Life with Ginger
Nettie Baker on the perils of having a rock star for a father
The only hint of wildness in Nettie Baker’s south London semi is a Gothically-styled front room with a sinister-looking stuffed fox on the back of the sofa. Unless you also count Nettie’s flamboyant false eyelashes, which certainly tick the bold statement box: “I will never be a suburban matron,” she acknowledges with a defiant smile.
One would have expected no less from the eldest child of Ginger Baker, the “bad boy” drummer genius from the Sixties supergroup Cream.
Last year, Nettie’s first memoir, Tales of a Rock Star’s Daughter, described the fame and fortune of the Baker family in the “sunny, moneyed” Seventies, when George Harrison, the former Beatle, once offered up the 15-year-old Nettie as first prize in a game of pool during a drug-fuelled party at Clapton’s mansion in 1976.
“I was naively thrilled at being the centre of attention, but although nothing happened, a line was definitely crossed,” she recalls.
Her second volume, More Tales, which has just been released, depicts the sudden downturn in the family fortunes in the “grey, povertystricken” Eighties.
Nettie’s father, by then a veteran of three post-cream bands – Blind Faith, Ginger Baker’s Air Force and the Baker-gurvitz Army – had moved with wife number two to Italy after the collapse of a recording studio business he had set up in Lagos, leaving his first wife, Liz, Nettie and her two siblings to be evicted from the family home – the exotically named Camelot – in Harrow on the Hill, north London.
As his memoir Hellraiser recounts, the wilful Ginger went on to spent most of his wealth from Cream’s 15 million worldwide album sales on heroin, cocaine, LSD, women, polo ponies and disastrous business ventures over three decades.
“It was like a light switch flicking off – we went from rich to poor,” remembers Nettie, who was 24 when Ginger told them he couldn’t pay the mortgage any more.
In his own memoir, her father claimed that Liz was so furious at him leaving her that when his tax bills arrived at the house, she would throw them on the fire. Debts mounted up in every direction, adding to the chaos.
“It was much worse for Leda and Kofi [her brothers], because they were eight and nine years younger than me; having started out in a pretty sheltered environment in private schools, suddenly they had to go to the local comprehensives,” says Nettie.
‘When I was a toddler, Dad would hand me a spliff and say to me, take a puff of this’
At 58, she is a survivor, like her reprobate father, the rock cat with nine lives. Today as he approaches his 80th birthday, Ginger, who suffers from emphysema after years of heavy smoking, and a degenerative spine condition, is living in a rented property near Canterbury with wife number four, Kudzai Machokoto, a Zimbabwean who is 42 years his junior. Although royalties still come in, he has nothing like the mega-riches of Cream’s guitarist Eric Clapton, himself a reformed addict.
Kudzai has become his carer in his old age, but relations between her and his three – and only – children are not exactly cordial, although Nettie refuses to go into any more detail.
It was only once Ginger had moved to Italy that he finally weaned himself off heroin and played with the likes of Jimmy Page, the Led Zeppelin guitarist, and John Lydon, the former Sex Pistol, before trying a shortlived career as an actor in America. Meanwhile, Nettie’s mother Liz struggled to pay the bills.
Unsurprisingly, during this time Nettie found solace with a group of punkish free spirits “who liked me for myself, not for my famous father. It was a lifesaver.”
There is plenty of riotous punkparty detail and though never judgmental, this latest tome emerges as quite a cautionary tale.
Her Bohemian upbringing was, she says, “chaotic”. “It wasn’t consistent parenting – you never knew whether the two of them were going to be OK.”
When Nettie was six, her parents took her to Acapulco and “by their own admission got so out of it on Acapulco Gold dope that they forgot they had a child to look after and I got really sunburnt with blisters”. She adds: “As I grew older, everyone said I was very sensible compared to my parents – but somebody had to be!”
The 12-year-old Nettie would find herself playing mother to her toddler siblings – and drugs were always part of the scene at home with her parents. “When I was a toddler, Dad would hand me a spliff and say to me, ‘Take a puff of this, it’s much better than cigarettes’,” recalls Nettie.
“At 13, 14, I would go out with my parents and we would all get drunk together. At the time, I thought it was great, that they were the best parents. Mum gave me speed when I was 23; their generation was very naive about drugs and Dad didn’t understand that soft drugs could be a gateway to the harder stuff.”
However, in one of his rare moments of parental responsibility, Ginger warned Nettie not to take heroin as he had done from the age of 21. One of Nettie’s closest friends died of the drug at 31 and she still mourns him. “Heroin was the great divider among my friends – it changed everything,” she admits.
Instead, Nettie took amphetamines and later cocaine; today she takes nothing stronger than a glass of wine in the evening. “When I took drugs, I took a tiny amount compared to the others,” she says. “I didn’t need much to make it work, so I never got addicted.”
Looking back at her childhood, she believes her mother’s particular tragedy was that her personality disorder was only diagnosed too late in life for treatment. It meant she would often get into physical fights with the volatile Ginger and also led to several suicide attempts. Liz died of cancer in 2014.
“My mother was never happy,” recalls Nettie. “She went really crazy at one point and had to be sectioned when I was nine, just after my brother Kofi was born. I remember saying to one woman we knew, ‘I wish you were my mum.’ I wanted a stable mother and I didn’t have one.
“She would knock on my bedroom door and say she had taken an overdose and I would run out shouting for help to the neighbours, including a nice vicar who lived opposite. It was all a cry for help and Ginger didn’t have the emotional maturity to handle it, which is why he escaped. My mother used to say it was no fun being married to a womanising junkie.”
Little wonder then that her punk friends became her new family: “I was always looking for parent substitutes, which is no bad thing because it’s resulted in me having a lot of families,” says Nettie.
Although she doesn’t do self-pity, it’s clear she was also looking for love with a series of unreliable men that could be traced back to her inadequate, irascible father – who, she says, would regularly call her stupid.
She freely admits she was also looking for “finance”, since her parents had never encouraged her to think about a career; she was asked to leave the private school, Heathfield, in 1971, when she was 10, because of newspaper headlines about Ginger’s drug taking.
Her formal education ended at 15 when she left the Stella Mann school of dancing after acquiring three O-levels (in English literature, language and art) in order to work as an unpaid groom to her father’s polo ponies. “I thought I was going to have a wild time and meet some rich man on the polo field and marry him; I was looking for someone like Jilly Cooper’s show-jumper hero Rupert Campbellblack,” explains Nettie.
She never did land the show jumper of her dreams, but was married for a while to the late musician Michael Lewis, with whom she had her beloved 27-year-old daughter, Zara.
Although mother and daughter are close, Zara has taken a very different path in life to Nettie. “She’s the campaigns manager for the Leonard Cheshire disability charity and owns her own flat, which is marvellous – so I don’t have to worry about her at all,” says her proud mother. Despite her often challenging relationship with Ginger, Nettie nevertheless remains proud of his musical achievements and has effectively become the keeper of her father’s flame.
While Kofi (named after Ghanaian drummer Kofi Ghanaba), who now lives in America, followed his father into drumming and Leda, based in Amsterdam, works in IT, Nettie went back to college and is now a fulltime writer. She co-wrote Ginger’s autobiography Hellraiser in 2009 and runs his website (gingerbaker. com). She also contributed to a lavish
‘I’ve had a lot of experience with addicts – and I’m not very sympathetic’
new photographic anthology, out next month: Full Cream.
Although she admits that writing the book was quite an emotional experience, Nettie’s experiences have left her without sentimentality.
“I’ve had a lot of experience with drug addicts and let’s say I’m not very sympathetic. You have to have had a really hard time – like flying Spitfires at 19 or your child dying – for me to feel sorry for you.
“For the first time in my life, I’m completely away from addicts, thank God,” she says. “I just think, for God’s sake – it’s so self-indulgent.”
More Tales of a Rock Star’s Daughter is available now (Wymer Publishing, £14.99); Full Cream is out on Aug 23, also Wymer Publishing (£59.99). Ginger Baker’s website is at gingerbaker.com