Going Off Alarming: The Autobiography: Vol 2 (3 page)

‘Mrs
Baker,’
began the fellow.
‘I’ve
just got off the number one bus up at the top of the turning and I nearly trod on this tortoise. The man from the post office says he’s
yours.’

Well, Mum couldn’t thank the chap enough, although Tom, clearly furious at such busy-bodying, had withdrawn deep into his shell and was refusing to assist in the inquest. I later got the blame
for leaving the front door open,
‘When
you know full well he’d be off like a
shot.’

It was a few nights after this, while we were watching
Take Your Pick
with Michael Miles – a wonderful and extremely popular peak-time games show in which members of the public could win tiny caravans, a carpet or £50 in five-pound notes – that Tom’s indoor visa was abruptly cancelled.

My mother, like most 1960s mothers, loved a knick-knack. In our front room we had a madly contemporary, if mass-produced, glass-fronted cabinet full of things like chalk poodles, Toby jugs, little highly glazed
ladies’
boots as well as decorative ash trays and faux Georgian porcelain figurines. What my mum liked best though was a novelty teapot. Since these were too large to fit into the spaces in the cabinet, she displayed her collection on a tall but narrow corner unit that could house about three teapots on each of its five triangular shelves. As we sat watching
Take Your Pick
that night, the fixture, which stood a few feet behind our television set, was full to capacity. Never the sturdiest of structures, it was nevertheless well grounded by the combined weight of Mum’s pride and joys and topped by her favourite piece of all, a china cabbage leaf arrangement whose lid featured several caterpillars hurrying away from a radish.

I can’t remember which of us first noticed that the entire column had begun to move. Not too much initially, but before long it was swaying back and forth like a Japanese city bank during one of their regular earthquakes. It turned out Tom the Tortoise had strolled into the front room earlier that afternoon and, having patrolled his usual haunts, decided to find somewhere enclosed and shady to take a nap. The base of my mother’s teapot unit offered just such a darkened area, a space at floor level where the unit’s feet supported the bottom-most shelf. The gap was about four inches high which, happily, if at a pinch, was exactly the same height as Tom himself. Having snuggled into this retreat he had dozed off facing the wall. Now, many hours later, it seemed Tom had awoken and had momentarily forgotten where he was. What’s more, this accommodation no longer exactly fit his requirements. Somehow
the den appeared to have shrunk. Or possibly he had swelled. Whatever the science involved, Tom the Tortoise suddenly felt constrained and horribly claustrophobic. In an attempt to free up a little shell space he began vigorously shunting himself to and fro, and it was this repeated motion that had manifested itself in the upper decks of the unit. As the giddy rhythm gathered pace, Mum leapt from her chair, one arm outstretched, shrieking
‘Fred
! Do
something!’
But it was too late. Like Tom, Fred had only just surfaced, the fatal combination of a hard day’s work, an open fire and average TV having sent him off into a beautiful kip. Helpless to prevent disaster, we looked on as with one final lurch Mum’s teapot collection toppled forward like a punchy heavyweight who’d taken one too many on the chin. The noise! Dear God, the cacophony of that moment what with the shattering pottery, the impact of shelving on television set, our massed family screams as we rose to our feet and, because one unseen teapot had yanked the aerial out of its socket, a burst of loud white noise cutting across it all. Amid the sobs and recriminations I looked over the wreckage and there was Tom, free at last and casually making his way toward the back door, his thoughts seemingly anchored on that half a strawberry he had earmarked for supper. Mum, absolutely distraught, saw him too. Taking her slipper off, she hurled it at him as hard as she could.

‘You
fucker! You destructive little
fucker!’
she screeched. The slipper missed its target and Tom appeared not to notice. Arriving at the back door he saw it to be closed. I swear he then craned his scaly old neck round to peer at our hysterical tableau. He followed this up with a sanguine look that seemed to say,
‘I
say, could one of you get this for me? Don’t know about you lot, but I’m
starving.’

Mum cried all the next day and the Great Tortoise Teapot Disaster would be something she measured all other breakages and disappointments against for the rest of her life. Needless to add, our garden door was never, ever, allowed to be left open after that and Tom remained penned in on the porch until some concrete mix was applied to the base of the four-foot fence between us and
the Brimbles, bringing to a close that particular avenue of reptile escape.

Anyway, the point is, nobody in my family had ever been in show business. But in the spring of 1982, without actually trying, in show business was exactly where I found myself.

Are You Having Any Fun?

T
here’s a school of thought that many people drive themselves to become famous to either please, or spite, their parents. In my case, I became famous because it was convenient. It was, in a physical sense, literally handy. The TV programme that I’d almost sleepwalked on to, the
Six O’Clock Show
, was made at the London Weekend Television studios, roughly fifteen minutes from my front door.

I cannot emphasize enough how significant a factor that was in the decision to adopt a comparatively sedate career after my wilder years working in a hip record store, getting mixed up in the birth of punk rock and particularly my recent tutti-frutti hurricane ride on the
New Musical Express
. I’ve often wondered how keen I would have been to pursue a life in front of the lens had the programme been made by the BBC, who were way across town, a thousand miles away in Shepherd’s Bush. In London traffic, Shepherd’s Bush could be a two-hour trek from my place in Bermondsey, and I don’t know if I could have stuck such a tedious commute for long. I fully accept people may curl a lip and feel such world-weary posturing is unforgivably lofty, given what a huge break landing a gig in TV might seem. However, in my defence I would offer that until just a few months previously, I’d been going all over the world getting paid to hook up with exotic, half-crazed drug-fuelled pop stars in fantastically fancy-pants hotels, notorious bars and sold-out stadiums. In that light, I promise you, even the most exciting discussion about a regional news programme’s proposed running order starts to look a bit pale around the gills. Throw into that mix the grim subterranean meeting rooms of the BBC’s TV
Centre and you may glimpse why the shot simply wasn’t on the board.

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.