East End
from the to the West End
Cheryl Baker has been in the public eye since the 70s but shot to fame after the ‘skirt incident’ in 1981. We caught up with her at a rehearsal studio in Kent to find out about her work, fame, who she despises and how Velcro changed her life.
You’re what they call a real life East Ender, what was it like growing up in Bethnal Green?
Well, nobody was rich, everybody lived in a council flat, and so I was just one of those people. I lived in a council flat until I was 29, in the same flat I was born in and I absolutely loved it. I’ve still got all the friends I had then and I still see all the friends that I went to school with since I was five years old so I’ve got really happy memories of my time in Bethnal Green. Everything we had was second-hand; all of our clothes were from Brick Lane Market. The only thing I had new was every year my mum used to take out a Providence cheque and buy us a new coat or a new outfit for Christmas or something like that. The rest of the year it was all second-hand. And it was literally often from the kind of stalls now that were like a jumble sale, it was literally tables like this with loads of clothes piled on and you’d have to look through and she’d go ‘Reet, like that?’ (Cheryl’s real name is Rita) and I’d go “yeah” so that would be my new clothes. My dad was a shoemaker and worked in a factory and their sample shoe at that time was a size four so I would get all the samples. You know like I say ‘we were poor’ but it’s absolutely true but I was really happy. I was one of five kids, it was a really happy family, lots of tears and lots of laughter and really good friends and as I say I still see them now. First, we went to watch this show - it was amazing and fantastic and the choral singing was so good we joined there and then and so I was in that for the next five years and I always used to cry at the finale of the last show because it was so wonderful and it was always six months odd until we did the next show. It was that standing on stage that did it. In fact there was one time in particular we did a Christmas show for the local community and me and my sister sang Mary’s Boy Child. We didn’t have music and the pianist couldn’t play it so we sang it acapella, we just sang two voices in harmony and at the end of the song the whole audience was crying and I can promise, it was better than winning the Eurovision Song Contest. I would still be at the time maybe 17 years old and it was the most fantastic feeling and I thought then this is what I want to do, but until I was 21 I was a shorthand typist.
From that happy childhood when did you develop an appetite for fame?
I always wanted to be a singer and there was a park behind where I lived so as children we would go over there and we would do shows, we would dress up in our mum’s clothes and perform. I thought it was to old people but they were probably parents 20 or 30 years old but I thought they were old! A lot of the songs were post-war as I was a postwar baby, part of the baby-boom. Even though I was born in 1954 after the War, my dad didn’t come back from Greece (or wherever he was) until 1948 as even though the War had finished they still had to stay on. I used to sing as a child and really wanted to be a singer but at aged 16 I knew it wouldn’t actually happen, I knew it never would be and at that age, I got a proper job. I left school and worked as a shorthand typist in the city. I also joined an amateur operatic society in South London just because my sister knew someone in it.
So was it straight to stardom after that?
No, after that I worked for an Israeli called Joshua - the whole company was me and him. One day, I came into work and there was no Josh and he’d left a note: ‘Gone back to Israel.’ You are always on the reserve list in the army in Israel if you’re not already in the army and he had to go back. It was shortly
8