Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography

by Baker, Danny

  So, hey-ho, punk was dead, but somehow the nation soldiered on. A bigger personal impact in the Baker household came when my father announced that he would be leaving the docks after more than a quarter of a century ‘down the hold’. At the time, dockworkers were being offered what appeared to be attractive severance packages to quit their jobs. When this sum rose to £4,000, my dad buckled. ‘The game’s over, Bet,’ he told my mum. ‘I better grab it now before they withdraw the offer.’ And so he did. And then watched aghast over the next eighteen months as the severance figure rose to£11,000. The party that he threw to mark his departure, along with two other dockers who had also signed away their livelihoods, was about the most sumptuous all-day food-and-drink binge I have ever attended. It was held in the Adam and Eve pub in Rotherhithe and the trio must have had about fourpence ha’penny left between them once the bill came in. Every docker in London past and present had somehow crammed in to salute their fiery former union leader, and I was burning with pride as they told story after story about what it was like to work with the old man.

  At one point Dad disappeared for a short while and then came marching back into the pub in the smart black uniform of the Corps of Commissionaires, complete with white sash and shiny peaked hat. On cue, the landlord of the boozer put on a raucous tape of the song ‘We Are the Soldiers of the Queen, My Lads’ and Dad strode round and round the place for its full duration, accompanied by deafening rhythmic clapping and endless salty heckles. It was a magnificent moment and I knew that, no matter what I did, I could never be the performer Freddie Baker was. He just seemed to give off a life force in waves.

  I’d had no prior warning of his uniform stunt and, though he looked every bit like an official security man, thought it was intended ironically. It wasn’t. It transpired a lot of ex-dockers were being employed to sit on the front desks of new skyscrapers that were shooting up all over the City. Soon these giant corporations would engulf the very ground that London’s mighty docks had once occupied. That big business was initially paying ex-dockers to protect their premises now seems grimly ironic. But how had Dad got a job with the august and totally respectable CoC? As I understood it, at the very least, you had to have a clean criminal record and a spotless army discharge, and Fred was batting zero for two on that count. True to form, he had secured the position because someone knew someone who knew another bloke who could, for a score, sort something out with the references and paperwork. Thus, barely a week after making what he soon referred to as ‘the biggest mistake of my life bar none’ he found himself sitting at front reception of some faceless glass monolith in EC1. My dad, the security guard. He lasted just under three weeks. The first warning he was given – or perhaps he gave them – is, I feel, a most empowering story.

  As he saw it, one of the more humbling duties he was required to perform was to take any hand-delivered mail that came into reception directly to the recipient. ‘Let ’em come and get their own fucking letters,’ was his take on the service. Delivering one such package to a first-floor desk one day, he put the thing down in front of some hotshot in his twenties and was in the act of turning to walk away when he heard, ‘Hang on – you! This isn’t for me. I don’t know who it is for, but that’s not me, okay? And could you put anything that is for me in my pigeonhole in future – you nearly knocked coffee all over everything there.’ And without even looking up, he held out the package for Dad to take away. Pausing for a deep breath, Dad took the proffered envelope and went back down in the lift.

  Having brooded about what had happened for approximately thirty seconds, he then went back upstairs again. Calling from the office doorway he said, ‘Excuse me – can I have a word with you?’ The chap indicated that he could. ‘No,’ said Dad, ‘out here, away from these young girls.’ Baffled but intrigued, the man walked to the lift area where Fred was waiting. In Dad’s own words, this is what happened next:

  ‘I got hold of him by the fucking collar and I said, “Listen to me, you little cunt, I’ve got a son older than you, and if you ever fucking dare speak to me like that again I’m going to chuck you straight out that fucking window. Got it?”’

  The hotshot whimpered to the effect that my dad had gone mad.

  ‘No, I’m not mad. I was when you said it, but I controlled myself. I’m calm now – and lucky for you, or else they’d be scraping you, ya little ponce, off the pavement outside. All right?’

  Apparently it was. That afternoon my father was given a warning about his behaviour, to which he’d replied, ‘Well, you can warn me all you like, but I’m telling ya, I know how we’d have dealt with saucy fuckers like that in the docks. So we’ve both been warned, all right?’

  Two weeks later Dad was ‘let go’ from security, and indeed drummed out of the Corps, after a large amount of copper was reported missing from some works going on in the basement and it was decided that this wouldn’t have happened if my dad had secured the area before leaving. Or indeed, if he hadn’t told his mates where the copper was. Somehow, the City survived the loss.

  Coincidentally, just across the river, another high-rise office building was evicting its own noisy troublemaker. In a move whose folly was only surpassed by its sheer optimism, the NME had been given a berth on the twenty-fifth floor of King’s Reach Tower, the giant Thameside phallus that housed virtually every magazine title published under the IPC umbrella. Quite how they could have thought this psychedelic pirate ship full of renegade druggies and genuine rabble-rousers might co-exist alongside such ‘straight’ fare as Woman’s Own, Yachting Monthly and Horse and Hound is anyone’s guess, but the arrangement was proving disastrous. In the express lifts each day there was simply no middle ground between the diligent, staid office commuters and a shifty amalgam of twitching freaks that resembled a prototype casting session for Withnail and I.

  Things came to a head – though thankfully not literally – when following one particularly frustrating attempt to create gonzo journalism amid conformist surroundings, veteran anarchist Mick Farren hurled his typewriter through one of the enormous King’s Reach windows, where it plummeted about three miles straight down before exploding into jagged alphabet splinters on a second-storey parapet. Legend has it that Charles Shaar Murray, always a fellow of the driest wit, allowed the last few tinkling glass shards to fall from the frame before calmly saying, ‘New Stones album as bad as that, eh, Mick?’

  Even before this notable defenestration IPC executives had expressed alarm about the growing effect the paper was having on its environment, most lately concerning the modifications newly arrived writers Tony Parson and Julie Burchill had made to their workspace. Appalled that the open-plan design of the place meant they might be mistaken for, and even have to have to fraternize with, the ‘desperate skinny hippies’ that constituted the rest of their NME colleagues, Tony and Julie had built what they called the Kinderbunker right there in the centre of Floor 25. This was a striking, foreboding steam-punk pillbox barricaded with all manner of barriers, hangings and mounted broken glass that completely shielded them from the outside world. I was allowed inside the Kinderbunker, but I don’t think many were. The older members of the paper – and they would have only been in their late twenties – had their own and far more communal version of this encampment in the record review room – a windowless, soundproofed cubbyhole within which each day a carpet of dope the size of Malta was smoked.

  Up until the typewriter-launching escapade IPC had tolerated all the NME’s wild eccentricities because the paper made just about the biggest profits in the entire organization. Now, though, they had had enough of this dysfunctional child running through their house waving scissors and decided to find it a new home far enough away for comfort yet close enough to still keep sending home those lovely cheques. And where better for a peppy hot pop magazine than swinging Carnaby Street? Of course, Carnaby Street hadn’t so much as twitched let alone swung in over a decade, but the new NME HQ on the third floor of numbers 5–7 carried an air of secrecy and inde
pendence that perfectly satisfied the crazies. Or should I say ‘we crazies’, because soon after the NME set up its circus in the centre of town, I came home from the treacherous wastelands of punky self-employment and signed on as the new King of Reception – and I was determined to be at least 30 per cent better at it than my old man.

  My Carnaby Street reception den was a small, low-lit annexe arrived at through a pair of battered blue swing doors outside a clattering 1950s elevator. Beyond my new lair, a single exit led either along a small corridor which housed the kitchen, a cramped photo library and ultimately the editor’s office, or else, turning right, expelled you out into the main writers room, a waspish cauldron of rock gossip and argument. People have described the atmosphere at the NME to be either an intimidating, unforgiving, supercilious courtroom, or else an exhilarating, wise-cracking latter-day Algonquin. From the moment I accepted the greeter’s post I not only decided on the latter but was determined to one day crank up its overheated reputation by several more degrees.

  The new NME office was approximately five minutes’ walk from Dean Street, where my old record shop had operated, and so once again the number 1 bus was my daily chariot to the heart of the hoopla. And what unimaginable hoopla was waiting in store. If I had stopped to consider my life thus far I would have doubtless judged it an unconventional barrel of surprises, liberally laced with enough spicy characters and peculiar situations to see me well fuelled through the anecdotal decades to come. Even if events now settled down into a regular pattern of everyday work, rest and play, I could always look back to my teens and say, well, at least I kicked up some sparks there. How could I possibly know that, in terms of life as a firework display, I hadn’t even got the rockets out of the box yet.

  I suppose the key benefit of working in the legitimate music press in the seventies and eighties was, oh, I don’t know, probably that it magnificently sated your every hope, wish and desire. You pretty much kept your own working hours. You worked alongside some of the smartest minds and funniest mouths of the day. You got ridiculous amounts of free records, often with promotional gifts attached. You were given the best seats at sold-out concerts. You got to tour with obvious up-and-coming geniuses, as well as experiencing the insane pandemonium of a major act on the road. You attended launch parties, post-gig bashes and backstage hoo-hars. Best of all, record companies were desperate to fly you anywhere from New York City to Caracas, Venezuela in order that you might hang out and have a chat with one of their star turns. I was twenty years old and, call me a sentimental old fluff, but that sort of simple life just appealed to me.

  For now though I was simply the kid on the front desk. No one was going to pay me to fly out to LA to sort mail and answer the phones. I shared the reception area with two women a little older than I was called Val and Fiona. They generally typed, filed, organized and attended to all the small details of the working rock’n’roll day without which the entire NME would have collapsed in on itself like the house at the end of Poltergeist. I made them laugh a lot – initially because I had absolutely no idea how to operate the switchboard. You’d have thought this might be a required skill in a receptionist for the world’s biggest-selling music weekly, but I knew I’d actually been hired because I was a punk from the notorious Sniffin’ Glue fanzine, which was far more important to the paper. The switchboard had twenty lines on it, indicated by twenty flashing bulbs and around fifty short extension switches that enabled you to re-route calls to whatever desk was needed. There were no names next to these switches, you just had to learn the pattern of the office layout and know which bell to fire up. I soon invented a better system. If a call came in for, say, Ian MacDonald – now recognized as one of the most influential writers of the period – I would walk to the door of the main office and shout out, ‘Ian, phone for ya.’ He would ask where and, walking back to the switchboard, I would ring one of the fifty extensions at random. Whatever phone rang, Ian picked up. This system worked because the NME wasn’t the sort of place where anyone sat at their desk much anyway. People perched, stood around and gathered in groups. The office more resembled a barracks than a functioning workplace. I was forever cutting people off too. This wasn’t intentional, but the switches on the board had three settings: Off, Connect and Hold. I simply couldn’t work that out and would honestly dread the frosty calls that always began, ‘Hello, I am the manager of the Moody Blues. I have been trying to speak with Steve Clarke, but I’ve been cut off three times. Now is there anybody else there who can help me?’ And I would apologize profusely, say I’ll just get him – and promptly cut the poor bastard off again. In frustration, I would then lift the entire switchboard up a few inches and drop it again to teach it a lesson.

  What I did bring to the party was a certain crackpot style that I think people expected of the paper. I began finding colourful ways to greet callers, rather than a terse, if useful, ‘Hello, NME.’ I might say, ‘Yup – City Morgue. You stab ’em, we slab ’em.’ Or, ‘Hello, WKTU! We Play All the Hits!’ Or the evergreen, ‘Congratulations, you are the one hundredth caller – where do you want the car delivered?’ Many times readers would be calling up to get clarification about something, or even to complain to somebody, but could barely hide their nervousness in contacting such an awesome institution as the NME. I frequently misjudged how robust one could be with such people in thinking they would get a kick from my act. The conversation might go something like this.

  ‘Hello, NME – we’re having a fire sale, get ’em while they’re hot!’

  ‘Yes, hello? Hello. I’m just an ordinary reader . . .’

  ‘Ha! So, a sap in other words.’

  ‘I’m sorry? Well, look last week you ran an article saying the new album by The Enid was scraping the bottom of the barrel . . .’

  ‘I think you’ll find we said it should be nailed down into a barrel and sent over Niagara Falls, but go on . . .’

  ‘Yes, well, anyway, I’m a big fan of the band and think there’s actually some really interesting things on it.’

  ‘Then brush them off and run it under the tap.’

  ‘Can I speak to the reviewer – it was Tony Stewart.’

  ‘Do you have any money?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Tony Stewart is a fiver. I can let you speak to Julie Burchill for three quid. Or Angus MacKinnon for six pounds fifty, but he is terribly engaging.’

  ‘No look, I just want to speak with Tony Stewart. About his Enid review.’

  I would then lower my voice. ‘I wouldn’t, mate. He killed the last person to question his reviews. Beat him to death with a pool cue.’

  Now sometimes people laughed and sometimes people swore and hung up. The point is, I see now that the reception job was really my first ever phone-in show, albeit performing for one person at a time.

  Beyond all the high jinks and bravado though, being first in every day and then watching as this parade of, what still seemed to me, giants of the culture floated through the door in dribs and drabs was the paramount thrill. I still inwardly marvelled that they knew me by my first name, that they would sometimes ask if I’d heard a certain band. Within days I even started to insist I go to the pub with them, where I not only held my own among the fusillade of sharpened opinions but, ever so gradually, started to get the loudest laughs. Val and Fiona would cover for me during these sessions and I tried never to take advantage of that. Besides, I would always bring them back a sandwich and a cake and, with a couple of beers under the belt, my afternoon performances at the switchboard became even more flamboyant.

  Phil Collins once rang up absolutely incandescent about something somebody had written about him the previous week. He didn’t want to speak to anyone specifically, and just unburdened his ire in my direction, but seemed rather taken aback as I started agreeing with him.

  ‘They can be right ponces up here, Phil,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t have it either, if I were you. See, their trouble is they can’t play anything themselves, so they go after t
hem that can.’

  Phil concurred with this and even started quoting slights he recalled from years back. Pretty soon, he and I were calling each other ‘sister’ and discussing where we might get the best deal on some petrol and a box of matches to burn the whole place down. All during this various members of staff started drifting back from the Sun and 13 Cantons and as they entered I would say, ‘Here’s that Charles Shaar Murray now – he’s another one. Charlie, Phil Collins wants to have a go at you, take the phone!’ Charlie would then pull a face and leg it to his desk. ‘See, he won’t do it, Phil. Cowards, the lot of them!’ Oh, I was having terrific fun, and Val and Fiona were choking with giggles over their liver sausage and tomato rolls.

  Nick Kent – just about the biggest name in rock journalism and better known than most rock stars – was a nice man but a very bad junkie. Nick was as thin as a rasher of wind – ‘elegantly wasted’ was the agreed term – and had dressed in the same all-leather outfit since about 1971. The trousers to this ensemble had long since perished at the crotch and Nick’s notably long testicles hung visibly in the gloom like the weights on a grandfather clock. One day he stood jabbering at me in reception – you only had to shout ‘Iggy Pop’ and Nick would be good for about fifteen minutes of gossip and opinion – and his old knackers were once more taking the breeze. ‘Nick,’ I said, ‘for fuck’s sake, there are women present. And Val and Fiona.’ V&F laughed off my little gag and said it was okay, they’d seen Nick’s nuts many, many times before. ‘I don’t care, I’m not having it,’ I said. ‘Buy yourself a pair of pants, you mad bastard.’ Nick seemed suddenly petrified and his wild eyes betrayed a paranoia that far outweighed the moment. You really shouldn’t wind up people when they’re strung out.