Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography (25 page)

The reason I can is because in the very early 1980s I was in New York and Seymour Stein held a big company dinner at a Chinese restaurant somewhere near Gramercy Park. It seemed like most of the people on Sire Records were there, one of whom was almost certainly the new Sire signing Madonna Ciccone. I might have even sat opposite her, but who knew she would soon become the Dorothy Squires of the blank generation? Doubtless I chatted to her about the
NME
, and there’s every likelihood that I passed her some beef in oyster sauce at some point, but can I be 100 per cent sure? Not really. That said, can her future biographers get by without my noodle-sharing bombshells? Well, they are pretty obsessive, these people . . .

Seemingly uneventful as I believed life was in 1977, it was still fun and reckless and was working beautifully as a distraction before any of us had to look down the cannon-barrel of proper employment. The shove forward in my own momentum came in two separate kicks up the bum, courtesy of a pair of established champions of punk rock.

The first was Janet Street Porter. Janet has a deserved reputation for noisily cheerleading any new movement that has a chance of annoying the rest of her peers, and from 1976–77 she wrote countless articles and made many TV shows in order to catapult punk into the faces of what she considered to be the sleeping slug-like masses. When it came
Sniffin’ Glue
’s turn to stand in front of her cameras, I once again hurtled down the lens like a howitzer shell. I had absolutely no idea that that performance would be in any way helpful to me beyond the thirty-pound fee Mark and I were given for our time.

The other boost came in an almost casual aside from Tony Parsons of the
New Musical Express
. We were on tour in the West Country with, I think, the US bands Television and Talking Heads. Between several ferocious, eye-watering lines of speed, Tony asked me if I had ever thought about writing for the
NME
. Thought about it? I’d been standing there theatrically coughing and pointing to my chest every time I’d met anyone even remotely connected with the paper. I could think of nothing I’d rather do with my life. So, of course, now that the opportunity was being laid before me, I bottled right out.

‘Nah, I wouldn’t fit in there, Tone,’ I said, hoping he’d argue otherwise. ‘They want proper writing up there. Ours is more guerrilla stuff, independent. I couldn’t fit in a big system like that, y’know.’

I think he saw right through the jittery bluff. ‘Well, we’ve just moved to Carnaby Street and I know we need someone proper on reception – not a secretary type but someone cool to deal with all the nutcases we get in off the street. I think they’d bite your hand off. Street cred and all that. You could still write for
Glue
. . .’

That sounded very plausible. To be at the
NME
, to be part of the
NME
, to observe the
NME
but not have to deliver anything that might expose me to the
NME
. Oh I could see that, all right. I told him to float the idea to his editor. At that exact same time, way over in Los Angeles, Michael Jackson was busy preparing his album
Off the Wall
, a record that would truly unleash his legend on the world. And somewhere in the zeitgeist, both of our lifelines suddenly leaned toward each other in a barely discernible twitch.

However there were still a few more punk-rock battles to be waged before I would move on to that magical phase. Very soon after my talk with Tony, despite the impressive odds against such a thing happening again, I once again found myself in a nightclub where the half-crazed punters wanted to kill me.

All Shook Up

T
he second time that a baying mob got together and demanded my head on a pike it might be argued that I brought it upon myself. Halfway through the night at the Vortex, during one of the seemingly endless number of reggae twelve-inches that punk DJs always insisted on bombarding their punters with – something that has acted like aversion therapy on me about the music ever since – the dub abruptly stopped and an unexpectedly chirpy voice boomed out through the PA. ‘Just to let you know everyone. Just heard that Elvis Presley is dead!’ And the whole place cheered. Cheered! And cheered in such a yowling, slack-jawed cauliflower-minded lynch mob way that I knew I was done with this pin-headed punk rock forever. Cheering the death of Elvis Presley, which by any calculation was a terrific shock, simply because you’d read somewhere that punks ‘don’t like nuffing, like’ struck me as false force-fed bullshit right out of the top drawer. As the giggling thick-headed drunks and weedy misfit bozos asininely clinked beer glasses in celebration of their own retarded world view, I made my way toward the empty stage like a locomotive.

I grabbed the mic and began to harangue the assembled boneheads in a way that I fancy even a punk rock crowd weren’t used to hearing. I called them all Neanderthals, drones and wankers. I accused them all of being bandwagon-jumping, kneejerk shit-for-brains who had bought into cookie-cutter cartoon nihilism the same way the
Daily Mirror
had ordered it. Any name you can conjure up, I was firing at them. And I was still warming to this theme when the first bottle hit me. This strike was such a success among the temporarily stunned mass that within half a second everyone else was opening fire like it was the latest craze.

Amazingly it was yet another punk singer that rode to my rescue, this time Jimmy Pursey, who had been under siege with me at that Brummie Alamo, now bundling me safely toward the wings and taking a fair few bottles to the noggin for his trouble. Once offstage, I was livid and shaking. ‘Those ponces!’ I kept repeating. ‘Those idiot ponces! It’s fucking finished, this. Finished! Fuck the lot of ’em! Elvis Presley – what the fuck do they know about Elvis Presley other than what the paper’s tell ’em!?’ I was fairly hyperventilating by now as the uproar continued to play out on the club floor. Suddenly an arm grabbed me around my neck – but this didn’t feel like a fresh assault, more like a squeeze of brotherhood. When the embrace stopped, I stepped back and there was John Peel, tears absolutely streaming down his face. He could barely talk. When he did, he thanked me for ‘getting up there’ and said he too now felt like a stranger in a strange land.

‘Fucking baboons, John. Fucking cretins and baboons!’ I rumbled on, not quite matching his depth of moment. We came together again and I then strode furiously out of the seething, whooping disgrace of a nightspot. I left by the ‘artists only’ back door though – I wasn’t completely round the bend.

True to our word,
Sniffin’ Glue
magazine died the same month as Elvis Presley. Actually when I say ‘our’ word, it was Mark’s call to actually finish the magazine while its sales were threatening to go global and just as advertisers were clamouring for pages to feature their latest punk signings. In truth, he had not been a part of the fanzine for quite a few issues and had really been making a go of it with his group Alternative TV. It was announced that the last issue of
Sniffin’ Glue
would use every one of the four hundred or so advertising pounds we, apparently, had in the bank to record an ATV single and, in a farewell gesture, give it away free with the magazine.

Stylistically,
SG
itself was still pretty much the same A4 photocopied amateur hour it had been that summer day a little over a year previously when Mark had called round to have me check it out. It was a little thicker now, a modicum slicker in attitude, but still basically a Deptford bedroom fanzine. With the boom in its sales and reputation though, this ‘street’ style was getting a harder pose to pull off, even if actually putting it together remained a decidedly grassroots affair, made more arduous as its popularity exploded. Back when we sold only a few hundred of the thing, laying out its individual pages across a big desk and then trekking along taking one of each before stapling them together at the corner was no real hardship. But by the time we were printing up 12,000 copies of
Sniffin’ Glue
such a primitive method of collation needed many hands, much amphetamine – and still took up half the night. Then there was the editorial itself. The bigger bands now had to be approached through their press offices, who would always take
Sounds
or
Melody Maker
over us, while more and more stuff about the groups we had on our own labels strangely found plenty of space within. Mark had actually seen through his golden escape route from Nat West long before the end and had famously declared, ‘Punk died the day The Clash signed with CBS.’ By now that band were working on their second LP for the American corporate.

So, hey-ho, punk was dead, but somehow the nation soldiered on. A bigger personal impact in the Baker household came when my father announced that he would be leaving the docks after more than a quarter of a century ‘down the hold’. At the time, dockworkers were being offered what appeared to be attractive severance packages to quit their jobs. When this sum rose to £4,000, my dad buckled. ‘The game’s over, Bet,’ he told my mum. ‘I better grab it now before they withdraw the offer.’ And so he did. And then watched aghast over the next eighteen months as the severance figure rose to£11,000. The party that he threw to mark his departure, along with two other dockers who had also signed away their livelihoods, was about the most sumptuous all-day food-and-drink binge I have ever attended. It was held in the Adam and Eve pub in Rotherhithe and the trio must have had about fourpence ha’penny left between them once the bill came in. Every docker in London past and present had somehow crammed in to salute their fiery former union leader, and I was burning with pride as they told story after story about what it was like to work with the old man.

At one point Dad disappeared for a short while and then came marching back into the pub in the smart black uniform of the Corps of Commissionaires, complete with white sash and shiny peaked hat. On cue, the landlord of the boozer put on a raucous tape of the song ‘We Are the Soldiers of the Queen, My Lads’ and Dad strode round and round the place for its full duration, accompanied by deafening rhythmic clapping and endless salty heckles. It was a magnificent moment and I knew that, no matter what I did, I could never be the performer Freddie Baker was. He just seemed to give off a life force in waves.

I’d had no prior warning of his uniform stunt and, though he looked every bit like an official security man, thought it was intended ironically. It wasn’t. It transpired a lot of ex-dockers were being employed to sit on the front desks of new skyscrapers that were shooting up all over the City. Soon these giant corporations would engulf the very ground that London’s mighty docks had once occupied. That big business was initially paying ex-dockers to protect their premises now seems grimly ironic. But how had Dad got a job with the august and totally respectable CoC? As I understood it, at the very least, you had to have a clean criminal record and a spotless army discharge, and Fred was batting zero for two on that count. True to form, he had secured the position because someone knew someone who knew another bloke who could, for a score, sort something out with the references and paperwork. Thus, barely a week after making what he soon referred to as ‘the biggest mistake of my life bar none’ he found himself sitting at front reception of some faceless glass monolith in EC1. My dad, the security guard. He lasted just under three weeks. The first warning he was given – or perhaps he gave them – is, I feel, a most empowering story.

As he saw it, one of the more humbling duties he was required to perform was to take any hand-delivered mail that came into reception directly to the recipient. ‘Let ’em come and get their own fucking letters,’ was his take on the service. Delivering one such package to a first-floor desk one day, he put the thing down in front of some hotshot in his twenties and was in the act of turning to walk away when he heard, ‘Hang on – you! This isn’t for me. I don’t know who it is for, but that’s not me, okay? And could you put anything that
is
for me in my pigeonhole in future – you nearly knocked coffee all over everything there.’ And without even looking up, he held out the package for Dad to take away. Pausing for a deep breath, Dad took the proffered envelope and went back down in the lift.

Having brooded about what had happened for approximately thirty seconds, he then went back upstairs again. Calling from the office doorway he said, ‘Excuse me – can I have a word with you?’ The chap indicated that he could. ‘No,’ said Dad, ‘out here, away from these young girls.’ Baffled but intrigued, the man walked to the lift area where Fred was waiting. In Dad’s own words, this is what happened next:

‘I got hold of him by the fucking collar and I said, “Listen to me, you little cunt, I’ve got a son older than you, and if you ever fucking dare speak to me like that again I’m going to chuck you straight out that fucking window. Got it?”’

The hotshot whimpered to the effect that my dad had gone mad.

‘No, I’m not mad. I was when you said it, but I controlled myself. I’m calm now – and lucky for you, or else they’d be scraping you, ya little ponce, off the pavement outside. All right?’

Apparently it was. That afternoon my father was given a warning about his behaviour, to which he’d replied, ‘Well, you can warn me all you like, but I’m telling ya, I know how we’d have dealt with saucy fuckers like that in the docks. So we’ve both been warned, all right?’

Two weeks later Dad was ‘let go’ from security, and indeed drummed out of the Corps, after a large amount of copper was reported missing from some works going on in the basement and it was decided that this wouldn’t have happened if my dad had secured the area before leaving. Or indeed, if he hadn’t told his mates where the copper was. Somehow, the City survived the loss.

Coincidentally, just across the river, another high-rise office building was evicting its own noisy troublemaker. In a move whose folly was only surpassed by its sheer optimism, the
NME
had been given a berth on the twenty-fifth floor of King’s Reach Tower, the giant Thameside phallus that housed virtually every magazine title published under the IPC umbrella. Quite how they could have thought this psychedelic pirate ship full of renegade druggies and genuine rabble-rousers might co-exist alongside such ‘straight’ fare as
Woman’s Own
,
Yachting Monthly
and
Horse and Hound
is anyone’s guess, but the arrangement was proving disastrous. In the express lifts each day there was simply no middle ground between the diligent, staid office commuters and a shifty amalgam of twitching freaks that resembled a prototype casting session for
Withnail and I
.