Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography

by Baker, Danny

  The upshot of this shameful wriggling about was that I went in to see NME editor Neil Spencer soon after and told him I might have to jack-in reception and join the writing staff full time. I even had a replacement lined up for him. There was this great kid who brought all the new records and press bulletins over from Decca Records. He was a total live wire and often hung around reception anyway. His name was Gary Crowley and he could start right away, if needed – which is what happened. Later Gary too went into TV and radio, which sort of suggests that that gloomy cabin of a space was, for a time, some sort of prototype X Factor machine.

  All this time, my other life back in the Flat With The Black Kitchen operated at what, by comparison, was a pretty humdrum level. My flatmates remained serenely indifferent to the disparate ways we all earned a living and would hardly react at all if, for example, they awoke to find John Lydon and Jah Wobble of Public Image dossing down in their front room.

  ‘Do you want tea, mate?’ was about as curious as they ever got about the pop stars I’d bring back. Once I brought the two male singers out of Manhattan Transfer home for a few liquors. I had gotten on spectacularly well with them at some do earlier in the day and we had later wound up in various South London pubs after they’d asked me to show them the ‘real’ London. We were all well alight and now, back at my place, had started to sing a selection of popular classics familiar to all. My fellow flatmates Lonk and George were trying to follow the film Night of the Demon on BBC2. Eventually Lonk turned to Tim Hauser – ManTran founder member and widely respected jazz vocalist – and said, ‘Mate, you’re not on the telly now. I’m trying to fuckin’ watch this.’

  One and One is One

  As far as personal relationships were concerned I had been rather playing the field during this period. Given my circumstances, you will understand that a pretty sizeable old paddock it was. My wife wastes no opportunity in reminding me these days that I was an unreliable bet back then and that, though we had definitely been going out with each other for a period, I had simply failed to call back one evening and sort of drifted away. To use her words, ‘You were always very nice about it, but I think you suddenly forgot who’s who for a bit.’ Indeed, so hopelessly blasé about the rock-and-roll lifestyle had I become by the seventies’ close that I made a mistake so glib and clichéd that Bill Wyman himself might shoot me a reproving glance.

  I went and, ever so briefly, got married.

  Oh but this was a peculiar thing for me to do. Not because of the other party involved – a wonderful bright and attractive girl called Kelly – but because of the ridiculous manner in which I approached the whole affair, like some kind of jolly spree. I have never considered myself an emotionally flip or shallow person when it comes to love, and the Great Institutions and Baker Family Weddings had always been immense and powerful occasions. Marriage is a massive thing. Yet there I was, actually getting married in a Camberwell registry office one Friday afternoon like it was no big deal. There was no honeymoon booked, no big party planned. I have absolutely no idea what either of us could have been thinking.

  Neither of us wanted particularly to be married, I think – or had any notion what it might really involve – but the idea of shocking everyone we knew rather appealed to us. At least, that’s how it strikes me now. God knows, it only lasted a matter of months, and even during that time the pair of us were gallivanting about all over town in opposite directions.

  The circumstances of how we came together, however, would certainly fall under the banner of ‘met cute’ in an implausible rom-com. They should also tip the wink that, as a great romance, this union probably required a lot of scaffold from the start. Right. Before I reveal how we met I’m going to write another of those short, explosive sentences that I will ask you to ponder and digest the import of ahead of my giving you the full story. Ready?

  We met in jail.

  And no, we weren’t there as observers for the Catholic Church, nor was it a prison-themed cocktail bar. It was a real jail and we were there because, along with nine or ten others, we had been put there by the police.

  Here’s how such a thing can happen. Despite my time on the road with Ian Dury and the Blockheads, I have to say that they are pipped to the title of ‘Best Band to Tour With’ by the group Darts. Darts were a nine-piece retro rock/pop band that had an absolute string of Top Ten hits between 1977–82. Most of the band members had been around the scene for some time in various other earnest, ‘worthy’ and flat-out unsuccessful outfits and so were enjoying their time in the chart-topping sun more than most. At the time of our story, Darts were at the peak of their popularity, playing large venues all over Britain, and were an absolute challenge to keep up with in the offstage high-jinks-no-sleep-till-Hammersmith department.

  One night on tour the band were booked into an entirely inappropriate motel just outside of Derby. Arriving at the place at about ten-thirty at night, they were told by a pinch-faced man in a low-lit reception that had he known they were a pop band and not an actual darts team they would never have been booked in at all. As it was, he would allow them to stay for this night but the bar would be off limits and he would appreciate it if everyone went to their rooms now and found other accommodation first thing in the morning.

  Now Darts were not teenagers. They were not addled wild men with reputations to keep up like Motorhead either. They even dressed in jackets and ties. But you wouldn’t want to mess them about like this. At first their manager Bob tried to impress upon the man that his charges were grown men (and one woman) and that he was speaking to them as though they were some sort of chain gang on the run. The man simply intensified his look of disgust and said,

  ‘You can bleat all you want, but I’m going to bed and I suggest that you get this lot secured soon too. I’ve got proper guests to consider.’

  It was George Currie, the fantastic wiry guitarist from Dundee, that now stepped forward as spokesman for the band.

  ‘Why don’t you fuck off?’ he reasoned.

  Mine host snapped his head toward George with a glare that suggested he had been vindicated in judging this chart-topping rabble sub-human. And with that he disappeared through a door behind him. Now nobody knew what to do. Bass player Thump Thompson tried dinging on the reception bell and yelling, ‘I say, my man!’ repeatedly, but this just got on everyone’s nerves. It was then I noticed that the mini-switchboard sitting behind the counter was the exact same model as the one I’d used at the NME, and that the top right-hand light was on, which usually meant that one of the main house phones, and not an extension, was in use.

  ‘I bet he’s ringing the police,’ I said.

  I lifted the phone on the reception counter and dipped the switch under the light. I listened in. He was ringing the police. Amid general groans and curses, the nine-strong Darts band, with manager plus myself from the NME and newly arrived Kelly Pike from Record Mirror simply decamped into a deserted darkened area to our left, which was clearly some sort of bar and TV area. The idea was to await the arrival of the constabulary and try to argue our case. Except, the longer we waited for the flashing blue lights, the worse everyone made the situation. The first thing was that band members started to go behind the small bar and serve themselves bottles of beer. There was no suggestion of stealing it, and to that end a whip-round had been organized and about £30 had been stuffed into a pint mug. (In 1979, £30 bought a terrific amount of beer.) Soon, however, the ludicrous attitude of the terse little chap running the establishment began to tickle us all. I was told to go and see if he was still on the phone. He wasn’t, but – and I fully admit this was a lousy thing to do – the devil got in me and so I started blindly connecting random rooms with each other. All that would have happened is the phone would have rung in somebody’s room and a confused guest would have simply found themselves talking to a fellow confused guest but, at the time, everyone thought this was terrific fun. I think I must have connected about twenty people. I like to think that at least one other mar
riage was set in motion this way. I know mine was.

  Still the police had not arrived on the scene. The next thing to attract the band’s attention in the bar was a large bauble that hung from the central light fitting. A contest was got under way to see if it could be headed like a football from a standing start. Nobody could do this until one Dart – and I’m not going to say it was George Currie again – took a leap at it using a chair as a springboard. Not only did he connect with it, the thing flew off at about 500 mph and hit a row of wine glasses hanging upside down behind the bar. The ensuing noise of that meant that, like pre-programmed cretins, we were suddenly living up to the motel manager’s predicted stereotype. Everyone froze and knew this was bad. Bob sighed and said, ‘Come on, now, chaps. This won’t do us any favours.’ And then one Dart – and I’m not going to name him – said, ‘Oh fuck it, he wanted the Sex Pistols, give him the Sex Pistols!’ and threw his Carling beer bottle over his shoulder and straight through the plate-glass window behind.

  It was at that moment the police turned up.

  Soon, and in a pretty civilized procession, everyone was bundled into what used to be known as a ‘Black Maria’ and away we all went to the local nick. Once there, we were put into two separate cells, with poor bemused Kelly Pike not even allowed to be in the same one as the only other female, Darts’ fearsome front woman Rita Ray. It was here that I formally introduced myself.

  ‘Hello, I’m Danny Baker of the NME,’ I said. ‘Should make a good story, eh?’

  She said she knew who I was, which, for me, was a terrific boost.

  ‘Listen,’ I continued with new vigour, ‘if they think we’re not really part of this lot, that we’re just a couple mixed up in all this, they might let us toddle off. What you reckon?’

  She thought it worth a try and I announced to the section of the band that was sharing the cell with us, good friends all, that I was going to deny all knowledge of them, demand to be removed from the presence of such low-lifes and basically cut them adrift to their fate. Was that all right by them? They said it was. And it worked.

  A few months later, Kelly Pike and I were in front of a frankly indifferent registrar committing to another kind of legal high jump.

  The day after, my friend, photographer Tom Sheehan, called round to the flat Kelly shared with two other girls to give us the couple of contact sheets of negatives he’d taken of the Big Event. We put them on the table and the very next day I picked up the Sunday papers to chuck in the bin and scooped up the photographs too. We never saw them again. How’s that for an omen?

  Back at Debnams Road the union was taken surprisingly calmly. Everyone came to the day, had a bite to eat afterwards and my dad even said, ‘This ain’t a bad way to do it. I think having the big old do can be a load of balls. Too much. Don’t make you more married, does it?’

  I’d forgotten that he and Mum had had theirs with even less frills than this. Then he eyed me sideways. ‘You know you ain’t cut out for it, don’t ya? You watch.’

  I attempted to be offended at the time.

  The Chrome-plated Megaphone of Destiny

  ‘Hello, Danny, this is Janet Street Porter over at London Weekend Television. I wonder if you could come and see me in the next few days? The thing is, I’m planning a new TV youth series for the weekends and I think you’d be great presenting it. Would that interest you?’

  That was it. That was all there was to me beginning a career in television that has, at the time of writing, lasted more than thirty-three years. I hadn’t sought it or even considered such a thing. As usual, I hadn’t any career plans at all beyond whooping it up at the NME. Those TV bits and pieces Mark Perry and I had done two years previously while punk was hot had faded with the noise of the movement. And now, completely out of the blue, JSP, who must have noted and then salted away whatever fiery twinkle I had shown during my brief time on her documentary, simply rang our office and invited me to be on television once a week.

  Placing the phone back down again, I don’t even remember being that thunderstruck by the opportunity. First things first.

  ‘All right, suckers,’ I shouted out across the thundering type clatter of the NME desks. ‘I’ve just been offered a HUGE job on telly. That’s my lot around here. You may NOT be my friends any more. You may NOT look directly at me. You have all lost and I have won. I am probably a millionaire already. Now queue up to kiss my ring. That is all.’ The jumbled response from my fellow writers indicated that they were somewhat unimpressed by my good news. To be fair, going into TV was not necessarily viewed as a huge break back then. TV was dreary. Conformist. Ordinary. TV wasn’t rock’n’roll. As I was to find out.

  The programme Janet wanted me for was called Twentieth Century Box, a show that was to go out – in eye-catching black and white – on Sunday lunchtimes in the London area. Its brief was to reflect the lives and tell the stories of ordinary young people in the region. It was clear that I wasn’t going to have – or care to have – a lot of editorial input in the series. My job was to pop up at the top, explain what you were about to see, and then provide a pretty dry voice-over as the audience were let in on the day-to-day thoughts of kids who worked at Ford’s motor plant or at a racing greyhounds’ kennel. To be honest, I thought most of the shows were terrifically dull, but Janet knew exactly what the station needed and I suspect today these programmes would be fairly valuable as an unvarnished document of working-class lives in the period. As for my performances, I think it’s fair to say that they were hopeless, stilted, phoney and poor. Why she had faith in me after the first few test read-throughs, I have no idea. At one point I did think the producers might be going out of their way to trip me up. Take the greyhound one, for example. To this day I can recall the exact words I was supposed to say straight into camera for the opening. In fact, I ought to – I had to redo them around 150 times. I could not get those words to flow. This was the opening.

  ‘Hello. And this week on Twentieth Century Box we’re going to take a black-and-white look at what life is like at the wrong end of the greyhound gravy train.’

  I mean, what? The wrong end of the greyhound gravy train! That, to me, given the speed at which I speak, was a hellish obstacle course that had more to do with an acrobatic Ronnie Barker routine than my natural patterns of speech. Even worse was the one a week later, focusing on a group of North London lads hoping to break into pop music. They were Spandau Ballet. Here’s me again, cross-eyed and confusticated under the studio lights:

  ‘Hello, this week on the show we’re going to be having a black-and-white look at a band who many people believe are ushering in a whole new era in rock music.’

  Ushering in a whole new era in rock music? Thanks for that one too, Janet. Thank God I wasn’t Jonathan Ross! Trying to make this all look and sound like I was simply shooting the breeze only served to freeze my facial features and paralyse the very vim that had got me the gig in the first place. And everyone who worked there seemed so mean!

  The studio was in total blackout, save a harsh light on my chair and the blue screen behind it on to which the programme’s logo was to be post-added. I had no idea who, or how many, were out there in the darkness, and any chummy dialogue I tried to get going while people shifted lamps and adjusted boom mics seemed to disappear straight down the Grand Canyon. I can recall rather desperately trying to see if there were any other Millwall supporters on the floor. Masking my eyes from the glare, I put the question. Nothing. So I carried on, ‘No? No? Not Millwall. No? No one from the Lions . . . the old Millwall . . . nobody . . . eh?’ in a voice that started out boldly but ended up as a squeak about the size of a cocoa puff. I wasn’t going to like this game at all. This wasn’t like my world. Nobody seemed to want to waste time bullshitting, or arguing about obscure musicians, or creating pointless jokes at others’ expense. In fact, everybody seemed to have something to do and they were busy doing it. (Don’t worry, I later found out how fantastically wrong these early impressions were.)

&n
bsp; The social low point came when I was in the canteen around show three. Still desperately searching for common ground with somebody, anybody, at the LWT studios – Janet being forever bound up in script and production duties – I was haplessly pushing my tray along the selection rail when I saw a man much older than me, coming towards me, beaming.

  ‘How’s it all going, are you finding your way around all right?’ he asked breezily.

  ‘Oh, hello!’ I chirped. I didn’t recognize him, but enormously relieved I had made some sort of impression at last, I added, ‘Tell the truth, I thought I might have become invisible. Yeah, I’m enjoying myself, but it’s very serious around the studios . . . isn’t . . . it.’ The last two words were said at cocoa-puff level. This man was now giving me a look like I was waving my private parts at his mother. Then another voice started responding to his initial question from directly behind me, and I realized he hadn’t been addressing me at all. I quickly slunk away from the hot-food bar, having only selected some baked beans and a few boiled potatoes. I did not belong here.

  Twentieth Century Box only took up one morning a week. I was paid £75 for each show, which I think rose to £125 by the series’ end, possibly because Janet had a bizarre attack of conscience. Truth is, she could have slipped me a tenner and I’d have been OK with it. Not because I thought the gig was some sort of big break into show business. No, the real reason I was more than happy to trouser the extra cash was that, despite the alien surroundings, I found the ‘work’ risibly easy. This insouciance stemmed purely from complete indifference about ever doing it again. Quite simply, I had a great job already. The idea of giving up getting on planes and tour buses to knock about with pop stars purely in order to put a bunch of ‘young people’s issues’ into the Petri dish on airless local TV didn’t require much thought. As far as I could see, most ‘young people’ would love to be doing what I did for a day job in the first place, so why the hell would I be chasing my tail there?