Danny Baker has revealed he ended up married for six weeks before exchanging vows with his current wife – and it was all thanks to the debauched antics of a ’70s pop group.

Baker was working as a journalist at the New Musical Express alongside future second wife Wendy when he went on tour with Darts, a nine-piece doo-wop band popular in the 1970s and early ’80s. 

Things soon went awry when he found himself marrying another woman – but he barely saw her again after their ‘wedding day’.

Appearing on the Rosebud podcast, Baker, 67, recalled: ‘I got married for about six weeks. On tour with the Darts, a group of fantastic people – nine of them. Absolute debauchery – terrific time though.

‘And there was this young reporter there from rival paper, the Disc and Music Echo.

‘And she was kind of lost in this maelstrom of rock ‘n’ roll stuff and one night we came back to this H๏τel in Derby, and there may have been some contretemps.

Danny Baker has revealed he ended up married for six weeks before exchanging vows with his current wife – and it was all thanks to the debauched antics of a ’70s pop group 

Baker went on to marry his second wife Wendy in 1988 and the couple had three children (pictured in 2003)

‘I wasn’t involved in the contretemps. Various chandeliers got smashed. They were a nine-piece rock band.’ 

He added: ‘The police got called and I said to her “The only way we’re going to get out of this, we’ll pretend we’re a couple caught up in it”.

‘That’s how I met her. And we kind of got off. For a lark a week later we kind of got married and then we hardly saw each other again.’ 

Baker went on to marry his second wife Wendy in 1988 and the couple had three children.

He said: ‘Wendy was one of the only working class people at the NME. Julie Burchill later.

‘I’ve always been an absolute sucker for regional accents. Wendy’s from Romford. But it’s also a shared humour, a shared background, the whole thing – we were both adrift at the NME.

‘We both went off and got married to other people.’ 

After splitting with their respective partners the pair wed and remain happily married.

Baker was working at the NME alongside future second wife Wendy when he went on tour with Darts, a nine-piece doo-wop band popular in the 1970s and early ’80s (pictured in 1982)

Darts in 1978. The band enjoyed moderate fame in the United Kingdom in the late ’70s

No stranger to controversy, Baker was condemned by social media users in 2020 after he joked that former Black Sabbath vocalist Ozzy Osbourne’s past cocaine use had caused him to develop Parkinson’s disease.

The comment came just eight months after he was sacked by the BBC over a tweet in which he shared a picture of a couple walking a chimpanzee shortly after Meghan Markle gave birth to eldest child Archie, with the caption: ‘Royal baby leaves hospital.’

He tweeted: ‘Not to be unsympathetic to a genuine hero but when Ozzy Osbourne says his ‘mild Parkinson’s’ is down to a fall he once had I’m thinking it must have been when he fell into a vat full of cocaine in 72 and didn’t get out again for 35 years.’ 

Twitter users were outraged with many saying he was ‘nasty’ and were outraged that he could even joke about the disease.

One said: ‘Parkinson’s is a cruel cruel disease. Bare that in mind.’ 

And another user added: ‘So wrong. Parkinsons is not a coke fuelled consequence. It’s an indiscriminate pig of a disease that can blight the lives of anyone’.

Another user said: ‘Really helpful when discussing a situation that tears a) the person and b) their family apart. I’m not being ‘woke’ but you and I are old enough to remember the phrase ‘it’s not a laughing matter’. Cruel.’

Things soon went awry when he found himself marrying another woman while touring with Darts – but he barely saw her again after their ‘wedding day’

Baker was condemned by social media users in 2020 after he joked that former Black Sabbath vocalist Ozzy Osbourne’s past cocaine use had caused him to develop Parkinson’s disease 

The comment came just eight months after he was sacked by the BBC over a tweet in which he shared a picture of a couple walking a chimpanzee shortly after Meghan Markle gave birth to eldest child Archie 

Social media users replied to his tweet with many branding him ‘cruel’ for joking about the disease