Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography (34 page)

‘About twenty pounds each,’ he said, suddenly in his usual voice, as if intrigued I might be able to put him on to a better source. As it happened, I could. During my initial stint in One Stop at Dean Street we had been about four doors along from a typically shady but nonetheless popular sex shop run by one Maltese Tony. Tony would come into One Stop and hope to barter our respective goods with usually minimal success: a cassette of Marvin Gaye’s ‘Let’s Get It On’ simply could not be balanced out in primitive vibrators and tit mags – particularly with a manager like John, who was as gay as a French horn. Tony would often be in the pubs around the area too, usually leaving one of his hapless younger brothers or cousins to attend the always busy local footfall into the establishment. The thing is, if you knew Dean Street you probably knew Maltese Tony, and I certainly did. So I walked Peter to where I last knew him to be stationed and, having found he’d moved on from there, on to a newer smut vendor’s in Brewer Street. Here at last, though he had to be summoned from the Mecca bookmakers across the road, was our man. I introduced Peter to him and, by his reaction, either Maltese Tony had never heard of this lanky legend to my left or else, in his business, one always presumed utmost discretion when talking shop. ‘Twenty quid!’ Tony spluttered when I told him what Peter was paying per tape. ‘And you paid it? Jesus, I’m a mug to meself!’ The upshot of this was that Peter subsequently slashed his porn bill by 75 per cent and in drinking, gambling, sex shop Tony, possibly made a friend for life.

He certainly never forgot the favour I’d done him. On the many occasions I met him after that – and especially when more shockable company were gathered – Peter Cook would always greet me with: ‘Ah, it’s Mr Baker. Notorious and superb provider of top-grade pornography to ninety per cent of London, Western Europe, the World.’ Sometimes he would extend the gleeful introduction to: ‘One word from this man and the whole of Great Britain would have to stop masturbating overnight.’ I never explained these appalling non-sequiturs to aghast guests – there would have been little point and, anyway, the twisting grin and twinkling eyes on Peter’s face showed he was almost willing me to try and start explaining the legend away. And I suffered it happily, of course. Getting to know Peter Cook was one of the great satisfactions of my career. Along with Spike Milligan he created everything we now understand as modern British comedy. Lennon and McCartney, Milligan and Cook. Four names that form the DNA at the core of all greatness I have enjoyed seeing created in my lifetime.

One Tuesday, loafing about the Carnaby Street office, I received another surprise call from Janet Street Porter to say they were going to make a second series of
Twentieth Century Box
and I was to front it again. ‘This time, though, I think you should go out and do the interviews and everything,’ she said. What was more, I was now going to get £250 a show. Lovely.

The very next day in the
NME
, shortly after trumpeting I was soon to be earning ‘more money than you junkies have ever dreamed of’, assistant editor Phil McNeill called me over. ‘Well done on the telly,’ he said, ‘but listen. You still want to work here, yes?’ I said I wouldn’t dream of leaving all the little people in the lurch just because my life had worked out and theirs hadn’t. He ploughed straight on.

‘Good. Michael Jackson – like him?’

Michael Jackson had released
Off the Wall
around a year previously, totally conquered the world, and was apparently working on its follow-up,
Thriller
. So, yes, Phil, I like him, even if some up here affect to not know who he is.

‘Good, because he’s available for an interview and we’re the only paper he’s talking to. It means you’ll have to go to Los Angeles – all right with that?’

I was all right with it.

Kid Charlemagne

W
e’ll begin my story of the time spent with Michael Jackson by examining my father’s relationship with motor cars. My old man didn’t learn to drive until the late 1970s, when he was well into his forties. When he did, it was simply because he had somehow acquired a caravan at Dymchurch – the charming but tiny seaside hamlet in Kent – and knew he needed a practical way to get down to it. Nobody knows how he got this caravan. It may have been a gambling debt, it may have been via some stranger in a pub, it may have been left to him in a will via some distant great-aunt – nobody can recall or figure it out. He certainly wouldn’t have bought it ‘straight’, that’s for sure. I never once heard him express the slightest interest in having one and the only time the family ever holidayed in a caravan, at a dreadful if typical site near Caister in Norfolk, he had noisily asked for his money back on the first morning after finding out all holidaymakers were required to sing a communal song at breakfast. I must have been about five when that happened and I can dimly remember sympathetically absorbing some of my mum’s obvious terror as he sat there, arms firmly crossed and with a face like thunder while all around him happy campers belted out the ‘Good Morning’ melody. When it was over he said – loudly – ‘Well, I’m not fucking having this,’ and made straight for Reception.

In fact, throughout the 1960s whenever anyone won a caravan on a TV games show – and, kids, most people did receive one of these bubble-shaped dwellings in the days before Simon Cowell decided they’d rather have record contracts instead – he would say, ‘Can’t think of anything worse. Where’s the luxury in that? Like going back to the fuckin’ hopping days.’ ‘Hopping’ of course was the now highly romanced version of a ‘holiday’ that for much of the last century was the only break from relentless factory work available to London’s working class. It was an exchange whereby they could live rent-free in very basic rural shacks in return for bringing in that year’s hop harvest. You can read many accounts online of how rustic, bonding and wonderful an experience it apparently was for the proletariat, but not one of these encomiums will have been penned by Frederick Joseph Baker. His stories of living in the poky, amenity-free, bug-infested, straw-floored farm huts could give any WW2 Burma POW a run for their money, and he wasn’t keen to relive the deprivations via any cramped caravan.

Except, now he had one. Or, more accurately,
we
had one. The first step to taking possession of our suddenly acquired country estate was, as I say, for Dad to pass his driving test. Now I’m pretty sure he must have achieved this, although, again, I do not remember a single time he ever went on a lesson. Whenever I asked him when was it he passed his test, the answer would be either ‘In the army’, or ‘While you were away’. Whatever the truth, the first vehicle he owned certainly lived up to such a dubious legitimacy. It was a low, decrepit, two-seater minivan of the type used for very light removals or carrying sacks of cement about. He and my mum would sit up front and everybody else would sit on the floor in the back, where there were no windows and holes in the floor, like the Flintstones’ car, through which you could literally see the road beneath.

When he first got it we all had to traipse outside and sit in it at the kerb. ‘I know it’s an old banger,’ he’d say, ‘but it’ll get us there.’ Only my mum was brave enough to voice the shared reaction to this: ‘Get us there? Why, where we going – the graveyard?’ It certainly wouldn’t have passed any MOT – which was irrelevant, because up until the turn of this century I never knew anyone from where I grew up who booked their cars in for an MOT anyway. MOTs took two minutes, didn’t even require the vehicle, and were issued by placing a tenner into the hand of some bloke who operated out of a railway arch. That said, it fairly bombed up and down the A2 for the next few years as we in the back attempted to remain perched on the rear-wheel arches and ignore the smell of petrol. This disintegrating, oil-burning pig of a vehicle was eventually replaced by a ludicrous pale turquoise Austin A40, a car that looked like Robin Hood’s hat and which Dad said he’d bought for forty quid. Now I know absolutely nothing about cars,
nothing
, and have only owned three different ones since I passed my test in 1988. I find motor cars about as interesting as algebra, but even I knew this faded, genteel-looking vehicle was all wrong for Dad. But, on the ancient adage that ‘it gets you from A to B’, he stuck with it for a while, and it was during the reign of this lemon that my old man offered to run me to the airport so that I might make my flight to meet Michael Jackson.

My plane was leaving from Heathrow, somewhere Dad had never been to in his life. To be fair, I had only a vague idea of where it was myself – I’d simply never paid attention on any previous trips and was in any case hopelessly woolly about any parts of town outside South and Central London. ‘Heathrow. That’s
west
innit?’ he said. I said I thought so, and away we went. About forty-five minutes later there we were, pootling along in Robin Hood’s hat, heading up Charing Cross Road – which is at least the West End – because Dad had said he was ‘going to go out through Camden’. Now, for those of you unfamiliar with the layout of the capital, let me tell you, attempting to get to Heathrow Airport from South-East London via Camden makes about as much sense as going to Paris from Dover via Wales. In the event, it didn’t matter because as we crossed over the junction of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road the Austin A40 totally dropped dead and blocked the junction. Again, if you don’t know this intersection you might want to buy
The AA Big Book of Worst Places to Break Down
– it will be right there on the first page. Neither of us had the faintest clue what to do next, and Spud’s idea of running repairs was to swear vociferously, keep turning the ignition key and pump the clutch like it was the bass-drum pedal on a Motorhead single. Traffic was halted in every direction. A bus driver honked his horn and yelled out, ‘Why don’t you push it into the kerb?’ to which my old man naturally replied, ‘I’ll push you into the fucking kerb in a minute, mate.’ Then he just flopped back in the driver’s seat, informing a host of gawping pedestrians, ‘I’m fucked, I’m fucked,’ over and over again. As the pandemonium intensified, I can remember thinking, ‘I bet Michael Jackson is having dinner in Beverly Hills right now, completely unaware of any of this.’

So this was the beginning of my legendary trip to meet the most famous pop star in the world. The resulting article has been re-printed many times since – it was the last interview he gave for nearly fifteen years – but every time it’s mentioned to me all I can think about is the humiliation of sitting there amid the fury of London’s road users as my father stubbornly refused to do anything about the death of his forty-quid car. Eventually, I bailed out of the old wreck and took the tube. For what it’s worth, the Austin A40 never went again and was removed by Camden council after it had been left half up on the pavement outside the Dominion Theatre. In the months following, various summonses arrived at 11 Debnams Road – all of which Dad filed straight in the bin until whatever bureaucratic department it was just lost the will to live. A few weeks later he acquired a fifth-hand white Citroën saloon, the back half of which, I remember, would rise up upon ignition via some sort of pneumatic function that worried us all. We later found out this was a famous feature of those cars, but only after several sessions where Dad had asked me to sit on the boot ‘to stop it doing that’.

And so to Los Angeles. I would be working again with photographer Joe Stevens, a highly respected, if notorious, fast-talking New York hustler whom I’d last laughed myself hoarse with while travelling through Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie on the Jam tour. On that occasion, Joe had had terrific fun testing the patience of some Russian soldiers who’d boarded our bus, first by offering them
three
US dollars for their guns, and then chanting ‘USA! USA!’ at them while handing over his passport. They ignored him grimly, which was just as well because when he pointed at me and said, ‘This is the guy you want. He’s carrying many valuable drugs,’ I actually had a little wrap of speed in my back pocket. Now Joe was on the West Coast with me and, when I encountered him now at the Sunset Marquis Hotel, he was lying fully dressed on the bed, his bag still unpacked on the floor bedside him, hanging on the phone for someone. Before I could greet him, he put a finger to his lips and signalled for me to sit down. Eventually he began talking.

‘Uh-huh. I see. But you think you could provide one, eh? That’d be terrific. Appreciate it. Yes, Epic Records, and they’ve already OK’d it. This afternoon about two would be great. OK, thanks.’

He put the phone down and smiled broadly.

‘What was that,’ I asked, ‘hooker service?’

‘No. You know some hotels have a house tailor? They don’t here, but they’re finding one for me. I’m gonna have a suit made.’

And he did – all on Epic Records’ expense account. Such was the generosity – or, more accurately, bloated ignorance – of major record companies back when sales were astronomical and the budgets were lush. Furthermore, Judy Lipsey, our PR go-between, told us that the meeting with Michael and his family wouldn’t be for another forty-eight hours so we should just relax for a few days and enjoy the amenities. We even had a car and driver on permanent standby outside the hotel, in case we needed to go anywhere.

When Joe and I were eventually scrambled to the appointed meeting, nothing happened for about three hours. Well, when I say nothing, that’s not entirely true or fair. The other Jacksons began turning up in dribs and drabs. First to arrive was Tito, a surly hunk of seniority among the brothers, who launched right in by saying that any questions I had I should direct by name to whichever Jackson I felt was best suited to answer. ‘So if you are gonna talk about the business or how we came to be what we are today or what our plans are,’ he continued without meeting my eye, ‘there’s no point asking . . . I don’t know . . . Michael, for instance.’ Uh-oh. It was as if the air conditioning had suddenly gone into reverse. I could see that there were going to be two big problems with this proviso. The first was that I suddenly couldn’t recall a single other Jackson brother’s name. Indeed, had Tito not been wearing a baseball cap with the word ‘Tito’ on it I might have believed he was called Harpo. Maybe they would all wear name hats; that’d be a reprieve. Otherwise I was sunk. Suddenly the junior suite at the Sunset didn’t seem so free any more.