Fabulous Baker Boy

Ginger Baker was the drummer with two of the most influential and iconic groups to emerge from the 60’s, yet he doesn’t think of himself as a rock musician. “I’m a jazzer…always have been,” he tells Jonathan Wingate. “I don’t really look on Cream and Blind Faith as being rock groups at all.”

As interviewees go, Ginger Baker isn’t the easiest subject you could pick. His curmudgeonly manner is the stuff of legend. He rarely gives interviews these days, and within less than 30 seconds, it becomes pretty obvious why. True to form, he sounds irritable from the off, so I start with a loosener asking him to talk about his musical beginnings, thinking it might put him in something resembling a good mood.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he says with a bronchial chuckle. “It’ll take a fucking long time.” Over the course of the next hour and a half, speaking from his 75-acre farm in the Cederberg region of South Africa, Baker does his best to be as thoroughly unpleasant as possible, yet he is never less than  fascinating for a moment.

Ginger Baker’s origins would have looked rather different to his present surroundings in South Africa, where he spends much of his time raising polo ponies: he was born Peter Baker in Lewisham, South London on 19 August 1939. Before he found fame with two of the first rock ‘supergroups’, Ginger Baker had played with numerous top-notch trad-jazz bands, before sitting in with Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated and joining the seminal Graham Bond Organisation, where he first crossed swords with bassist Jack Bruce.

While Clapton was soaked in the …

by Jonathan Wingate
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