Going Off Alarming: The Autobiography: Vol 2

by Danny Baker

  The moment Frank Zappa said it to me I could visualize the old man sitting beside him, wearing an identical expression and turning to say, ‘See what I mean about him, Frank? Silly as arseholes.’

  I left the hotel room as instructed. Monty and Tom say the atmosphere remained flatlined, despite their attempts to haul it out of the permafrost. The article, when it was published, made Zappa seem particularly sullen and difficult with no mention of the fiasco that had coloured his mood. Happily, among much of my day-to-day circle, offending the composer of ‘Peaches en Regalia’ carried slightly less weight than offending the real-life Percy the Tramp.

  However – and to return to the point I think I was making – my dad’s indifferent reaction to my work changed when TV put me in the orbit of names he knew and situations he understood. While not exactly bursting with pride, he would sometimes obliquely enquire as to whether this unexpected boost to his reputation on the estate was worth getting used to.

  ‘This telly game,’ he’d ask as he drove me to work, ‘d’you reckon you’ll stick it out?’

  I’d tell him I reckoned so, and he would pull a face as if to say, ‘I’d get stuck in while you can, boy . . .’

  Over those first couple of years, the extraordinary popularity of the Six O’Clock Show in London took everyone involved with it by complete surprise. Broadcast live virtually all year, it grabbed an enormous audience every Friday evening. In terms of onscreen confidence and star pulling power, the show was more like a network Light Entertainment juggernaut than a vehicle for the featherweight end of local news. I became thoroughly identified with it in people’s minds, signifying as it did the start of many a working house-hold’s weekend, and I was very happy to go along with every bit of its broad-brush wide-eyed hoopla. This was easy street. This was plush. The rising amounts of money that LWT were throwing at me required but the flimsiest of workloads. Here’s how it went, year in, year out.

  I couldn’t drive, so on Monday lunchtime my old man would pick me up in his motor and chauffeur me to what is now the ITV studios by the Thames. There I’d barrel through a raucous hour-long meeting, during which all the real makers of the show would outline their simple but inventive ideas for the short film reports around which that week’s show and guests would be hung. As noted, the atmosphere in the ideas room would be ebullient and competitive – if not quite up to the unforgiving standard of NME editorial meetings, where you really did need every bit of jousting armour your wits could muster. What they both had in common was that, once business was concluded and the dead had been buried, everyone went straight to the bar to guzzle down liquids as if an enormous asteroid had been sighted hurtling past the moon.

  On any of the three days following these team meetings I would be required to front one of the selected reports, craftily adapted as they were from an original item spotted in one of the capital’s micro publications. It might be about rag-and-bone men. It might be about budgerigars. Eccentrics and their inventions was always a winner. Solid-gold subjects like nudists, improbable ghost sightings and ecclesiastical fashion shows became our staple fare. Quite often I was required to dress up and behave idiotically for a gag piece to camera, emerging from inside a wheelie bin or hanging on a bell-ringer’s rope. On location days, everybody involved enjoyed long lunches in good restaurants – all cheques picked up by LWT, of course – and all of us had a fair few again after the final shot. Sometimes well before it too.

  Come Friday, the show would be staggered through once in a mid-afternoon rehearsal then boomed out at six o’clock absolutely live in front of an audience with a top-notch guest joining we regulars to chat breezily about events. By seven it was all done; the audience would applaud wildly and copious amounts of free food and drink would be forced upon everybody concerned.

  This light, stress-free schedule was my entire week. So what did I do with the rest of my time? Well, fuck-all. Absolutely fuck-all.

  Possibly because I couldn’t allow myself to believe that this nonsense would amount to anything, I may have been stockpiling my greater energies for some more tangible toil yet to reveal itself as my True Calling. I knew I was pretty slick at frothy TV, but who wouldn’t be? Competent showing off certainly didn’t feel like a particular skill or anything I could take elsewhere if they decided to hand me my hat – a prospect that didn’t unsettle me one iota. I was very aware that I simply lacked whatever determined, or maybe needy, gene it is that makes show-folk strive. Most new TV performers, having finally got their break, really, really don’t want to fuck it all up. After all, this was ‘it’, the longed-for breakthrough signalling that their career was on the up at long last. The problem was, I didn’t come from a background where people had ‘careers’. You went to work, you had various jobs at different times, but it was all in a jumble. It did not define you or plot your course in life – and thank God for that. All of us on the Six O’Clock Show felt extremely fortunate to varying degrees, but I felt lucky in a different way, like when you find money down the back of a couch or get into the pictures without paying. I certainly never regarded any of this folderol as ‘getting my foot in the door’. What door? As far as I could see, I had arrived in Wonderland by accidentally popping up out of a loose manhole cover.

  Had I been required to struggle a bit, or even had the tiniest hankering for the media lifestyle, I would have been completely absorbed in how well I was now doing and possibly gone round the bend in an orgy of self-love, like so many do in broadcasting. If I’m honest, I reckon I would have made a first-class media-mad person. We will meet examples of this potty breed as my story unfolds. On the many occasions I got to observe them pout, rant and rave, I always suspected that, given a more insecure nature, a good excuse and a penchant for unhinging drugs, I could have given all them a right old run for their money. As it was, ever since quitting school without so much as an O-level to wave at the hard-knock life, employment had felt like extended lark. Even if it came to a halt in the next heartbeat, I would still have looked on it as an exhilarating suspension of real life. I imagine my wife would have said to me, in the normal years that followed my fleeting fame, ‘Do you remember when you used to be on telly a lot?’ and I’d say, ‘I know!’ Following which the pair of us would crease up at the giddy memory of such a preposterous liberty.

  Perhaps it is my passport for the years 1978–88 that best sums up my half-hearted commitment to whatever it was I felt I did for a living. In the space on the document marked Occupation were written the curious words Music Writer – and they were written in my own hand too. When I had filled out the form for this, my first proper hardback passport, I had been writing in fits and starts for the punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue – a stapled-together amateur effort sold by myself and a few friends. The idea that I could put ‘Journalist’ down as my profession seemed hopelessly grand. So I put ‘music writer’ and toddled off to the official offices in Petty France to hand in the forms, prepared, if called upon, to better explain my fuzzy old line of work. In the event, nobody was in the slightest bit interested in what I did. But when the little book was handed to me, there, under profession, my job was given as ‘musician’. I stared at this for some time. Would it do? Did it matter? I figured it might. The reason for me applying for the thing in the first place was that my friend Stephen Saunders and I were selling everything we had to hop aboard Freddie Laker’s Sky Train – a new venture by which you could fly to New York for just £60. What if the notoriously cynical cops at US immigration read this ‘musician’ boast and asked me to prove how I made a crust? At worst they would hand me a saxophone and ask for a demonstration, at best they might casually ask what instrument I played – and you can’t answer ‘nothing’ to that one, unless you’re Yoko Ono. So right there outside the Passport Office I took a biro and crossed out ‘musician’ and wrote above it my original bluff of ‘music writer’. I had no idea that doing this was totally illegal. Basically it invalidates the entire document and makes you ineligible to travel anywhere,
though I have to say that in the ten years I went around the world on it, only once was I ever questioned about the alteration. Arriving at Los Angeles to interview ex-Motown boss Berry Gordy – who by that time was running a peppy disco label called Solar – a guy at Customs asked if I actually wrote music, ‘Y’know, like Beethoven’. I told him that I had changed the words myself and they were just a lie basically. ‘I didn’t hear that,’ he said, handing it back to me with a facial expression I have since come to know as ‘the old skunk-eye’.

  So there it was. I was in my mid-twenties, popular and successful, hopelessly, happily in love, earning tons of money in a fantastic, easy job on TV that was a real pleasure to do. The form in autobiographies is to now write: ‘. . . but I had no idea that this idyllic lifestyle was about to come crashing down around my ears and life was going to get very hard.’ I fully understand that. It’s the kind of thing that gives consecutive chapters some emotional light and shade. ‘Ah!’ says the reader. ‘A reckoning!’ As I said in the first book, it might appease certain sourpusses if I eased up on the lashings of joy and light that seems to attend the events in these volumes, but to what end? What I present are the bald facts and we’re stuck with them. Indeed, in the current style I should say SPOILER ALERT here, because any readers who could reasonably expect a bit of struggle and darkness from their tomes might want to make for the last bus now because a) I don’t get cancer till Book Three and b) Believe it or not, the professional hijinks were only just beginning.

  None of the preceding cart-wheeling should leave you with the impression that, even with a hit TV show thundering away each week, I was entirely to the manor born. In fact I could have done with putting on a little more side and taking expert advice in how best to handle this jamboree. Here’s a perfect example.

  When you first begin achieving any kind of profile through the media, you simply can’t do enough to keep up with the schedule such a privileged position brings. You reply personally to the trickle of letters that arrive at the studios. You accept invitations to present cheques in pubs, often many hours from your home. You take part in tug-o’-wars to raise fourpence ha’penny for church-steeple funds. I have even been locked into authentically fashioned medieval stocks in order that people might throw sodden sponges at me for 20p a pop. This, to be fair, can be a lot of fun, so long as people are forming a queue to aim their soggy missiles at you. It is in the longueurs between customers that you begin to question your status as a draw. There you are, in public, your head and hands poking through two tiny wooden apertures that scrape off skin with every attempt to find comfort, arse and legs sticking out behind, inviting stray stones from the younger set, and, worst of all, a procession of indifferent stragglers go strolling by within yards of this ignominy, not so much as glancing in your direction. You’ve taken a few hits, so the water saturating your hair is now freezing cold and the seemingly incessant rivulets make you blink like a strobe light. Meanwhile, the woman assigned to take the money and hand out the sponges is similarly fed up with being ignored and keeps throwing you embarrassed glances, saying things like, ‘Blimey, you’re a flop! We had Wincey Willis last year and I’d taken thirty quid by this time.’ Of course you can take this information either way. You can tell yourself Wincey is a controversial figure so it’s no wonder the crowds flocked to launch their sponges at her helpless head, whereas you are universally loved and simply do not deserve such treatment. But part of you wonders whether it’s because the public have no idea who this absurd man in the humiliating contraption is and haven’t the least desire to waste 20p attempting to feed his raging ego. The internal debate surges back and forth interminably as the punters drift by, oblivious, ignoring your inane grins that you hope will make you look a bit like someone they’ll have seen on television at some point.

  Extraordinarily, my mum and dad would treat these low-wattage gatherings as irrefutable signs that their boy was at last on the map. My previous front-page bylines in the world’s most read music paper were as nothing compared to being pictured on page 17 of the South London Press in a pretend head-lock with wrestler Kendo Nagasaki. Of course, this was understandable. Friends of theirs would shout across the Jolly Gardeners saloon bar, ‘Here, I saw your Danny in the South London yesterday!’ Whereas they never came across a single living soul who had seen my rather caustic half-page about Brian Eno in that week’s NME.

  The very first public event I was ever invited to attend as a result of my minuscule public profile was a fête at the Erith & District Sports Centre. I was actually asked to open the affair. It was to be on a Sunday morning at nine o’clock and, suburban Erith being a good forty-five minutes from where I was living, I asked my dad if he’d mind ‘running me’. (Nobody I knew ever asked for a ‘lift’ from the few among us who had cars. You always asked if someone could ‘run’ you somewhere.) Spud’s face as he drank in the info that I was kicking the event off was a picture of wonder and joy.

  ‘How comes they asked you?’ he said. And I knew that he’d only asked so he could hear the reply that would confirm his pride.

  ‘I suppose they’ve seen me on telly and think it’ll drum up a crowd. I dunno.’

  He drank this in momentarily, then moved on to his inevitable secondary train of thought: ‘And are they giving you a nice few quid?’ he beamed with a relish signifying my confidential answer would be all over Bermondsey’s best boozers later that day.

  ‘No,’ I said with as much insouciance as I could muster. ‘I mean, leave off, Dad, you do these things for nothing. You know, it’s a good cause and that.’

  The fascination fell from his face. ‘What? Fuck-all? Not even a drink?’

  ‘’Course not,’ I came back, though by now not meeting his eye. ‘That’s not the way things are in telly. They’re trying to build a new sports hall or something in Erith. You can’t ask for money. Anyway, I’m happy to be giving something back.’ Even as I said this I knew I might as well have been talking Chinese.

  ‘Give something back! Well, if you say so, boy. But I tell ya – whenever there’s pound notes flying about, you better have a fucking good look how much of it winds up in the pot. You’ll soon find out who’s giving something back! Do yourself a favour – just make a few enquiries when you get there. You find the right bloke and you’ll get in the swim – they’ll all be at it, don’t you worry about that.’

  Again, readers of the previous book will already know that, no matter what the gathering, service or enterprise, Spud always believed there was ‘a swim’ that allowed access to only a golden few. He never, ever had the slightest trouble ‘finding the right bloke’ on these occasions, because nine times out of ten that bloke would be him.

  In the event, on the morning of the Erith & District Grand Fête the phrase ‘in the swim’ would have another, almost literal, meaning. It was hammering down. Pelting. As we sat about to set off in Spud’s two-tone bronze 1976 Ford Granada, neither of us thought the trip would be necessary.

  ‘They ain’t gonna fuckin’ go ahead with it in this, are they?’ he asked, for about the fifth time.

  I explained that – cancelled or not – I had better show willing and pitch up. Dad didn’t see this.

  ‘Wha’for? Even if the gates are open, you’d have to be puggled to come out in this. Fuck me, boy, people wouldn’t turn out for Frank Sinatra in this lot – what chance you got?’

  Bolstered by this, I asked him to turn the ignition key and head south.

  When we arrived it wasn’t raining as bad. It was raining far worse. The venue was an open-air municipal complex, little more than a small reception bungalow, a few changing rooms and then a running track encasing an oval grassed games field. There were about six cars outside in a car park that could’ve held fifty. Out on the field were three drenched and bedraggled stalls that looked to have been erected and abandoned some hours previously. The long PVC banner announcing the event had come adrift at one end and was slapping against the puddles as the wind whipped beneath it. In th
e short run from our car to the facility’s entrance, my dad and I could not have taken on more water had we gone down on the Lusitania.

  Bursting breathless and cursing into the tiny concrete reception space, Spud summed up our situation with a surgeon’s precision:

  ‘Well, this is bollocks!’ he boomed, without the slightest hint of humour.

  Far from laying on a welcoming committee for their star turn, there wasn’t a soul in sight. Plainly the thing had been called off, but I still needed it confirmed before I would get back in the car and order Dad to find the nearest warm café. I wanted them to know I had at least seen my part of the bargain through like any seasoned pro was expected to in ‘my’ business. Three options stood before us. The door straight ahead would lead out on to the running track. To our right, a short corridor of changing rooms and showers. To the left, behind a council-blue door with a frosted-glass window, was what we assumed was some sort of office. Dripping a trail behind us, I knocked on the glass. As I did, I was able to make out a few blurry, silent figures within. When a woman eventually opened the door she looked us up and down and said, ‘Have you come for the fête?’

  ‘I’m Danny Baker,’ I said, blowing a good-sized droplet off the end of my nose. ‘I was asked to open the event.’

  ‘You were?’ she replied, with, for my liking, too strong an emphasis on the first word.

  I nodded.

  ‘Yes, well, that’ll have been organized through John Riley,’ she barked. ‘I’m afraid he’s not arrived yet. Come in, won’t you?’

  Inside the cheerless little room four other people were gathered about a wooden table, trying not to hog a two-bar electric fire that was causing significant steam to rise from sodden shoes and trouser legs. After shaking hands all round, we were offered tea. Some small talk about the conditions ensued, during which I could just about hear Spud behind me, wheezing a low ‘fuck-ing hell’ in a singsong tone I recognized as both amused and exasperated. Then one of the ladies dropped her bombshell.