Going Off Alarming: The Autobiography: Vol 2

by Danny Baker

  ‘Is your father up yet, son?’ enquired the chap.

  Waggling my little finger in my ear, I sleepily told him Dad was out. He seemed not to buy this. Plainly this was not his first time being fobbed off at our place, hence his unusually early start.

  ‘Now look, boy, I know he is and you tell him that unless—’

  That was as far as he got. Spud came thundering down the stairs and roared up to the front door.

  ‘Listen, you big ponce!’ he shouted, causing the man to back off into the square. ‘That’s my son you’re talking to. He’s seven years old and if he says I ain’t in – I AIN’T IN!’

  With that he slammed the door and went back to bed, leaving me to admire the extraordinary Wonderland perfection of what had just occurred.

  There was no way of disabusing Dad of the notion that this was the way everyone carried on, so you didn’t try. You just let him roll with it, generally with a growing realization that he might be right. He did suspect though that this method of defying the storms of working-class life, the ducking and diving as they say, was in the process of dying out. He was also aware that I was not quite constructed of the same intrepid, confrontational timber.

  ‘So what you gonna do? How’re ya getting Rod his few quid back?’ he asked, intrigued.

  ‘I dunno yet,’ I replied. ‘But it’ll be all right.’

  ‘Course it will,’ said Spud, without a trace of doubt, adding as he turned to the racing pages of his paper: ‘We can always forage, us lot. There’s always a way.’

  I’d heard him say this countless times when I was growing up, and it is such a fantastic trait to have had passed down to me. On the surface it appears to have no basis in reality and can seem little more than denial. Yet if you have it, you know it trumps anything as intangible as mere hope and defines almost every action and situation you face. When we eventually arrive at the moment I was told I had cancer, you’ll see it kicks in rather well there too.

  Anyway, about two days after the VAT men had pitched up like the broker’s men in a panto, Emma Freud rang. She said she’d told them at GLR that I ought be on the radio and now they wanted to see me. ‘It’s absolutely shit money here,’ she chirped, ‘but you will be so good at it.’

  So. OK. Radio. Let’s have a bash at that.

  Call Any Vegetable

  The huge advantage I had when striding along Marylebone High Street toward Greater London Radio’s studios to meet the controllers was that I had never really been a radio listener. Having no car in the family when growing up I had no experience of long holiday drives with familiar DJs thrashing their way through the Top 40, or even the usual tale of taking a transistor radio to bed to listen to a far-off friendly voice deep into the night. I had heard John Peel quite a few times, but he was nothing like the fixed date he was in most of my contemporaries’ lives. I had heard some of Kenny Everett’s invention-filled broadcasts too, but again they would have just been on in the background in a café or round someone else’s house. In my own home as a kid it would have been the staid and reliable sounds of Two-Way Family Favourites and Housewives’ Choice that Mum would have on to accompany the housework. The most evocative radio memory I can muster would be the intro to Sing Something Simple that filled our house every Sunday teatime while Spud prepared the shellfish supper. Actually, let me elaborate on that a little.

  Sundays in Debnams Road – and I fancy in 95 per cent of working-class homes during the sixties – followed exactly the same routine every week. The day began fairly early with breakfast (the only time in the week that meal would be eaten). While a stack of kippers was not unknown, this would normally consist of a fry-up of sausages, bacon, eggs, beans, tinned tomatoes, fried bread, bread and butter and a big old teapot of tea. This sizzling repast would be served up one plate at a time to whoever claimed they were starving the most. None of the plates ever matched on the kitchen shelf and the flatware – ‘eating irons’, as Dad called them – was another conglomeration of misfits all mixed together in a drawer. The metal-and-Formica kitchen table never had a cloth on it and I never saw both of its fold-down sides extended at the same time. Rather than all get around it at once, and thus completely block off access to one side of the small room, you ate in shifts. The tea was never-ending, made with actual tea leaves in the pot, and the milk sat in its bottle, never decanted into a jug, smack beside the red and brown sauces, the sugar bowl, butter and tea strainer, all crowded into the centre of the narrow eating surface. A plate of fried breakfast, though mainly eaten off the plate, was good for at least three mid-meal sandwiches too. Laying a thickly buttered slice of Mother’s Pride bread right next to your grub, you would lift piles of the hot mixture on to one end of this and then just fold it over. Chomping your way through this oozing bulging creation, you’d arrive all too soon at the last bit of crust, which would then be mopped into the pools of beans and tinned tomatoes for a final succulent mouthful. Having consumed at least half a loaf in this manner, you’d top up your mug of tea, rise up and say, ‘What biscuits we got, Mum?’

  At around eleven, after doing the washing up – ‘Everyone fuck off out of it while I do this’ – Dad would commandeer the bathroom for the elaborate Sunday-morning ablutions he employed prior to the Jolly Gardeners sliding its bolts off at noon. One of the few terrifying sounds I can recall from an otherwise idyllic childhood is my old man thundering: ‘Who turned the fucking immersion heater off! Water’s running stone-cold up here!’ Fortunately, these explosions were rare, and as soon as he emerged from the bathroom Dad would get dressed up in full suit and hat with shoes that he had previously polished to army standards, rounding off the immaculate vision perfectly. Quite when this ritual became the norm among working men I have no idea, but up until about 1975 the pubs on Sunday lunchtimes in those areas that housed factories, docks and heavy industries were jam-packed with blue serge, silver mohair and 100 per cent worsted, mingling in the combined mists of Old Spice, Brut and strong drink. And the pubs were packed. All of them.

  Upon leaving the boozer, Spud, toting a carrier bag containing a few bottles of Guinness to have with his dinner, would head straight for the rickety shellfish stalls that were plonked on the pavement outside most public houses. There he would select from the various bowls of seafood, bagging up pints of prawns, cockles, eels, winkles and whelks, as well as a large pink-and-pale-cream boiled crab that would be our teatime centrepiece.

  Then it would be home for the Sunday roast that Mum had down to a fine art. So much so that my abiding image of Bet on a Sunday is of her on the settee in our front room, legs tucked up beside her on the cushion, reading the Sunday Mirror while various pots and saucepans bubbled away in the kitchen beyond. Between one o’clock and three, the air along the communal landings on council estates hung rich and heavy with the smell of a thousand roasts wafting from open kitchen windows. It was an olfactory fog of gravy, Brussels, cabbage, carrots and trays of potatoes browning off around resting joints, stuffing being spooned out of tender chickens. By the time you got home from a drink, though it had been barely four hours since the hearty breakfast, you were ravenous and desperate to get among it.

  Then everyone would have a bit of a kip.

  At about six, people would start to rouse themselves. Mum and Dad would do all the washing up, then Bet would go upstairs to get herself ready for the upcoming night out. While she did, Dad would decant all the seafood from the sodden, yet famously hardy, small brown bags in which they were dispensed and start the laborious process of preparing our next meal of the day.

  As with decorating, this was an activity which required Spud to be totally isolated, as though he were working with high explosives (which, given his temper, he was). Preparing shellfish for the table is just about the most labour-intensive task in the entire culinary canon. It is fiddly, smelly, messy work and can be very disheartening when you finally see the amount of edible return weighed against the mountains of shells, husks, bone and poisonous detritus the process produ
ces. Were this not so, I maintain that the winkle sandwich would be as popular in Britain as the egg or sausage variety. A canopy of winkles, each one freshly disinterred from its black shell with the aid of a safety pin, sprawled over a slice of thickly buttered bread, splashed in vinegar before being concealed beneath the upper slice and squashed down, is as near ambrosia as any fare gets. On the down side, to liberate enough winkles for a single sandwich takes about two hours. Is it worth it? Yes. Do I want to do that? No. But for my old man the ritual had an almost sacred quality on Sunday evenings, and so we’d hear him out in the kitchen swearing and huffing, providing himself with a running commentary:

  ‘Where’d that one go? It fell on the floor, where is it?’ Or the constant refrain, ‘I’m not doing this bastard job no fucking more!’

  This was merely the build-up to the most difficult of his duties: prising every last bit of meat from a hard, unyielding crab. Today there exists an entire range of tools designed for this specific task, but back then Dad simply set about it with a hammer. The heavy thumping that boomed from the kitchen sounded as if he was mending his boots rather than preparing a meal.

  Once the last bit of white flesh had been sprung, the final prawn peeled, each whelk separated from its tail and all the winkles winkled out, we would be summoned to make short work of the bounty. Mum, half made-up, would add a tin of salmon and an angel cake to the spread, and there, ladies and gentlemen, I would feast upon the finest food I have eaten in all my life. Dad, strangely, would never join in. Every week we went through the same conversation as he, shirtless, in a white vest and suit trousers with the braces dangling, made his speedy exit from the kitchen.

  ‘Dad? Ain’t you having none?’

  ‘I’m all right. I’m going upstairs to have a wash. I’ll pick on what’s left, just leave a bowl of eels, that’ll do me . . .’

  Today, on the few occasions I try to recreate this banquet, I have to admit I cannot conjure up such noble discipline. The only thing he did take away from the room would be the small Sanyo transistor radio that peculiarly he would not have on while he was up to his elbows in crustaceans. Only when he retired to the bathroom and set about refreshing himself for the second pub session of the day – the Duke of Suffolk being the required step-up in venue when Mum went along too – would the transistor come to life with the lilting intro to ‘Sing Something Simple’ by the Cliff Adams Singers and a glorious secure calm would settle over the house. The tune retains its power to lull me like a narcotic to this very day.

  None of this Proustian preamble was of any assistance to me as I arrived at 95 Marylebone High Street for my ‘quick chat’ with the GLR controllers, Trevor Dann and Matthew Bannister. The interview, such as it was – for I do rather tend to take over in these situations – went with a definite swing, I think, although I am under no illusions that it was my recent reputation as a London TV ‘face’ that they believed would give the local station a boost rather than any untapped broadcasting potential. For a network that called itself Greater London Radio, the place was noticeably lacking in people who sounded like natives of the capital. I was offered a three-hour breakfast spot at weekends starting at 6 a.m. I took it. Actually, I took it even before Matthew uttered a phrase that was starting become a refrain where this gig was concerned:

  ‘The money’s not great, I’m afraid,’ he said with a guilty look toward his shoe.

  And it really, really wasn’t. I was offered £70 per show. Not per hour, not per record, not per word – per three-hour show. This was and remains the fathomless canyon in finances between national and local BBC services.

  I took it all the same.

  Arriving home, I bounded in, announcing to Wendy that I was back in the media business at the very highest level and we should immediately haul the kids home from school and all go out to celebrate. Overjoyed, she never thought to ask me how much I was getting for it, and I certainly wasn’t going to spoil the moment by pointing out that this proposed meal would in itself eat up my first month’s wages.

  ‘Radio though, eh?’ she said with a trace of scepticism. ‘Do you know anything about that?’

  The honest answer was ‘Not a God Damned thing.’ This guileless state of grace would turn out to be the greatest boon imaginable to my subsequent life at the mic.

  However, I am not sure whether the bosses at GLR were aware that I had literally zero experience in their medium, beyond one catastrophic appearance on the show Jelly-Bone where, for the only time since Sumeria in 55 BC, someone’s tongue really did cleave to the roof of their mouth.

  I was due to start in two Saturdays’ time and they asked whether I would be able to pop in again before then to ‘get acquainted with the desk’. This desk, should you be unclear, is that thing you often see DJs sitting behind that features about the same amount of dials, knobs and meters as Apollo. By nature I am an extremely confident old horse, but in the days leading up to this proposed ‘run-through’ I started having definite anxiety dreams. I remember one in which Paul McCartney asked me to join him onstage at an imminent Wembley Stadium concert but asked if I could have a couple of sitar lessons first. My wife tells me I awoke from that one wailing like Oliver Hardy getting a thousand volts sent through him.

  I went back to GLR on the Thursday before my programme was due to start. It was lunchtime and Emma Freud was on the air. Trevor Dann thought it would be a good idea if I went in to her show so she could unveil me before GLR’s modest audience. This peppy five-minute exchange saw Emma and I cooing at each other a good deal before she finally asked me to introduce the next record, which I did in the style of an old-fashioned Radio 1 jock, right down to getting the name of the track and artist out just before the first word of the song kicked in. When I emerged from this spot Matthew Bannister was beaming. ‘You did that well enough!’ he said, chuckling. I laughed too. Yet at that happy, relaxed moment, neither of us could have had a clue that over the next twenty-five years I would never do such a conventional and routine thing again.

  From there he led me to a dim, vacant studio and sat me down in front of all the forbidding technical hardware.

  ‘I take it you’ll not be driving yourself at first?’ he said. GLR, with its minuscule budgets, preferred all presenters to manage themselves.

  ‘Not at first,’ I trilled, setting him up for the punchline. ‘I think I’ll only need help until the oceans boil and the sun turns to blood.’

  With another snort of comforting laughter Matthew walked across to a short row of grey house-phones perched on a shelf.

  ‘Hi, mate,’ I heard him say quietly into one after a few moments, ‘I’ve got Danny Baker here. I wonder if you’ve got five minutes to brief him about the desk? Great. Thanks.’ Putting the receiver down, he made for the door.

  ‘I’ve got to get back to it,’ he said, exiting. ‘Somebody will be up in a moment to take you through it.’

  Sitting alone, I marvelled at the array of gadgetry packed tightly on to the wood-framed board. I recognized the long thin slits with plastic squares that slid along their length as the ‘faders’ you dragged up and down to make records play. But there were about twelve of those here. What did they all do? As for the legion of other knobs, switches and buttons, the contraption looked exactly like a Moog synthesizer, the monstrous and complicated instrument that in my early teens I had literally dreamed of owning one day. Idly, I twisted something at random. Had I just turned up the broadcast volume of the whole station? Had I put the news woman on air just as she was in the middle of swapping a juicy story with her colleague? Curiously, an excited imp in me hoped that I had. I must have remained alone at the controls for about five minutes, when suddenly the studio door sighed open and in walked a gangly youth wearing Buddy Holly’s glasses and Ivan the Red’s spare hairpiece. I was later to learn that he had not been in London long, arriving down from Manchester too late to marvel at the tail end of my SOCS tenure. Thus he had absolutely no idea who I might be, just as I had no inkling that this kid,
whose energy levels instantly struck me as rivalling the nation’s finest, would come to be like a younger brother as we tumbled toward the millennium.

  ‘Hello!’ he barked, striding toward me, hand held straight out for a vigorous shaking. ‘I’m Chris Evans.’

  Baby’s On Fire

  Though by 1988 the switch from LPs to compact discs was in full flood, a substantial part of my record collection was still in that old – and these days happily revitalized – vinyl format. Much of the stock liberated from the record shop where I had once worked had remained in my old bedroom at Mum and Dad’s council flat, simply because I had never lived anywhere that could comfortably house such an impressive library. Now that I had a job where I would need them all again, I set about uniting the old favourites under one roof – or to be precise, in one cellar at Scawen Road. Two incidents that happened while attempting this seemingly straightforward task nearly killed me.

  The first was when I called round to Debnams Road to box up all the hundreds and hundreds of albums that had lain undisturbed since I’d bid adieu to that period in my life when every music release seemed vital. Or at least that’s how I perceived it then. When you fall in love and have children, your wild dancing years appear suddenly juvenile and, like the memory of a distant old playground, while the affection remains, you find it hard to conjure up the potency the attraction once held for you. Happily, for me this turned out to be but a temporary amnesia and before long I’d be climbing back over the park gates to ride on those noisy swings and roundabouts all over again. Indeed I believe that my mania for music began to reboot itself that very evening as I sat packing up all those rediscovered LPs from my teenage bedroom floor. Then again, had I not lovingly lingered over the richly evocative album covers, track listings and long-forgotten liner notes, I probably wouldn’t have been there when the explosion happened.