Going Off Alarming: The Autobiography: Vol 2

by Danny Baker

  Eventually Wendy handed me a clean flannel, some disinfectant, some plasters and a towel and told me to hobble across to the men’s showers to fix myself up. I agreed and turned slowly to make the trip to the cold concrete amenity block. As I took the first few steps away from the caravan I heard loud peals of helpless laughter coming from inside. Wendy subsequently told me that when the giggling dam burst, Bonnie flew into a real rage at her mum and aunt and for the first time in her life let fly at them. ‘It’s NOT funny, you . . . you . . . you pair of mares!’ she screamed and flung herself on the bed sobbing.

  When I came back with my wounds bound I had to sit her down and explain that, though it seemed so terrible it could not possibly be funny, it really, truthfully, actually was. Daddy, when you thought about it, was a bit of a twit. And she allowed herself a short guilty snort of laughter.

  Approximately eighteen hours later I arrived stiff-legged and at snail’s pace into the tiny studio the advertisers had set up for their screen tests. I had to do a few ad-lib links to camera and then several ‘cold’ interviews with paid extras about their home life and domestic chore routines. The gash in my left shin thumped like a bass drum throughout, but I suspect it was when I shared the story of how I came to be so injured that they really warmed to me and decided I was the man for the job.

  There isn’t much to say about the three years I appeared on the campaign, other than that, for the seventeen days a year I was required to knock on stranger’s front doors, I earned an absolute fortune. The commercials themselves, and by extension their bumptious front man, were widely deemed to be the brashest, rottenest, most irritating things on television. Daz as a product, meanwhile, suddenly began overtaking all its competitors in the mysterious, yet apparently vital world of the forty-degree wash. It was almost as if these people knew what they were doing.

  The thing that most astounds people who gingerly enquire what the hell it was like making such notorious bilge is that these thirty-second scenarios in which overwhelmed housewives invited me into their homes to look at their ‘whites’ were all completely genuine. The victims of the camera crew ‘hits’ upon their home were entirely unaware they were going to be on TV. What would happen was that a local supermarket would be staked out and anyone seen exiting with another brand of washing powder would be asked to try a ‘new’ product that came in a plain white box with no hint as to what it was. The only stipulation was that they had to be ready to receive a phone call two weeks hence to talk about the results. This phone call would in fact be up to twelve advertising people barrelling down on them, filming the whole nightmarish intrusion. Very few seemed to mind this, even when some of the homes we piled into looked as if they had not tidied up since a gas main exploded in their front rooms carrying off Granddad and the family cat. Every now and then of course somebody would open the door and say, ‘What? No! Fuck off!’ These never failed to cheer us all up, because it swiftly ticked another one off the list of our seventeen different locations in a day and also would undoubtedly get a good laugh when shown on the client’s Christmas out-take video.

  One notable Doorstep Challenge, as the commercials were known, had me feeling more guilty than I usually did when barging into someone’s day. We were in Sheffield and I had knocked on this particular door four times without getting a response. The ad’s producer told me that someone was definitely in because as usual she had phoned ahead about half-hour previously to make sure we weren’t wasting our time. All the occupant knew from this was that they would be getting ‘a call’ sometime in the next two hours so please don’t go out. I knocked again and from somewhere upstairs in the house I heard an agitated ‘Who is it?’ Followed by, ‘Oh . . . um . . . hang on,’ delivered in the unmistakable timbre of somebody who’d been interrupted while having it off. Sure enough, a few moments later a woman opened the door, clutching at the neck of a thin dressing gown, ruddy of face and with her wayward bed hair suggesting she had very recently been throwing her head about a good deal.

  ‘Yes?’ she panted at me.

  I could hardly bare to tell her.

  ‘Hello!’ I said brightly, but with my eyes begging her forgiveness. ‘It’s the Daz Doorstep Challenge! Can we come in and see your whites?’

  That she didn’t kick me in the balls there and then bears testament to this saintly woman’s good nature. Instead she uttered, ‘What?’ a few more times, to which I repeated my ghastly catchphrase in the name of dogged continuity. At the end of this repartee between us there was a couple of seconds wherein she looked at me uncomprehendingly before saying, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ and slammed the door. As the crew marched back to the coach that ferried us all around, I think I stood there frozen for several minutes waiting for someone to throw a blanket over me. I believe it was then that I made the decision to leave the DDC band and return to private life. This I did at the end of that contract and I still have a letter from the Leo Burnett Agency thanking me for all the work and adding in a postscript that they were very impressed because they’d never known anyone walk away from as much money as their final offer to me contained. It had been £285,000 for one more year, but they perhaps overlooked the key fact that they’d paid me so much already that I just didn’t need the gig any more.

  Far and away the best perk Daz duty brought my way was coming face to face with Bob Dylan at last. I can imagine many of you have just sat forward in your seats. ‘How on earth,’ you are sputtering, coughing up that last swallow of tea, ‘could all that deplorable baloney about sparkling sheets and shining results even at low temperatures possibly have come to the attention of possibly the greatest talent the modern world has known?’ Well, allow me to fill you in on that one. First, though, perhaps you’ll allow me a few moments of quiet triumph over all those who believed my Daz adverts were an irredeemable travesty that, as far as toxic waste goes, probably deserve to be buried deeper than all those spent plutonium rods that China never knows what to do with.

  The story goes like this.

  I didn’t discover Bob Dylan’s music until surprisingly late in life. Growing up, neither my brother nor my sister had any time for his tangled lyrical genius, preferring The Beach Boys and The Beatles respectively. This is all to the good, because I think exposure at too young an age to such prose might have made me prone to having a bash at the deep-dish stuff myself, possibly even moulding me into nascent student material, which, of course, would have been a disaster. It wasn’t until around the age of thirty that I discovered there was a Bob-Dylan-shaped hole in my musical palate and, upon investigation, received a nasty shock when I realized I had frittered my life away until that point. Even then, I stopped short of going to see him in concert, mainly because I dreaded someone would ask me if it was my first time and I would have to lie like an actor, resorting to improbable guff like, ‘Oh, far from it. I was at the Albert Hall in 1966, don’t ya know. Yes, if you listen to the unedited bootlegs of it you will hear him dedicate “Visions of Johanna” to the little lad in the World Cup Willie T-shirt who knows all the words to the songs. That was me.’

  However, my brother-in-law Brian – who some of you may possibly have seen as the mannequin King Harold with an arrow in his eye at the London Dungeon – was the real Dylan deal. Brian knew every song, every variation and hungrily sought out any obscure recordings of his hero as only Bob devotees can. So when Dylan came over to play something called the Phoenix Festival in 1995, Brian asked me if I still had any connections in the music industry who could sort him out anything special. As it happened I did, and decided to go with him to the concert site on an airfield near Stratford-upon-Avon. We had backstage passes too and one of the clearest memories I have of a pretty boozy day was seeing Brett Anderson from the group Suede looking a bit grey around the gills as he sat in a food tent. I surmised the reason for this was that his band had been declared as headliners some time back before Bob Dylan had been announced and contractually had to be top of the bill, no matter who was later added to the strength
. I don’t think they’d bargained it would be Bob Dylan. His name had added considerably to the demand for tickets and Brett’s outfit, good though they are on their day, were now going to have to follow him. I didn’t know Brett, but seeing his glum expression thought that if I acknowledged what I believed to be his malaise it might cheer him up.

  ‘What ho, Suede!’ I said as I passed him. ‘Dropped a bit of a bollock there, going on after Dylan, eh!?’

  Against all my hopes, this seemed to push him further into his shell and he never answered, simply sinking further down into his chair. Still, onwards and upwards.

  About an hour before Dylan was due onstage an extraordinary and controversial edict went around the VIP area. Apparently, Bob didn’t want to see anybody backstage when he arrived, so the whole place would have to be cleared of everyone but essential staff when he mounted the stairs to start his set. This included all other performers, roadies and technicians, plus the hundreds of hangers on, liggers and drug dealers usually found in this privileged paddock. I don’t believe Dylan himself would have made such an imperial demand, but it’s typical of the muscle-flexing nonsense management entourages – the scribble that surround top talent – arbitrarily insist on to show their importance. It’s testament to the awe and respect Bob Dylan commands that some very big names of the UK music scene complied with this request, albeit accompanied by some grudging noisy protest. A row of heavy-set security men in black puffa jackets fanned out to gently shoo everyone to the fringes of the zone while a small marquee was erected and we all awaited the arrival of Dylan’s motorcade. As this was happening, one of the bouncer-types spotted me slowly walking away.

  ‘Hey, Danny Baker, y’soft bastard, for fuck’s sake, eh?’ he called after me in broad Glaswegian. ‘Danny, where’s ya Daz? I’ll show ye me fuckin’ whites, if ye like – put me on the telly, pal!’ He seemed thrilled. Clearly, here was someone who didn’t recognize a single rock star at the event but knew his TV faces. ‘Danny – y’want to go round the front, up close?’ he then asked me. Bidding Brian and myself to come towards him, he turned to his equally bulldog-like compadre: ‘See who it is? It’s the fuckin’ Daz man!’ To which his mate said, ‘Aye, it is! Danny! Where’s ye fuckin’ doorstep challenge, ye wee cunt!’ Aside from being a tad over-familiar, this made absolutely no sense as a question, but I sensed I was on to something good here and so swore something equally meaningless and insulting back at them. They roared with laughter. ‘Danny, go with him,’ said the first bouncer urgently, ‘he’ll sort ye right out . . .’

  This we did and the perk we had garnered ourselves was a trip round to the photographers’ pit right in front of the stage – also completely cleared of people – where several of the thick-necked security had already taken up their positions. As we entered the pen, our minder chum called over his shoulder, ‘You stand wi’ us, Danny. As long as you’re no goin’ ta attack the bastard, you’re fine. You wait until I tell my mam I was with you – I might have ta get a photo after OK?’

  I said it was.

  Well, Bob Dylan came on the stage and was utterly superb. This was during his electric rabbi period where he and his band all wore bolero hats and long black coats while attacking his back catalogue with some verve. Several times he looked down into the pit and must have wondered who these two civilians were, sectioned off from the riff-raff and applauding like crazy. This would have been privilege enough, but as his set reached its climax with an encore of ‘Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35’ I made a fateful decision that changes the headline on this tale from How I Stared Directly into Bob Dylan’s Eyes to How I Made a Complete Idiot of Myself in Front of Bob Dylan. During that dreadful extended chaotic final note that even the best of bands do to signify a song is ending, I nudged Brian and said, ‘Come on, let’s nip round the back again and watch him come offstage.’ As we made to leave, our security pal asked us where we were going. ‘Toilets!’ I shouted. I don’t know why I said that. It was a rotten deception after these blokes had gone out on a limb for us, but I was by now quite hyped up and, yes, on the outside of quite a few bottles of Budweiser, and I didn’t want them to ask us to wait.

  As Brian and I trotted around the rear of the stage, there was Bob Dylan and his band already descending toward the little marquee that had been erected for them to briefly relax and receive a few select guests within. Dylan, I remember, had removed his stage hat and had his head enveloped in a bright pink towel. As he disappeared into the tent, I felt we had missed our chance to get really close to the legend, possibly slapping his back or exchanging a few words during which he would realize that I wasn’t a nutcase and invite both Brian and I to join them all under the canvas. Then two things swung the odds back in our favour. I saw the first Glaswegian bulldog man was on sole duty at the marquee entrance, and beyond him inside was the unmistakable lofty, languid frame of the great Nick Lowe.

  I knew Nick pretty well and was sure he would be pleased to see me. More importantly, he was already in conversation with Dylan and once at his side I was confident he would effect the necessary introductions. In short, I was in! Bustling over to the tent, I calmed the initial look of alarm on my puffa-jacketed pal’s face by saying, ‘It’s OK – I know that bloke. He’s asked me to pop by.’ At this he even held back the canvas flap as I strode by. Nick Lowe had his back to me and was wearing a wonderful black-and-white cow-skin jacket that at that time was his trademark. Walking right up to him at a brisk pace, I grabbed him around the waist and said, ‘Nick-eee! How ya doing?’

  Nick turned around, surprised, almost spilling his drink. I beamed at him and made a gun-shape with my thumb and forefinger while clicking my tongue.

  Only it wasn’t Nick Lowe. I don’t know who it was, but an individual less like Nick Lowe it would be difficult to describe even if you were asked to achieve this by a police sketch artist. So now there was me, some fellow who looked nothing like Nick Lowe, two other blokes and Bob Dylan all standing round suffering a ghastly silence. The man who wasn’t Nick Lowe eventually broke the spell.

  ‘Uh, buddy,’ he stammered, ‘could you, uh, just give us a few moments here?’ Though he said this politely, his eyes were darting around, obviously hoping to locate security.

  Saying nothing at all, I turned away just in time to see brother-in-law Brian, who had been several yards behind me, legging it out of the tent and possibly the county too. I exited right after him. My Scots friend grabbed my arm. ‘Danny, what the fuck? You’ll get me in all kinds of shit, what the fuck were you doin’, f’Chrissake?’

  I don’t know what I replied. Indeed, I don’t know what I said for the next few years. I bumbled through life in a sort of traumatized bubble, living in constant fear I would hear a Bob Dylan record and the whole disastrous episode would come flooding back. Today I am more sanguine about it and can even play ‘Rainy Day Women’ without sweating panic-stricken bullets. Whenever I run into Nick Lowe – the real one and not one of these weasels who go around pretending to be him right up until the last minute – I will always happily relate the story for any company with a light laugh. Against this, I think the fact that shortly after the Phoenix Festival our house switched to Ariel Liquid for all our washing machine needs, a decision that persists to this day, illustrates that perhaps further therapy is required.

  I would place my wordless meeting with Bob Dylan slightly above my wordless meeting with Her Majesty the Queen. This too happened under serendipitous conditions when I nipped out to the local corner shop one evening to buy an Evening Standard. The convenience store was situated in Trundley’s Road, Deptford, close to the yard where mad Rambo the dog marked his turf. Nobody has ever mistaken Trundley’s Road for The Mall, so as I emerged from the shop with my newspaper I at first thought the outsize black vehicle stopped at the traffic lights was a funeral car that had come adrift from rest of the cortège. As I walked past the stationary limousine I looked inside and found myself exchanging an awkward glance with Elizabeth, Queen of Great Britain and Her Other
Realms and Territories. She was wearing a pale lemon dress and hat, with her gloved hands in her lap. Like a character in a bad sitcom I literally stopped in my tracks and gawped at her while furrowing my brow. It was one of those reason-scrambling moments where normally you would find yourself being shaken awake by a railway employee telling you the train had now arrived in Folkestone, all change, please. The Queen continued to look in my direction and I remained frozen with my Evening Standard under my arm. There was no other traffic on this often quiet back street and not a single other pedestrian with whom I could share and confirm the improbable vision. The lights seemed to be taking for ever to turn to green, but eventually they did and the Queen sailed away. At a quickening pace I scooted back to tell Wendy what had just happened.

  ‘Wend! I just saw the Queen! The Queen in Trundley’s Road! She was just at the traffic lights!’

  Wendy seemed mildly surprised but neither knocked out or incredulous. ‘Oh, that’s the Thames Barrier at Woolwich. She opened it today, she must have been on the way back from there.’

  Something registered in my brain. Yes, I had heard about the new Thames Barrier but didn’t know it was being opened that day and had no idea the Queen was officiating. Anyway, that wasn’t the point.

  ‘But she was in Trundley’s Road! Outside the everything shop. In Trundley’s Road. Where it goes into the bus lane. Trundley’s Road. The Queen.’

  ‘Well,’ Wendy coolly reasoned as she swept by me with Bonnie on her hip, ‘I expect they come around that way to avoid Evelyn Street at this time of night. That’ll be solid.’

  This was hardly the point. I could not understand why the huge event of chancing across the Queen when you pop out for a paper wasn’t going over as big as I anticipated. In fact, whenever I got to tell the story later I always embellished it by saying that, as Her Majesty looked at me, I took a ten-pound note from my pocket and, pointing to her picture, said, ‘Look, ma’am, I collect all your money!’