Steve Baker

steve

(for short biography click here)

Born Stephen Spencer Baker, September 1956, Nottingham, England.

In 1968 he was awarded a scholarship to Nottingham High School, a well respected English ‘Public School’ where he gained a bagful of primary qualifications before leaving home and school at the age of 17 to wash dishes in a Yorkshire Hotel. This annoyed his teachers as he had been expected to achieve high academic success and follow a career as an Architect. It didn’t annoy his parents too much (the hotel concerned were unavailable for comment).

Having already started managing bands while at school, he continued to develop his apparent lifelong addiction to working with creative people. After starting a small independent record label at the age of 19, solely for the purpose of releasing music by the band he then managed, he played dangerously at the edges of personal bankruptcy for what seemed like an eternity. During this ‘wilderness time’ many varied ‘proper’ jobs had to be undertaken to avoid debtors prison. While the specifics of this employment can be safely consigned to the mists, it would be appropriate to note that much commercial experience was gained from areas as diverse as retail sales, corporate contract negotiation, computer-aided-design and computer programming and installation.

Several bands were managed during this period, none of whom made any money – for anyone. In 1981 Steve moved to Liverpool as a tour manger and administration person for a small record label. The company, of which he eventually became a director, had two music publishing arms and a small recording studio and did actually provide a meagre income for a few years. However, early commercial success for the main artists dwindled and the principals went their different ways, dividing up the management of the various artists connected with the project.

By now it was 1984 and after a further 18 months in financial purgatory, the artist Steve had continued to manage (professionally known as BLACK) wrote and recorded an independently released hit record. This success was parlayed into a major recording contract, several hit records and a subsequent highly lucrative publishing contract. Over two million worldwide album sales and many exhausting trips around the world followed – a Wonderful Life indeed.

In the clear knowledge that such success could be as brief as the glint of sunlight on a falling guillotine, both Steve and his long suffering artist partner decided that diversification would be a shrewd move. So in 1991, a new company was formed under the deliberately misleading name of tomato. Co-founded by Steve (who took the role of managing director), Colin Vearncombe (the aforementioned recording artist aka Black) and John Warwicker who had been the art director and visual language ‘mentor’ of the Black project, the company grew from a shaky start to international fame over the course of the last decade of the second millennium.

At the end of 2003, Steve resigned as Managing Director of tomato. This freed him up to enjoy his new found life in Tokyo with his newly found wife, Yoko Kobayashi, a television journalist and writer.

He continues to be obsessed with creativity and its interface with business and spent three years acting as a part-time advisor/consultant to the government in Sapporo, Northern Japan on a long term plan to stimulate the creative economy (see Ideas City). As a result of this work, a discussion document; blueprint for a creative economy has been made available.

During the last few years of his day-to-day work with tomato, he became increasingly fascinated by the possibilities that education could offer and was the main instigator of a series of tomato workshops which travelled the world, over a period of four years. A book has been published about these events, written by Ed Panar and Corinne Nakamura. Steve’s main role, apart from organising these events, was to present lectures on Creativity and Business. This has lead to him to publish some of the text from these lectures and discussions on creativityinbusiness.net – an ongoing project that has led to the publication of eBooks in Japanese through cibnet.jp. Inspired by the ideas that were founded in the tomato workshops, Steve developed an outline plan for Project Esin – a permanent, purpose-built space for creative workshops, producer training and spin-off creative companies. If anyone has a spare US$10million to invest in something that could be the Bauhaus of the 21st century, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Steve also acted as a business advisor to Protohaus a California-based interface design/innovation/prototyping company who developed a suite of social network applications for the mobile environment.

However, a major change in balance has been effected and Steve now spends at least 50% of his time working on creative projects either on his own or with other creative partners. One major creative focus is the development of screenplays with his writing partner and friend, Gisli Snaer Erlingsson – the Icelandic Film Director. They also worked together in making a documentary about the future of education for the 21Foundation.

Another co-authored project with friend and photographer, Steve West is a photographic essay on waitresses. This project is very nearly finished click here to see the book design and a selection of photographs that have been shot in and around Tokyo.

Since 2002, Steve has also following his teenage dream of writing a science fiction series. The first book in the series (authored as S. Spencer Baker) is Slabscape : Reset. It was published in November 2010 and is a ‘webback’ which means it’s accompanied by an online reference resource.

Despite being enthusiastically anti-social, now the book is finally out S. Spencer Baker is reluctantly flirting with twitter and facebook.

The books are available on both paperback and eBook formats through Amazon and Blip Books

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