first person
Crème de la
Cream I SUPPOSE IT WAS THE UNLIKELY combination of accidentally falling asleep in Lord Rothschild’s bed after a gig for the Duke of Edinburgh, and snapping the front axle of a Range Rover on a potholed track in a motor rally that got me into polo. The fact that these two incidents happened almost ten years apart has absolutely no bearing on my ability to hit a ball from a galloping pony or play the drums better than anyone – well, almost anyone – on earth. The first happened back in my pre-Cream days when I was playing with Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated at a party organised in honour of an entire team of Argentinian polo players. We were playing wonderful music when a man jumped on stage tooting his hunting horn very out of tune. I wasn’t impressed. Others present recollect that I was, well, a little bit out of it and I dozed off on his lordship’s bed. But I can’t have been too out of it – the encounter with some of the world’s most famous high goal players must have triggered some subliminal urge in me to have a go at what I had always judged to be a sport for Hoorays. Of course, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Polo is a great leveller. It has a lot in common with football, but it took me the best part of another decade to discover this. Up until then my only encounter with my four-legged friends had been confined to riding as a small child in my retired grandfather’s horse and cart around the streets of Knowstone in Devon. The second incident, the one that put me in the saddle and fired up a lifelong passion for the sport that brought me a two-goal handicap at the age of 56, came in 1974 during the Argdungu Rally in West Africa. I was living in Nigeria at the time, where I
had invested my life’s savings in a worldclass recording studio. How does a jazz and rock star end up here? Simple. Africa is the spiritual home of the drum. It may be a long way from my native Neasden in West London, but the odyssey was as natural as it was essential to my musical development. Away from my studio – we’d just recorded Band On The Run for Paul McCartney and Wings – I had achieved a bit of a reputation as a rally driver. Indeed, Sideways Baker and his Dancing Range Rover were known to perform with the kind of uninhibited gusto otherwise reserved for my drum kit. As I executed an unexpected 180 degree turn at a checkpoint on the first day of the rally, a voice yelled from somewhere inside the cloud of dust I had created: “Bloody Hell. The way you drive you should play polo!” The voice belonged to Colin Edwards, who was then best polo player in Nigeria, with a five-goal handicap. He was also extremely amusing, totally mad, and had friends in high places – as I was to discover over the next few days. Edwards had been brought up as one of the children of the Emir of Katsina, also an outstanding player. He spoke fluent Hausa with the exclusive royal accent. I was leading that rally on the final night stage when I became the only person to ever snap the front axle of a Range Rover. The backup vehicle mysteriously failed to materialise and my navigator and I were forced to spend the night stranded in the desert. The next morning we managed to borrow a couple of bicycles to take us to the nearest village, from where we got a ride on an African bus to Kano. We went to the Kano Club in search of Edwards and a more permanent form of transport.
If it hadn’t been for a broken axle on an African rally, Ginger Baker might never have discovered the joys of polo. Here, as he prepares for an historic reunion with Cream, the legendary drummer recalls the outrageous origins of his love for the sport
“Mr Edwards is not here,” the barman confided, “but he is driving a Range Rover and will be along in a few minutes.” And so he was. A very battered and cathedral-shaped model, with no glass in any window, skidded to a halt in the car park in another cloud of African dust. This was our missing back-up vehicle which Colin had managed to roll in the desert the day before. The whole day that followed was an amazing experience and formed the start of a firm friendship. At the time, in the early Seventies, I had a few worries on my mind. Things weren’t going well with the studio. I’d fallen out with my partner, who happened to be the regional Minister for Trade, and I had just survived a bust for arms and drugs. I’d also been arrested and put under armed guard at a business meeting. My whole investment, as it transpired, was doomed. Anyway, I flew
18 Hurlingham
18-21. Ginger Baker Sec1:18
27/4/05 4:45:09 pm
