Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  ‘On her front step I mentioned that Uncle Ron and Aunt Anna had two sons, my cousins. “They’ve only got one son now,” she said. I asked what she was talking about. In a very dramatic and hushed voice she said, “David … he took his life.” Those exact words. She invited me into her house where I sat stunned for maybe an hour or so, my mind flicking back to my memories of David. For a few moments I thought she might be deranged and was making this up. Eventually Ron arrived home next door. Ron thanked his neighbour for her hospitality to me.

  ‘Ron was welcoming. As we went into his house Ron said that his neighbour was very kind but I should not start thinking they’re all like that. Meaning, I suppose, the population of the Home Counties. Ron and I sat in the living room. He surmised very quickly that I had been told about David. We then left to collect Anna from her nursing job at the local hospital.

  ‘Anna was surprised to see me. She was friendly and said it was a welcome surprise to have me visit. She told me they had been in contact with David a few days before he died, saying they were going to meet him somewhere in London, but he called to say he had to return to his hostel to pick up a bag. Their meeting didn’t take place. Within five to ten minutes Anna said she couldn’t talk about it any more. Later that evening Aunt Anna said that David had liked to spend time out in “no man’s land”, the bushy area just over their back garden fence. It was indeed a difficult time. I felt very sad for them and all of us. They told me what John was doing. Aunt Anna and Uncle Ron had some charmingly detailed naïf paintings that Johnny had done in Malawi. They said Johnny had enjoyed being there and meeting the people who lived in the mud hut dwellings that were in his paintings. Uncle Ron told me that David had found Malawi to be “troubling”. I stayed the night in David’s old bedroom, which had remained as David had left it. I stayed awake far into the night.’

  Ron and Anna Mellor’s ghastly difficulties over David did not end with his death. Acting with its characteristic blend of insensitivity and profound hypocrisy about the death of one of its parishioners, the local Anglican church at first refused to bury David as he had committed the sin of suicide. ‘Anna had to fight to get David buried,’ remembered Richard Evans. ‘Eventually he was buried in Warlingham.’ Along with Keith Wellsted, a friend of Johnny Mellor with whom he would sometimes stay at half-term at his parents’ home in Suffolk, Ken Powell from CLFS went to the funeral with Johnny to offer support. Some twenty or so mourners were present. ‘I’m sure it affected him, but he wasn’t in pieces,’ said Ken. ‘Whereas Joe was quite ebullient, his brother wasn’t. I can remember going to the house after the funeral, thinking how dreadful it must be for his parents. At the house the sadness was all-pervading.’

  Iain Gillies told me Joe had shown him David’s suicide note: ‘It was the evening of Anna’s funeral, about the 3rd or 4th of January 1987, that Joe and I went up to the loft at Court Farm Road. He passed me a few things to look at and then a piece of folded paper. It was David’s suicide note. I had not known of its existence and I was very surprised at Joe showing it to me. I read it silently, sighed, and handed it back to him. Neither of us said a word about it. We went back downstairs. Thinking back to that day, 9 March 1971, when I was first sitting alone with Uncle Ron in his living room, he did say something about David leaving a note. By the time Joe showed it to me sixteen years later I had forgotten about this and also presumed, perhaps naïvely, that it would have been destroyed. I was asked not to repeat its contents.’

  Two weeks after David’s suicide, his younger brother went on an already planned holiday with Paul Buck. You can imagine the hushed, tearful conversations between the desperate Ron and Anna: ‘Best for him to get out of the house, let’s try and let things get back to normal.’

  Johnny Mellor had booked two ‘berths’ for four nights, beginning on 13 August 1970, for £1 at the Cuckmere camping site near Newhaven in East Sussex. ‘He rang me up and he said his brother had committed suicide and I was shocked,’ said Paul Buck. ‘I think he just wanted to blank off from it. He didn’t really talk about it on that camping trip. Except for one time he came back to the tent and he said, “I’ve just washed with my dead brother’s soap.” I don’t know whether he felt guilty or not. People do, don’t they, family?’

  Johnny ‘Woolly’ Mellor outside a shop in Horam, East Sussex, in 1970. (Pablo Labritain)

  The two teenagers spent a nice time on their camping trip, hitch-hiking the sixty or so miles to the south coast and extending the four days for another three. (‘We weren’t that grown up because I rang my mum and asked if she minded if we stayed a bit longer.’) Yet Paul Buck was aware of the shadow of death that lay over the holiday: ‘Certainly at the time he was in denial. They turned their backs on what had happened to David, but not in a callous way. While we there, all the time we heard this Joni Mitchell line, “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone,” from Big Yellow Taxi. That bothered him.’

  There is a picture Paul has of Johnny on the shoreline, looking happily miserable, seeing the irony of the mistake he has just made: he has run into the sea, straight into a submerged boulder, and banged his shin. There’s another one with a nameless pretty girl who had been at CLFS and happened to be staying on the campsite. Johnny and Paul had a little hash with them, and in the evenings would drink in the local pubs and try and get off with girls.

  Did Joe take on some of his brother’s distant role when David committed suicide? People with dead siblings frequently assume something of the role of the deceased. So it is almost certain that whoever Joe was before David died, he had a bit of his brother in him after his death; and at the same time, the death of David represented losing a large part of himself.

  Moreover, considering the extent to which David Mellor was influenced by the National Front and Nazism, is it any surprise that Joe Strummer should have turned so resolutely against fascism? From the time in 1978 that the Clash appeared at the Rock Against Racism concert in Victoria Park, before an audience of 80,000 people, their front-man was almost indelibly associated with the side of punk rock that had disassociated itself from those flirtations with swastikas espoused by Sid Vicious and Siouxsie. Joe changed that image of punk, becoming rather righteous in his role of tragic, vulnerable spokesman. To what degree, we may ask, was this motivated by his brother’s desperate end?

  Although it could hardly compensate for the tragedy Johnny Mellor and his parents had undergone, at least there was some good news that summer.

  Although his progress in his Advanced level GCEs had been as stumbling as when he had sat his ‘O’ levels – he had passed Art with an ‘E’ grade, the minimum, been given the consolation prize of a further ‘O’ level pass (one step better than a fail) for the English Literature ‘A’ level paper, and failed History – he had been accepted on the strength of his portfolio for a foundation course at Central School of Art and Design in Southampton Row in central London, by Holborn underground station – a more prestigious school than his original choices, Norwich and Stourbridge. His ambition was still to be a cartoonist, though at school he had declared he wanted to ‘be in advertising’. John Mellor’s course at Central began on 7 September 1970: it was less than six weeks since the sudden death of his brother, and one must presume he was in a state of shock. At the instigation of his grieving parents, anxious their surviving son should have some sort of support system during his further education, he moved into Ralph West hall of residence in Worfield Street by Battersea Park. On his first day at Central college he learned that his place at the art school positioned him as a member of an elite group: there had been over 400 applicants for the sixty places available on the ‘Foundation Year’, which introduced students to the disciplines of art school, preparing them for a degree course at a college of their choice. That Johnny Mellor had succeeded in getting in to Central was a tribute to his talent as an artist.

  Having left school, he attempted to metamorphose into some sort of semi-adult new being. Now he announced to everyone h
e met that his name was ‘Woody’: this was what he was known as at Central – no one called him John or Johnny or even ‘Woolly’, or was confused that he was no longer known as that. Attracted by the cut of his jib, another new student, a girl called Deborah Kartun, overheard him in conversation with a boy who introduced himself as ‘Ollie’. ‘My name’s Woody,’ he said to him. When Deborah started talking to him, he said, ‘My name’s not really Woody: I made it up – but that name Ollie sounded so stupid.’ ‘At Central,’ said Deborah, ‘he was quite extraordinary. It was evident from the first moment I met him there: he was always at the centre of things.’

  Johnny’s completed art school application form. (Deborah van der Beek, née Kartun)

  On his first day at the art college, in the vast studio room where the ‘fresher’ students collected nervously to meet up, ‘Woody’ Mellor encountered another new student, a girl called Helen Cherry. ‘On the first day we made friends,’ she said. In what would become increasingly typical of him, Johnny was drawn to her because of her eccentric, quirky personality; although her striking prettiness was probably also an attraction: tall and lanky, Helen Cherry would swan through Central in sweeping long dresses. Later that first term John Mellor and Helen Cherry worked together on a cartoon that was published in the college newspaper. Considering what he had so recently endured with David, its theme was telling: ‘It was about this bloke,’ she said, ‘who fell in love with a picture of an air hostess on a poster on the tube. And then in a state of depression he thinks he can find her by jumping on the tube line – and dies.’ Yet at no point during Woody’s time at Central was there any mention of David Mellor, that other depression sufferer, and what had happened to him. Another Foundation student, Celia Pyke, said Woody’s demeanour was such that until I told her about it she had had no knowledge at all of the tragedy: ‘My impression was that he wasn’t somebody who had anything hanging over him. He was so lovely, so funny, so charismatic. A girl I’d met had told me to watch out for him when I got to Central. She said he was one of her best friends – I think she’d been at school with him – and that he was not only a really great person but that he was someone who would do something really great.’ (Later at Central Celia would discover one aspect of Woody’s greatness – that he was ‘a really great snogger’.)

  Helen Cherry had been born only days before Woody Mellor, on 10 August. ‘When he first met me and found out that I was born in 1952 that seemed to be a definite advantage to being his friend: “It’s a really special year!” He had funny little phobias about things. Sometimes in a group of people he’d need to pick on somebody: I felt that was a downer side of his character. But he was a very lively, warm person, and really good fun, a laugh a minute. We’d never walk down the street: we’d have to run. He’d say, “We’ll be old when we can’t run down streets. We must run down streets and skip. It’ll be the end of us if we walk.” A very vibrant personality.’

  When Iain Gillies came down to London in March 1971 for an interview at art school, he immediately got a sense of his cousin’s life in the hall of residence. ‘He let me – illegally – crash in his room at Ralph West. We collaborated on some artworks in his room. There was paint, glue, cardboard, broken glass and other assorted detritus stuck and smeared over most of the floor. He seemed to approve of this at first but then to my surprise he decided I was making too much mess and he terminated the art projects.’ (Iain was so untidy that he nearly got Joe thrown out of his room.)

  ‘At Ralph West,’ continued his cousin, ‘he had a picture or two of Jimi Hendrix stuck on his wall, along with the date of Hendrix’s death. He said that Hendrix was his favourite. He also told me that he’d been to the Isle of Wight pop festival. He was very enthusiastic about it and had written out a reminiscence for either a school or college project. He had a few, short, absurdist poems he had written lying around in his room. One poem was called “I’m Going to Getcha”: I’m going to getcha/ You can run into the garage.’

  In an evident effort to mark out an identity for himself, Woody would carry a small, battered suitcase with him everywhere that he went; as well as his work materials for the day, it also contained various items of sentimental value: a bus ticket from his favourite bus ride, for example, and the stub from the most enjoyable cigarette he had smoked. But this seems to have been the full extent of any personality that he carried about him. One student, Carol Roundhill, remembered him being dressed in clothes only on the very periphery of fashionability: ‘too short corduroy trousers, a sleeveless knitted pullover, and a short-sleeved shirt and big Kickers shoes. He used to swap things: he had a shirt of mine he used to wear, a little short-sleeved aertex games shirt from my grammar school.’ Helen Cherry found him another second-hand fur coat, of the sort affected by some student boys aspiring vaguely at hipness, a look by now a little out of date. Carol Roundhill’s initial impression of Woody Mellor, in fact, was that ‘he was like a lot of boys: he wasn’t that attractive. He had very dry skin, very curly hair, and dandruff. He struck me as a little lost. It seemed to me sad that someone would move to London and live where he was – although there were a bunch of boys from Central in the same place. He reminded me of one of Peter Pan’s lost boys. The other boys were very focused. Most came from public school and were very self-assured: lots of them knew what they wanted to do before they’d even done the course. But he definitely didn’t. Yet he was really, really friendly. Everybody really loved him. He didn’t have any false exterior and was totally approachable. He wasn’t at all ambitious. I’m amazed he did get it together in the end to work out his talent, because he didn’t seem that bothered at all at art school. He seemed to be in the wrong place.’

  Joe Strummer later was characteristically thoroughly dismissive of his time at Central. ‘Well, if you’re in the position I was, there’s only one answer to what you’re going to do after school, and that is art school, the last resort of malingerers and bluffers and people who don’t want to work basically,’ he declared to Mal Peachey, with what you may feel is something akin to false modesty. ‘I applied to join Central Art School, in Southampton Row, and I was amazed when I got in. And then when I turned up I realized that all the lecturers were lechers. All the lecturers were horny, and they had chosen twenty-nine girls and ten blokes to make up the complement of forty [sic]. I just got in there as one of the ten blokes that they needed to make it look not so bad. They had chosen – obviously – twenty-nine of the most attractive applicants from the female sex, and then they spent all year hitting on them. And that was art school.’

  ‘Maybe it would have been better for him if he’d done fine art, or if he had been able to work out his own ideas,’ considered Carol Roundhill, on the same course. ‘In the graphics studio the work you had to do was very prescriptive, not very creative. It was literally learning how to make letters of the alphabet. It wasn’t his thing.’ This was not what Helen Cherry saw as being the experience of Woody Mellor at Central. ‘A lot of the information about Joe’s life at Central isn’t correct – that he was pushed out of art school, or that he dropped out. He didn’t: he really enjoyed his first year at art college. He liked it!’ ‘He really loved being at Central,’ confirmed Iain Gilles.

  The college’s eminences grises seemed not only to like him, but to appreciate his work. One of the tutors at Central was Derek Boshier, a pop artist of considerable renown – he appears, dancing the twist, in Pop Goes the Easel, a Ken Russell documentary about pop art. ‘He was very friendly with the girl students. He used to get off with them, though,’ added Carol Roundhill, ‘not with me.’ You also wonder if he might not have been a model for the type of rock-star artist that Woody became as Joe Strummer, when he was not disinclined to behave in a similar manner. Woody and Derek got on well. ‘Derek Boshier was a very sensitive and intuitive man, and he was very sympathetic and friendly towards Woody, particularly friendly with him,’ said Carol.

  Derek was a Trotskyite. ‘I connected with Woody over politics,’ he recal
led, indicating that the mood of the times, and perhaps Ron Mellor’s incessant left-wing rants, had finally found a sympathetic home in the soul of Woody Mellor. ‘The atmosphere then was very open to politics. The courses I taught were always mind-opening, not academic. I was into appropriation, a big art movement of the time: for example, I asked my students [a previous one was Caroline Coon, who by now was a doyenne of the hippie underground and ran Release, a charity that provided legal assistance for people who had been busted for drugs] to get hold of a map of the London underground and replace the stations with people’s faces or images that seemed appropriate.

  ‘When I knew him, he was called Woody. He was a good worker. He had this sort of white man’s Afro haircut, not too long, and was a jeans and sweater sort of person. I was aware that there had been something troubling in his past.’ Derek insists that Woody would often ‘do his own thing’, bringing a guitar with him to art college, no doubt the one he had been given by his cousin the previous year: ‘He’d sit there with a guitar, playing things like “Blowing in the Wind”, during the morning break. He was a huge fan of Bob Dylan. Sometimes it would be hard to get him back to work after that.’

  ‘Doing his own thing’ included Woody Mellor’s extra-curricular activities while at college, specifically the smoking of joints on the building’s roof. (‘I think he was more into smoking hash than I realized,’ said Carol Roundhill. ‘I used to carry it for him, in case he was stopped and searched.’ Iain Gillies recalled trudging round Surrey lanes near Ron and Anna’s house with Woody: ‘“This must be the definition of impossibility,” he said to me. “Trying to score dope at midnight in Warlingham on Christmas Eve.”’)