Danny Baker: Going to Sea in a Sieve, review Think of Danny Baker as Bermondsey's answer to Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed spaceship pilot from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Baker is bumptious, even overbearing, yet life with him promises a wealth of fun: who would not tag along for the ride? Two heads may seem over-the-top, yet the one Baker usually presents to the world is cheerful and unflappable, while - like Beeblebrox - he keeps the more fragile head under wraps. The world got a rare hearing of the other head on Thursday, when Baker lambasted the "pinhead weasels" who had axed his BBC London show. Both Baker and Beeblebrox are at their best on the radio where flights of improbability as much as off-the-cuff insults come into their own. Baker's autobiography, Going to Sea in a Sieve, relies heavily on his verbal cheeriness. A description of a concrete boat in his childhood playground, for instance, simply ends, "A boat!," leaving the trace-memory of his voice to sell the scene. Other stories skip by with little more than an "uh-oh!" to convey the thrill of young Baker's skulduggery. The style is immediate, though the readers must do so much work, they might feel they deserve a mention in the acknowledgements. Above all, Baker and Beeblebrox share a relaxed attitude to risk-taking. Beeblebrox keeps his cool thanks to a pair of peril-chromatic sunglasses that turn black when danger approaches. Baker gets around the problem with a more low-tech solution: he simply refuses to look ahead. Socrates thought the unexamined life wasn't worth living. Baker, at least, is determined to give it a bloody good try. He was born in Rotherhithe, son of Fred "Spud" Baker, who combined a life of thievery with work as a union organiser on the docks. Baker scorns the idea that children raised in a "casually irresponsible atmosphere will go on to repeat or even escalate the process." However, his memoirs prove the opposite; the fact that he has never seen the inside of a prison ought to be a black-mark against British policing of the 60s and 70s. At 12 years old, Baker began selling boxes of records that his father would steal from the docks. Leaving school at 15, he found work in a West End record shop frequented by the cream of Glam Rock. He spent his days camping it up with Elton John and Marc Bolan, and his nights in pubs unloading stolen records, spending money lifted from the shop's register, and telling impressionable girls he was David Essex's sexually confused younger brother. The photographs of him in sparkly clothes demonstrate how he was able to get away with such an outrageous lie. When punk came along, Baker was approached by a school friend to help on the seminal fanzine Sniffin" Glue. Soon Baker switched to the NME where he matched figures like Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill as an acerbic critic. However, though Baker admired the talent of angst-ridden punks, he was more at home among happier types, such as the novelty rock "n'roll group Darts. His memoirs end in 1982, with Baker falling in love, which requires that he swiftly dumps the wife he had earlier married during a drunken blowout. In Baker's cheery version of events, there is no harm done as he loses one wife and gains another. But one wonders why he is so afraid of opening the aperture a little wider and testing his version of events against others" recollections? The outline of a far darker book hovers at the edge of these memoirs but, in a surprise aside, Baker says he cannot drag his "foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart" through these pages. The man is large, bit his focus just that bit too narrow. Going to Sea in a Sieve by Danny Baker 272pp, W+N, £18.99