Bulger uses interviews conducted in Baker’s South African home interspersed with archive footage and animations. He takes his subject from war baby, to jazz obsessed teen, through to the high and highly strung days of Cream as well as his Nigerian odyssey where he fell in love with African music and more incongruously – Polo. Watching the archive material it’s difficult to disagree with the assessment of Baker as the greatest rock drummer of all time, although Baker does himself vociferously disagree, seeing himself as an inheritor of the jazz tradition. He still takes time however, to dismiss contemporaries such as Led Zepplin’s John Bonham and The Who’s Keith Moon as lesser beings.
There are in fact few people, (excepting Eric Clapton and Baker’s step-daughter (by wife number 4)) who are talked about with any warmth and those who worked with him, particularly Jack Bruce, whilst full of admiration, display the glazed look of people with PTSD. Baker’s passions are or have been – drums, heroin, polo and dogs and not necessarily in that order. Family life features nowhere on the list and the interviews that are most revealing about his non-musical legacy are those with his children who are either glad of the distance between them or wish they could better understand this strange and bitter man. Bulger gets as close as anyone is likely to get to Baker. His subject ultimately comes across as tragicomic; a man who knows his place in musical history, but won’t let others define it. An old dog with a gruff bark who, as Bulger finds out, still has some bite left.
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