Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography

by Baker, Danny

  The collected rabble rousers, cynics and savage wits at the NME lost little time in deflating any ego I might have been nurturing since getting in front of the cameras. They found particular joy in my apparent endorsement of Spandau Ballet – a group who, though generally unknown, were already veterans of the review-room toasting fork. When I presented a similar show about some other newcomers called Iron Maiden they all but debagged me and made me walk up Carnaby Street wearing a bell and a placard around my neck. To shut them all up I would simply remind them that I was earning two grand an episode. And they believed it. And they did shut up. Possibly their greatest triumph, though, was when somebody on the staff got in touch with a colleague who worked on one of the more breathless teen-girl magazines over at IPC central. He arranged it so that I – a marginal, briefly glimpsed presenter of a regional Sunday lunchtime show – was surprisingly installed across a heart-festooned half-page as that issue’s Gogglebox Hunk of the Month. Bravo, boys, bravo.

  My specialty at the paper had by this time refined itself purely and simply to cramming in as many jokes as I could. I wrote tortuous headlines for the articles and two or three captions for every picture we ran; sometimes the sub would use more than one of them and, once, in a feature about Mott the Hoople’s Ian Hunter, ran all six of the options provided. I would completely make up short bogus items for Thrills, our ‘quick news’ section. Typical of these was the news that Peter Gabriel – then still not quite the huge solo star he was to become – had passed his final exams to be a lower league football referee. Pete, I wrote, had made his debut, not behind the whistle but running the line at a recent Southend home fixture. I even furnished it with a post-match quote: ‘Amazing really. I feel the same rush as when I had just stormed it with the band. The ball moves a lot faster than when you see it on telly but, yeah, all in all, I’m chuffed.’

  There was a running joke about a gang who would break into bands’ dressing rooms while the group were onstage and leave as gifts valuable guitars and PA equipment. Anywhere I could create a little mischief, I was home. There were press releases to send up, gossip items to mess about with and, my forte, dozens of single releases to review. I must admit that the actual sound of a 45 came a poor second place to any material I could wring out of its name, lyrics or even what the group looked like. More than a decade later, I was approached by a chap at a media function in a Mayfair club: ‘Hello, Danny, you reviewed my old band’s single once,’ he said, a sentence guaranteed to make me apologize in advance. ‘You took the piss out of it so bad, we broke up.’ Well, naturally I was mortified and started making all sorts of conciliatory noises. ‘It’s fine, really,’ he laughed, ‘we were rotten. Pretend mods. You did us a favour. I’m MD of this place now.’ We chatted a bit more, but I still felt like a louse. Before parting I apologized again but went so far as to suggest that they really couldn’t have been much cop if a review finished them off. ‘Oh no, we weren’t,’ he smiled. ‘Pretend mods, like I say. You ended the bit by saying, “And off they go – like Lambrettas to the slaughter.” ’ I winced for him but secretly was thinking, ‘Oh, that was rather good.’

  I began to do less and less by way of proper interviews. Chiefly, I confess, because I absolutely hated having to transcribe them from tape to paper by longhand afterwards. There’s dedication to craft for you.

  One absolute howler I had with this was after being away with The Jam in Germany. The band were at a real crossroads in their evolution, but were also, as it transpired, on the verge of a string of truly classic 45s including ‘Going Underground’, ‘Eton Rifles’ and ‘When You’re Young’. At the time, I was due to hook up with them in Berlin just as they were about to bring out their first truly top-grade pop single, ‘Strange Town’. The great thing about being on the road with The Jam was that Paul Weller’s dad, John, was the band’s manager and always saw to it that the record company, Polydor, put the band up in proper hotels. Also Bruce Foxton and Rick Buckler – bass and drums respectively – were a tremendous amount of fun to be with. On this tour we tested the pace of life particularly strenuously in Hamburg’s always attractive Reeperbahn district. Paul himself was a more serious and brooding concern back then. Fed up with simply being front man to a ‘good time, live for the moment’ outfit, he was already attempting to find the path to true and lasting musicianship. It was now dawning on him that he probably wouldn’t be able to achieve this with The Jam, loved as they were, and much more loved as they were to become.

  Number One hit records and lasting credibility certainly seemed a long way off when the group played at the famous Star Club a few nights after I arrived, where exactly twelve people were in the audience. Twelve. I don’t produce this paltry figure to emphasize how small the crowd might have been but as a genuinely accurate statement. Twelve people saw The Jam in Hamburg. Bruce Foxton and I went around and counted them. Afterwards, unusually for a musician, Paul asked if he could meet me in the bar of the hotel, ‘to talk about things on my own’. A few hours later, after sitting separately from the other members of the group, accompanied by his then girlfriend Jill, he waited until she went up to her room and the chaps had made their way into the night before coming over to join me.

  ‘Turn on your tape, Dan,’ he said, ‘I’ve got plenty to say.’ And he had. This was a pour-your-heart-out scoop all right. As I remember it, Paul all but quit the band there and then. Disillusioned about the way punk had fizzled and been corrupted, he was creatively frustrated and growing apart from his colleagues as well as unsure exactly what was the point of any of this empty noise-making. I knew all I had to do to this cover story was stick a couple of quotation marks around it and, late as it was, I rang one of my mates at the NME to tell them as much. This was going to be BIG.

  So you can imagine the mask of confusion I wore when I turned on my cassette to feverishly scribble down all this great copy and was merely greeted by an anaemic cover version of ‘Girl from Ipanema’. Even odder was that Paul Weller himself seemed to be providing a distant scat vocal backing to this shoddy samba. Then I heard myself joining in, a little clearer, but not by much. I tried to piece the mystery together and eventually figured what had happened was that in boozily plonking down my all-in-one cassette recorder on the bar table I had positioned its directionally sensitive microphone right underneath one of the hotel’s muzak speakers. All I had recorded was the output from that and, consequently, the only quote I could rely on was the less-than-earth-shattering scoop that a woman in South America was small and tanned and young and lovely.

  This endless dreary dirge had taken precedence over Paul’s sensational gut-spilling. Worse! The sit-down had taken place at about one-thirty in the morning of a long night, so while I could remember the broad tone of the conversation – I think – I definitely couldn’t reanimate enough of the proper confession to give it that all-important horse’s mouth element. I realized I was going to have to make a lot of it up. You sit there, fingers hovering over the typewriter keys, thinking, ‘Now what did he say about that?’ and ‘Who did he blame for that again?’ and worst of all, ‘Would he have said this?’ When the piece came out, it was a half-hearted mishmash, a real flabby blancmange. It did not run on the cover. I saw Paul not long afterwards.

  ‘What the fucking hell was all that blather you had me saying in that piece?’ he asked, a little hurt. I had rather overdone the word count and made the normally guarded PW seem suspiciously verbose. I told him what had happened and he actually smiled. ‘Fuckin’ ’ell, eh? I’ll be stuck with some of them quotes you put in me mouth forever now! Still, I’m glad most of it was left out. I’ve changed me mind on a lot of it.’

  To this day I have no idea what really should have been in there, or how it might have changed the fortunes of one of Britain’s best-ever pop groups.

  That particular debacle happened when I was still hurtling around on various rock-band itineraries pretty much non-stop. By mid-1980 I was at least openly making up stuff for publication rather than att
aching it to some hapless personality or other. Very few ‘happening’ groups now seemed to pique my interest and for a while my byline only really showed up when interviewing comedians. I spent the afternoon with Roy Hudd, who had a terrific album out of old music hall standards. This was perhaps not quite what the NME readers craved between their 3,000-word treatises on Joy Division and, ahem, Crispy Ambulance, but this is what they got. Bob Monkhouse couldn’t have been nicer, picking me up at the station, taking me to his house, making sure I got to see him before, during and after a recording of Family Favourites and even writing to me after the piece was published. Quite why he needed the NME, I couldn’t figure, but there it was.

  Truly exploiting the ‘meet your heroes’ luxury, I jumped at the chance to hook up with Peter Cook. Something that happened during our long, fuzzy day together remained a private joke to Peter whenever we met again in the fifteen years he had remaining. At some point during our discussions – I think I was initially allocated an hour with him – we had, rather inevitably, decamped to thrash things out in more depth at the Coach and Horses pub in Soho. After about an hour there, Peter made to excuse himself. ‘I’ll be right back,’ he began, threatening to leave me in the fearsome company of Dr Who Tom Baker, genius columnist Jeffrey Bernard and a growing table of terrifically seasoned drunks. ‘I’m just going to exchange my pornographic videos for some fresh ones.’ He was not joking, and relished saying it as though he was announcing a suburban library trip. I had noticed earlier that he’d been carrying under his arm a shabby Tesco bag wrapped around what appeared to be a couple of house bricks. Now I surmised it must contain roughly four hardcore VHS tapes. Though legitimate home-video releases of major films were still a notable and haphazard affair back then – as well as an expensive one, with major new titles costing, on average, about £40 – the Soho adult shops already had a system in place wherein they would (illegally, of course) sell you blue films on tape that, once returned, entitled you to 50 per cent off your next purchase. The price of your initial stake varied greatly. I asked Peter how much he was paying for them.

  ‘About twenty pounds each,’ he said, suddenly in his usual voice, as if intrigued I might be able to put him on to a better source. As it happened, I could. During my initial stint in One Stop at Dean Street we had been about four doors along from a typically shady but nonetheless popular sex shop run by one Maltese Tony. Tony would come into One Stop and hope to barter our respective goods with usually minimal success: a cassette of Marvin Gaye’s ‘Let’s Get It On’ simply could not be balanced out in primitive vibrators and tit mags – particularly with a manager like John, who was as gay as a French horn. Tony would often be in the pubs around the area too, usually leaving one of his hapless younger brothers or cousins to attend the always busy local footfall into the establishment. The thing is, if you knew Dean Street you probably knew Maltese Tony, and I certainly did. So I walked Peter to where I last knew him to be stationed and, having found he’d moved on from there, on to a newer smut vendor’s in Brewer Street. Here at last, though he had to be summoned from the Mecca bookmakers across the road, was our man. I introduced Peter to him and, by his reaction, either Maltese Tony had never heard of this lanky legend to my left or else, in his business, one always presumed utmost discretion when talking shop. ‘Twenty quid!’ Tony spluttered when I told him what Peter was paying per tape. ‘And you paid it? Jesus, I’m a mug to meself!’ The upshot of this was that Peter subsequently slashed his porn bill by 75 per cent and in drinking, gambling, sex shop Tony, possibly made a friend for life.

  He certainly never forgot the favour I’d done him. On the many occasions I met him after that – and especially when more shockable company were gathered – Peter Cook would always greet me with: ‘Ah, it’s Mr Baker. Notorious and superb provider of top-grade pornography to ninety per cent of London, Western Europe, the World.’ Sometimes he would extend the gleeful introduction to: ‘One word from this man and the whole of Great Britain would have to stop masturbating overnight.’ I never explained these appalling non-sequiturs to aghast guests – there would have been little point and, anyway, the twisting grin and twinkling eyes on Peter’s face showed he was almost willing me to try and start explaining the legend away. And I suffered it happily, of course. Getting to know Peter Cook was one of the great satisfactions of my career. Along with Spike Milligan he created everything we now understand as modern British comedy. Lennon and McCartney, Milligan and Cook. Four names that form the DNA at the core of all greatness I have enjoyed seeing created in my lifetime.

  One Tuesday, loafing about the Carnaby Street office, I received another surprise call from Janet Street Porter to say they were going to make a second series of Twentieth Century Box and I was to front it again. ‘This time, though, I think you should go out and do the interviews and everything,’ she said. What was more, I was now going to get £250 a show. Lovely.

  The very next day in the NME, shortly after trumpeting I was soon to be earning ‘more money than you junkies have ever dreamed of’, assistant editor Phil McNeill called me over. ‘Well done on the telly,’ he said, ‘but listen. You still want to work here, yes?’ I said I wouldn’t dream of leaving all the little people in the lurch just because my life had worked out and theirs hadn’t. He ploughed straight on.

  ‘Good. Michael Jackson – like him?’

  Michael Jackson had released Off the Wall around a year previously, totally conquered the world, and was apparently working on its follow-up, Thriller. So, yes, Phil, I like him, even if some up here affect to not know who he is.

  ‘Good, because he’s available for an interview and we’re the only paper he’s talking to. It means you’ll have to go to Los Angeles – all right with that?’

  I was all right with it.

  Kid Charlemagne

  We’ll begin my story of the time spent with Michael Jackson by examining my father’s relationship with motor cars. My old man didn’t learn to drive until the late 1970s, when he was well into his forties. When he did, it was simply because he had somehow acquired a caravan at Dymchurch – the charming but tiny seaside hamlet in Kent – and knew he needed a practical way to get down to it. Nobody knows how he got this caravan. It may have been a gambling debt, it may have been via some stranger in a pub, it may have been left to him in a will via some distant great-aunt – nobody can recall or figure it out. He certainly wouldn’t have bought it ‘straight’, that’s for sure. I never once heard him express the slightest interest in having one and the only time the family ever holidayed in a caravan, at a dreadful if typical site near Caister in Norfolk, he had noisily asked for his money back on the first morning after finding out all holidaymakers were required to sing a communal song at breakfast. I must have been about five when that happened and I can dimly remember sympathetically absorbing some of my mum’s obvious terror as he sat there, arms firmly crossed and with a face like thunder while all around him happy campers belted out the ‘Good Morning’ melody. When it was over he said – loudly – ‘Well, I’m not fucking having this,’ and made straight for Reception.

  In fact, throughout the 1960s whenever anyone won a caravan on a TV games show – and, kids, most people did receive one of these bubble-shaped dwellings in the days before Simon Cowell decided they’d rather have record contracts instead – he would say, ‘Can’t think of anything worse. Where’s the luxury in that? Like going back to the fuckin’ hopping days.’ ‘Hopping’ of course was the now highly romanced version of a ‘holiday’ that for much of the last century was the only break from relentless factory work available to London’s working class. It was an exchange whereby they could live rent-free in very basic rural shacks in return for bringing in that year’s hop harvest. You can read many accounts online of how rustic, bonding and wonderful an experience it apparently was for the proletariat, but not one of these encomiums will have been penned by Frederick Joseph Baker. His stories of living in the poky, amenity-free, bug-infested, straw-floored farm huts coul
d give any WW2 Burma POW a run for their money, and he wasn’t keen to relive the deprivations via any cramped caravan.

  Except, now he had one. Or, more accurately, we had one. The first step to taking possession of our suddenly acquired country estate was, as I say, for Dad to pass his driving test. Now I’m pretty sure he must have achieved this, although, again, I do not remember a single time he ever went on a lesson. Whenever I asked him when was it he passed his test, the answer would be either ‘In the army’, or ‘While you were away’. Whatever the truth, the first vehicle he owned certainly lived up to such a dubious legitimacy. It was a low, decrepit, two-seater minivan of the type used for very light removals or carrying sacks of cement about. He and my mum would sit up front and everybody else would sit on the floor in the back, where there were no windows and holes in the floor, like the Flintstones’ car, through which you could literally see the road beneath.

  When he first got it we all had to traipse outside and sit in it at the kerb. ‘I know it’s an old banger,’ he’d say, ‘but it’ll get us there.’ Only my mum was brave enough to voice the shared reaction to this: ‘Get us there? Why, where we going – the graveyard?’ It certainly wouldn’t have passed any MOT – which was irrelevant, because up until the turn of this century I never knew anyone from where I grew up who booked their cars in for an MOT anyway. MOTs took two minutes, didn’t even require the vehicle, and were issued by placing a tenner into the hand of some bloke who operated out of a railway arch. That said, it fairly bombed up and down the A2 for the next few years as we in the back attempted to remain perched on the rear-wheel arches and ignore the smell of petrol. This disintegrating, oil-burning pig of a vehicle was eventually replaced by a ludicrous pale turquoise Austin A40, a car that looked like Robin Hood’s hat and which Dad said he’d bought for forty quid. Now I know absolutely nothing about cars, nothing, and have only owned three different ones since I passed my test in 1988. I find motor cars about as interesting as algebra, but even I knew this faded, genteel-looking vehicle was all wrong for Dad. But, on the ancient adage that ‘it gets you from A to B’, he stuck with it for a while, and it was during the reign of this lemon that my old man offered to run me to the airport so that I might make my flight to meet Michael Jackson.