Never Stop

Danny Baker never stops. Over three hours onstage at the Royal Hippodrome Theatre in Eastbourne last weekend, with his Cradle to the Stage show, and he barely gets beyond his primary school years and a handful of reminiscences about great comedians he came across in the 80s. But then he has never stopped: nascent scribblings for Sniffin' Glue, a stint at the NME, yoof documentaries, prime time television shows, comedy writing, ground-breaking radio shows and, most recently, autobiography and its subsequent sitcom serialisation. Transferring the raw material from his autobiographies to a stand-up show was supposed to be his swansong before he retires to the Florida Keys but another tour is already booked for next year so that, despite his many digressions ("Now, here's a thing..."), he can at least get onto his adult life proper.

Once he actually starts his routine - we have a very engaging half-hour preamble about why he's actually doing the show - Baker tells warm and funny anecdotes about his dad, Spud, and family life in Bermondsey. These are extensions of the excellent Cradle to the Grave TV show and are all told with Danny's familiar amphetamine delivery: never missing a beat, never drawing a breath. There are great stories about kids and fireworks, insurance burglaries and his dad's general resourcefulness in always chasing the next pound note to provide for the family. It all paints a picture of life on a south-east London council estate in the 50s and 60s which stays just the right side of nostalgic. But when he mentions his mum's jobs at Shuttleworths and Peek Freans, I can't help but feel a little sentimental: my dad worked at Peek Freans when I was a kid and, such were the employee perks, that I was a teenager before I saw what an unbroken biscuit looked like.

After the interval, when he does move on to his career, he attributes his breaks to "dumb luck" - being in the right place at the right time and having perfect recall. Working on The 6 O'Clock Show, his forensic knowledge of obscure past routines enables him to make instant connections with irascible comedians Spike Milligan and Kenneth Williams when the pros around him are floundering. His love of comedy shines through: he talks about Max Miller albums as being more important to him than the contemporary pop music he and his friends were listening to growing up, and he seems genuinely in awe of the fact that he is on a stage where Miller once trod the boards.

He is a marvellous raconteur and, despite claiming to be out of his realm of experience, a natural performer. In fact, his avowal that he is new to the stage is not true: the first time I ever heard of Danny Baker was reading an account in the August 1977 Sniffin' Glue of him jumping up onstage at the Vortex the night Elvis Presley died to berate the punks, who had cheered the news, for being disrespectful to a true rebel. Hopefully, we'll hear that story on next year's tour; but I'm not holding my breath.

Cradle to the Stage is at the Theatre Royal, Brighton on 30th April.

The Past is a Foreign Country

About a thousand years ago – well, thirty five but it feels ever so much longer – I wrote a punk fanzine, called Intrusion, with three of my mates. It started in 1978 and lasted for eight issues. It was standard Sniffin’ Glue-inspired fare: the first few editions were single-sided Xerox and it then moved on to the sophistication of double-sided printing. Pages were a mixture of hand-written and typed, with felt pen and Letraset headings. Photographs were rarely original and covers were generally cryptic collages. We mainly sold it through a small ad in the back of the NME, but Rough Trade and a couple of other record shops stocked it successfully on a sale or return basis.

Looking at the excellent Essential Ephemera recently, a blog that unearths forgotten fanzines from the punk era, I came across a post on a fanzine called Toxic Grafity. It prompted me to recall that we had helped its writer with his earlier version, No Real Reason. When I say helped, I think we were involved in getting the first issue photocopied; it then developed into a strong Crass/Poison Girls anarcho-punk fanzine with much more direction than our own. But it made me search online to see what place Intrusion fanzine had secured in the annals of punk. There were three results of my Google search: it had made it into that exhaustive document of punk, Bored Teenagers, and then there was a review, taken from issue 5, of a gig at the Croydon Greyhound on a Penetration fan website. The last result was on eBay; a punk memorabilia seller was offering a copy of issue 7 and there had been one bid of £10. Delighted to see that our modest offering still had currency in the modern world, I went up into the loft and found the bundle of fanzines that I have carefully kept. There, amongst copies of Sniffin’ Glue and Ripped & Torn, was one of each of the eight editions of Intrusion fanzine.

If the past is a foreign country, having your sixteen-year-old self reflected back at you through your juvenile punk ramblings is an uncharted corner of the solar system. It is a mixed experience - at once heartening, baffling and embarrassing. The writing was generally good and the content shows that we were not just playing at it. There were interviews with John Peel, the cartoonist Savage Pencil, band members from Siouxsie and the Banshees and Penetration, and lesser known south London local bands Rodney and the Failures and The Vamp (the latter featuring drummer Max Splodge, soon-to-be lead singer of top ten-hitters Splodgenessabounds). There were live gig reviews of all of those bands, and The Clash, Adam and the Ants, The Adverts and The Mekons, as well as quite perceptive pieces on the recorded output of Alternative TV, Wire, PIL and even David Bowie.

For a reason I have no recollection of, I was writing under the name “Andi Recondite” and some of the pages were nothing more than a puzzling collection of random images and scribbles. More embarrassingly, there was a lot of conflicting and shouty “punk’s dead/punk’s not dead” polemic, which got worse in the later editions and was probably the reason that the fanzine floundered. Interviews were generally typed-up verbatim, like a script, and were not that incisive. Cleary running out of questions, the Banshees started to interview us. (SEVERIN: What’s your favourite Banshees song? ME: All of them!) Oh, dear. But it was passionate, angry and – most importantly – self-produced. And there was some well-intentioned, but naïve, politics. Items on Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League, articles on the Persons Unknown anarchist trial and an apposite picture of an imminent Premier Thatcher with a swastika on her forehead and the Mekons’ lyric “we know what we know and tomorrow is an empty day” underneath.

Issue 7, the one up for sale on ebay, does not stand out. Strangely, it has a cartoon drawing of the four writers on the cover (that’s me, second left) but, that apart, it does not seem to be different from any of the other editions. Maybe it is collectable because of the Peel interview, something he did not do that often. I remember we arranged to meet him in a pub around the corner from Broadcasting House, and he was mortified that The Adverts and Wire were in the pub. He was at great pains to point out that it was a coincidence, that he did not hang out with bands. This is borne out by the rather churlish revelations of Mark E. Smith and Morrissey that, despite being championed by Peel, they had little contact with him. I think they are rather missing the point; as are some others: when I went back to eBay, the winning bid, for an original edition of a fanzine produced by some teenage punks on a council estate, was an inexplicable £124.