Going To Sea In A Sieve

Well, I was planning to follow up my Brexit posts with one on immigration and this might appear to be a sensible title for it. However, it's on a lighter topic altogether.

I don't give myself much chance to read books these days and, when I do, they are usually autobiographies. It's several years since I read a novel, Dan Brown proving enough to put me off for life so far when I read my wife's copy of Angels and Demons, having run out of reading material on holiday one year, as she tried to take it back off me from a third of the way through as I harrumphed, muttered and groaned repeatedly.

This year I read 3 good autobiographies on the beach,  Danny Baker's "Going to Sea in a Sieve", Tom Cox's tale of his year trying to make it as a golf pro, "Bring Me The Head of Sergio Garcia" and Bernard Sumner's "Chapter and Verse". (Sorry, I know you don't need it, but Sumner was in one of my all time favourite bands, Joy Division which morphed into the long lived New Order, making the huge hit "Blue Monday" and the no 1 selling 1990 England World Cup Squad song, "World In Motion". Not the journey I'd have predicted when "Unknown Pleasures" was released or, indeed, when I saw Joy Division on Tony Wilson's early evening Granada TV programme "What's On", doing "She's Lost Control" in July 1979. A vivid memory. Lots of cool breaking stuff was featured by Wilson, there really is nothing like it now. It's all on youtube, I guess, like a clip of the Granada appearance at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRUhHF-aVy0).

As you might expect from a raconteur with the gift of the gab, Baker's book rattles along with page turning gossip and yarns about his life as a schoolboy and the first part of his career, until he gets established in TV. As his early broadcasting career was with London channels I didn't know who on earth he was when I first heard him on Radio 5's 606 football phone in. While I was into punk rock, I never saw a copy of the famous ground breaking fanzine, Sniffin Glue, which was dreamt up by a school buddy of Baker's and which he contributed to before landing a job at the NME. I was a Sounds man myself, the NME always struck me as far too cynical, holier-than-thou and a bit like reading the Guardian, so I never saw his byline there. And John Peel wrote for Sounds, as well as Gary Bushell, whose career then took him on to the Sun and now the Daily Star. Bushell and co were writing about punk before the NME, which seems to be overlooked now.

Baker's whole career seems to have been a series of happenstance opportunities which, to be fair, you have to have the talent to exploit. He tells of his first meetings with Elton John, Marc Bolan, Queen and other well known artists as he worked at the super trendy One Stop Records, where they all went to pick up the latest American imports (remember them?). Then, after his well connected boss went to the USA and started Sire Records, that contact led to an American based record executive coming to England to take Baker's advice on signing acts for a new record label. That executive was Miles Copeland so, not surprisingly, an early signing was Miles' brother Stuart's band - The Police. Baker's most successful recommendation was The Fall, who he had seen playing to a tiny audience in Huddersfield.

Then, with the NME, he went on the road with the likes of The Clash and Ian Dury and the Blockheads, though the best fun was with mainstream act Darts. He ended up in Derby jail with the band. NME sent him to LA to interview the Jacksons, just as Thriller was coming out and Michael was relegating his siblings to has beens. It was the last published interview with Jackson for 15 years and revealed how dysfunctional the Jackson family was and that Michael was unlikely ever to grow up. Like Peter Pan in some ways, but Peter was the leader of a group of lost boys, whereas Michael was just lost, albeit hugely talented. The half dozen pages on Michael Jackson are absolutely fascinating.

But many of the best yarns are about Baker's experience of growing up. Anyway, I can't recommend the book highly enough, especially if you like reading about the 60s and 70s and music. But I can't figure out for the life of me why it's called "Going to Sea in a Sieve" as Baker never looked like sinking.