Legendary Cream drummer Ginger Baker is one of the original Wild Men of Rock. Blessed with a preternatural musicianship, which he condenses down to being all about timing, but cursed by a self-destructive drive which has seen him wrestle a prodigious drug habit, family implosion and penury.
Through all this, Baker’s musicianship has served him well and taken him on an amazing journey with some of the greatest musicians in the world such as Fela Kuti and Eric Clapton, not to mention inspiring many of the world’s great musical eccentrics like John ‘Jonny Rotten’ Lydon. But as impressive as the virtuoso musical talent is on show, it’s the man himself who proves the most transfixing.
We are taken through his tough childhood, his early London years establishing himself as stand-out drummer on the London jazz scene, his battle with heroin addiction, his abandonment of his wife and child, his love of polo and on and on through the most complex and painful life where it seems his very humanity has been sacrificed on the altar of talent.
A remarkably candid document of an important musical figure and at the same time a searing portrait of a man in free fall doing his best to destroy any human relationship he can as he drums on into personal oblivion. A stunning film.