Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography (24 page)

I took a closer look at the stocky middle-aged man in question. It was former Arsenal midfielder George Eastham. I exclaimed as much in a tone with possibly too much glee for the room.

Mick snatched at my wrist. ‘Shut up! What ya trying to do? I’m not fucking going over there or nothing. I just thought you’d wanna know, you being into football and that. I useta, y’know, watch all that shit too.’ And his eyes continued to linger on the anonymous bloke with his foot on the bar rail, enjoying a half.

Of course what Mick really wanted to do was go over there and gush, possibly get his guitar signed, but in those times there was an unbridgeable gap between music and football, and the always crippling concept of ‘cool’ allowed little fraternization between the two cultures.

Mind you, Mick also once got a bit frosty when, round at the flat he shared with Generation X’s Tony James, I saw him, fresh out the shower, in just his pants and a towel wrapped around his hair. Feeling that perhaps this image revealed too much of his personal grooming habits, he pointed to the towel and said, ‘I had to wash me hair all right? Don’t let this get into your fucking magazine.’

I didn’t. But today I will betray that sacred oath and tell the world outright: some members of The Clash liked to look good and Mick Jones, post shower, would wear his hair in a towel like America’s Next Top Model. I’ll now go further. I too often used to adopt this male towel-turban on exiting the bathroom. Against this, at the time of writing, both Mick and I are very bald indeed and can only dream longingly of such a utopian state of affairs.

There were a few times though when the band allowed themselves to be a little playful. At the Post House with us was the revered American rock critic Lester Bangs, who was penning one of the more famous and weighty examinations of what was happening in Britain at that time. He couldn’t have looked less like a punk rocker. Tubby, moustachioed and dressed in a crumpled khaki jacket like some ageing putz who never left his apartment, Lester had nevertheless seen it all and had written some of the defining articles in all of counterculture history. He was also a tremendous raconteur and monster consumer of the weed and the wine. These last two talents combined one night when, mid-story at our table in the bar, he schlumpfed off into a deep sleep. The Clash, a band he was about to elevate to mythic status in the upcoming 10,000-word piece that would emerge from his time with them, didn’t really have a lot of respect for this drawling old hippy, who I think might have even smoked a pipe. Taking advantage of his passing out, they began to dress the snoozing genius in the remnants of that night’s meal. As I recall, this consisted of lots of lettuce leaves, boiled eggs and rings of cucumber. There may have been a few triangles of leftover sandwich bread tucked into his breast pocket too. All the empty plates were then carefully stacked up in his lap. Once he was fully festooned, everyone went up to bed and left him there. The next morning we were all in reception, waiting to move on to the next town, when down the stairs came Lester still in the same rancid clothes but now sans any additions. Calling over to the front desk he said brightly, ‘Could you prepare my bill for me, I’m checking out. I’m room 242 and my name is Salad. Mr Egg Salad.’ Followed by, ‘Hi, guys – much happen after I left the party last night? By the way, nice prank – but you do realize I have been set on fire many times by Iggy Pop, don’t you?’ Lester plainly wasn’t about to be fazed by any bunch of UK kids.

A few days later we were in Bournemouth. I had planned to hang around with The Clash for a few more dates – I wasn’t really doing anything major in terms of writing, you just sort of did it back then – and it was here that I finally buckled to the pressure of not having called home for a while. Having found a call box and explained to my mum that I was on the road with a really great group – something I’m sure meant absolutely nothing to her beyond it sounded like I was once more living for pleasure alone – she interrupted whatever I was babbling to her about Joe, Paul and Mick, and told me that Blackie, our beloved, wonderful, door-answering dog, had died. I sat on the floor of the phone box thoroughly numbed while she told me that he’d finally gotten so old he had simply packed up.

I felt rotten. This was no time to be tearing it up with a rock group, but I had no money with which to make it back to London. By a stroke of luck, Bernie Rhodes, the group’s manager, was driving back to town that day. Bernie was a pop-eyed, bespectacled, round-faced hustler of the first water – and if you think I can talk fast then you really should’ve heard Bernard back in the day. On our journey from the coast he came up with more non-stop straight-faced flim-flam, hoo-har and horse shit than anybody since Phil Silvers’ Sergeant Bilko. Even I started to believe that punk was a pre-planned situationist coup designed to take over the world. He also played, at terrific volume, a series of cassettes he’d made that were unlike anything I’d ever heard before. The music on them was totally eclectic, sometimes consisting of a mere ten seconds of something, other tracks played at strange speeds, and the whole soundscape was cut up and interspersed with all manner of random dialogue laid across tunes, snatches of radio ads and TV shows. The whole sounded brilliant, if a little jarring, and very much prefigured what was to happen a couple of years later with scratching and hip hop. So maybe the old rogue really did know a thing or two.

I arrived home to a downbeat Debnams Road, heavy with the kind of sudden space and lack of everyday pace that haunts any home when a dog disappears from the scene. My dad was sat glumly in the front room and, while not actually in tears, could only manage to pull a tight resigned smile of greeting to me. After a horribly silent few minutes he said, ‘I won’t get another one. I wouldn’t have another one after him.’ And he never did.

I had never known our house and family to be so wounded by anything. Even neighbours came by to see how we were doing. And then all the stories about Blackie started. The time it was snowing and he was chasing a football out in the square. The square had four concrete bollards across the entrance to the cul-de-sac to stop any cars driving in and these were set at the foot of a small incline. Blackie, going at full speed after the ball, noticed these too late. He immediately put the brakes on, but the combination of the icy ground, the incline and his impetus saw him slide at great speed toward the pillars. I promise you, as he did so, he gave a hapless look round to all of us, identical to the one Wile E. Coyote displays when he’s chasing the Road Runner and runs out of cliff. Clattering into the concrete, he knocked himself spark out and we carried him indoors on an R. Whites lemonade advertising board.

On another occasion he got an abscessed tooth and had to be taken to the vet’s some twenty minutes away in Southwark Park Road. The vet had warned my mother he would be groggy afterwards and might need assisting with the journey home, so my mother took a baby’s pushchair along. Sure enough, after the extraction he was groggy, boss-eyed and rubber-legged and in no fit state to go anywhere under his own steam, so into the pram he went. My mother says the ensuing walk home was just about the most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to her, with people astounded at the pampered treatment this mongrel was getting and many of the women openly pitying this poor cow who, obviously having no children of her own, was reduced to going through the motions with a dog. It didn’t help when, hoping to clarify the bizarre situation, she found herself saying, ‘It’s all right. I’ve just taken him to the dentist.’

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing he ever did was following one Sunday dinner when only my brother, my sister and I remained at the kitchen table. Sharon and Michael got into a furious argument over one of the more rarefied subjects ever to divide siblings – the exact positions in which people had frozen after the volcano eruption at Pompeii. It all started happily enough with the pair of them coming up with various postures and saying, ‘Some people died like this,’ or ‘Some people died like that.’ I can remember giggling like crazy as my brother and sister struck attitudes similar to those Madonna would re-invent as ‘vogueing’ a quarter of a century down the line. It began to turn ugly though when Mike got up from the table, bent over, held his ankles, looked back at us through his legs and said, ‘Some people died like this.’ Sharon said they couldn’t have and that he wasn’t taking the game seriously. Michael replied that he’d seen it in a history book and that they might have been tying their shoelaces when they heard the explosion and became engulfed while looking back to see what it was. Other explanations for such a pose are available, of course, but it was the 1960s and we were all quite young. Anyway, Sharon pointed out that people didn’t have shoelaces then and Mike changed his argument to cover sandal-like footwear in general, and suddenly the noise of Vesuvius was as nothing compared to the racket under way in our kitchen (or scullery, as it was usually called). All this time Blackie had been sitting in the doorway, waiting for any titbits from the Sunday roast to be put his way. As the volume reached near hysterical levels, the dog stood, got up on to his back legs, reached the open door handle with one paw and then slowly walked backwards into the passage outside. He had simply heard enough and had closed the door on us. He had never done this before and never did it again, but the absolute disdain with which he backed out of the room, closing that door behind him, killed the argument stone dead and, yes, froze everyone as solidly as the ancient Pompeians.

Now he was gone and we spent much of that sad day rooting through old boxes and handbags, trying to find any photos we had that included him. To be fair, we actually had very few photos of anybody at all and I am always both amazed and a little jealous of anybody that has a proper visual record of their childhood. In all, I calculate there are perhaps twenty family photographs at most covering the five Baker family members from 1950 to 1970. There are none of me as a baby and only three of me before the age of five – one of these taken by the school. Then there’s another gap and I’m not sighted again till the age of about eleven. Images of family members are far outnumbered by poor and baffling photos of windmills and fields and streams and sheep and church spires. And water. Looking back through the few bundles of 1960s pictures I have been able to locate, it is as if there isn’t a river bend in the Norfolk Broads that Dad didn’t document. Not once did it ever occur to us to stand in the foreground. Perhaps, like the Beatles, I was sporting a splendid moustache in 1967 – there is absolutely no solid evidence one way or the other.

After moping around the house all day, I caught the bus up to the West End to see if anything was going on at
Sniffin’ Glue
. When I arrived, I found the place was crawling with Americans – and happening ones, too. Their top-grade leather jackets, shirts of outlandish and striking design and even patterned sneakers spoke of New York in the best possible terms. On top of this, I couldn’t help but notice that one of them was probably the most stunning woman I had ever laid eyes on. During our introductions, I suddenly figured out who these people were – I had their terrific first record – and now I felt like I had just emerged from a manhole in the floor with a straw between my teeth. They were Blondie, they said, in town for some UK dates, and they had actually sought us out to get the drop on what was happening.

Hearing this, Mark and I exchanged a glance. This could be tricky. London punk was not like New York. Over there, the scene seemed to be driven by a focused, literate, arty crowd who networked through a series of ultra-cool loft spaces and vital nightclubs, exchanging heated views on what was happening in terms of both form and context before disseminating the results out on to the streets in brilliantly designed newspapers edited by Andy Warhol. I could only really offer the news that the London scene was a bit quiet at the minute because my dog had just died. They wanted to know where the Pistols were. We said we didn’t know. Sandra downstairs might know, but she had had a cold on Friday and so might not be coming in. Were The Clash likely to drop by? No. Okay, so where was cool to hang out during the day? Again something of a grey area, given that we usually sat around Dryden Chambers reading the
NME
. If someone had a couple of quid we might go to the café in St Anne’s Court for egg and chips, or possibly a pint in the Nellie Dean. You
could
wait until the Vortex Club opened at nine, but all the groups scheduled to appear there that evening were really terrible – hello Bethnal, Menace and Bernie Torme! – and there’d usually be a fight in any case.

Blondie received all these hot bulletins with the appropriate excitement. Then Chris Stein asked, ‘You’re Danny, right?’ Whoa! He’d taken my name on board. ‘Yeah, uh, Seymour Stein and John Gillespie said to say hi.’ Once more the old record shop connections had come through. A few months earlier I had met another New York band, Talking Heads, and I now played that card. Turned out they knew Lester Bangs too. So now we had a little rapport going. I remember it was a very crisp and sunny day outside, and after a while Debbie Harry asked where she could get some good shoes. I felt like saying, ‘Look at me, Debbie. If I knew where to get good
anything
would I be dressed like this?’ But instead I told her that South Molton Street was always a good start and offered to show her the way.

Thus, within forty-eight hours I had jumped off a Clash tour, buried my genius dog and was now shoe-shopping with a very chatty Debbie Harry. She bought me a bacon sandwich too. Before they left to rehearse their act, the whole band signed a copy of their album for me, complete with goofy doodles and vampire teeth additions. That night I used it as a goalpost during a kick-about with my mates up on Blackheath and when the game ended left it by accident in a nearby pub called the Hare and Billet. Today, whenever a Blondie song comes on the radio or they feature in some TV clip show, my first thought is who has that annotated LP now.

In the retelling, all of this possibly sounds like a pretty jumping couple of days for me and yet my immediate reaction is that it was Blackie the Genius Dog who was far and away the most memorable of the protagonists. It’s only as the legends of the principal players grow that these incidents parlay up into something worthwhile. The best example I can give you of this comes via a question that I love to have people ask me. In fact, I will insist they put it to me, because the answer is so delicious. Here goes: if you ever bump into me, do tug my coat and ask if I’ve ever met Madonna. My answer? I don’t know. I think so. I
love
being able to say that.