by Baker, Danny
My normal speech patterns returned approximately two days later. When I told Wendy that I’d nearly died and tried to inject as much terror into the telling as I could, she just smiled indulgently. ‘Well, you didn’t look like it,’ she trilled. ‘I got some nice photos.’ She still doesn’t believe how close I came to drowning that afternoon. And the kicker is, her photos were lousy. Two or three fuzzy off-kilter shots of a generic water mass with, in the distance, a possible waterfall and what looks like the crescent of a puce beachball lost in the deluge and struggling to remain above the surface.
When we got back from Hawaii, my dad came around.
‘London Weekend been trying to get hold of you. Rung about five times. I told ’em you was away, but they didn’t listen. What do you reckon they want?’
My mum and dad’s number was for years my default contact if people needed me urgently. I knew why my dad was so keen to pass this message on. He hadn’t said as much, but he’d really liked my appearance on the Six O’Clock Show and it had even been seen by friends of his. After the show went out, he said,
‘Saw that last night – was all right, that one, wannit? Gonna do any more?’
This was a good deal more than he’d ever said about Twentieth Century Box and his enquiry about possible further spots showed he wanted to nudge me along that road. Now, grudging or withheld parental approval has famously been known to either exquisitely torture or demonically drive performers throughout history – sometimes both – but I can’t follow that line of thought at all. I never wanted my old man to praise or even particularly acknowledge how ‘well’ I was doing. Such a longing strikes me as babyish. He went out and earned his way in the world and I have too, and if at any time he’d put his arm around me and gushed about how proud he and Mum were, I think I’d have died of queasiness. Would my brother and sister therefore have been seen as less spectacular because they toiled in plainer, more unglamorous fields? Ugh. Frankly, thumb-suckers needing validation through Mom and Pop’s approval, or who use their families to measure, justify or glorify their achievements or even talk about their work indoors want locking up in a giant crib full of mirrors.
Still, when the old man told me later, ‘Wally Shaw saw you on that thing the other night too. And a couple up the pub asked me about it . . .’ I was glad that he was getting a kick out of it for his own sake. My mum, on the other hand, has never ever mentioned a single word about what I do for a living, other than occasionally asking where I’ve been all week or commenting, ‘What was that bleedin’ thing I saw you on the other night? Couldn’t make head or tail of it.’
I rang Greg Dyke back. He asked me if I’d been seeing the show much lately. It had been three months since its debut. I said I hadn’t and he then asked me if I fancied ‘a bit more work’. Of course what I heard was, ‘a few more five-hundred-pound notes’. Well, if I did, I wanted my ears cleaning out, because Greg now offered me £750 to be on the show every week and even come into the studio to talk alongside Michael and Janet. Quite why I was suddenly so necessary to the show after this lengthy gap I still can’t fathom. But starting that very next week I became a babbling, ebullient fixture for Londoners every Friday night at six.
For the first couple of shows, in which I investigated the minute world of beekeepers followed by an exposé of pie-and-mash shops, I still considered it all to be a happy distraction from getting out on the road with rock bands and trying to keep up with the bear-pit competitiveness of the NME writers’ room. Except, though only twenty-four, I felt a bit past it to be still banging away about gigs and hot new vibes. I’d been at that racket for a long time now and the eighties were shaping up musically into a synthetic angular nuisance of a decade in which the underground counterculture I had so loved was looking a bit spare and exhausted. More than this, Wendy and I wanted children. Lots of them. And being Daddy Hard Rock did not strike me as a dignified way to enter life’s second act.
Then once more, the wheel turned. I was in Southwark Park Road, known locally as The Blue, coming out of the bread shop when I saw a woman standing on the pavement right in front of me. She looked at me and her mouth sort of wobbled as if she was nervous about something.
‘Hello, I’m sorry to bother you,’ she started, and I honestly thought maybe she was going to ask for a few quid or something. ‘But I watch you on the telly and I wondered if you’d sign this?’
What? Who did she think I was? I laughed lightly and asked her if she was serious.
‘Oh yes, it is you, isn’t t it?’ she said shyly.
‘Me?’ I responded.
‘Yes, you’re Danny Baker, aren’t you?’
I said lamely that I suppose I must be and, at last taking the pen from her, I signed my name on the paper.
‘Thanks so much. Love you on the show,’ she said, and off she trotted, still looking at what I’d written.
I remained frozen to the spot for quite a while.
Wow. So. I’m Danny Baker, eh?
Well. This was new.
List of Illustrations
1. Mum and Dad, Fred and Bet, on holiday in Leysdown, 1960. Dockers had only recently started earning good money. Their clothes if not the location show it.
2. Sister and brother, Sharon and Michael, at Leysdown. I am in Dad’s arms behind. Didn’t dance then, don’t dance now.
3. Mum and the kids, 1960. Many people mistake this location for Hawaii but in fact it was taken on the Moon some nine years before the Americans arrived.
4. With Dad. I’m wearing what was known as a ‘sloppy Joe’ T-shirt. Dad working the vest look in a way that I could never carry off.
5. Our garden at Debnams Road. The proximity of the railway arches in the background made it possible for passengers to hit our tortoise with discarded fag packets.
6. In the the wonderful Rotherhithe School Library, 1966. I am telling the photographer my name was Peter. I have no idea why I lied like that. Note: local barber’s cavalier attitude to traditional fringe-cutting.
7. Debnams Road, where we lived at number 11 (see handy arrow) for the first 20 years of my life, pictured shortly before demolition in 2012. The site is probably called Dock Quays Happening Apartments or similar today.
8. Debnams Road glimpsed, in reverse, from out in the grounds. I have marked me and my brother’s bedroom with a star. It used to be marked with animal fats and chemical run-off from the nearby railway arches.
9. Christmas Day in Debnams Road. Millwall kit, tracksuit boots and ball. I can still recall the smell of their exotic newness. Meanwhile curtains look for any excuse to go up in flames.
10. Mum and Dad in the kitchen, 1970.
11. Dad with Blackie – the miracle mongrel of the Silwood Estate who was brighter than 75 per cent of people I have met since.
12. My camera jammed and I got this effect. Tommy Hodges (right) and Peter King playing football in the square. Look through the woozy effect and you can see the council provided a stone boat.
13. West Greenwich Secondary School, Form 1b, 1968. Front row, four from left.
14. West Greenwich, 3rd Year, First XI. Back row, second left. Front, second right, is my later punk cohort, Mark Perry. We played in red and black shirts like Kraftwerk. Shorts and socks were assorted colours. And street shoes allowed, apparently. We were actually a very good team.
15. At One Stop Records, 1973. Now look again at the cover of this book and behold the ruins of a once-great beauty.
16. With Paul Baldock in the twilight days of the record shop. We’re discussing the best way to reverse articulated lorry up to the back door before giving over the keys.
17. Ladies and Gentlemen – the disastrous black kitchen of Camberwell. Good friend Steve (Sebast) ponders what havoc we have wreaked.
18. I have no idea who this lovely girl is or where I am. But I recall that I spent huge amounts of the seventies in just such a clinch.
19. Newquay, 1975. I’m not drunk nor stoned, but had chosen to sleep outside the tent rather than pa
rtake of the toxic atmosphere within, aka the great smell of men enjoying themselves.
20. My sister, with her brothers, on her wedding day. I’d literally just got back from an enormous chaps’ holiday in Newquay and, consequently, am possibly still a little fried.
21. Mob-handed at the Global Village disco, Charing Cross; a cavernous, competitive, volatile venue that was Saturday night. I’m in the white belt hanging on to the girl.
22. 1977. Punk rock has happened and Sniffin’ Glue fanzine was right at its beating heart. Mark and I affect moodiness while holding society responsible for stuff. And that. (JFA Archive)
23. On the roof of Dryden Chambers, 1977. I seem to have gatecrashed a photo session for Mark’s band, Alternative TV. ‘Cheer up, lads! It’s pop music!’ (JFA Archive)
24. Bashing out copy at the NME. I’ve never smoked so must be affecting the cigarette to impress the girl behind. It worked. We didn’t know it then but we were to spend the rest of our lives together.
25. With Peter Cook in 1979. We appear to have settled in some kind of Arabian Nights Grotto or possibly waiting our number to be called in a Marrakech cat house. (Tom Sheehan)
26. In Los Angeles to hang about with Michael Jackson. Here I am showing the strain with his PR Judy. This living-for-pleasure-alone racket was showing few signs of tailing off.
27. Very tired on Ian Dury’s tour bus. It’s fair to assume that, though journalistically diligent, I had been wildly caning it. (Tom Sheehan)
28. My first TV publicity picture, for the series Twentieth Century Box. Theme-tune writer John Foxx and producer Janet Street Porter join me in dressing down. (LWT)
29. In the lounge awaiting the flight to Miami and a rendezvous with Earth, Wind & Fire. Wendy and I were running away, 1981. (Anton Corbijn)
30. The Runaways, Miami, 1981.
31. By the power of flim-flam alone I’m now in Honolulu. Here, I’m saying hello to my aghast bank manager.
32. Wendy and I, impossibly young and impossibly broke and yet, most impossibly of all, in Hawaii. What me, worry?
1. Mum and Dad, Fred and Bet, on holiday in Leysdown, 1960. Dockers had only recently started earning good money. Their clothes if not the location show it.
2. Sister and brother, Sharon and Michael, at Leysdown. I am in Dad’s arms behind. Didn’t dance then, don’t dance now.
3. Mum and the kids, 1960. Many people mistake this location for Hawaii but in fact it was taken on the Moon some nine years before the Americans arrived.
4. With Dad. I’m wearing what was known as a ‘sloppy Joe’ T-shirt. Dad working the vest look in a way that I could never carry off.
5. Our garden at Debnams Road. The proximity of the railway arches in the background made it possible for passengers to hit our tortoise with discarded fag packets.
6. In the the wonderful Rotherhithe School Library, 1966. I am telling the photographer my name was Peter. I have no idea why I lied like that. Note: local barber’s cavalier attitude to traditional fringe-cutting.
7. Debnams Road, where we lived at number 11 (see handy arrow) for the first 20 years of my life, pictured shortly before demolition in 2012. The site is probably called Dock Quays Happening Apartments or similar today.
8. Debnams Road glimpsed, in reverse, from out in the grounds. I have marked me and my brother’s bedroom with a star. It used to be marked with animal fats and chemical run-off from the nearby railway arches.
9. Christmas Day in Debnams Road. Millwall kit, tracksuit boots and ball. I can still recall the smell of their exotic newness. Meanwhile curtains look for any excuse to go up in flames.
10. Mum and Dad in the kitchen, 1970.
11. Dad with Blackie – the miracle mongrel of the Silwood Estate who was brighter than 75 per cent of people I have met since.
12. My camera jammed and I got this effect. Tommy Hodges (right) and Peter King playing football in the square. Look through the woozy effect and you can see the council provided a stone boat.
13. West Greenwich Secondary School, Form 1b, 1968. Front row, four from left.
14. West Greenwich, 3rd Year, First XI. Back row, second left. Front, second right, is my later punk cohort, Mark Perry. We played in red and black shirts like Kraftwerk. Shorts and socks were assorted colours. And street shoes allowed, apparently. We were actually a very good team.
15. At One Stop Records, 1973. Now look again at the cover of this book and behold the ruins of a once-great beauty.
16. With Paul Baldock in the twilight days of the record shop. We’re discussing the best way to reverse articulated lorry up to the back door before giving over the keys.
17. Ladies and Gentlemen – the disastrous black kitchen of Camberwell. Good friend Steve (Sebast) ponders what havoc we have wreaked.
18. I have no idea who this lovely girl is or where I am. But I recall that I spent huge amounts of the seventies in just such a clinch.
19. Newquay, 1975. I’m not drunk nor stoned, but had chosen to sleep outside the tent rather than partake of the toxic atmosphere within, aka the great smell of men enjoying themselves.
20. My sister, with her brothers, on her wedding day. I’d literally just got back from an enormous chaps’ holiday in Newquay and, consequently, am possibly still a little fried.
21. Mob-handed at the Global Village disco, Charing Cross; a cavernous, competitive, volatile venue that was Saturday night. I’m in the white belt hanging on to the girl.
22. 1977. Punk rock has happened and Sniffin’ Glue fanzine was right at its beating heart. Mark and I affect moodiness while holding society responsible for stuff. And that. (JFA Archive)
23. On the roof of Dryden Chambers, 1977. I seem to have gatecrashed a photo session for Mark’s band, Alternative TV. ‘Cheer up, lads! It’s pop music!’ (JFA Archive)
24. Bashing out copy at the NME. I’ve never smoked so must be affecting the cigarette to impress the girl behind. It worked. We didn’t know it then but we were to spend the rest of our lives together.
25. With Peter Cook in 1979. We appear to have settled in some kind of Arabian Nights Grotto or possibly waiting our number to be called in a Marrakech cat house. (Tom Sheehan)
26. In Los Angeles to hang about with Michael Jackson. Here I am showing the strain with his PR Judy. This living-for-pleasure-alone racket was showing few signs of tailing off.
27. Very tired on Ian Dury’s tour bus. It’s fair to assume that, though journalistically diligent, I had been wildly caning it. (Tom Sheehan)
28. My first TV publicity picture, for the series Twentieth Century Box. Theme-tune writer John Foxx and producer Janet Street Porter join me in dressing down. (LWT)
29. In the lounge awaiting the flight to Miami and a rendezvous with Earth, Wind & Fire. Wendy and I were running away, 1981. (Anton Corbijn)
30. The Runaways, Miami, 1981.
31. By the power of flim-flam alone I’m now in Honolulu. Here, I’m saying hello to my aghast bank manager.
32. Wendy and I, impossibly young and impossibly broke and yet, most impossibly of all, in Hawaii. What me, worry?
Endnotes
1 With the possible exception of Patti Smith’s Radio Ethiopia.
2 I suddenly realize this sentence may read a little peculiar. However it is perfectly sensible. Our family dog, Blackie, a lovely mongrel with an unimaginative name, was quite the most miraculous animal I have ever known. He could both open the front door upon request – by hooking his front paw under the door handle and walking backwards – as well as knock at it using his snout after he’d had enough of roaming the estate. We would let him out first thing in the morning and be alerted to his return by the most furious clatter at the letterbox. Passers-by would stagger at seeing such canine genius. As for his door-opening skills, visitors never tired of witnessing the feat and, to be fair, Blackie never refused a performance. The only exception he made was with my sister Sharon. He would not allow her access. ‘That bloody dog hates me,’ she would say as he lay on his mat in the
passage ignoring her calls to him, no matter how endearingly she cooed. ‘Come on, Blackie, let me in, there’s a lovely dog. Good boy, come on, let me in, eh? Oh, you awkward sod!’ The family took our dog’s extraordinary talent, which today would surely be a YouTube sensation, as perfectly normal behaviour. So there it is: our front door key for fifteen years was our dog. Who also used the doorknocker to be let in. Astounding but 100 per cent true.
Danny Baker is a comedy writer, journalist and Radio DJ. He currently presents his Saturday morning show on BBC Radio 5 Live and is a regular face on TV. He still lives in south-east London.
A Phoenix ebook
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Ebook first published in 2012 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
This ebook published in 2013 by Phoenix
© Danny Baker 2012
The author and publisher are grateful to the following for permission to quote:
