Macca’s ex-PR man turns down £150k book offer

Posted by Axegrinder on 22 October 2008 at 11:42
Tags: Geoff Baker, Paul McCartney

Good news for Sir Paul McCartney – his former PR man, Geoff Baker, claims he has turned down an offer of £150,000 to write a book about his time working for the ex-Beatle. 

Baker is currently writing a novel, Diary of a Madman, which is updated daily on his blog. The novel is about a music PR man losing his mind while working for a rock star, although Baker insists “the book is not about me, Paul, my family, my friends or anybody or any event that I have actually experienced”. 

On Monday, Baker, a former showbusiness editor of the Daily Star, wrote on his blog: “If I was writing for money I wouldn’t have turned down the latest offer of £150,000 upfront to pen my Mcmemoirs and I wouldn’t be smoking roll-ups; well, not roll-ups this small.”

He also reveals he has just been sacked from his PR role for pop band Purplemelon “over some matter of annoyance at my persistence in saying ‘that won’t work, it’s a crap idea’, so I’ve returned to freelancing features for Her Majesty’s Press and am about to start whoring myself out as a columnist for any who will have me but most likely The Lung Disease Gazette.”

Baker was working as a freelance journalist when he began working for Macca in 1989. They parted company in acrimonious fashion in 2004.

No happy reunion for Macca and PR man

Posted by Axegrinder on 10 October 2008 at 00:30
Tags: Geoff Baker, Paul McCartney, The Sun, Uncategorized

For a brief moment on Thursday it appeared that Sir Paul McCartney had kissed and made up with his former publicist, Geoff Baker, whom he fired back in 2004.

The Sun ran a story by Ben Ashford about vegetarian Macca allegedly blasting McDonald’s “after accusing them of using his picture to flog hamburgers”.

The piece attributed the quote “What sort of morons do McDonald’s think Beatles fans are?” to “Sir Paul’s spokesman Geoff Baker”.

But this was far from true. Writing on his blog, Baker puts the record straight.

“This is new to me and, I suspect, Paul and the excellent Stuart Bell, who actually is the spokesman that I am not.”

Sir Paul severed his ties with Baker in September 2004, claiming his behaviour had “not reached the professional standards” he had come to expect from him.