by Baker, Danny
You often read that none of us are 100 per cent straight nor 100 per cent gay. This simply isn’t true. The onus here is always on the straight person for some reason, but ask most gay men if they secretly fancy women, or a lesbian if she is actually waiting for the right man to come along, and they’ll direct you down the nearest lift shaft. For most of us, even the bisexual shot isn’t on the board. That’s all well and good, but I believe – and have had this confirmed by many gay friends – that I would have made the most terrific homosexual. In the light of the extraordinary ‘blokey-ness’ that would later become attached to my public persona, such a boast may seem fanciful – provocative, even – but it is true. I learned the ways, language and lifestyle from the best on the seventies gay scene. It was never about acting gay – whatever that might be – but knowing gay, and I took to that like a duck to water. I absorbed it all and it’s never left me. For the last ten years I have presented a daily radio show that alternates its co-hosting roles between a lesbian, Amy Lame, and a gay man, Baylen Leonard. They will tell you: in private, I am so queer. After I recently bested Boy George himself in a little verbal sparkling, he said, ‘I always forget how fucking camp you are, Danny Baker. It’s weird.’ Equally, only last week I surprised the life out of actor Alan Cumming. I am very proud of my ability to do this. In terms of gay qualification I can sail through the written part of the exam. It’s on the practical part I fall down. Along with coming from South-East London, I believe it is one of the few things I have in common with David Bowie.
It was Bowie, of course, who made the gay agenda so vital in ’73. After a few years of jumbled formula, pop and its culture had become a fantastic game again. Away from the scene in the shop and in the thunderous dark disco-pubs of Bermondsey, my way of dressing and even talking became ever more fanciful. Going by the book, you’d have thought that the sensible-top-and-Levis legions would have thumped the life out of me, what with my necklaces, red-and-yellow shoes and one-piece, skin-tight, zip-up overalls with gas station logos stitched across the back. This was purely the influence of glam rock and nothing to do with my exposure to gay culture at work. Indeed, none of the gay crowd I knew went in for the feathers and satins at all – their look was much more classic contemporary and altogether more tasteful (and expensive).
The reason I could get away with it was that a) I was always with a large and very conventional crowd of, well, geezers who could look after themselves; b) most of the hard-nuts knew me and my family from the estate; and c) the girls plainly LOVED it. Standing at the pub urinal in my pale blues and pinks, a local hard-nut in sensible leather jacket and denim would hove into the next bay and say, ‘Oi, Baker – I know you get stacks of crumpet, but don’t you feel a right cunt dressed up like that?’ To which I’d reply, ‘Well it works, dunnit?’
The real clincher was telling the girls I really was gay. Well, at least, as good as, you know. In fact, seriously thinking about it and pencilled in for some time next year kind of thing. Most found this to be magnificent news and, in a stroke of logic neither party examined too closely, would immediately suggest we started going out together. I would agree and my incipient sexuality was thereafter allowed to hover there like some inheritance in the offing. Meanwhile the Ben Sherman and boots battalions were still slogging through the foothills of heavy metal chat-up.
It didn’t always work. For every girl fascinated by the exotic there’d be her friend who’d think you were a weirdo. So, in a sort of pincer movement to impress those who found my peacock self too outré for their taste, I created another tremendous alter ego. I became David Essex’s brother. This me, I suggest, became my teenage flim-flam masterpiece.
I’m not quite sure how it got started. I’d seen David in Godspell and it’s possible that my girlfriend at the time said, ‘You look a bit like him.’ There was a grain of truth in this. I could smile like him – crooked and tentative while looking in a different direction to one’s intended target. I had sort of similar hair to DE and I could do his voice. Add those bonuses up and a boy would be mad not to exploit the gift. So David Essex’s Brother I became. Obviously I wasn’t in character full-time, but like Peter Parker and Spider-Man, I’d morph into DEB when societal needs demanded or when an unknown girl was in danger of being bored to death by a brickie with no famous relatives at all. And like all super-hero alter egos, I would fiercely protect my identity. Once word got around some pub that I was David Essex’s brother girls would often, after a few sweet Martinis, come over and say, ‘I know it’s mad, but my mate says you’re David Essex’s brother – you ain’t, are you?’ To which I would do my David Essex smile and say, ‘No’ in my David Essex voice, and she would scream, ‘Oh my God, you are!’
I know. As a plan it seems almost too simple, doesn’t it?
I had all eventualities on lockdown too. One of the most common fires I had to put out was if a girl said, ‘You reckon you’re David Essex’s brother, right?’ To which I would drawl, ‘No, honestly.’ Then she would come at me with her main thrust: ‘Yeah, well how come your name’s Baker then? His real name is Cook. How’s that happen then?’ To which I would sigh and say, ‘Look, David doesn’t want us all to be bothered by the press and his fans and that. So he lies about the family name. Cook. Baker. Get it? Now please don’t let others know about that, because it’s a real drag for me mum.’ Even at the time I knew this was brilliant.
I dressed like him. I bought a white suit, some collarless shirts and several fancy waistcoats. I became very good at mimicking his theatrical head tilts and hand gestures. If one of his songs came on in the pub I would hold my head in my hands and say ‘Oh no!’ and people all around the place would nudge each other and know why. I nearly had an earring put in – quite a rarity in males at that time – but only decided not to when I remembered, if I did, my dad would push me under a train.
The apogee of my time as David Essex’s brother came when his film Stardust was due to be premiered. I was going out with a wonderful-looking girl from North London called Lorraine, with dyed white hair fashioned the way Bowie wore his as Aladdin Sane. I’d met her through the record shop and she too had somehow, despite all my care not to let it slip out, found out that I had a brother who was currently Britain’s top teen idol.
Now the way these affairs worked was that once the girls had bought into the idea of me being DEB they actually hardly mentioned it again at all. That would be uncool. In fact, they would feign disinterest. Obviously the truth was that they were dying to meet him, and I would chum the line by dropping in several invented – but artfully mild – anecdotes about what ‘me brother’ had done or said the other day. These titbits would act as condiment during the usually short period where we were stepping out. However I was nuts about Lorraine and I wanted our relationship to run on and on. To this end, a tremendous slice of luck came my way.
During this period my sister had a job as a typist at Granada Entertainment’s London offices in Golden Square. Through her job, she would sometimes be fractionally ahead of a piece of showbiz breaking news, though usually nothing of earth-shattering importance. One day she told me that David Essex had a new film coming out, a follow-up to his hit ‘That’ll Be the Day’. She added that Adam Faith was going to be in it.
Well, that was plenty of background for me. In a move I suspect the TMZ Hollywood website would now be proud of, I bust this story out right across South and Central London’s female population. I further told them that they mustn’t tell anybody about it, which, of course, is a method of spreading gossip that is still quicker than the Internet.
‘Is Ringo Starr going to be in it again?’ they asked in low tones. ‘No,’ I replied, followed by a cautious look in both directions. ‘They couldn’t agree on a deal with Ritchie, so instead they’ve got – and for God’s sake keep this under your hat – Adam Faith.’
Now I ask you. How in the world could anybody know such insider gen if they weren’t the living blood relative of the film’s main star? How loyal
a brother was I that I hadn’t mentioned anything about the project the previous twelve months while it was being made?
And the whole ridiculous fantasy was about to get even more bizarre.
I invited Lorraine to the film’s premiere.
Now as you can imagine, I had no more hope of getting a ticket to the London premiere of Stardust than I had of getting a seat on the next Apollo moonshot. I don’t know what I could have been thinking, but the extraordinary rush I got from simply saying the words overwhelmed any panic I would soon feel about making the boast stand up.
Not unnaturally, Lorraine wanted to know when this fantastic event would be happening. I said it was all very secret. Amazingly, she saw the wisdom in this. Not for a second did she query why the
star-studded release of a major motion picture was, possibly for the first time, requesting a press blackout.
That noted, it is probably worth remembering that we had not yet become the celebrity-soaked society that many shake their heads at today. When UK show business was reported at all in the Daily Mirror – for there really was only the Daily Mirror for the masses – it would usually be after the event and certainly nowhere near the front end of the paper. Nobody outside the TV and the papers, themselves quite remote media in those days, had much of a clue or appetite concerning what was going on in the fame game. To this day I have no idea whether David Essex’s Stardust actually did receive a big West End premiere. All I knew at the time was that it had to have one and, what’s more, I was going to have to attend and so was she.
What gave my crackpot outburst a great boost was the fact that neither of us really knew what a premiere was. In my mind it simply meant the first showing of a film, and this vague notion of how blockbusters get launched was further helped a few days later when Lorraine said, as casually as she could muster, ‘Will your brother actually be there?’ This gave me the perfect opportunity to muddy the waters and say something along the lines of: regretfully no, because of a prior commitment.
What I actually said was, ‘Yes, definitely. Why wouldn’t he be?’ Having painted myself into a corner, I then began to set fire to the ceiling. But it was okay. Somewhere deep within me I knew I would come up with a plan. And when I did, I must say, it was rather a pip.
The first thing I had to do was secure tickets to that first showing. Not a press showing – I hadn’t a clue then that such machinery existed – and certainly not any night of a thousand stars bash in Leicester Square. No, I figured the first showing meant the very first time the public could buy seats for it, and that would undoubtedly be at a large venue in London’s West End. Once posters started to appear for the film on the Underground I jotted down that its debut was to be at the ABC in Shaftesbury Avenue and the date was set for a couple of Thursdays’ time. During my next lunch break from the shop I walked to the advance box office and bought two tickets for that very first performance, which was just over a fortnight away and at the decidedly unglamorous time of half past two in the afternoon. Then I hurried along to the nearest stationer’s in order to, appropriately, sprinkle a little stardust over the entire ruse.
I purchased a John Bull printing set. This was a very popular bit of kit that worked as both a game and a proper business aid. It consisted of a small inky pad with a little wooden stamper into which you could insert some of the hundreds of tiny rubber alphabet letters that came in the seven-by-five-inch tin. Once you had assembled your message or company name, you’d press it in the ink and then stamp the not-always-legible imprint on anything from shop receipts to a picture of the Prime Minister’s face in today’s paper. Barely a notch above potato prints, John Bull sets nevertheless had a ring of legitimacy when applied to official documents. Carefully compiling my letters, I took the pair of tickets and brought down the stamp hard. Each one now read on its reverse:
FIRST SHOW
COMPLIMENTARY
DAVID (FAMILY)
That evening I met Lorraine. I left it a while, then opened the bomb hatch. ‘Oh, I got given these today,’ I said, stifling a yawn. Taking the two £1.20 stalls tickets in her hand she lit up. ‘Oh wow! So we’re going! Amazing!’ Then she turned them over. ‘Oh my God – look at that!’
I took the tickets and examined them. I reacted with mild surprise. ‘Oh, right. Ha. Never saw that. Oh well, that’s how they come, you know. These are the ones they hold back.’
About a week later I informed her that, no big deal, but David wouldn’t be at our screening. He was really pissed off actually because the company had said he had to be at the one for all the boring interviews and that. We wouldn’t have got to see him anyway. When the day of our showing came around I made sure we got there late enough that the lights were down and the place was already packed. I promise you, as I entered in the half-light with my white suit, pale blue collarless shirt and with a small black hanky knotted round my neck, many people there turned to look as I loped up the aisle. During the film itself I made sure to chuckle loudly at lines that were not obviously amusing, as if I knew of some hidden significance. When Lorraine asked what I was laughing at, I whispered that I’d tell her after. Each time she would squeeze my arm a little tighter.
Ladies and gentlemen, I too simply have no idea how on earth I got away with all this nor what the hell I thought I was up to.
Lorraine and I finished our fling about three months later. She never did get to meet David.
I Went to a Marvellous Party
The truly bizarre thing about my double life as David Essex’s brother was that during the entire period I was actually, virtually daily, moving in the society of tangible, flesh-and-blood, big-league pop superstars. One Stop was not only the store of choice for the discerning music buyer, its vital and rarefied vinyl attracted most top musicians anxious to keep abreast of whatever was trending in the new American releases.
I knew that Elton John had previously worked alongside our manager John in Soho, but I hadn’t realized that, to some extent, his stratospheric success in performing had actually taken him away from this job that he’d loved. Consequently whenever he had a break in his global performing schedule he’d race home to see what was on our shelves.
The South Molton Street shop itself was a small, one-unit affair with album browsers arranged in an L-Shape along one wall and under the window. Against the other wall were two large glass-doored listening booths from which we often had to eject moochers who had clearly come in, not to buy anything, but to kill a lunch hour listening to their favourite record. Single records were displayed on the counter with back-up copies of each title stored on shelves beneath. It was while I was crouching down among these 45s, refilling a batch of Isley Brothers, Fatback Band or simply Slade’s latest, when somebody, bold as brass, walked up to the counter, lifted the bit that was marked STAFF ONLY and quickly strode into the minuscule area behind the till that served as the shop’s office. What’s more, from my cowering vantage point, I could identify this interloper only by the startling fact that he was wearing silver and red spangled stack-heeled shoes with little wings attached to the sides.
Enter Elton.
Now Elton John is still a huge, huge star. But in 1973 he was by some distance the BIGGEST star in the world. It was said that during this time he was responsible for 2 per cent of all records sold globally – an astonishing statistic given how huge, crowded and lucrative the music market was then. And here he was, less than three feet away on a drizzling Tuesday morning in W1, cuddling my friend John, kissing his cheek and asking with brotherly affection how on earth he was doing.
The only other famous person I’d ever been near to was Charlton FC’s 1968 assistant manager Eddie Firmani, who had given me a medal following my team’s victory in the Southwark Park under 12s five-a-side tournament.
I stood up. Both Elton and John turned to me. I was looking right into the extravagant glasses of the most famous person on the planet.
‘This is Danny,’ said John. ‘Started here last month.’
&n
bsp; The next ten seconds may have been one of the most pivotal moments of my life. When, as a young teenager, you are lobbed into a position where you are so plainly out of your depth, so under-prepared in life to negotiate, and faced with a scenario so far-fetched that it may as well have come from the pen of Arthur C. Clarke, you are left with certain options. You can faint. You can flounder. You can start to cry. Or you can make out that the seismic circumstances under way are so much to your way of doing things that you barely noticed a shimmer in the cosmic canopy. There and then I found that I had a disposition to entertain the last of these.
‘Hello, mate!’ I said, shoving out my hand. ‘You support Watford, don’t you?’
Elton looked entertained by my verve. ‘Yes, tragically,’ he beamed back, then as Elton would, he said, ‘I notice he’s got you on your knees already, dear.’
I laughed. He laughed. We all laughed! Elton John: my new mate. Well done, everyone. Back at West Greenwich I calculated they’d have all been going into a double History lesson about now – probably with homework.
We had some chit-chat about football – which manager John ducked out of, having not the slightest interest – and I think it clicked with Elton that I supported Millwall, a team as unfashionable as his own. Then the world’s leading talent got on with what he really enjoyed. Serving himself records. He would potter about the shelves, usually taking two or three copies of each record, as well as cassettes and eight-tracks of everything for music-on-the-move. When we were down to the last copy of something and the sleeve would be out in the browser racks, he would know exactly where that would be located and fetch it himself. He would bring in long lists of things he needed or records he wanted ordered, complete with the album’s factory catalogue number alongside – the mark of anyone who has ever worked in a shop. More than once he would be crouched down invisible beneath our counter, rifling through the singles shelves, when in would come an unsuspecting punter. Sensing someone was there, they would ask whether we had the new Stylistics record in yet. Up would stand Elton John, who would then sell it to them. It is surprising how much a person’s hand can shake simply removing a banknote from their wallet.