(Credits: Far Out / F. van Geelen / Omroepvereniging VARA)
Sun 19 April 2026 19:00, UK
If you dig into the strangest stories in music history, the root is often something simple, something sweet, or something heartbreaking. Most of the time, the wildest and most chaotic behaviour comes from a basic desire to be cared for. Just ask Ginger Baker.
Well, I suppose you can’t ask him, because Baker died in 2019, but it’s something his life makes clear. In many ways, it’s remarkable he lasted that long. In the 1960s, when the drummer was one of the most sought-after musicians around and was moving between powerful groups, he was also getting caught up in the darker side of the scene. As his career took off, so did his drug use, and he developed a heroin addiction that would haunt him until the 1980s.
He claimed that throughout those years, there were probably around 29 times when he vowed to get clean, but only relapsed again. However, how could anyone actually hope to go cold turkey when everyone around them is at it too?
Especially when Baker joined Jack Bruce and Eric Clapton to start Cream in 1966, it wasn’t just the coming together of London’s three most powerful players; it was really the coming together of three of music’s biggest addicts.
Naturally, that’s not conducive to a band who want to stick it out long. Despite Cream’s musical power, they only lasted for four years as a band before the drugs, and the drug-fuelled in-fighting tore them apart. But then after that, the relationship between the members only got more bizarre.
In a 1975 Rolling Stone interview, chatting with Cameron Crowe, Clapton said that Baker kept trying to kidnap him. “During the addiction, Ginger would come down to my house,” the guitarist admitted, “I had the doors locked and everything, and Ginger wanted to kidnap me and take me off to the Sahara,” conjuring up a wild scene.
But in reality, when you look past the mania of that, it’s oddly sweet. There was clearly care between the members, despite the struggle of the split. “Cream died a very slow death. It was painful,” Clapton said as they were all struggling in their own ways, and the tension that it caused was awful. You don’t just stop caring though, and especially when addiction is involved, there’s also the element of wanting help and wanting to help others.
In his own way, Baker was trying to help. “His way of curing it is to get in his Land Rover and drive across the Sahara,” Clapton said of the plan, adding, “You can’t score anything in the desert”. In his own way, trying to break into Clapton’s house and kidnap him was Baker’s attempt to get him clean and get the friendship back together.
While Clapton was open to that, the problem was that the friendship and the band were too entwined. In 1975, he had no intention of returning to the trio, stating clearly, “If there was a way that we could have gotten back together again and enjoyed it, I would have signed the papers. But I didn’t see any enjoyable prospect in it.”
