hit me. This strike was such a success among the temporarily stunned mass that within half a second everyone else was opening fire like it was the latest craze.

  Amazingly it was yet another punk singer that rode to my rescue, this time Jimmy Pursey, who had been under siege with me at that Brummie Alamo, now bundling me safely toward the wings and taking a fair few bottles to the noggin for his trouble. Once offstage, I was livid and shaking. ‘Those ponces!’ I kept repeating. ‘Those idiot ponces! It’s fucking finished, this. Finished! Fuck the lot of ’em! Elvis Presley – what the fuck do they know about Elvis Presley other than what the paper’s tell ’em!?’ I was fairly hyperventilating by now as the uproar continued to play out on the club floor. Suddenly an arm grabbed me around my neck – but this didn’t feel like a fresh assault, more like a squeeze of brotherhood. When the embrace stopped, I stepped back and there was John Peel, tears absolutely streaming down his face. He could barely talk. When he did, he thanked me for ‘getting up there’ and said he too now felt like a stranger in a strange land.

  ‘Fucking baboons, J
ohn. Fucking cretins and baboons!’ I rumbled on, not quite matching his depth of moment. We came together again and I then strode furiously out of the seething, whooping disgrace of a nightspot. I left by the ‘artists only’ back door though – I wasn’t completely round the bend.

  True to our word, Sniffin’ Glue magazine died the same month as Elvis Presley. Actually when I say ‘our’ word, it was Mark’s call to actually finish the magazine while its sales were threatening to go global and just as advertisers were clamouring for pages to feature their latest punk signings. In truth, he had not been a part of the fanzine for quite a few issues and had really been making a go of it with his group Alternative TV. It was announced that the last issue of Sniffin’ Glue would use every one of the four hundred or so advertising pounds we, apparently, had in the bank to record an ATV single and, in a farewell gesture, give it away free with the magazine.

  Stylistically, SG itself was still pretty much the same A4 photocopied amateur hour it had been that summer day a little over a year previously when Mark had called round to have me check it out. It was a little thicker now, a modicum slicker in attitude, but still basically a Deptford bedroom fanzine. With the boom in its sales and reputation though, this ‘street’ style was getting a harder pose to pull off, even if actually putting it together remained a decidedly grassroots affair, made more arduous as its popularity exploded. Back when we sold only a few hundred of the thing, laying out its individual pages across a big desk and then trekking along taking one of each before stapling them together at the corner was no real hardship. But by the time we were printing up 12,000 copies of Sniffin’ Glue such a primitive method of collation needed many hands, much amphetamine – and still took up half the night. Then there was the editorial itself. The bigger bands now had to be approached through their press offices, who would always take Sounds or Melody Maker over us, while more and more stuff about the groups we had on our own labels strangely found plenty of space within. Mark had actually seen through his golden escape route from Nat West long before the end and had famously declared, ‘Punk died the day The Clash signed with CBS.’ By now that band were working on their second LP for the American corporate.