Читать книгу Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer - Chris Salewicz, Chris Salewicz - Страница 11

In the summer of 1971 the second Glastonbury festival took place, with a very special guest. Michael Eavis, a dairy farmer who on his own land held the Glastonbury festival, for which admission was £1, was contacted by the devotees of the Guru Maharaj Ji and his Divine Light Mission: ‘We’ve got God in town: can we bring him to the festival?’ ‘It was very odd,’ Eavis told the writer Mick Brown for his book The Spiritual Tourist. ‘Somebody said God had arrived and could we put him on stage, and my thought was: Well, the festival’s for everybody really, so why not? By the time he went on stage everybody in the audience was completely stoned out of their minds, and you could hear this ripple going around, “Wow! That’s God!” Then he started preaching against drugs, which I think everybody there found a bit disconcerting.’ Guru Maharaj Ji, a pudgyfaced 13-year-old Indian boy, had been whisked down to Glastonbury in a Rolls-Royce rented to honour him by those who were already his followers.

Maharaj Ji’s unique selling point was the promise of ‘inner peace’ through the practice of meditation techniques known as ‘Knowledge’. As this is also a term for the rigorous training undertaken by London taxi-drivers, I can never hear the term in a Maharaj Ji context without visualizing fleets of black cabs. Maharaj Ji now lives in some splendour near Zuma beach, north of Malibu, in southern California.

That 1971 Glastonbury festival was the moment at which the Divine Light Mission planted itself in the (un)consciousness of potential followers in the UK. One of them was Woody Mellor, who had been a visitor to the 1971 Glastonbury festival. Helen Cherry said: ‘Like me, Joe got into Guru Maharaj Ji and we used to go to that a lot.’ I recall telling Joe Strummer during the time of punk how I’d once done a course in Transcendental Meditation and him surprising me by replying, ‘Yeah, I did something like that.’

This interest in Maharaj Ji was not a fleeting craze for Woody Mellor. For over a year the eastern religion filtered ceaselessly through to his brain via the habitual haze of marijuana smoke around him: the following year Iain Gillies visited Woody at his next address, at Ridley Road in Harlesden, and his cousin asked Iain the question, ‘Who are you Scots into?’ ‘I said I liked the artist Egon Schiele and Dylan Thomas. Woody pointed to a poster on the wall of Guru Maharaj Ji: “We’re into him. We think he’s cool.”’ This revelation of his cousin’s mystical leanings startled Iain: ‘I said, “You’re into him?”’ The next day Iain came across Woody in the kitchen explaining to someone how to rob a nearby bank.

Don’t we naturally wonder if Woody Mellor’s fascination with Guru Maharaj Ji could have been a consequence of the death of David? Doesn’t tragedy often oblige those left in its wake to seek an answer in some form of religious figurehead? Or was Woody simply infected with the ubiquitous mystical spirit of the times?

Richard ‘Dick the Shit’ Evans, also became an adherent of Maharaj Ji. ‘Helen had a huge spiritual side to her. I think we got sucked in. I learnt a lot of things, like breathing techniques, that I still use today. There would be emphasis on things like, “I want you to think of nothing,” and you just can’t. Woody and I did it for about a year. It suddenly occurred to us that it wasn’t that interesting.’

Woody was not ‘fanatical’ about the Divine Light Mission, Helen Cherry said, but would certainly meditate for the requisite hour every day. ‘Guru Maharaj Ji had a big function in Central Hall, in central London, the first public meeting in London. Joe saw him, but I don’t think he met him personally. He would hang around the ashram in north London a bit, but not as much as me.’ Deborah Kartun did not approve or participate in this allegiance to Maharaj Ji: ‘I’d been brought up in an atheist family.’

Something else had happened to Woody Mellor at that Glastonbury festival. During the set by Arthur Brown, the self-proclaimed ‘God of Hellfire’, a rooster called Hector had flown up and perched himself atop an imposing crucifix, part of the stage dressing, at the very moment it was about to be set alight during Brown’s performance highlight of his hit song ‘Fire’. Hector was almost instantly incinerated, the ultimate fast food. From that moment on Woody became a vegetarian: he decorated a soap tin for Helen with drawings and the adage: ‘We love to eat nuts and honey.’ (‘I lost it, and I nagged him that I couldn’t live without one, so the next one he did said, “Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette.”’) Shortly afterwards, returning home from a party towards breakfast time, Woody Mellor picked up a pint of milk that had just been delivered to a doorstep and was promptly arrested by a passing policeman: in court the next morning he was fined a few pounds, earning a criminal record for petty theft. Did this lead to a certain amount of musing on the nature of drinking cow’s milk? Soon he announced to all and sundry that the drinking of milk was a con trick by the Milk Marketing Board: ‘He thought milk was very bad for you,’ said Helen. ‘He felt that people should have never been persuading children in the 1950s to drink milk.’ He maintained this view for the rest of his life.

With almost painful slowness, Woody Mellor began to angle himself in the direction of the career choice he had expressed to his father. The arrival of Tymon Dogg at 18 Ash Grove, along with the presence of the accomplished guitarist Clive Timperley, proved inspirational. ‘I remember Joe singing this chorus, I’m going to be sick / I wanna puke up in a bucket of water, and trying to play it on Tymon’s ukulele,’ said Helen

Soon their time at Vomit Heights was at an end. ‘Ash Grove was falling apart after we’d lived there for a year,’ said Helen. ‘There was a bit of damage: there had been so much dancing at one party the kitchen ceiling had come down, and Tymon somehow destroyed the garden.’ It was time to move.

In September 1971 the Vomit Heights crowd moved into a second-floor, three-bedroom flat at 34 Ridley Road, Harlesden, rented from an Irish couple; with occasional exceptions, Woody’s subsequent London addresses would draw closer and closer to Notting Hill until he was living in the area proper. For some reason, Woody Mellor always insisted that his new address was in Willesden, although that is at least a mile to the north. Was this because Harlesden was considered an almost unmentionably rough area, an underclass immigrant district locked away into its own world because it was so badly served by public transport? Helen lived there with her boyfriend Robert Basey; Woody shared a room with Kit Buckler, a friend from Ralph West who had booked the groups at his own college – when Kit moved out he was replaced by Dick the Shit; a Frenchman had the third bedroom, little more than a box-room; and Tymon Dogg slept in the communal living-room.

It was not a great time for Woody Mellor. No longer financially underpinned by the government grant he had received as a student at Central, he was frequently virtually destitute. He had sunk to the ocean-floor of life: the dank, threatening district of Harlesden was a long way mentally from the landscaped lawns of the City of London Freemen’s School, or the quaint village-like life of Upper Warlingham. Woody was, said Helen, ‘very lost at the end of the art college year’, although his spirits were still underpinned by his devotions to Guru Maharaj Ji. He briefly worked laying carpets, following this with flat-cleaning jobs. He attempted to start a painting and decorating business called HIC, which stood for Head in the Clouds, but this attempt at business stalled almost from its inception.

Iain Gillies came to stay a few times, and he and Woody would stay up all night: ‘On a couple of occasions, as I was making my way to bed at 8 o’clock in the morning, Joe would say that he had to go off to do a flat-cleaning job.’

In a letter to Annie Day, Woody gives his impression of the district in which he is living: ‘This pad is in a pretty GRIM area like goods yards etc etc Oh yeah loads of spades like this:’ He has illustrated this thought with a distinctly politically incorrect cartoon of a black man wearing a sweater emblazoned with the slogan OOGA BOOGA, dancing in front of a house that bears the number ‘34’. Out of the top window peers a character with a question-mark emerging from the top of his head, who you assume can only be the letter’s signatory – who in this instance is ‘Johnny Red’. Stuck next to the cartoon black guy is a celebrated frame from the then renowned underground press cartoon strip ‘The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers’, in which the stoned hero holds a handful of joints and is mouthing the speech bubble, ‘Well, as we all know, DOPE will get you through times of NO MONEY better than MONEY will get you through times of NO DOPE!’ (It is worth noting that in hip circles of the time in Britain to call black people ‘spades’ was considered a sort of cool political correctness … )

Poverty meant that Woody would occasionally stoop to shoplifting, at which he was not very good. ‘One time,’ said Helen, ‘we were in this bakery, and I could tell that he was going to go for this mince pie. He ordered some bread and as this poor woman turned round to get it, he stole this mince pie off the top of the counter and put it into the big dirty old fur coat that he had. But he’d forgotten that it had no pocket in it, and so this mince pie came tumbling out by his foot on the floor, and the woman spotted it. It was so embarrassing that I just couldn’t stop laughing as we followed him out of the door, trailing crumbs behind him. He was just no good as a thief, made a complete balls-up of it. He hadn’t thought it out at all. He was better at dressing up as a poor boy and putting it on for the greengrocer, he was quite good at that. He would help me in the kitchen so long as it was something he wanted to eat, so long as it was carrots and sweetcorn. He seemed to eat sweetcorn every day.

‘He was a very sincere person, and you were very lucky if you had him as a friend, because he had an energy, a spark. Sometimes we’d spend whole evenings by getting out a piece of wallpaper and having drawing fights. We’d have battles: he’d imagine something and he’d draw it, and say, “This is coming to get you.” I’d have to do a drawing back to put his men down and send in another missile. I remember him getting hold of one of my sketchbooks and starting in felt-tip in the corner, “This is Gonad”: it was all about this poor chap called Gonad. He was very good at starting some of the titles, but the endings … No, he didn’t get a lot of endings.’

Woody’s missive to Anne Day from 34 Ridley Road – soon he would be physically ejected from the property. (Anne Day)

On visits to his parents, John Mellor would gloss over the hand-to-mouth existence he was living. ‘Woody tried to reassure his father that he was on the correct career path by announcing that he had secured a desk job,’ said Iain Gilles. ‘A few seconds later he added that he would be sweeping up for a Warlingham cabinet maker. Ron thought that this was very funny.’

In a letter that he sent to Paul Buck in December 1971, Woody included a centre-spread poster of Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant – whose first albums he had loved at CLFS – from the weekly music paper Sounds. He had satirically improved the picture of this archetypal rock-god, including a speech-bubble that read, ‘Look at me, I’m wonderful,’ and adding drawings of holes in the singer’s arm with one word appended to them: ‘heroin’. The letter contains instructions for a then current urban myth about a method of getting high, on a par with – but probably much more dangerous than – their efforts to smoke banana-skins at CLFS: it consisted of boiling toadstools in red wine, the drinking of which was alleged to promote an interesting trip. ‘I don’t know: I’m afraid,’ he admitted in his letter. ‘But there’s plenty of guinea pigs here. I had a hair cut last Monday, hope you’re still in this room 8 of yours, otherwise you are not going to get this poster. Why don’t you come up? Love the Wood Bird.’

By early spring of 1972 Woody had begun to accompany Tymon Dogg down to the West End on his busking expeditions in the tiled corridors of the London tube system. They would hit the underground in the late evening, ‘when we judged everyone in town was drunk’. At first Woody Mellor simply acted as Tymon’s ‘bottler’, his money-collector; their regular pitch was at Green Park, where the Piccadilly and Victoria lines converge. ‘That’s how I got into playing, following Tymon Dogg around in the London underground and first collecting money for him like a Mississippi bluesman apprentice.’ Then Woody moved up in the world: ‘I bought a ukulele, ’cos I figured that had to be easier than a guitar, having only four strings.’ The instrument, for which he paid £2.99, came from a Shaftesbury Avenue music shop: ‘I began to learn Chuck Berry songs on the ukulele, and go out on my own, down in the London underground.’ One night when Tymon Dogg decided to try his luck one stop up the Victoria line at Oxford Circus, he left Woody at Green Park with his ukulele. ‘The train emptied at one end of the corridor. One second the corridor was empty, the next it was packed with people streaming through. It was like, now or never, playing to this full house. That was the first time I remember performing on my own.’ Realizing how crucial it was to grab the attention of his prospective audience in seconds, an attitude he developed in the future, Woody came up with a repertoire of Chuck Berry songs: ‘Once I was playing “Sweet Little Sixteen” on the ukulele and an American happened to walk past and he stopped in front of me and went, “I don’t believe it, I can’t believe it,” and he began smacking his forehead, and staggering around, and nearly fainting, and I stopped playing and said, “What? What?” And he went, “You’re playing Chuck Berry on a ukulele!” And I hadn’t considered it to be odd at all. I only started to think it was a bit odd after this American had, like he was nearly banging his head on the subway wall with the ridiculousness of it. And so I just carried on with that, and eventually I got a guitar.’

Then they were evicted from their flat. The Irish landlady’s displeasure with her tenants seems to have been based on a number of factors that had equal weighting; but they mainly focused on the fact that Woody had taken in a mentally distressed black tramp, giving him his bed.

Helen Cherry had a certain sympathy with the response of the woman and her husband: ‘I mean, we did make a terrible mess of 34 Ridley Road, and they could probably see that this was all a bit anarchic. “What is going on in our place?” So they kicked us out really badly. They just turned up, let themselves in and started dragging people down the stairs and putting everything in black bags and throwing it out of windows. They were larger than we were, and took everyone by surprise. My boyfriend was dragged down the steps. All our stuff was just thrown out in bags.’ ‘We were paying rent,’ said Dick the Shit, ‘but the landlord and his wife came up, with a couple of Irish mates, and they physically threw all our stuff out of the house, onto the road.’ After being manhandled down the stairs and pushed out of the house, Woody stood on the pavement in a state of shock, absolutely stunned that this had happened.

The effect of this eviction, at the end of April 1972, was for Woody’s shocked stupefaction to almost immediately transmute into furious anger. It strongly politicized his view of the property-owning classes, even though his landlord oppressors were working-class Irish. ‘I’ve been fucked up the arse by the capitalist system,’ he later told Sounds. ‘Me, personally. I’ve had the police teaming up with landlords, beating me up, kicking me downstairs, all illegally, while I’ve been waving Section 22 of the Rent Act 1965 at them. I’ve watched ’em smash all my records up, just because there was a black man in the house. And that’s your lovely capitalist way of life: “I own this, and you fuck off out of it!”’

Luckily for Helen Cherry and Tymon Dogg, Helen’s parents had a flat they used in London in Miles Buildings, a five-storey tenement walk-up between Church Street and Bell Street, close to where the beginning of the Westway crosses Edgware Road. It wasn’t available at first, however. In another two-room flat in the building lived Dave and Gail Goodall, who sewed tops and skirts that they sold at a weekend clothing stall at the then tiny Camden Market, close to Chalk Farm. At first the Ridley Road collective moved into Dave and Gail’s flat. ‘They’d put down a bed in their living room. But there would be three or four of us. I remember once even sleeping at the end of their bed. They were very generous and giving,’ said Helen.

Dave Goodall, a Jewish Marxist from Manchester who smoked ceaseless quantities of hash but could always be relied upon to come up with food or supplies of electricity, would join with Tymon Dogg in forming the two biggest influences at this time on Woody Mellor; whereas Tymon informed Woody’s musical education, Dave was at the heart of his political instruction. Coming after the unpleasant eviction from 34 Ridley Road, Dave found in Woody a candidate ripe for schooling in the possibilities of more radical means of accommodation. ‘There was a hierarchy of articulateness,’ said Jill Calvert, a cousin of Gail Goodall, ‘and Joe wasn’t necessarily at the top of it.’ He also was not that certain about himself. ‘I remember having a conversation with him in Dave and Gail’s place,’ said Helen Cherry, ‘and him saying very seriously, “Look, I want to be a guitarist, but maybe I can’t be because I should have been starting at thirteen or fourteen. I can’t just pick it up now. I’m not going to be good enough.” And my saying, “No, go for it, if that’s what you really want to do.”’

As though to drive home Dave Goodall’s lessons about the iniquities of the property-owning classes, there was no real room in his and Gail’s Miles Buildings flat, and any lodgers had to crash where they could until Gail and Dave got up in the morning – at which point Woody was always the swiftest to take their bed. In a postcard to Annie Day, dated simply ‘May 1972’, with an address given only as ‘Warrington Lane’, he tells her of his problems: ‘I have been evicted so don’t send no letters to 34 Ridley Road. At the moment I’m hitching to Wales planning to stay there. Just been to Bickershaw Festival, it rained a lot but had a pretty good time. I’ll send you my new address when I’ve got one or if not I’ll write in 2 weeks. Writing this with 1 hand standing up. Love John.’

‘Between my visits in Easter 1972 to Ridley Road and summer 1972 to Edgware Road, he had started busking in the tube with Tymon,’ remembered Iain Gillies. ‘He had his ukulele at Edgware Road, but he had plans to play some serious guitar, first left-handed and then right-handed. I said something to him about him being left-handed and he said, “Don’t worry, ’cos my left hand’s on the fret and it’s shit hot …”’

Once the guitar had arrived, Dick the Shit accompanied Woody on a couple of busking expeditions. ‘I bought this bass, so we were kind of playing: we were just learning how to do it. I used to tune his guitar for him, ’cause he couldn’t physically do it. When we were busking together all Joe could play was “Johnny B. Goode”, with a twang in his voice. I had a huge issue about this. I’d say, “We’ve got to play something else. We’re just frauds: all we can play is half a dozen chords – it’s just appalling.” He said, “Look, they’re just walking through. Nobody ever hears the second song!” He was absolutely right. He didn’t give a shit. I did, but he was right.’

‘Tymon and Woody went off to Holland to do some busking,’ said Iain. ‘But they were back in London within a day or so, having been deported as undesirables. Woody suggested that they could try again after disguising their instruments as bags of golf clubs.’

Woody Mellor was still pretty much financially destitute. Later he told Gaby Salter that at this stage of his life he was often driven to scavenging around the rotting fruit and vegetables discarded in the gutters of Soho’s Berwick Street market to find something to eat. (‘Around that time,’ said Iain Gillies, ‘Aunt Anna told me, “We let John have a little money.” Those exact words. So he had a little allowance at this “financially destitute” time.’) But soon an episode occurred on the London underground that disturbed Woody sufficiently for him to decide to abandon busking altogether as a career choice. While he was performing on his patch at Oxford Circus, a loudspeaker blasted out above his head, commanding him to stop playing and advising him that the Transport Police had been despatched to arrest him. As he told Paul Morley in the NME, ‘This guy walked past, and I screamed at him, “Can you hear that? This is 1984!” And he gave me a funny look, and rushed off. I thought, “Ah, fuck it,” and packed it in.’

At this point, early in the summer of 1972, several of the former Ridley Road collective also said ‘Ah, fuck it’ to London. The father of a friend owned a farm outside Blandford Forum in Dorset, 140 miles to the west of London and for the last nine or so months Woody and his friends from Ridley Road, with the addition of Deborah Kartun, would frequently hitchhike down there for a few days’ respite from London. But now, because of their lack of permanent accommodation in London, a planned ’weekend in Dorset’ turned into a stay of two months. As, according to Dick the Shit, ‘there was all sorts of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll’ going on, a blind eye needed to be turned by the farm owner, who happened to be the local Justice of the Peace. The fact that an Indian tepee, in which Woody frequently slept, had been set up by the visitors on his grounds was no doubt considered only an aesthetic embellishment. Deborah Kartun joined him there for the duration: ‘the Tepee, which we shared, was really tiny. It wasn’t a “Tepee People” thing, it was one from a child’s toyshop.’

When Deborah went away for a couple of weeks on a family holiday, Woody wrote to her in a letter that fully expresses his tender feelings for her:

Dear Debbie,

My arms and legs are aching and there is straw in my hair. I have been working all day on this farm – it’s really good work because its [sic] “in time with the seasons” if you know what I mean.

I just got your letter … it was lovely. I really enjoyed reading it, and it put me in a good mood. I hope you don’t look like that drawing! Oh yeah last night we were all standing around after work getting paid when who should drive up but Ken Turner! Later on when we passed around the joints he got pissed off a bit and left. I can imagine the house and fields and woods from when we went there last time. I can see you wandering about like this.

I really would like to be with you – two weeks isn’t long at all, but I’m a bit better off than you because I’ve got something to do re work but you’re on holiday.

Love

Love

Love

Woody XXX

I LOVE YOU

Woody’s loving cartoon of Deborah Kartun. (Deborah van ber Beek, née Kartun)

But from the bottom of his heart Joe also cared for and loved his male friends. ‘Drug cocktails’ were such a specialty of the house that Dick the Shit began to develop what Woody Mellor considered to be a dependency on amphetamines. ‘He solved that problem for me by sitting me down in a room and repeatedly playing Canned Heat’s “Speed Kills”. He was being a real friend, and sorted that out for me.’

The assembled collective made ends meet by haphazardly labouring on the farm. ‘We made a life-size replica of Stonehenge out of straw bales. We all got severe bollockings for that.’

But the last straw was when Helen Cherry went down to answer the door to the postman with no clothes on. ‘He runs back to the village and announces, “There’s sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll up there.” We all got kicked out. Joe went back to town.’

For her part Deborah Kartun went off to Cardiff Art School, to begin a three-year degree course in ceramics. ‘That was when I dumped Woody. I had to split up with him: he was dropping out quite seriously, and doing a lot of speed and acid. He was becoming quite wild, and was difficult to live with – you’d make an arrangement and he’d turn up four days late.

‘But I don’t know if he realised I adored him. But we were both acting parts very much, part of that art-school thing. You know how he always acted. I remember he went to an early Gilbert and George show, and was bowled over by it. We went to a fancy-dress party where I dressed up as a vampire tough woman, gorgeous fifties’ dress, but with plastic vampire teeth. He got very upset.

‘But the acting thread ran through everything all of us did: it was play-acting, like children, all a continuation of dressing up as kids. Even his cowboys and Indians thing was part of this conceptual approach to life.’

But Woody Mellor had friends at the art school in Newport, a few miles from where Deborah was studying in Cardiff.

In November 1972 he wrote to Annie Day from Upper Warlingham at what in hindsight we may see as a pivotal point in his life; although he writes on a greetings card, which bears the image of a blue elephant – shooting flowers out of its trunk – under the light of a full moon in a floral jungle, he packs both sides with his neat italic script; the envelope is postmarked ‘Croydon Surrey, 10.45am 15 Nov 1972’, and he has appended the phrase ‘Tutti Fruti Mail Service’ by the stamp.

Dear Anne I’m doin’ a cartoon strip at the moment called ‘GONAD SLEEPS IN LATRINES’. I have to because in a flash moment I said I’d do it for the college I used to go to’s magazine. This girl was supposed to do it but she couldn’t be arsed and I saw a chance to get my famous character in print but now in the early hours of the morning I begin to weary and the cigarette smoke drifts into my eyes but with a few tons of SELF CONTROL I should finish in about 3 hours. I’m down at my parents home for the weekend and tomorrow I’m going back to London, then on Wednesday I’m going down the M4 to Newport in Wales. I’ve decided to settle down there HA-HA for a while at least. The stinking press of humanity drives me from London. I wonder how yer college education is getting on. What are you learning anyway? Will you accept belated thanks for that last letter of yours? Cut your hair? I’ve just had mine done. I wanted it Futuristic so at the moment its like the Queen’s. Last week I had a great rocknroll quiff but it takes a lot of sweat to keep it like that. Maybe I gotta use Brylcreem again. I’m playing the guitar a lot now and I’m goin down Newport to practice and get shit hot. May take a year or too [sic]. Well now, you got any young men chasing you? It might make life more interesting but NEVER believe a word they say. What do you think of the picture on the front? I got it because it looks just like a bad copy of ROUSSEAU which I suppose it is. Some of that guy’s paintings are really OK. Do you know that one with a tiger asleep in a desert with a full moon? Its my favourite, makes you want to cry if you’re drunk. And I think he was a bank clerk during the day and doing these really weird pictures at night. I got a real NIGHT scene set up here at the moment with Radio Lux just turned up dead faint so you can hardly hear the guy say “DATELINE – friendship, love and EVEN marriage”! I’m sittin at my drum kit with a drawing board on the snare drum and a spotlight on the side Tom Tom because it’s the only “table” available but I have to be careful not to tap the bass drum pedals when some rock n roll comes on because it will wake the P. and M. In one of your letters you say you were listening to the Doors, well funny you should say that because I’ve been living with a guy whose nuts on the Doors and he puts on ‘Riders of the Storm’ and I’ve been thinking it’s real good because before I didn’t reckon on them. ‘LA Woman’ that’s good too. It’s a pity Jim Morrison died he was OK. Have you heard ‘Runnin Blue’? That’s neat. Ah Kid Jensen [the Radio Luxembourg disc jockey] puts on the crummy records! I’m staying with a friend when I get to Newport but when I get a place I’ll send you the address straight off OK? I was goin to draw you a souvenir picture of Gonad but I can’t now. All my lovin John. PS. You heard Buddy Holly? Keep well XXX’

Of course, the most interesting information in this revealing missive is John Mellor’s announcement of his ability with the guitar: ‘I’m playing the guitar a lot now, and I’m goin … get shit hot. May take a year or too.’ Clearly he had decided to follow a musical course with complete dedication.

‘I ended up in Wales, after I had served my apprenticeship with Tymon Dogg, and there didn’t seem to be any way of making a living in London or surviving … and I followed a girl to Cardiff Art School, who I’d known in London, and she told me that she wasn’t interested, and I started to hitch back to London, and the first town you come to is Newport in South Wales … And then I got a job in the graveyard, got a room, crashed my way into art school, although I wasn’t at the art school, into the art school rock band, and that was really great, to learn your chops with some really kind people who let me sleep on the floor at first, and yeah that gave me a whole heap of help.’

The ‘really kind people’ were Jill Calvert, Gail Goodall’s cousin, and her boyfriend Mickey Foote. Mickey Foote had got into Newport art school ‘by accident’, said Jill. ‘He drove someone else down for an interview and got in. He was very talented.’ There was also a practical reality about this move, as Joe later told his friend Keith Allen: ‘I went there because there wasn’t any room in London. That’s why I went there. I was sleeping on someone’s floor, for a few months, in their kitchen, in a two-room flat, and you outstay your welcome. And I had a girlfriend at Cardiff Art College. So I thought I’d hitch down there and rekindle the romance. And I hitched down to Cardiff and she told me to shove off. And so I started to hitch back and the first stop off was Newport, and I had some friends there at Newport, ‘cause these were all people I’d met at the foundation year in London at Central. And I hadn’t made it into any other course so I was kind of on the lam.’

‘Suddenly,’ said Jill Calvert, ‘Joe turned up in the corridor of Newport College of Art, a massive public building, with his guitar on his back, and that was that. He was standing there, and I was very surprised. He wasn’t into Divine Light any more. Helen Cherry says he walked around at Central with a white sheet on. But when he came down to Newport he wasn’t into religion. He left all that behind him. He came with that guitar on his back and Divine Light wasn’t going to do it for him.’

Woody Mellor at first stayed with a friend from Central School of Art called Forbes Leishman, now a student at Newport, who’d taken him to the Students’ Union building on Stow Hill. At first Woody moved in with him; we get a glimpse of his life in Newport from a letter that he sent to Paul Buck:

So I’m living in Newport Mon[mouthshire]. I’m sending you a letter and want to buy you a guitar. £10 – yeah. You are getting a bass before you get a car. I don’t have my room here, but my address is Wood c/o Sir Forbes Freshman, 18 North Street, Newport, Wales. Forbes is the guy I’m staying with in Newport and I want to do this all winter: chasing women and playing guitar. Maybe that fearsome rock and roll band the Juggernauts might rise from the ashes of the 20th century. I went to see Deb, oh I need her, she don’t need me. Oh my darling can’t you see. I’m going to be a kitchen porter during this hard hard winter. I’ve got access to a piano but I know next to nothing about it. Well it could be better, it could be worse, we could be all be riding in a hearse. We could be ailing and screaming, we could be dying and bleeding, have you never seen a witch mutter her curse. The only thing for us to do is to sit down and play away hazy man til our dying days. Love Wood.

Newport, a mining district, had a strong local branch of the Communist Party. ‘They wanted to recruit Joe and me and Mickey into the Communist Party,’ remembered Jill Calvert. ‘Their main recruitment method was through dope. Joe and I went along to one of their meetings, and they cooked us a meal except that it was meat, and he was vegetarian, and I don’t think I ate anything either. So he smoked a lot of their dope that evening, but we didn’t join the Communist Party.’ Somewhat enamoured of a girl who was a party member, Woody did occasionally participate in some of its more grassroots activities. ‘Toeing any line is obviously a dodgy situation, or I’d have joined the Communist Party years ago,’ Joe Strummer said later. ‘I’ve done my time selling the Morning Star at pitheads in Wales, and it’s just not happening.’

The Communist Party was not the only form of marginal entertainment in Newport. The town was ten miles from Cardiff’s Tiger Bay district, a notorious anything-goes area that had been taken over by Africans and Afro-Caribbeans. In Newport docks there was a club called The Silver Sands, a Jamaican shebeen, run by a Mr and Mrs White, who were black. After paying the 10p door entrance to the wheelchair-bound Mr White, it was obligatory to buy a can of Colt 45 from Mrs White before proceeding two floors down; here a sound system had been set up with speakers as big as packing-cases from which reggae boomed and batted out, some of the Jamaican customers taking it in turns to ‘toast’ on a mike to this somewhat alien music. Woody would come along to it most Friday or Saturday nights, and it seems this was where he was first fully exposed to Jamaican music. Later he talked about how reggae’s rhythms had at first not made sense to him, until he spent an entire Christmas in Newport on acid listening to Big Youth.

In early 1973 Forbes helped Woody find somewhere to live: a friend at Newport Art School called Alun Jones, also known as Jiving Al, needed someone to share his flat. 12 Pentonville was supported by metal rods that held up the house: ‘the flat had an absolutely filthy kitchen,’ said Richard Frame, another Newport student who took over Woody’s room from him. Frame remembered scouring specialist record shops in Cardiff with Woody. ‘He was looking for Woody Guthrie records,’ he said, as though John Mellor was now trying to source the origins of his nickname.

Jiving Al Jones was a significant addition to the life of Woody Mellor. He was bass-player with a rock’n’roll group called the Rip Off Park All Stars, who covered original rock’n’roll songs with considerable dedication to showmanship. In Newport there was a big scene of teddy-boys and teddy-girls sporting the necessary accoutrements of brothel-creeper shoes and bouffant hair. By the time Woody Mellor had arrived in Newport, the Rip Off Park All Stars had run their allotted time and the group was hardly playing. Jiving Al and Rob Haymer, the group’s guitarist, decided to form another group, working with similar material. A drummer was found, a local mortuary attendant called Jeff Cooper. And who else might Jiving Al think of as front-man for this new, as yet unnamed group but his flatmate? ‘He’d just bought a guitar and taught himself to play in three to six months. He was a really determined man,’ said Jiving Al. But Woody was still a neophyte on guitar, and his voice was distinctly untutored. Yet he had a way into the group: ‘They had a drummer in the art school group but they didn’t have a drum kit, so I blagged my way into the group by saying, “You can have my drum kit, or use it, if I’m the singer.” So I blagged my way into the group like that.’

He was in Newport for almost a year before the musicians really began to gel as a group. In a letter to Paul Buck, he talked – among other things – about their rehearsals:

I’m working in a cemetery filling in graves getting £15.50 a week. We’ve got a new band together which might be OK if I don’t get thrown out for my voice. It’s so futuristic. They won’t let me play guitar because I can’t move my fingers fast enough. But screw that, so I’m practising at home and just singing with them whenever we get together for a practice. But you’ve got a bass. Every minute counts between now and next year. I’ll be at the same address next month. Are you going abroad? I’m trying to save money but I’m just getting out of debt. If the band gets going OK we’ve got a gig in February, I think I’ll hang around and pay my dues. You remember Chris? Blond Chris Payne. Last night he came up with his guitar for a go. I got my drums up here too. Next Friday I am going to take Deb to the flicks. I fancy going somewhere in Spring or Summer … We’re 20 years old, halfway through. Love Wood. When I’m out of debt in maybe seven weeks I’ll come to see you, okay. Johnny is a drum. Name and address of sender – American Sam.

The next letter to Paul Buck is dated 24 October 1973.

Dear Pablo, great stuff about bass and it looks good too. What make is it? A Fender? I thought you had half a million saved up, to put the down payment on a transcontinental sleeper bus or something. About 3 weeks ago I had a £30 quid tax rebate and this typewriter cost £10 and as for the other fucking £20 who knows. I’ll give you a quick rundown on what’s been going on down here. This is how it is. This band is called Deus Ex Machina, and there’s four of us. The lead guitarist is called Rob and he’s an egomaniac like myself and he’s OK. Then there’s Al on the bass and he’s a bit neurotic, you know, a bit dodgy baby, and Rob, I suppose he’s the guy who makes the decisions, and he told me that he had a secret plan to get rid of him on account of his neurosis, although he’s a nice bloke maybe he’s not strong enough to stand the pace. Then there’s Geoff the drummer who’s much older than us with a bit of experience but again he gets a bit down about chicks etc. But he’s bloody good but maybe he’ll go too in time. So there you have it. Oh yeah, and there’s me doing the sort of Mick Jagger bit and a bit of acoustic. We did four gigs last week. The first one was playing at the student union disco which we played good although I was shitting because it was my first gig but I learnt much there. And the next day we went to play in a party in a hotel in Shrewsbury, one of the bass-player’s friends’ 21st. That was a rub out because the hotel manager turned the main fuse off – ha ha. Then on the way back the van ran out of petrol and me and Rob walked 7 miles back into Newport at 3 o’clock in the morning. The typewriter nearly broke down back there. After that it gets better and better. We played the famed Kensington Club which is a big club where people like Dr John play on tours and on Monday nights where they have a crud night where they only charge 15p and bands trying to make it play. We were the only band on and there was 776 people there. The manager said after it was great. There was all these teenage typists and smooth trendy guys and we came on looking dead rough and went straight into Tobacco Road and Can’t Explain etc. I was sweating like a pig and I had black nail varnish on with me leathers. Rob was wearing an old dressing gown with an Elvis t-shirt underneath with braces. Then we played at the Arts College Dance supporting Good Habit who charged £100 which is a fuck of a lot. I was completely drunk and wearing clowns trousers and we played really good. We even whipped out Johnny Be Good which we’d never played before. So that’s how it is. We’re just practicing at the moment. Thank you for your letter. There ain’t much to do except be a rock and roller and maybe get a little drunk and type all through the night. I’m still working sort of but I don’t go in much now. Well they won’t sack me. Good pictures. Here’s one of me in a graveyard. [He encloses a photograph of himself, with shoulder-length hair.] I’d been up the pub with the diggers and they drank 3 pints with an empty belly in 25 minutes so I was drunk. And there was a pretty girl with a camera so I got her to snap me and send me a print. Come on, keep playing bass. Love from me to you. Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States. PS I’m going to marry Princess Anne, I’m going to sing for a big old band, toot my flute til the bird-seeds fly and I’m going to get old and die.

Shortly after, Deus Ex Machina was renamed with the less complex moniker of the Vultures. Richard Frame still has a poster for the group ‘with a picture of a flock of vultures flying along, drawn by Woody, and faces of the group. I had Joe’s room when he moved out. He left the drum kit and the ukulele.’ Later Woody came to collect his drum kit, but seemed to forget about the ukulele. When the Clash played a show in Bristol at the end of 1977, Joe Strummer spotted Richard Frame in the audience. ‘Hey, Frame,’ he hollered out in between numbers. ‘Where’s my fuckin’ ukulele?’ Richard Frame also has a tape of Woody Mellor singing a song entitled ‘Bumblebee Blues’, probably the first song he recorded, a grumbing 12-bar blues. At the beginning of it Woody is asking someone called Martin, who also plays guitar on the tune, if he is putting his fingers in the right place on the fretboard of his guitar.

Woody Mellor wrote to Carol Roundhill about the group.

I’m playing in a Rock’n’Roll band called the Vultures. It’s a funny sort of band, one minute we’ll be hating each others guts and splitting up the band, and the next we’ll be as close as brothers getting drunk together. At the moment we’re in one of the former states. I’m doing a few cartoons and a bit of writing. Recently I’ve been taking everything about Dylan Thomas out of the library and reading till dawn. I think I know everything there is to know about him, except for one thing – I can’t find a book of his poems! There’s 101 books on ‘The Art of Dylan Thomas’ or ‘The Life of Dylan Thomas’ or ‘The Storys [sic] of Dylan Thomas’ or ‘The Broadcasts of Dylan Thomas’ but not one book of poems. I think they expect every Welsh home to already have one. I’ve got a really nice sunny room. It seems to catch the sun all through the day except for the late evening, and I spend a great deal of time with my feet on the window ledge watching nothing in particular. Deborah lives 10 miles down the road in Cardiff. I go and see her once in a blue moon, but she’s really tough and mean now! Grr Grr!

Woody was not a great success as a gravedigger; he was not particularly strong and did not prove good at digging six-feet-deep holes in the ground. He was soon transferred to the less arduous task of clearing the cemetery of rubbish and general debris. ‘I wasn’t strong enough to dig graves,’ he said. ‘The first morning they’d told me to dig a grave and when they came back I’d gone down about three inches. And so they said, “Oh, that’s useless.” So they set me on just cleaning up the cemetery. A really, really, really big one. And they told me to go and pick up every glass jam jar or piece thereof. The cemetery was enormous, and they’d been leaving jam jars with flowers in them there since the Twenties. In the winter of ’72–’73 I was working in the graveyard. That was a really tough winter too.’

Tymon Dogg drove down from London, arriving in Newport in the morning, and went to the graveyard, where ‘I went and had a cup of tea with these gravediggers. They called him Johnny. It was funny, they thought Johnny never really got involved in anything. I think they thought he was a bit slow or something, because he wasn’t interested in stone and talking about it, so they knew he was a bit different.’

The money he earned in the cemetery gave Woody greater scope for his generosity; when Jill Calvert was depressed, he bought her a pair of new trousers. At the time he was experimenting with further names; Johnny Caramello and Rooney were two of these.

On one visit to London from Wales, his cousin Iain Gillies saw Woody briefly; he felt that his time in Newport had brought about a change and was doing him good: ‘He was all Farmer Giles sideboards and flashing smashed, decrepit teeth. He had a new level of liveliness that I had not seen before. Anna, his mother, would tell us about Joe’s comings and goings. She told me in 1973 they were giving Joe a year to decide what he was going to do.’

This decision of Ron and Anna to let their son run with his freedom seemed to be paying off, although not every appearance of the Vultures fully hit the spot: ‘We played obviously the art school dance or whatever. And we had made it to the Granary in Bristol, but we were godawful and they bottled us off. We were playing the Who’s “Can’t Explain”, “Tobacco Road”, and also anything that was popular at the time. I think we had a version of “Hocus Pocus” by Focus that the lead guitarist wanted to play, because it was obviously all lead guitar or whatever. We were trying to play anything that wouldn’t get us bottled off, really.’

At this stage in his life Woody Mellor was not a great drinker. ‘He despised people on benders,’ said Jill Calvert. ‘We couldn’t stand the hippies who were deadbeats. He had contempt for them too. He’d take what was going but he was fuelled and driven.’ Jill saw a lot of Woody as she and Mickey Foote were not always getting on; she would end up going over to Woody’s at 12 Pentonville: ‘We’d have mushrooms and toast and I taught him about Van Morrison who he didn’t seem to know anything about: Astral Weeks was a very important record to be into, but he’d never heard it. And we became friends and sort of confidantes. I had one brief conversation with him about David. In those days it would be considered extremely uncool to admit to indulging in any sort of self-reflection. All your life was about the now. That was particularly Joe’s thinking.’ Jill Calvert was known for being an extremely pretty young woman. So it is hardly surprising that between her and Woody there was often, as she puts it, ‘a kind of suggestion’. Such a semi-platonic relationship with a member of the opposite sex fits the precise pattern of Woody Mellor’s relationships with women at this time. Later, he confided to the photographer Pennie Smith that he had believed that women weren’t really interested in him, and felt, as he put it to her, ‘like the ugly duckling’. As we know, the ‘ugly duckling’ of fairy-tale legend turned into a beautiful swan. But this would not happen for some time, and in the process Woody would undergo a complete volte-face on his previous more innocent attitudes. All the same, Jill Calvert received a shock when Woody told her that he had found a new flat: ‘It’s next door to where you live. I thought, “Well, that’s a bit odd. Because you won’t be able to sneak round to see me then.”’

This flat, next door to Jill Calvert and Mickey Foote, was at 16 Clyffard Crescent. Not long after that, early in 1974, ‘he suddenly didn’t have any flat at all’, said Jill. Woody had omitted to pay the rent. ‘And then he lived in our place.’ Woody slept in the living-room: ‘The return for him living in our place was that he’d write Mickey’s thesis.’ Although Mickey Foote was studying Fine Art, his final-year thesis was on a subject familiar to Woody Mellor: pop music. ‘Woody sat at the typewriter with a note on the door saying, “3,000 words, 4,000 to go.” It was no problem for him to write this. We fed and housed him.’

In May 1974 Woody Mellor moved back to London. ‘I realized that we weren’t going to get anywhere in Newport,’ Joe said. ‘The lead guitarist was wanting to go up the valleys and settle down with a woman, and everything was wrong with the group. So I left Newport, and went back to London.’