ON THE ROPES

Every so often a new character shows up in the world of broadcasting and his fans say, "This is the one we've been waiting for", a true original and so it was with Danny Baker. He might have looked as someone unkindly put it, - rather like a badly wrapped parcel - but he was a stylish performer, cocky and confident and combative and entirely at home behind a microphone in a live radio studio.

Someone once called him the "New Messiah of Broadcasting". When Radio Five Live came on the air, he was the obvious choice to present a Football Chat Show and a great success it was too….till he went too far and got sacked. The same happened to him at Talk Radio eventually, he tried television but his chat show "Danny Baker After All" was panned by the critics and his nostalgia game show was cut after one series. The tabloid newspapers still loved him though, mostly because they claimed he always out on all night drinking binges with the likes of Paul Gascoigne and Chris Evans.

Danny Baker, did you expect your life to go along that sort of path?

No, I don't come from any kind of showbizzy background, yet I've ended up, for a while anyway, as one of Britain's Ratpack Showbiz Elite. In fact hearing it like that, it's obviously, what you can do is only the headlines of it.

Yeah, we'll get into the details later

Yeah and the short answer there is no and it didn't of course, but in the headlines that's what it looked like.

You did terribly well when you where in Primary School, top boy in your year, obviously a very bright kid, but you didn't want to go to Grammar School, you wanted to go where all your mates went?

It was just it looked fusty and me friends were going to a school that looked a lot more fun. Now I'd like to say it was a brooded over decision but it wasn't. My mum and Dad said "Oh you can go there if you like", but I knew somewhere if you went to the Grammar School, it led onto the kind of career that I even then knew I wasn't interested in i.e. being working class you either did the site or the bank and that was the bank route and I didn't fancy working in a bank and even then that kind of nagged at me I think.

Education for the sake of education wasn't in your mind then?

No, no, actually I think because it was 1968/69 and I was aware of Rock-n-Roll. I'd seen Fleetwood Mac - I was only like 10 or 11 - I'd seen Fleetwood Mac supported by the Groundhogs and I thought, thats for me and if you see Natwest supported by Barclay's Bank, it doesn't have the same pull!…and so then I just figured that I might have become trapped academically and you know, be on a route I didn't want to.

What you did instead is that you went to the NME?

Via Punk Rock and via a couple of Summers of doing nothing gloriously, when it was quite a chic option to be unemployed, you know, 75/76, it was quite cool. I worked in a Record Shop first, when I left school, then took two Summers off and then Punk Rock kinda started and my friend asked to borrow my typewriter because he worked in a bank, Mark Perry, he went to my school, called himself Mark P and said "Have you heard about the Sex Pistols, you know about music, come and see the Sex Pistols and all this?" Started typing this magazine 'til I thought, well I'm not letting him steal my thunder, helped him out with it, that became "Sniffin' Glue" magazine which became something of a huge noise in the publishing world all of a sudden and that led on the NME saying "Do you want to be our Receptionist?"

Listen to the above

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