Danny Baker reveals he was secretly married to another woman for six WEEKS before exchanging vows with current wife Wendy
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Danny Baker has revealed he was married for six weeks before exchanging vows with his now wife – and it was all thanks to the riotous antics of a ’70s pop group.
Baker was working as a journalist at the New Musical Express with future second wife Wendy when he toured with Darts, a nine-piece doo-wop band popular in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Things quickly went wrong when he found himself marrying another woman, but he hardly saw her after their ‘wedding day’.
Appearing on the Rosebud podcast, Baker, 67, recalled: “I’ve been married for about six weeks. On tour with the Darts, a group of fantastic people – nine of them. Absolute debauchery – great time though.
‘And there was a young reporter from rival newspaper Disc and Music Echo.
“And she was kind of lost in this maelstrom of rock and roll stuff and one night we came back to this hotel in Derby, and there were maybe some setbacks.
Danny Baker has revealed he was married for six weeks before exchanging vows with his now wife – and it was all thanks to the riotous antics of a ’70s pop group
‘I was not involved in the setbacks. Several chandeliers were destroyed. It was a nine-piece rock band.”
He added: ‘The police were called and I told her, ‘The only way we’re going to get out of this is to pretend we’re a couple involved in this.’
‘That’s how I met her. And we kind of got out. A week later we got married for fun and after that we hardly saw each other again.’
Baker married his second wife Wendy in 1988 and the couple had three children.
He said: “Wendy was one of the few working-class people at the NME. Julie Burchill later.
‘I’ve always been a huge fan of regional accents. Wendy’s of Romford. But it’s also a shared humour, a shared background, the whole thing – we were both adrift at the NME.
“We both left and married other people.”
After divorcing their respective partners, the couple got married and remained happily married.
Baker was no stranger to controversy condemned by social media users in 2020 after joking with that former Black Sabbath singer Ozzy Osbourne’s past cocaine use had caused him to develop Parkinson’s disease.
The comment came just eight months after he was fired by the BBC for a tweet in which he shared a photo of a couple walking a chimpanzee shortly after Meghan Markle gave birth to eldest child Archie, with the caption: ‘Royal baby leaves Hopital.’
He tweeted: ‘Not unsympathetic to a true hero, but when Ozzie Osbourne says his ‘mild Parkinson’s’ is due to a fall he once had, I think it must have been when he fell into a barrel full of cocaine fell and didn’t come out again for 35 years.’
Twitter users were outraged as many said he was “filthy” and could even joke about the disease.
One said: ‘Parkinson’s disease is a cruel, cruel ass. Keep that in mind,” and another user added, “So wrong. #Parkinson’s is not a consequence of coke. It’s a random pig of a disease that can destroy anyone’s life.”
Another user said: ‘Really helpful when discussing a situation that is a) tearing the person apart and b) their family apart. I’m not being ‘woke’, but you and I are old enough to remember the expression ‘it’s no laughing matter’. Cruel.’
Baker was condemned by social media users in 2020 after he joked that former Black Sabbath singer Ozzy Osbourne’s cocaine use had caused him to develop Parkinson’s disease
The comment came just eight months after he was fired by the BBC for a tweet in which he shared a photo of a couple walking a chimpanzee shortly after Meghan Markle gave birth to eldest child Archie.
Social media users responded to his tweet, with many calling him “cruel” for joking about the disease