by Baker, Danny
‘I. . .I. . .I. . .’ the drugs made Nick semi-coherent at the best of times. ‘I. . .I. . .I. . .pants?’
‘Yes, pants,’ I said.
His face seemed to betray that he was trying to recall the word and its meaning from some far-off other life.
‘I’ve got, I’ve these, I’ve. . .I’ve. . .’
And I promise you, right in the middle of his fumbling for words a light on the switchboard came on and it was Nick Kent’s mother on the line. Now, as the conduit for all remote conversations in and out of the NME I had a short list from all the writers of who I should always put straight through and the others who were to be put off at all costs. Nick Kent only had one request on his list and that was ‘UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES LET MY MOTHER KNOW WHERE I AM’. I could always tell when it was Dear Mother K calling because she had a sweet mum’s voice and would always ask to speak with ‘Nicholas Benedict Kent’. I had lied about her son not being there on countless occasions, but this time I said, ‘Yes, Mrs Kent, he is here. In fact, he’s standing right in front of me. Nick – it’s your mum.’
Well, Nick’s facial features seemed to go into shuffle mode at this. Here was a man who had survived nights in some of the most notorious drug dens in London and who held a swaggering rock’n’roll reputation a notch or so beneath Keith Richards’, yet faced with a call from his mother he reacted as a vampire to sunlight.
I went further. ‘Mrs Kent, he’s got no pants on and a lot of young girls work up here. Send him some, will you?’
She chuckled and said, ‘He does rather let himself go.’ Anyone who knew Nick at the time will applaud this magnificent example of British understatement. Meanwhile, Nick put his hands to his head and looked like he might bolt from the room, but instead he strode into the main office and picked up the phone I was ringing. ‘Yeah, yeah, uh, hi, Mum, yeah, how’s things?’ I heard him begin.
‘You are rotten,’ said Fiona, laughing. ‘But I do feel sorry for her sometimes . . .’
Ten minutes later, Nick was back, balls still proudly on the under card and picking up his point about Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton as though nothing had happened.
‘How was your mum?’ I said eventually.
‘Oh, you know, okay,’ he chirped, a bit bewildered by the enquiry. ‘I don’t speak to her enough, actually. But please don’t ever put her through.’ I genuinely think he’d already forgotten I just had.
Indecent exposure aside, Nick Kent’s other great eccentricity was that he couldn’t type and so wrote his intense and these days university-studied three-to-five-thousand-word dissertations completely longhand and upon anything that happened to be about. Once, when the muse struck Nick while he was, as usual, ‘crashing’ at a friend’s house, he penned one of his huge think pieces on the reverse side of a cornflakes box that he had opened up and flattened out. He would typically bundle into the NME at about six in the evening on the day the paper was being sent to the printers and after most others had gone home. He would then take his cornflake packet or series of envelopes or kitchen roll to Wendy, the editor’s secretary and best typist in the office, and ask if it was at all possible that she could stick around for a bit and make sense of the scrawl he now thrust toward her. Oh, and it wasn’t actually finished yet, but if she would pass him some paper, or an old tissue from the bin, he would do that now. And there he would sit, his bony leather-clad arm extending all around the page so that the broken biro in his claw-like hand created each legendary paragraph from the top of the sheet downwards. Nick’s very sweet nature and pleading eyes would always swing this, driven by his desperation to know that the money for next week’s fixes had to be guaranteed. Each time it happened, Wendy would resignedly sigh, take her coat back off, remove the cover from her Olivetti, and oblige the most famous rock writer in Britain with some free overtime. But then Wendy would do that. She loves a lost cause. So much so that she later married me. We have been together now for thirty-one years.
Feels Like Home to Me
In 1978, if you had wanted to get in on the exciting video boom then sweeping the country but lacked the funds to buy one of these new wonder machines, I know where you could have got one for free. There was a Philips N1500 sitting right next to the big rubbish bins in Debnams Road, SE16. It was still in good working order but had now been so superseded by new technology that it may as well have been a lump of rock and a chisel. The reason it was waiting for the dustmen was that after two decades in Debnams Road I was moving out and my parents had no intention of giving house space to ‘this monstrosity’. ‘I’m tossing it out,’ declared the old man, ‘It’ll be nice to have some space back in the front room – can fit a fuckin’ double-decker bus where that was.’ Hamish never did get his two hundred quid for it either.
My flight from the nest had come about pretty quickly, following a friend of mine taking advantage of the ‘sons and daughters’ scheme then being offered by most London councils, which allowed offspring of existing council tenants to get a flat of their own for a ludicrously low rent as soon as they reached voting age. My mate Sebast (real name Steve) had seized upon this and was informed by the council that if he could find three others to share with him there was a big old four-bedroom drum in Camberwell ready for occupation. The rent was £20 a week. Not each – between us. Sebast and I decided to have some of this and, joined by George (real name Mick) and Lonk (real name John), we began living independently for the first time. I was the youngest of we four rough-and-ready blokes at twenty, Lonk the eldest at a statesman-like twenty-two. You can imagine the style and splendour in which we lived.
I had only been at the flat a few days when the most peculiar incident occurred. I was sitting at the NME reception one afternoon when, rather startlingly, I had someone asking to be put through to Danny Baker. He said he was calling from the Daily Express and, in a nutshell, told me that they were always looking for people to feed their William Hickey gossip column with tittle-tattle and somebody had told him that I was in a good position to furnish such juice. I couldn’t figure this out. Firstly, newspapers then weren’t at all interested in the machinations of the pop world, and secondly, even if they had been, I was hardly the rock’n’roll equivalent of Hugh Hefner. However, this man was insistent that we could forge a relationship, mentioned there being money in it, and asked if he could come and see me to discuss it further. I gave him my new address in Camberwell and he said he would be there the very next morning. Who on earth did he think I was?
Now the term ‘morning’ is a very loose one in a house with four young blokes in situ, particularly a Saturday morning, which this one was. ‘Morning’ for us usually arrived tentatively at about the time Grandstand got under way at midday, so it was a tetchy Sebast who stood over me in his pants at 8.30, shaking my shoulder, saying, ‘Wake up, Dan. There’s some bloke at the door. Says he’s from a paper. Didn’t you hear all the knocking?’ I hadn’t of course, and as Sebast disappeared back into his pit I shuffled up the passage, in my pants, to face the mystery man at our door.
‘Danny Baker?’ he said, way too brightly. ‘May I come in? I’ve a very interesting offer for you!’
Groggily, I showed him into the front room with an apology that we hadn’t had a chance to clear up yet. In fact it looked like nobody had had a chance to clear it up since VE night, but he found a space to sit down and, still in my boxers, I plonked myself down opposite him, all ears.
He then began a rambling explanation of how his newspaper wanted very much to start feeding more and more pop gossip into their pages and how they were building up a network of sources who might help with this, and how I, both at my current job and, actually, because of my previous ones, had sort of topped their list of wagging tongues to recruit. I was still totally in the dark. I had my Mick-Jones-of-The-Clash-Dries-His-Hair-Like-a-Lady thing but, to be honest, that didn’t strike me as much of a splash.
‘I only really know a few punk rockers,’ I offered weakly, but this chap seemed to have done a bit of d
igging around.
‘Well hang on,’ he said, and he edged closer to me, ‘what about this record shop you worked in?’
‘Wow! You know about that?’ I beamed. ‘Ah now, there you were dealing with proper big stars. Yes, that was when you should have tapped me up!’ I was genuinely impressed he knew about One Stop and became quite animated, possibly displaying the full Nick Kent in the process.
‘Yes, those are more like the people our readers would like to hear about. Who was it you met there?’
‘Well, you name it. Er . . . Marc Bolan, Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart—’
‘Elton John.’ He interrupted with great purpose.
‘Ah yes, now then, Elton I do know pretty well,’ I barked, puffing myself right up. ‘Yes, Elton John is a proper mate.’
‘Yes . . . so I understand,’ he almost purred in a satisfied tone. ‘In fact, you lived with him for a couple of years, right?’
I found myself expelling a noise somewhere between What, Where and Why.
Almost on cue, Sebast, unable to get back to sleep and still in just a little pair of boxer shorts, walked into the room holding a coffee mug.
I could almost see our guest thinking, ‘Oh, I’m at the right place here. A nest!’
‘Lived with Elton John?’ I eventually managed to gasp.
The hack, now having pretty much torn off the false beard and abandoning his cover story, nodded back with a conspiratorial raising of his eyebrows.
‘Sebast,’ I said, as drily as I could, ‘when did I live with Elton John?’
‘Dunno,’ he deadpanned helpfully, ‘about three years ago now, wasn’t it?’
I stared at our visitor hard.
‘Elton John?’ I managed falteringly once more. ‘You mean, like as in Elton John?’
He said he did, although this time even his words came with a timbre of definite retreat.
‘But I’ve only just moved out from me mum’s.’
The Sahara-like sandstorm going on inside my head must have started to become visible because he now seemed to internally collapse, succumbing to the fact he had been sold a full pup and pooper-scooper.
‘Actually, I think I’ve been given some duff information here,’ he said, with as much of a smile as he could muster. ‘I think someone’s been sending me up.’
At this point Lonk, hearing the early morning voices, walked into the front room to see what was up. At least he was wearing trousers.
‘Lonk, this bloke’s been told Dan lived with Elton John for two years!’ said Sebast triumphantly.
It was something in the way Lonk simply glanced my way and said ‘Him?’ while continuing to stir his tea that seemed to clinch it for the drowning reporter.
‘Yeah, well, look, sorry about this, but I’ve obviously got some wires crossed,’ he snapped rising from the chair. ‘I think some old friends of yours have been having fun with both of us.’
Here’s what I later pieced together. During this period in the late seventies Elton John had been doing a lot of boosting for the Labour Party, including some hefty financial donations. With talk of an election on the way it would discredit both Elton and Labour if a lurid gay kiss-and-tell could be unearthed to splash all over the tabloids. The Express, a leading and then still credible drummer for the Tory cause, thought they had landed the big one when, after making enquiries about the superstar among his beloved – and very loyal – South Molton Street circle, they had been playfully pointed in the direction of possibly the only straight male to have worked on the road in the last twenty years. I never found out who actually put my name into the brew, but I suspect it was Robert, the manager at Brown’s, who had always found my heterosexuality endlessly amusing. Whoever it was, I must say it was a terrific idea and it suckered in the old smelly-socks scribblers hook, line and sinker.
There was one little arrow still left in the quiver though.
As the man from the Express left, he looked around our shabby tip and said, ‘Shame, you know. I’ve got a blank cheque from Beaverbrook Newspapers in my pocket. I could have gone to fifteen grand for you.’
Naturally at this all three of us started shouting ‘Oh, THAT Elton John!’ and suddenly remembering long hot summer nights spooning with the Rocket Man as the sun went down. The hack grinned sourly and toddled off.
The following Monday I called Gary Farrow at Elton’s Rocket Records in Mayfair to alert him to the squalid machinations taking place along Fleet Street. Less than a day later, a case of champagne arrived for me at the NME. A case! Taped to it was a tiny envelope with a handwritten note within.
Dear Danny! it read. So sorry about the Express thing. You know they’re ALL cunts, don’t you? Love Elton.
I stuck that card into some wet paint on my bedroom wall up at the flat. I did this quite a lot because I hadn’t the faintest idea or skills when it came to interior decoration. If I wanted to put a poster up I would repaint a section of the wall and press the artwork to it. My biggest flop was with a magnificent eight-feet-by-four Warhol-style Ian Dury promotional design that looked great for about ten seconds until the chocolate brown gloss securing it started to seep through in patches, making the glorious dayglo colours go mouldy and even obliterating them in several plate-sized places. When I wanted to put up some curtains in the room I hadn’t the slightest idea how to erect a rail so I simply nailed them up there. That’s right – I nailed my curtains in place, and when I wanted to open them I would hold them back with some LPs.
I wasn’t alone in this Neanderthal approach to DIY. We decided our kitchen – a large space, this being a great old 1930s apartment – should fly in the face of tradition and be entirely black. Black walls, black surfaces, black ceiling, black cupboards. Now this radical arrangement might not be the worst of ideas and I’m sure many Goths have an identical scheme in place. However the advantage you may have over us is that you might have had the slightest clue how to go about it. What we did was go out and buy three huge tins of black gloss paint and start slapping it about like circus clowns in a slapstick sketch. Nothing was prepared, rubbed down or undercoated. We simply painted everything gloss black. Everything: even the floor and the taps. Within the first few strokes it became clear this was a catastrophic thing to be doing and yet we clung to the idea that the job needed to be completed for the full effect to be seen. Well, we were correct there, all right. The bizarre black kitchen of Fairwall House was universally agreed by all who saw it to be the single worst room in the world. It was staggeringly awful, worse than you can possibly imagine, and, as if in outraged protest, the kitchen simply refused to let the paint dry and permit itself to become usable. For months after we would have tacky black smears on our hands, clothing, up the hall carpet, everywhere. The soles of my shoes reeked of gloss paint and Fiona in NME reception would often ask, ‘Are they still decorating the offices upstairs?’ Outside the front door to the flat there were so many black footprints along the landing it looked like one of those guides to the steps of a new dance craze. Today among my friends, no anecdote from the period is allowed to pass without somebody interrupting with the pitying, incredulous adjunct, ‘God, do you remember your black kitchen?’ Many now believe it was all my idea; to which I say, even if it was, as with National Socialism, they all went willingly along with it.
Days at the NME were settling into a lovely pattern of long, verbally competitive drinking sessions after work that would then spill into some event, gig or club like the Speakeasy with the writers more often than not being joined by gaggles of musicians from bands big and small. One or two exceptions aside, nobody among our number had homes to go to – in the traditional sense – and nobody had any personal commitments. Once more I was living for pleasure alone and being paid to do so. Within a couple of months, I allowed myself to add to this bounty by actually starting to write for the New Musical Express – something I had both dreamed about and been intimidated by for the last decade. In my mind, I had no axe to grind, no fantasies to fulfil, no global audience to sa
tisfy. I just wanted to make the other NME writers laugh.
This certainly wouldn’t have been apparent in my first few appearances in the paper – dreadfully constipated and bolshie hunks of drivel reporting on some punk-related films and books. Whatever style I thought I was affecting was suffocated under a desperate slathering of clumsy street slang and a misplaced urgency that suggested everything under discussion was of the utmost significance. The main reason for this posturing was that I figured I had been hired as a punk so had better write like one, or at least someone whose first allegiance was to the exhausted form. The trouble was that my heart was no longer in any of that and the music I was being asked to write about bore no relation to the music I was actually playing and hearing all the time. Worse, the sounds I was keenest on weren’t the sort of noises the NME went in for. I now liked bright pop and disco. Even as I penned yet another article about Sham 69 and their battle for ‘the kids’, the record I was most crazy about was the nutty gay stomp ‘Macho Man’ by a still unknown lunatic dance troupe called Village People. In the pubs of Bermondsey – the real ‘streets’ so romanced by the rock press – nobody was playing the somewhat grim and earnest student-pleasing guff that the paper championed almost without question. Black music at the NME was reggae or dues-paid older generation soul. Anything current and commercial – Earth, Wind & Fire, Kool & the Gang, Michael Jackson – was viewed with terrific suspicion. The masses in the pubs and clubs all over the world had no such agendas and, as ever, the popular chart-busting black acts of the day knew the quickest way to the dance floor. In fact, my addiction to the new twelve-inch disco format had led me to get nights working as DJ in some of the rougher South London boozers – places like the Lilliput Hall, The Fort and the Southwark Park Tavern. I wasn’t all that good, certainly never spoke, but knew how to keep the hits a-coming and would get the most terrific thrill whenever somebody approached the decks to ask me ‘what that last record was’. Wonderful carefree noises like ‘Ring My Bell’ by Anita Ward, ‘Instant Replay’ by Dan Hartman, ‘In the Bush’ by Frantique and ‘Everybody Dance’ (Yowzah!) by Chic all had some of their first London airings amid the threatening crush of these proletarian bear-pits.
