Читать книгу Ginger Baker - Hellraiser - Ginger Baker - Страница 11

When I got home, I started looking for a drum kit straight away. As luck would have it, a friend over the road called John Evelyn knew of one going for 12 quid. This comprised of a bass drum, snare drum, hi-hat and one cymbal.

I told Mum I wanted to buy a drum kit and she said, ‘You haven’t finished paying for your bloody bike yet!’ She didn’t agree at all that this was a good idea; it was something quite insane to her.

However, I was pretty determined and I managed to get hold of a toy drum kit for three quid. It had only one head on the bass drum, so I cut up my tent to make another one and painted a design on it. The tom-tom was very thin, so I got a biscuit tin and made it deeper so it sounded a bit better. The tighteners were just on the top head with wing nuts, but I had a kit of sorts.

We formed a little band, with my cousin John playing banjo very badly, John Evelyn on trumpet, John Finch on trombone and a 14-year-old called John Rangecroft on clarinet. We actually did a gig at Bunjie’s Coffee House, near Robert Freemans where I worked, and we earned something like four quid.

I saw an advert in the Melody Maker for a ‘trad’ band. Trad jazz was the thing then, though I was listening to modern jazz drummers like Phil Seaman and Max Roach. All the jazz clubs were playing traditional jazz, Ken Colyer, Chris Barber and the like. So, in answer to the advert, I went all the way over to Leytonstone for an audition with this band The Storyville Jazzmen. I turned up there with my toy kit and I’d only been playing a few weeks! I told them that my real kit was busted and that I was having it fixed. I got the gig though, just like that.

Mum was impressed that I’d got a job in music so she lent me 50 quid to get a drum kit. A regular gig we played was at a place near Wembley called Gladstone Park and one night I became aware of this beautiful dark-haired chick in front of the stage who could really dance. I’d often see her on the station going from Wembley to Neasden, but I was too shy to talk to her, so I got the bass player to chat her up for me. Her name was Liz, she was 17, five months my senior and the only child of Ann and Evelyn Finch, a secretary and train driver respectively, of 10 Elm Way, Neasden.

She dances moving her body in time to the beat of the drum

A smile of abandon,

Enticing, exciting,

Long legs and long raven hair.

Arrows of instant attraction

Hit home like a sweet neat rum

A flame of passion

Desiring, inspiring

Love and a lifetime as one.

With warmth in the cold chill of winter

Cool sense in the heat of the sun.

She would stand by her man

Beguiling, still smiling

Suffering pain and despair.

At that time, the band leader of The Storyville Jazzmen was banjo player Hugh Rainey. The clarinet player Les Wood gave me a whole pile of 78s by Baby Dodds and said, ‘This is what we want you to play like.’

This was a total revelation to me as now I realised where Max Roach had come from and it had a permanent effect on me. Baby Dodds was the first jazz drummer and best of the early jazz drummers. Trumpet player Bob Wallis had a good reputation and he joined about a week after me.

Now this was quite a band and we regularly played at the Ken Colyer Club and became very popular. One week I actually earned ten quid, which was astounding. Bob believed in the idea of a ‘professional musician’ who had no day job and, after earning ten quid, I thought, Yeah, and so I left mine.

I told Jimmy Hillman the art director that I wanted to be a musician and he was dumbfounded. ‘You’ve got to be absolutely crazy!’ he said. ‘You’ve got a fantastic career ahead of you here as a graphic artist and we’re really pleased with what you’re doing. But, if it doesn’t work out, you can always come back.’

I got home that evening and told Mum, Pop and Pat that I was leaving home and giving up my job the next day. They were stunned.

A cyclist friend of trombone player Johnny Mortimer had recently lost his mother and was living alone in his flat in Lancaster Gate just off Ladbroke Grove, so I got a room there for ten shillings a week. This was the start of my life as a professional musician and it didn’t really work out too well. Most of the time I was skint and at times was reduced to going through the landlord’s pockets when he’d gone to work to find a couple of bob. I lived on Weetabix for about three months. I finally visited home and Mum was horrified because I looked like a skeleton, so I moved back.

I had started going out with Liz and she came along to gigs and helped me with the kit. I had no transport then and I had to struggle half a mile down Southwood Road to the station. I rigged up some wheels for the bass drum and it wasn’t so bad going down the hill but it was a bugger getting back up again. Sometimes the milkman from my old milk-round days would take pity on me and give me a lift up the road on his float.

One day, Liz invited me over for a meal at her parents’ place, which, in the light of the financial situation, was always welcome. I turned up at Elm Way wearing old green cords and suede shoes with the soles split. I was taken aback when her father Evelyn opened the door with his face all scratched. Apparently, he’d said to Liz, ‘We’re not feeding him,’ and she’d attacked him. That’s when I first realised how violent Liz could be.

I got offered a gig with the Terry Lightfoot Jazzmen, which was one of the more popular trad jazz bands around. This was the big time – £16 a week and a band suit, blue, white shirt and tie and a bandwagon! I got Vic O’Brien to make me up an all-white matching drum kit to replace my previous one, which had been made up of bits and pieces. Terry wanted me to play a constant four to a bar on the bass drum, but I was listening to Big Sid Catlett at the time. I’d put in off-beat bass drum explosions occasionally, whereupon Terry would nearly swallow his clarinet. One night I did this at a big gig in town when all the women were there, and Terry turned to me and shouted, ‘You’re not fucking practising on my gigs!’

So I yelled back, ‘You can stuff your band up your fucking arse!’ At 18, I was among the last to be called up for National Service. The other musicians said I should go for the Guards and get in a band, but I just wanted to be getting on with my career musically and decided to fail the medical. My future father-in-law reckoned that in his experience I would never fool the army medical board.

In those days, you could buy an inhaler called Nasaltone filled with a folded piece of blotting-type paper, about three inches by one-and-a-half, which was covered with Benzedrine crystals. Some bright spark had discovered that, if you tore off small strips and swallowed them, you could get high and each strip would give you three hits. I thought this was a good scheme and so I bought two tubes of Nasaltone.

I had to go into central London for the x-ray first and then get a bus to Wimbledon for the medical examination. I decided not to take the Benzedrine before the x-rays, but, as I waited for the bus to Wimbledon, I swallowed the contents of both which was a massive overdose. Well, the bus got to the end of its run and I was still on it. This happened again going back the other way. I asked the conductor to get me off at the correct stop, and when I finally arrived at my destination I was so late that the Ws were going in!

Firstly I had to sit a written exam to which I gave very strange answers. I wrote long and complex answers to every question. The medical examination proceeded with my objecting to them shining lights into my ears and it took eight of them to hold me down. It really was most extraordinary! It ended up with them giving me a D4 and saying, ‘We’re sorry, but we can’t take you.’ It was great. As I went out, I heard one of them say, ‘Poor boy.’

Outside there were loads of blokes looking really happy asking me, ‘Did you pass?’

‘Of course I didn’t,’ I replied. They seemed surprised that I wasn’t disappointed.

When I finally got back to Liz’s parents, I went to bed for two days feeling really ill, all the while praying, ‘Please God don’t let me die!’ He heard me.

All the trad musicians hung out at the Star Cafe (now long gone) on Old Compton Street, Soho. This is where I met up with guitarist Big Pete Deuchar, who asked me to join a band he was taking to Germany. The guitar player in this outfit happened to be John McLaughlin, and I took the job. However, a couple of days before we were about to leave for Germany, I banged into Bob Wallis at the Star. He’d got a job with a much better band. It was led by guitarist Diz Disley and included trombone player Johnny Mumford and Dave Tomlinson, the clarinet player. They convinced me to take the gig. So, on the train going to Germany, I told Big Pete that I was giving him two weeks’ notice and I’d already arranged to go on from there by train to Copenhagen and meet up with Diz Disley.

In Hamburg, I stayed in the house of a guy who’d been a submarine captain during the war. My German was actually quite good, so I could converse with him and he was a nice bloke. The band was playing in a place next to a strip club and we all behaved like typical English people abroad. The strippers used to come in and watch us and were all showing out to the band, so we thought we were on to a good thing here. Then, on a Monday night, when we got some time off, we all went into the strip club, where we were informed that the only woman in the show was the announcer! All the rest were transvestites. They had tits and everything: it was all quite extraordinary for 1958, but six hard-ons disappeared immediately.

Now I had to make the trip on my own with my drums to Copenhagen for the new gig. It was a 28-hour train journey, but I really enjoyed it, watching the countryside go by and imagining that I was a spy.

Hugh Rainey had told me in the Star that Bob Wallis had a blood condition called thrombophlebitis and I had to make sure he didn’t drink. Of course, the first thing that happened when we got there was that we went out to a nightclub, got horrendously drunk and ended up staggering back to our digs through the snowy streets.

We got thrown out of loads of places in Copenhagen, doing things like playing hide-and-seek in the middle of the night in a guest house and ending up in the servants’ quarters of this big hotel, up on the fourth or fifth floor.

I wasn’t getting on very well with the rest of the band by now, as trying to stop Bob drinking had become impossible. One of them set fire to a pair of old socks in a waste bin and threw them into my room, so I opened the door and chucked them out into the hall. The next thing I knew there were fire engines everywhere. I’d set the hotel on fire. Not surprisingly, we got thrown out and ended up in a seamen’s hostel, where we very nearly got assassinated for playing silly drunken games at three o’clock in the morning. All of a sudden, the doors opened and we were confronted by several large tattooed guys who looked ready to kill us.

But it was good band and the gigs went down well. In the middle of it, we did a whole tour of Scandinavia with the gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe. She was a great lady and really took to me when we first met. She had bright-red hair like me and said, ‘Oh, baby, your hair’s so cool. What do you use to make it that colour?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘It’s natural.’ To which she threatened to pull down my trousers to check if I was telling the truth.

She was a laugh. She was hugely popular and the big showstopper we played with her was ‘Didn’t It Rain?’ This had a helluva riff and we used to rock like hell.

While I was abroad, I bought an engagement ring for Liz and sent it to her for her birthday on 8 March. I also sent postcards to my future in-laws. On 19 March, I sent them one of the lobby of a smart hotel. I wrote:

I’m now on tour in Denmark. This is the sort of hotel we’re staying in, not bad, eh? On Thursday we go to Sweden and on Saturday to Norway. We’re having quite an enjoyable trip. Last night was our fifth concert with Sister and it didn’t go too badly considering we’ve only had one rehearsal. We’ve got another today before the concert. What a drag…

Another, dated 23 March, shows the North Bridge and Royal Guard in Stockholm:

We had 11-and-a-half-hour train journey here yesterday, all in the same train as well! It’s 6 degrees below freezing, the pavement is covered with about 4 inches of ice! This hotel is even more luxurious than the others, with radios in all the rooms and dials on the wall which you set to whatever time you want to be awakened. Also marvellous showers. You’d like the food here even more than in Denmark, they certainly know how to eat out…

On our way back to Copenhagen, there were loads of Swedish military guys on our train, downing lagers at a hundred miles per hour. The station at Copenhagen is on a curve: it’s a big ‘mind the gap’ situation, with a foot-wide cavern between the platform and the train. A huge crowd had assembled to greet Sister Rosetta and a little girl was standing in front with a bunch of flowers. Sister came towards the girl to take the flowers and suddenly disappeared down the gap, so the only things visible were her tits and her face! Everybody rushed to help her out, and she graciously accepted the flowers and we all got on our way. I travelled with her in the taxi to the gig from the station and her shins were scraped to hell. She sat down and let on that she’d hurt herself. Until then, she hadn’t reacted at all – it was absolutely amazing. She was a great professional.

By the time the tour ended, I’d fallen out with the band in a big way. We had a party on the last night and I had a row with Diz Disley. He referred to me as ‘Terry Lightfoot’s drummer’ so I called him ‘Ken Colyer’s banjo player’ and he punched me on the nose. As I jumped up to retaliate, I was pounced on by promoter Henry Johannson and his girlfriend. By this time I was very drunk and they carried me up to my room.

I vaguely remember that there was a chick in there and, when I got up to leave the next day, I found that I had only five krone left and the rest of my money had gone. Nobody in the band was talking to me, so I had just enough to buy a cheese roll and a cup of coffee before we got on the train and that had to last me until we got to the Hook of Holland. Nobody helped with me my drums either and I had to make three trips with them on to the ship. I vowed then that I would practise like fuck and leave all these guys behind.

Liz met me at the station and we were now engaged. At Southwood Road, the house was virtually empty. Next door on the right was also empty, upstairs and downstairs were vacant and the only occupants apart from us were the people next door on the other side. So I set my drums up and practised all day long. This prompted a family meeting in which Mum, Pop and Pat decreed that I should now ‘get a proper job’.

So I went to the Royal Arsenal Co-op Society warehouse in Woolwich, where I got a job packing and loading shoes from seven ’til five, with the option of doing an hour-and-a-half’s overtime. This was great ’cos the manager would always clock off at five and we’d end up playing football in the yard and getting paid for it.

Then one weekend in town I met up with a fellow drummer named Dave Pearson, famous among us for having a 26-inch Zildjian cymbal. He told me not to go to work the following Monday but to go with him up to Archer Street in Soho, where all the musicians hung out to get work. So I went up there and Dave helped me to get a few gigs – busking, nightclubs, anything at all. One of these gigs was with Danny La Rue in a Jewish club when he got booed off stage. But I started doing quite well.

I was still living at home then and several times I had to walk the seven miles back from Woolwich Arsenal station in the early hours of the morning. I was walking up Green Lane on one occasion when I became aware that all these cats were running up trees and I could hear this strange noise across the railway bridge between New Eltham and Mottingham stations. On investigation, I found the cause was an amazing number of rats! The road was covered by a huge mass scurrying along beside the railway line. I ran all the way home.

Another time I got back very late and as usual I had forgotten my key, but I had various ways of breaking into the house. Pop had blocked off most of them over the years, but it was a big old house and the front door had a large window next to it that I managed to get open about 12 inches. I was about halfway through with my feet and lower half outside the window when a local bobby shone a light on me. So now I had to get back out (even though I was nearly in) and explain to him that I actually lived there. I could hear Pop swearing as he came storming down the stairs to confirm my story. He had to get up very early for work and after nights like that he would come in to my room and shout, ‘You like being up, you bugger? Get up!’

In the end, I moved out into a place in Grosvenor Avenue near Arsenal Football Club in Highbury. This was a musicians’ hang-out and Liz spent a few nights with me there until her mother came round and was horrified that we were living in sin.

We got married on 17 February 1959 at Willesden Registry Office. When I arrived, Liz was nowhere to be seen, having a few drinks with her dad, so I asked the female registrar if she’d marry me instead. But Liz turned up eventually and we had the reception at her parents’ house in Neasden. As the place was full of musicians, this quickly deteriorated into a comic food fight, though the in-laws had just decorated their dining room. The next-door neighbour, Mrs Spicer, came and threw us all out and we ended up chasing a friend’s drunken dog up and down the road. It was a miracle nobody got run over.

Dave Pearson got me an audition with a big band and casually mentioned it was a reading gig. I couldn’t read music but Dave had some helpful advice. ‘You’ve got two weeks to learn – use your ears!’

The gig was with Ken Oldham’s band at the Galtymore, an Irish club in Cricklewood, and one quarter of the set was ceilidh music. The accordion player was knocked out with the snare-drum stuff I did and I got the gig. The band leader, however, was very concerned because I didn’t know what a repeat sign was and kept stopping before everyone else.

The following Monday, I observed Dave Pearson and drummer Danny Craig going through a drum part and suddenly it dawned on me what first-time bar and second-time bar meant. Now I was playing with the band and the band leader was very happy. After that I really started getting into reading. The Galtymore caretaker became a fan too and would let me practise in the afternoons while he danced around with his broom.

One of the alto players, Norman Duvall, who played the ceilidh stuff, sat in front of me. It was pretty complicated 6/8 stuff with lots of semi-quavers all over the place and I was playing every note. After the gig, Norman said to me, ‘Were you reading the part over my shoulder?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You read very well,’ he said, and told me to get two books out from the library. One was Basic Harmony, which outlines all the rules of classical writing, and the other was The Schillinger Method, which explains how to break them. This was the guy Glenn Miller studied under and it was how Miller had come up with that unusual sound. I went over these books studiously and soon I could read almost anything. Norman gave me the score of the top line of ‘Surrey With a Fringe on Top’ and told me to do an arrangement for the band, which I did, transposing and everything. Now you can do it on a computer but I still don’t know how to do it that way. The band played my version three or four times a week. It became a standard part for us and I was very proud of it. This was at the time of West Side Story and the song ‘Somewhere’, so then I did an arrangement of that in C sharp. When I took it to the band, the brass and horn players looked at all the sharps and said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’

Liz was now working as an usherette at Her Majesty’s Theatre in the Haymarket where West Side Story was on and she’d come down to the gigs afterwards. My final gig at the Galtymore came about on one of these occasions. The drums were right on the side of the stage and out of the corner of my eye I could see this drunk bloke hassling Liz and trying to slide his hand up her leg and she, being Liz, boshed him big time. As the guy was about to retaliate, I got hold of a big pair of pliers that I used for my drums, leaned over to him and said, ‘If you put a fucking hand on her, you’re dead!’

The band leader was pretty pissed off with me for threatening the clients and so my time there was up.

Liz and I left Grosvenor Avenue and took a flat in Cricklewood, the other part of which was occupied by Tibor Szakacs, a famous wrestler from Transylvania. Our kitchen was in a little outhouse and, not long after we moved in, I opened the door and Liz turned to me and said in quite an offhand manner, ‘Oh, look, there they are again.’ The whole floor was covered with cockroaches. I freaked out and ran, but I overcame this by telling myself that this was ridiculous and ended up by getting a bent iron pipe and hitting them with that. We caught some in a jar to show the landlady and ended up having a big row, so we moved into a place in Mowbray Road.

Next I got a gig with the Les Douglas Orchestra. We were scheduled to play two weeks at Green’s Playhouse (later the Apollo) in Glasgow, a place famed for its violence – one punter aimed a bottle over the balcony, five floors up and killed a pedestrian on the street below. We stayed at a place called Mrs Lookers, an incredibly damp and dingy doss-house where I met a tenor and flute player named Howard Morgan. He said our digs resembled a casualty ward from the Crimean War. Howard was a 5ft 1in Welshman, but he made up for his lack of height with an enormous dick. We had a very tall and tasty girl singer and, whenever she sang a ballad, Howard would wander up from the reed section with his saxophone and put his head between her tits. The audience loved all this and Howard got more money than us just for his antics on stage. He was hilarious and you just never knew what he was going to do or how he was going to do it. We became very friendly and we both smoked dope. In Glasgow, we picked up something I’ve never seen before or since called Rangoon Red; it was the most powerful stuff you’ve ever come across.

I’d had my first smoke sometime before after a Storyville rehearsal when I caught the last train from Charing Cross. I met a guy I knew on the platform and, as we were the only two in the carriage, he produced a joint and we smoked it on the train until he got off at Mottingham. Mine was the next stop and I walked home up Southwood Road feeling very good indeed.

After we’d finished the gig in Glasgow, we were due at an American base in the south of Germany called Sören. To get there, we first had to take a coach to Bovingdon, north of London. Howard and I were sitting in the back of the coach, rolling up this Rangoon Red and got so stoned we didn’t notice the exhaust was leaking until we realised we were covered in little black dots. At Bovingdon, we got on a Dakota DC3 for Germany and had to put on parachutes. Les Douglas’s wife and the girl singer had a lot of trouble getting these on over their skirts.

The flight was followed by yet another coach trip, so when we got there we were shattered and raided the base kitchen at 3am. The trumpet player was a Yorkshire guy with a very broad accent and we were all drinking coffee when he piped up, ‘’Ee, I’ve got no bloody spoon!’

‘Give it here,’ said Howard, who then pulled his dick out and slopped it in the coffee, before giving it back to him. The look on the guy’s face was a picture.

The waitress in the Officer’s Club where we played was very tasty. She wore Bavarian costume, with a white blouse accentuating her tits, high heels and black stockings. Howard said to me, ‘I’m going to have her.’ So one night when she was delivering drinks to a nearby table, Howard, still playing his tenor, removed his trousers, showing his little hairy legs, with socks, suspenders and underpants and went up to this girl. She then threw her hands up in horror and ran off with Howard still playing in hot pursuit, rather like a Benny Hill sketch.

After a while, Liz, Howard’s wife Moi and their son Alan flew out to join us. The dope had run out by this time and it soon came to the point where Liz and I decided that the money situation was also untenable. We skimped hard and managed to raise enough money for our tickets home; then I told Les Douglas I was off.

This was like a replay of the trip from Copenhagen; another seemingly endless train journey, with just enough money for a couple of rolls and cups of coffee between us. The sea crossing was very rough: the wind was howling and the passengers were soon seasick. I stacked my drums between the seats on deck, but then one of the sailors came up to me and suggested I move them before they went overboard. He found a place right in the middle of the ship and we wedged them in tight. At one point, the ship was rolling so much the stairs were almost horizontal and I flew across the deck, bashing into the supports that stop you falling into the sea.

After we returned to Mowbray Road, Liz fell pregnant, but we both felt we were unable to afford a baby at this time. Hanging out in the jazz clubs like Sam Widges and Ronnie Scott’s, I’d met up with an average bass player called Mike Scott and he got hold of some pills for her. However, although she was very ill, this attempt at a home abortion failed miserably – thank God – and she went on with the pregnancy.

It was the spring of 1960 and I was still going up to Archer Street and doing a lot of gigs. I was getting to know loads of jazz players like Pete Townshend’s dad, a tenor player named Cliff who I played a couple of gigs with. I used to get the night bus back to Kilburn and walk home from there. One night I met the drummer Dickie Devere, who had taken over from Phil Seamen in Kenny Graham’s Afro Cubists and had a good reputation, and we got talking. He complimented me on my playing and invited Liz and I over to his place.

So, on a beautiful day in May, with the blossom on the trees and the sun shining, we walked along Shoot Up Hill, past Kilburn tube station, into Fordbridge Road. Dickie’s wife opened the door and ushered us up to their first-floor flat. While we were talking and having tea, Dickie got out some tiny white pills. ‘Have you ever tried this before?’ he asked.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s smack.’

‘What’s it like?’

‘Well, it’s like smoking dope, but better.’

I had already been told that one smoke of marijuana would have you hooked for life and subsequently discovered this to be absolutely untrue, so I tried it. Dickie crushed it up on a glass table, rolled up a one-pound note and I snorted it, then he gave it to Liz and she did the same. I started to feel really cool, but Liz went as white as a sheet, rushed to the toilet and was as sick as a dog. I took her home and she went to bed feeling awful. This was a great thing for her because she never touched the stuff again. Meanwhile, I was successfully finishing the previous and current day’s newspaper crosswords, something I’d seldom managed before.

That Thursday, I was working with the Johnny Scott Band and we had a gig in Brighton. As a result of the smack, I was feeling really super good when Johnny came to pick me up. They all said I played fantastically well that night and I thought, I’ve found the answer here. All the barriers were down and I was just playing. But when Johnny dropped me off, he asked, ‘Did you take something tonight?’

‘Yeah, I snorted a jack.’

Johnny got really, very seriously angry. ‘Leave that stuff alone,’ he warned. ‘If you use that, you’re not working with my band any more.’

I thought he was crazy and I didn’t work with his band again. I was still doing plenty of gigs and, as Dickie was a registered addict and could get the stuff without any hassles, it became a regular thing for me to go round to his place and snort a jack before a gig.

I had a gig with Bobby Wellins over at Stratford in East London, but I still had no transport, so my friend Mike Scott picked me up in a brand-new white Ford Zephyr. We crammed the drums into the boot and on the back seat and Liz sat in the middle of them. After the gig, we went to some clubs but on the way home we ran out of petrol in the West End. Meanwhile, Mike had explained how he had come by the car. He used to work for a car theft group, and he knew of a vehicle-hire place where people who dropped cars off late would put the keys in the letterbox. Mike, equipped with a coat hanger, simply hooked them up. Now we were pushing the thing up Regent Street and the old bill arrived. ‘Is this your car, sir?’

‘No, it’s my dad’s car,’ answered Mike. ‘He told me to put some petrol in it and I forgot.’

The copper helped us push the car to the petrol station but Liz was shitting herself in the back because she thought we were going to get arrested. Mike dropped us off and drove the car up to Manchester where he sold it to somebody for a fiver.

We had another encounter with the police when my cousin John came on leave from the navy. I hadn’t seen him for ages so we had a night in town together. I was wearing my brand-new pair of grey suede winkle-picker shoes, of which I was very proud. We’d just got off the night bus and were on top of Shoot Up Hill, when a Jaguar came past. The car stopped and out got two plain clothes and two uniforms. One of them called me a ‘two-bit ponce’ so John started to get worried and was making a break for it when they attacked him.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I shouted and one of them punched me in the gut and trod all over my grey shoes, scraping them badly.

I went apeshit and explained who we were and what we were doing. They went off, thinking that was it, but it wasn’t. I walked to the next phone box, phoned the police and got a sergeant. This wasn’t good enough, so I said, ‘No. I want to come in and see a guy with pips on his shoulders.’ The nearest police station was Willesden, so we walked all the way there. They’d got this grey-haired inspector out of bed and I told him what had happened. He told me the bloke who’d punched me was also called Baker and it was his first day on plain-clothes duty. The inspector didn’t think I’d get much joy because as he said, ‘They all stick together like shit on a blanket.’ But they put this guy back on the beat in uniform. I saw him walking along one day and he gave me the filthiest look you’ve ever seen. But it shows that in England you can get somewhere with incidents like that.

Meanwhile, Dave Pearson had introduced me to a lot of people. All the drummers were so helpful to me, because they could obviously see that I had something a bit extra. I used to go to Jackie Sharpe’s Downbeat Club in Soho, where all the top jazzers would hang out, and in there one night I saw Phil Seamen.