Danny Baker - Going on the Turn

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Going on the Turn
A MEMOIR
This book is for Wendy, Bonnie, Sonny and Mancie.
Of course it is. Everything is.
Almighty thanks to Alan Samson at Weidenfeld & Nicolson whose barely suppressed sighs and patient drumming of fingers as I offered various phantom deadlines on this mighty work became as a mothers heartbeat to me.
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do. Jerome K. Jerome
Frederick Joseph Baker (1928-2008)
Elizabeth Kathleen Baker (1931-2017)
Michael Edward Baker (1952-1982)
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
List of Illustrations
Prologue
1.
(Im The) Urban Spaceman
2.
Get Em Out By Friday
3.
Look Out (Here Comes Tomorrow)
4.
The Low Spark Of High-Heeled Boys
5.
Its All Over Now
6.
He Who Would Valiant Be
7.
Somebody Said Your Name
8.
Spirit In The Sky
9.
Dance In the Smoke
10.
Quicksand
11.
Do You Believe In Magic?
12.
Solid Air
13.
Remake/Remodel
14.
Strictly Confidential
15.
Men Of Good Fortune
16.
Not Dark Yet (But Its Getting There)
17.
Resurrection Shuffle
18.
Roll Away The Stone
19.
Just One Victory
Coda
Also by Danny Baker
Illustrations
Copyright
List of Illustrations
Mum and Dad with my sister at the Festival of Britain, 1951.
Love this photo of Spud (centre & insert) pointedly ignoring pleas for dockers not to strike.
With Mum, 1960.
With Dad in our back garden.
1965.
1974. Chugging a beer while ignoring the ectoplasm.
1976. Oxford Street. Punk figurehead Mark Perry and I photo-bombed by old girl looking for her bus.
1979. At the NME.
Bored of rock stars I began interviewing comics. Starting at the top with Bob Monkhouse.
1982. Spud overlooking the Thames from landing of a council block. The Mayor of Londons office stands there today.
Holding Bonnie and Sonny on our wedding day.
I have no idea where this photo was taken. It looks like Holland.
With Wendy in the 1980s. Note the tremendous product placement.
With Chris Evans and Billie Piper, Palm Springs 2001.
Chris Evans and I late for a TFI script meeting. By which I mean theyd already been open twenty minutes.
Chris and I leaving the studio after the last ever TFI Friday.
An extraordinarily amusing mask of a horses upper jaw. Youre welcome.
I cant cook. But I enjoy butchery. Apparently.
With Chas & Dave. Possibly the most cockney photo ever taken.
Correction: THIS is the most cockney photo ever taken. With Tommy Steele in a pie-and-mash shop.
Danny Kelly and I feeling absolutely no pain in the 1990s.
Ah, thatll be Peter OToole and Ronnie Fraser with me, then.
Two old vaudevillians reminisce. My sunglasses and the trees make it appear I am wearing a wig.
Knocking about with the Stones in Chicago.
To be clear: this is me wearing a wig.
Emerson Lake and Palmer. Tailors would measure Greg and I, just for the exercise.
On air and on form.
And still I grow. Elton holding a picture of me from when we first met in the early 70s.
This is David Kuo. You see, he is real.
The Treehouse on air at BBC London with Baylen Leonard.
Producer Julia McKenzie would dress up the studio every single day. It changed with the seasons.
Peter Kay probably the shows biggest fan. Note boxes of mini-discs in foreground.
The radiation mask into which I was bolted daily.
At the Sony Awards and telling Roger Daltrey he should have turned it in after Substitute.
Sony Awards, post-treatment, with Rhod Gilbert. Dear Lord, I should not have been out.
Ah, life seems to be returning once more. A flagrantly hedonistic shot.
Recovering in Portugal. The biscuit is a prop. I could no more have eaten it than flown home by flapping my arms.
Sonny and I moments before I explained what hereditary baldness was.
Back in the world. The whole family enjoying my bandana/wig combo over Mancies halo.
My gals: Mancie & Bonnie.
Unaware of the camera, this reflective study is among my favourites.
The Bakers. Islamorada, Florida 2014.
And thats that.
Prologue
In 1968 ITV broadcast an episode of the childrens programme Lost in Space in which Will, the young boy of the family marooned on a faraway planet, discovered that the image he saw when he looked into a mirror was not simply a reflection of himself but another him entirely, living a separate life on the other side of the glass. I cannot tell you how profound an effect this had on me. It struck me as not only entirely plausible, but just about the most mind-blowing thing I had learned since my brother explained to me that our parents were not related like the rest of us but simply a boy and girl who had got together by chance. That information pole-axed me for days afterwards and similarly, after the space show was over, I sat on the edge of our settee so mentally exploded that I could not quite conjure up the necessary impetus to lift my rear end fully away from the fabric of our three-piece suite. In truth, it always took extra effort to haul oneself away from the sort of deep, heavy sofas favoured by my parents; huge mauve monolithic structures that provided the furniture worlds answer to Al Capones bulletproof car.
So for about two minutes I hovered there, bum slightly raised and vacillating above the base cushion like a jockey entering the home stretch still with a chance of third place. My mind was whirling. How could I have gotten to fully ten years old without somebody alerting me to this parallel universe lurking just a veneer away, complete with a parallel me. A twin! I always suspected I was that must be why so many of my contemporaries struck me as slightly backward misfits. But how to make contact with me/him?
I figured that in order to get this other self to break cover I would need to undertake an extended period of staring deep into my own reflection and for this, absolute privacy would be paramount. The last thing I needed was my father catching me in the act as I ogled myself, trance-like, nose a half-inch from the full-length glass in his wardrobe door, murmuring, Its all right, you can come out now. That would be as bad as the time he caught me kissing a photo of Dusty Springfield in, coincidentally, the Daily Mirror. On that occasion I had bluffed my way through the trauma by insisting I had dropped a piece of chewing gum on to the paper and was retrieving it, no-hands style. For about two hours afterwards I kept walking into his line of sight while theatrically over-chewing a non-existent Wrigleys so he would know how much that piece of gum meant to me. I thought I was carrying it off brilliantly until he said, Youre fucking gone, you are! I hope theres room in the van when it comes round tonight. (The van was a vehicle the old man often referred to; according to him, lunatic asylums toured the streets looking for new inmates much in the way rag and bone men sought out broken-down gas cookers.)
Finally gathering enough wherewithal to escape the pull of our settees mass, I hurried along the short passage that led to the downstairs toilet where a fair-sized mirror hung on the wall behind the cistern. Sliding the toilet door closed behind me, I leaned across the fixture itself and stared into the convex oval glass. And there I was. Or rather, there HE was. For quite some time we regarded each other, neither of us making the slightest move. I figured if I gave it long enough, he would eventually crack and by dint of his flickering lip or the infinitesimal raising of an eyebrow, we could begin our secret relationship.