Interview: Self-confessed motormouth Danny Baker shows no signs of slowing down

Danny Baker can talk.

That seems an obvious thing to say about the motor-mouthed bloke whose Saturday morning BBC 5 Live show has won no fewer than four Sony awards.

But it explains why he’s having to do another run of his hugely-popular tour telling stories from his life.

“The shows have grown to nearly three hours long, not because I take my time but because I don’t stop! That’s just how I am,” admits Danny, who started writing about music for the NME almost 40 years ago and is now a regular on TV.

“I thought I’d do a couple of nights when I tell these stories about The Clash and Bruce Springsteen and Bowie, Frankie Howerd and me dad and all of this, and that one date sold out and turned into 60-odd and I hadn’t even left school at the end of the evening!

“I’m a Swiss Army knife. I’ve written for everyone in the business and I didn’t plan on doing these tours, genuinely I was trying to retire.

“But I had to go back and do a second tour, which takes me from leaving school up to about 1988, the rock and roll years if you like.

“And in the meantime this podcast I do with Gary Lineker’s come along. I didn’t know Gary very well but he said, ‘I’ve been asked to do a podcast and I don’t want to do it with another player because that’s what I do on Match Of The Day anyway, I thought you might want to do it with me.’

“I go over to his house every Monday and these 12-year-old kids in the crew who know how the internet works put it on the internet and it goes to number one in iTunes.

“Last month, we did the first of our stage shows at a big theatre in London, 3,000-seater, sold-out, Gary now thinks, ‘Oh, this is great!’ so it looks like we’ll be doing a tour of that as well.

“The point is, here I am, my wife is drumming her fingers saying, ‘Don’t forget we’re retiring!’ – I really am after 40-odd years trying to tiptoe away but stuff happens and what can you do?

“I’ve got the radio show, I’m writing the books again, we’ve got these tours which is all good but the idea that you leave school at 14 and think, ‘Well, this’ll see me through the next 50 years’ is frankly absurd!”

The tour is based on Danny’s autobiographies, the first of which was also the basis for the BBC sitcom Cradle To Grave telling the story of the teenage Danny growing up with his larger-than-life docker dad Fred “Spud” Baker, played by Peter Kay.

© Matt Squire / ITV

“All I’ve ever done is mine this personality, that’s it, for better or worse,” says Danny, 62 this summer.

“I wrote the first book, I meant it to be a one-off autobiography but at the end of it, rather like the first part of the tour, I hadn’t really got anywhere. But people really liked it and the publishers came back to me and said, ‘Do you want to sign on for a couple more?’.

“I said I wanted it to be like a punk rock version of The Moon’s A Balloon, David Niven’s book which told you very little about what he was feeling but was anecdotally a terrific book about a specific time in Hollywood.

“It’s the cast of characters that counts. I’ve always been a writer and though I’ve made more money selling soap powder and Mars Bars over the years, I always knew these were in the back pocket.

“Like the shows, it’s not just, ‘Here’s another person I remember.’ It’s me in a conspiracy with the audience hopefully celebrating a certain way of life that if you come off the estates at 14 you’ll recognise.”

Fred Baker looms large in the books and tours and Danny says: “There’s a big laugh every 90 seconds and most of those come from me doing the voice of my dad.

“Man alive was he somebody. One of 14 kids. I didn’t know he was going to dominate my life and later career but I’m happy to do it because ‘Spud’ was an extraordinary leader of his union and an even better dad.

“I was in school, about eight years old, when I learned my old man wasn’t like the others.

“The school secretary came into the class, had a word with the teacher and next thing I hear is, ‘Danny Baker, can you go with the secretary, your father’s here.’

“Now that usually meant bad news and what had happened was my dad had gone in and said, ‘Freddy Baker, I’m here to get my son, I need to take him out immediately.’

“She said, ‘Can I ask why?’ and he said, ‘Could you not, it’s a family matter’ and I walked in and he’s there with his hands on his hips, ashen-faced.

“I said, ‘What’s the matter’ and he just said, ‘I’ll tell you outside’ and we walked out and I said, ‘Dad, what’s happened?’ and he said, ‘Nothing, I’m going to Plumpton races, wanna come?’.”

Danny’s gift is he can take anything and just run with it. I’m a huge fan of his Saturday radio show on which he will ask bizarre questions of his huge audience just to see where the answers lead.

“Here’s the thing, people have this idea that people want to talk about the same subjects or it’s as easy as saying, ‘What’s your most embarrassing moment?’ – though they don’t even do that any more, it’s all devil dogs, gangs and Brexit because they think being earnest gives you kudos as opposed to froth.

“I am froth, I’m shallow, all of that but it’s quite difficult to do that and you don’t ask a generic question – don’t ask a fan, ‘What do you think about VAR in football?’.

“What you do is give them those very, very specific questions like, ‘What have you been locked inside?’, ‘Where have you been locked out of?’, ‘Why were you getting through a window?’.

“So I’ll get Davy from somewhere coming on and saying, ‘You was asking earlier on if you’d ever found a mystery door in your house?’.

“Now, all the audience lean forward and think, ‘Oooh!’, I put on the mystery music behind it and the fella tells you he found a tunnel under his house which he then boarded up and has not been back to since and you think, ‘What?’.

“For me, that is worth any amount of phone-ins about, ‘What do you think Man United should do next?’ – shut up!

“If you’re going to do a football phone-in, ask people if they’ve ever sat next to someone who had an extraordinary odour – that doesn’t mean body odour.

“We got one bloke who said, ‘I’m a Bury supporter and there’s a bloke who sits in front of me who smells of Parma violets’, ‘Oh, really?’, ‘Yeah, and we call him Daffodil’, ‘Why do you call him Daffodil?’, and off you go!

“Fortunately, the BBC never once on Saturday mornings ask, ‘What are you going to be talking about?’ which is a privilege.”

Danny Baker’s Good Time Charlie’s Back! is on tour now.

For tickets and information, visit www.dannybakerlive.com