Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography by Danny Baker Page B

up the shock and awe with every subsequent anecdote but, believe me, I am having to cherry-pick even these from a vast storehouse of incident.
    In fact, it was the school-decimated-by-mouldy-meat-pie scandal that saw my very first television appearance. ITN had sent a camera crew down to SE8 to cover the event and as the presenter spoke straight to camera about hygiene lapses and something called botulism, Bernard Sibley and I stood over his shoulder mugging and pretending to be sick. Our performance made it on to the evening bulletin and all our other friends wasted no time in informing us that we looked like ‘a right pair of cunts’. Plainly then, I had this knack from the very beginning.
    Bernie Sibley was one of a growing group of us who, drop by musical drop, knew what was going on. Obviously, you had ‘Sugar, Sugar’ by the Archies all over the radio, but some of us had cottoned on to a shadowy off-air culture featuring things like ‘Peaches en Regalia’ by Frank Zappa and ‘White Room’ by Cream. The received wisdom now is that the cool set at the time listened to reggae, Motown and soul, but that rather overlooks the fact that everybody listened to reggae, Motown and soul back then. I can’t think of a household, ours included, that didn’t have one of the Tighten Up albums or Motown Chartbusters or the Atlantic Record samplers featuring Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin. Those records were okay, they were very popular at parties, but they weren’t new and peculiar to me in the way that In the Court of the Crimson King by King Crimson, with its startling album cover, suddenly was. This was weirdo music, different and difficult to track down – you wouldn’t find albums by (Peter Green’s) Fleetwood Mac, the Mothers of Invention and the newly formed Led Zeppelin in Starr’s at Surrey Docks. It was vital and it was happening and I set my controls for the heart of this underground scene.

 
     
     
    Are You Hung Up?
     
     
    A s the incident with my brother Michael’s Donovan cap has demonstrated, it was no easy matter to adopt contemporary looks and attitudes in our house. This was testing enough in the innocent era of Beatle boots and miniskirts, so what chance did I have of becoming a freak? Being a freak – a status I lusted after – meant, as I understood it, adopting the attitude of an uncompromising free spirit who had seen through the hippy smells and bells and was now intent on totally corrupting straight society through a mixture of shock, protest and a violent rejection of traditional values. Well, good luck getting that past my old man.
    The real problem for me was that being a true ‘head’ required a real year-zero attitude to the cosy past, and I was simply too fond of home, Sunday dinners and Tommy Steele’s ‘Little White Bull’ to throw in my lot with Ken Kesey and his Magic Bus crowd. Yes, I certainly wanted to bring down ‘straight’ society – or at least give it a black eye – but just on the side, as a hobby, and only in theory. Oh, and it had to happen while my brother was out and I had the bedroom to myself.
    Then, I would stare at the cover of the Mothers’ We’re Only in it for the Money album and yearn to be one of those free-living screw-you guys. Of course, I knew I was never even going to get close to that wigged-out look in Debnams Road. As soon as my hair reached anything approximating revolutionary length, Spud would shoot me an incredulous look and say, ‘Sure you should be walking past Carrington House with hair like that? They’ll be dragging you in free of charge.’
    Added to this, I was only twelve, so my parents still bought all my outfits. Locally sourced them, too, and as far as I was aware, no member of Jethro Tull got their stage gear from Kustow’s Men’s Outfitters in the Tower Bridge Road. That said, I was free to choose my fashion statements and I wasn’t a Little Lord Fauntleroy by any means, but there was a definite cut-off point. Had