Going Off Alarming: The Autobiography: Vol 2

by Danny Baker

  So the workplace being just up the road became the tipping point in what some of my NME colleagues came to gleefully refer to as ‘Tin-pot Elvis going in the army’. Something else that soothed the realization that my Vegas days were over was the fact that LWT were willing to pay me an absolute fucking fortune: £500 for my initial appearances, rising to £750 by the summer of ’82 – and this show was on every week, forty-two weeks a year. Those of you who read the previous book will know that these huge amounts of money, from the fanfare of receipt to the tinkling of the last tanner as it disappeared down the drain, lasted me about five days. Having been well schooled in the theory of largesse by my father, I now set out to eclipse his reckless reputation rather in the manner George Formby’s screen career swallowed up the legend of his old man on the stage. The size of the budget was never the point. To live high on the hog had always been second nature to us as a family and I had viewed every rising sun like the call to some euphoric theme park for as long as I could remember. My true thinking toward this latest splash from the cash stream was that I thought they were absolutely insane to be offering such sums to me at all. Five hundred quid? OK, if you insist. I had no agent. I had no reputation. I had no real ambition to actually do this ‘for a living’, whatever that meant. Yet here they were, walking up to me not only with a wheelbarrow full of ten-pound notes each Friday but, without prompting or so much as a blackmailer’s note, regularly asking if I could possibly carry this other sack of twenties away as though it were stinking up their bins and I was on my way to the furnace. Which, in one sense of course, I was.

  I can clearly remember the day I stood by the LWT lift on the tenth floor and Barry Cox, a lovely fellow who acted as some sort of executive on our harlequinade, sidled up to me with an almost embarrassed shuffle and asked if he could have a quick word. I honestly thought he was about to tell me that, though the show was doing very well and the public seemed to like me, would I possibly mind exiting the elevator at ground level and never coming back. This would have been fair enough. These people had been more than good to me and they were absolutely entitled to draw stumps on the lark anytime they chose. ‘Now what, Baker?’ the Gods would have chortled, and I suppose I’d simply have had to feel around inside Fate’s top hat and yank out another career rabbit by its droopy old lugs. I sometimes ponder this. It is quite possible that by now I’d have been, if not a leading astronaut, then certainly the chap who pushes the button to launch the spaceship then sits back, feet up, to read a magazine while it wends its perilous way into the atmosphere. All gravy, I’ve always thought that gig was – and they don’t even have to wear ties these days. Anyway, Barry hemmed and hawed about the critical point we were at in the show’s evolution – just coming to the end of series one and needing to up the ante for its return – when he lowered his voice further and said, ‘Listen, Dan – would eleven hundred be all right for you next year?’ I told him it would be all right. Indeed, I may have even expressed a little impatience about how slow he had been in noting my frustration at having to cart home that same old £750 week in, week out. As it was, I was willing to be big about it and, yes, for this kind of dough, I might even consider commuting as far as, oh, I don’t know, Alaska.

  In truth, I actually got into the lift wondering what the fuck was going on. Why do they keep giving me more money? Wendy and I paid only £28 a week rent at the flat, so I dare say we could even have rubbed by on that distant old five hundred I had so naïvely accepted all those months ago. Besides, a raise – as I understood it from my friends – was usually an extra tenner a week. Sometimes twenty. And didn’t you have to lobby for them, go cap in hand or at least employ a little leverage? As far as I knew, nobody else wanted me. In what universe did people, out of the blue, ask your permission to fork another three hundred and fifty crisp ones into an already bulging pay packet every Friday? Why, in eighties media of course.

  Stupendous stipend aside, the job itself was turning out to be an absolute pip. The SOCS office was freshly stocked with a dozen or so other young prospects who were also at the dawn of their TV careers and had lucked out on to this upbeat immediate runaway hit. People like Paul Ross, Jeff Pope, Charlie Parsons, Ruth Wrigley, Jim Allen, all of whom went on to be enormously successful in the broadcasting game. The hour-long programme was captained by Greg Dyke and the executive producer was John Birt; both subsequently became Director General of the BBC, both now notorious for different reasons. Above all, the atmosphere in the open-plan play-pit of an office was noisy, giddy and wild, with a terrific amount of gallows humour underscoring the worth of much of what was produced. It was one of those smart, cynical pens where the in-jokes, ad-libs and wisecracks came at a fearsome pace – usually at the expense of somebody else’s ‘art’ – where massive buffets of Chinese food and plentiful alcohol would be delivered late at night, and where the show’s snowballing success simply intensified the fun rather than piled on the pressure.

  The only eventual downside was that most of us who worked there genuinely believed that all jobs in television would be like this and, without letting daylight in upon magic here, let me tell you, they are not. (Many years later, when I first worked full-time at the BBC, I found that the accepted norm for TV show workplaces – even the frothiest ones – was an atmosphere somewhere between a long-haul flight and a suicide attempt in Lenin’s tomb.)

  The other great bonus of the SOCS was that I got to meet, work with and occasionally get to know the kind of recognizable TV personalities that my friends and family would acknowledge as bona fide stars. At the NME even my association with Michael Jackson made very little impact indoors. When ‘Thriller’ became an unavoidable global video sensation in 1983, my old man’s initial reaction to it was, ‘Is he the turn you went talking to that time?’ I confirmed it was. After watching a little more he had another query: ‘Is that what he’s known for – all the dressing up?’ I said something along the lines of how, for Michael, the music always came first, but, understandably during the transformation scene, Dad doubted this. ‘You know who used to do that in my day, don’t ya? Lon Chaney.’

  After this, Spud took to referring to Michael Jackson as Lon Chaney. Every single time. When the first allegations surfaced about what was supposedly going on behind closed doors at Neverland, the old man said to me, not without some relish that one of my supposed idols had become a scandal: ‘I see old Lon Chaney’s come unstuck – touching the kids up.’ Consequently to this day I still find it hard to think of Michael Jackson as anything other than Lon Chaney and, though less so, vice versa.

  Actually, while we’re here, I may as well tell you that Dad similarly rebranded Frank Zappa as ‘Percy the Tramp’. In 1970 I had put a poster of this icon of the counter culture on my bedroom wall. Not the infamous and bestselling study of Frank on the toilet – I think that’s a revolting picture and anyway, the old man would have had that down before the Sellotape had touched the wallpaper – but a simple head-and-shoulders shot of the great maverick with his arms folded. The morning after I had first displayed it, I came downstairs to get some tea.

  ‘That’s a lovely picture you’ve put up of Percy the Tramp,’ came a flat voice from behind the Daily Mirror.

  Percy the Tramp was a well-known, old-fashioned down-and-out whose beat was Deptford High Street. This wildly hirsute local fixture dressed in the classic garb of his social class, right down to battered hat, flapping boot soles and string belt around his distressed old mac. His two signature flourishes were a flamboyant nosegay of flowers that hung from his lapel (and were, surprisingly, refreshed daily), plus a milk-bottle full of tea that would be replenished free of charge by the bloke on the pie stall outside the Deptford Odeon – who I was told was his brother. Percy was completely harmless and once, when I was about five, thrilled me by raising his milk bottle to me as I passed, saying, ‘This is the only truth.’ Local legend had it that Perce was worth several million pounds but went off the rails when a doodlebug landed on his fiancée. It was
many years before I realized that a similar tale gets attached to every district’s local eccentric and, while attractive as a back-story, it was very likely bogus. This was pretty much confirmed one night when we stopped for a hot pie at his ‘brother’s’ stall and Peter King asked him if he really was related to the top hobo of SE8. ‘He’s not my brother, thank fuck,’ snapped the bloke, wiping down his counter. ‘And I’ve got the pox of being asked about it too.’ Some of my mates thought such a tetchy denial was proof positive that it must be true, but I think you have to draw the line somewhere.

  Anyway, in our house Percy the Tramp became Frank Zappa and then eventually any guitarist whose wayward solo tested the old man’s traditional ear.

  ‘Lovely that, boy. Beautiful music. Is it Percy the Tramp again?’

  Incredibly – although possibly not to those of you by now inured to the way my life has simply bounced along – within a few years I got the chance to judge the other side of the Frank/Percy comparison in the flesh. I had remained a big fan of Zappa, so in 1980 when Monty Smith, my good friend at the NME, landed an interview with him at a London hotel, I barrelled along too. This turned out to be a very poor decision and possibly instrumental in one of the most uncomfortable encounters I‘ve ever had with any celebrity. I must accept the lion’s share of the blame with this. Quite what role I thought I was going to play was something I hoped to figure out en route. Frank Zappa was notoriously hostile toward any rock journalist, and especially British ones, so what he made of the pair of us gormlessly loping into his inner sanctum stinking of beer, I’ll leave you to imagine. Monty says he heard Zappa mutter, ‘Great. Drunk English guys,’ as he turned from opening his hotel-room door, but I still think that was paranoia on Monty’s part. Whatever the truth, this went badly from the off.

  ‘OK,’ Frank drawled, sitting on the edge of the bed and eyeing me venomously as I dragged another chair across to sit beside Monty, ‘which one of you is actually asking the questions?’ Monty said he was. ‘So why the hell do we need him?’ he barked, stabbing his cigarette, held tensely between index and middle fingers, toward me like a pistol.

  ‘Oh, we always do it like this,’ I frankly fannied. ‘We’re known for it.’

  ‘Known for it?’ he replied, dragging the first word out and imbuing it with as much distaste as possible. Then, the coup de grâce: ‘Known by who exactly?’

  At that moment, just to make the atmosphere even more lighthearted, there came a loud thump at the room’s door and I rose to let in the third of what Frank doubtless considered to be an endless stream of toxic stooges, the ever-clubbable NME photographer, Tom Sheehan.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ dead-panned Frank, ‘another one. How encouraging.’

  The fact is, we should have arrived together – not that this would have eased the trauma for Mr Z – because all three of us had hitherto been necking down pints in the White Horse pub, a popular venue for rock journalists given that it was virtually next door to Cheapo-Cheapo Records, a tumbledown second-hand shop in Rupert Street that gave music hacks hard cash in exchange for the tons of promotional LPs record companies bombarded you with in those days. Knowing Zappa was going to be a thorny old encounter, Tom, Monty and I had wisely decided to meet there and stun ourselves heavily beforehand. Now bursting into his presence, Tommy – who like me was then a rotund fellow with few emotions outside the euphoric – explained it all in typical fashion.

  ‘I’m not late, Frank. We’ve been heavy on the old sherbs for a few hours and I stopped off in the lobby for a gypsy’s kiss. Could have used yours, but some people are a bit funny about that!’

  It was here I swear I heard Frank Zappa growl. Literally growl. However, we knew everything was going to be all right. You see, Tom had brought Frank a present. Armed with this we were confident that before much longer we would all be swapping phone numbers, lacing daisies into each other’s hair and laughing about how incredible it was that we had all got off on the wrong foot. The gift was that good. You see, through the rock’n’roll grapevine, Tommy had learned that the last time Zappa was in London he’d seen a copy of Time Out magazine that featured his face on the cover, cleverly formed of thousands of tiny music notes. Apparently somebody had heard him say he considered it rather good. Acting upon this lead, Tommy had tracked down the original artwork and secured it. This, in terms of the volcanic mood in the room, was to be our get-out-of-jail-free card. Thinking about it, it’s a wonder we didn’t extend the gag and wind him up further, possibly burning an old tyre in his hotel suite fireplace, just so we could watch the thunderous reaction dissolve into a beaming grin when we handed him the painting.

  Tom passed it across and Zappa unsheathed it from the stiffened cardboard holder.

  ‘What’s this?’ monotoned the maestro coldly.

  ‘It’s that thing, Frank,’ said Tom.

  ‘Somebody told us about you saw it,’ I helpfully chipped in, losing grip on the mother tongue in my enthusiasm.

  Frank Zappa gave a short baffled shake of his head and then looked back up to us like someone handed a summons on their wedding day.

  ‘It’s that thing you saw, someone said, you know,’ came Tommy again, by now selflessly protecting his sources lest they too might get dragged into in the looming bloodbath.

  ‘Ya got me,’ sighed our star with renewed weariness. ‘I don’t know what this piece of shit is.’

  Monty, possibly drunker than we two, stepped in to clarify: ‘No, not a piece of shit. Nothing like that. You said you really liked it and Tom got it. It’s yours – from us.’

  ‘I said I liked this?’ spat Zappa with a disbelieving snort. ‘I think you must be confusing me with . . . let’s say, a guy like Ted Nugent.1 I can do shit like this in my sleep.’ And with that he threw the thing away, spinning it with such force that it cracked against the far wall. ‘Now ask me some goddamn questions and let’s get this fucking thing done.’

  He was rude and we were stupidly drunk. I should have left it there. I really should have left it there. But we all go through a stage of believing that, if we could only spend five minutes with one of our heroes, we could show them that we are nothing like all the boss-eyed bumpkins they usually have to suffer and are in fact exactly the sort of down-to-earth great company they must be starved of in their rarefied fame bubble. We know their humour, interests and their speech patterns. We even know what bores them! In short, we are their soul mates . . . all bar the trivial matter of never having met. In Zappa’s case, I had actually come close to that, sort of, back in December 1971. That was the night he was attacked onstage at London’s Rainbow Theatre and hurled into the orchestra pit by the jealous boyfriend of a super-fan. It was an assault that put him in hospital for nearly a year and came close to permanently crippling him. The gift of the painting might have failed, but this memory was going to be my ‘in’.

  ‘Frank,’ I said, ‘you remember the night you got thrown off the stage by that madman?’

  He didn’t answer, but by the way his eyebrows shot up we may assume he did recall something of the night in question.

  ‘Well,’ I went on, ‘I had a ticket for the show after that, only it got cancelled! I’ve still got it somewhere. All my friends went to the early show, but I thought the late one would be better so I got tickets for that. And of course there wasn’t one . . .’ I finished, or more accurately trailed off with a particularly weak half-smile.

  The immediate lesson was, sometimes you really need to say words out loud to yourself in private before offering them up, simply to find if they have even a scintilla of collective worth. Having voiced this bunch, I was pretty sure they hadn’t.

  There are some people – aunts, sympathetic partners, small children, et cetera – who will kindly overlook the paucity of an anecdote and nobly try to fill the ghastly dead air that ensues after one has laid such a conversational egg. You won’t be surprised to learn that Frank Zappa isn’t on that saintly list. He was quiet for a while, his clasped hands resting on crossed l
egs that were vibrating in agitation. Then, glaring at me with a cold rage, my hero spoke:

  ‘OK, I need you to leave – and I mean right now.’

  In response to this I smiled at him vacantly like a hundred per cent half-wit.

  ‘And that’s all there is to it,’ he said.

  And in that final sentence the two worlds of Frank & Fred collided. ‘And that’s all there is to it,’ was possibly my old man’s favourite phrase, used to double-underline any declaration and regularly employed just in case his audience was under any illusion that he was opening the floor to a conversational counterpoint.

  ‘You’re not going out in those fucking shoes – and that’s all there is to it.’

  ‘We are not watching Monty fucking Python – and that’s all there is to it.’

  ‘You are coming out with us on Saturday to Aunt May’s – and that’s all there is fucking to it.’

  I often think a really strong Prime Minister would use the line at the despatch box:

  ‘We are going to drop a fucking bomb on Finland – and that’s all there is to it.’