Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
You cannot do justice to the life of radio personality, journalistic music legend Danny Baker in a few short lines, it is a near impossible task and one that even the man who was once asked by a Daily Express journalist if he lived with Elton John, is unable to do in just one autobiography.
Love him or loathe him, respect him for his appeal and attitude to life and his, several, brushes with the grim reaper or denounce him, to which many have done over the years including friends, he has lived a life. In fact reading his book Going To Sea In A Sieve: The Autobiography, readers may be struck by just how much he has lived life to the full and just how much he has been at the forefront of some of the major changes in British society.
If you are a fan of the man who supports Millwall with a passion that others couldn’t match, his ease behind the microphone whether talking about music or football, (to be fair to the man, nearly any subject that comes up on his weekly Radio 5 Saturday morning show) then the book is gold, as priceless to read as an unadulterated and pristine copy of Sniffin’ Glue or his notes on meeting a very young Michael Jackson before really going off the wall. If the very thought of him and his London banter makes you want to shout and curse then the book is also a great standard bearer for his life and will help anybody in that position of disliking him rage that little bit harder.
Danny Baker, the son of a London docker, the man who received by way of gift…in other words he never paid his benefactor for it, one of the first video recorders in the U.K. and the man who saw Queen flounce into his shop in Soho before they released their debut album and has a very low opinion of them is unapologetic for his fortune and again to be fair why should he be, he has lived, he took some chances as the autobiography attests and because of it has some of the most amazing tales in which for the vast majority of the book you cannot help but smile and think you lucky…so and so.
From his days in his Millwall home to the late 1970s, this is one of the biggest radio personalities of his time revelling in a larger than life history, it is Danny Baker’s tale and he tells it well.
Ian D. Hall