Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  Once he absented himself for a couple of days from the college: this followed a visit to the cinema to see the Arthur Penn film Little Big Man, in which Dustin Hoffman plays an ancient Cheyenne Indian, recounting his days of the Old West. The epic film purported to be an accurate portrayal of native American life and was both a commercial and artistic success. It had a deep effect on Woody Mellor. Along with another Central student called Simon Winks, he purloined a set of Helen Cherry’s Caran d’Ache pastels. With them they adorned their faces with Cheyenne-like war-paint markings. So attired, with blankets draped around their shoulders, they went and sat cross-legged on small rugs on the grass opposite the Houses of Parliament. ‘They did that for a couple of days,’ remembered Helen. As the subject-matter of his cartoons clearly demonstrated, Woody Mellor was very taken with the romance of the American West, and especially with the lifestyle of the natives. In 1991, when he stepped in to briefly replace Shane MacGowan as singer with the Pogues, he told me some of his reasons for temporarily joining the Irish group: ‘I like to make instant decisions, and go the whole hog with them. Because when I was young I remember reading about the Cherokees. I read some book about Indians, and one sentence was that when a Cherokee is faced with a decision he always takes the more reckless alternative. That briefly flashed through my mind, and I thought, “Go for it. What’s life for but to make reckless decisions?”’

  The rear of an envelope addressed by John Mellor to his schoolfriend Anne Day. (Anne Day)

  ‘There was always that whole Red Indian, earthy, camping thing he was into,’ considered Helen Cherry, ‘and how that was a more normal way of life, and that we should be living more like Red Indians. There was his admiration for Indian ghost dancing, for instance: if you put this magic vest on, you won’t get shot! He did live life a bit like that.’

  For a time Woody Mellor remained in touch with Ken Powell from CLFS. They would meet up in central London and go to pubs or the cinema, often to see art films – Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin was one. Ken Powell was surprised when Woody led him to the Plaza cinema in the Haymarket to see Paint Your Wagon, the comedy Western musical written by Paddy Chayefsky that starred Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood; Marvin’s performance of the song ‘Wanderin’ Star’ was the final tune played at the funeral of Joe Strummer, thirty-two years later.

  Music was not something that Johnny Mellor claimed as a career choice. Carol Roundhill never had any reason to think he might end up as a musician. ‘A writer, or a lyric writer, I thought. I don’t know about the actual music side of it.’ The doodles and sketches he would endlessly come up with she thought to be ‘very Catcher in the Rye stuff, always relating to himself, just quirky, childish, witty, funny stuff. He stood out as being quirky and funny. I think he was very in touch with himself. He didn’t put on any acts or try and impress anyone ever, he just didn’t mind letting it all hang out and revealing himself. That was what was so attractive about him.’

  But was Woody already harbouring secret musical ambitions? If he was bringing his guitar with him into class, it would suggest that somewhere within him he had decided on his direction. That Christmas he saw Andy Secombe, who by now was in his last year at CLFS. Andy had become the drummer in a band but had tired of it. ‘I bumped into John, and he said he’d swap the drum kit for something: “What are you into?” I said I was getting interested in photography. He said, “You can have my Minolta SLP camera. I’ll take the drum kit.” So I drove over in my Mini with the drum kit to his parents’ house. But we fumbled and dropped the camera on the concrete outside the house. Miraculously it still worked. But he was deeply embarrassed about it. “Does the camera still work?” he’d ask me every time I saw him.’

  The death of David Mellor had distressed Richard Evans, bringing home the pointlessness of the job he’d blundered into. Abruptly one day he quit, ‘and I walk out the door onto this industrial estate, and Joe’s sitting on the wall. He shouldn’t be here: he’s in London, at Central, and he’s sitting on this wall. And I said, “Johnny, what the fuck are you doing?” And he said, “Oh, I came to see you. I thought you were in trouble. Come with me.” Off we went.’ Richard moved into Ralph West, sleeping on the floor for two or three weeks and even joining Johnny Mellor for classes at Central, tucking himself away in the back row.

  As the year progressed at Central School of Art, Woody Mellor continued to make his mark. ‘Not in artistic terms,’ said Helen Cherry, ‘not in terms of producing much work, definitely he didn’t. But in terms of personality everybody knew him, though some thought he was an egotist.’ Carol Roundhill added, ‘He was everybody’s friend. I thought I was very close to him, but I went to a Central reunion later, and then a lot of people were claiming to be very close to him.’

  Having tired of the constraints of their respective student accommodation, Helen Cherry, Simon Winks, who had sat with Woody as an American Indian opposite the Houses of Parliament, and Eric Drennen, also at Central, did what many students did and rented a cheap property together. A suitable address was found at 18 Ash Grove in Wood Green. Richard Evans took a room. Clive Timperley, a guitarist who had a day-job working for an insurance firm, also moved in.

  And there was another lodger. Interlinked with what she perceived as Woody’s indubitable charisma, Deborah Kartun, who had met him on that first day at Central, was impressed that he had spent time in Africa: she thought this to be most sophisticated. For his part, the boy from a bungalow in Upper Warlingham found her background to be equally urbane: educated at King Alfred’s, a progressive co-educational school off Hampstead Heath near her Highgate home, Deborah, blonde, bespectacled and the same height as Woody Mellor, had a Communist father who was foreign editor of The Daily Worker. ‘Woody wanted revolution,’ she said, ‘although that was the mood of the times. It was all very unspecific – none of us were at all politically sophisticated. We were both so naïve.’

  In the second term at Central they had begun to become close. ‘It was very gradual,’ she said. ‘I was splitting up with this guy who had been having a nervous breakdown – he helped me through that. At first Woody and I just became friends – he could be good friends with women. I hardly dared think I might go out with him – he was at the centre of everything that was happening. Gradually we got together. At first I’d vaguely gone out with a friend of his, Tim Talent, but that was to get close to Woody.’

  When Woody found the house in Ash Grove in Wood Green ‘around April or May of ’71’, Deborah, who had been born a month before him, moved in with him. He told Deborah about what had happened to David: ‘He just said he had trouble communicating, but there was an implication that he might have been gay. Because you’re young you didn’t realise how enormous a thing like the suicide of a family member might be. He was probably still in shock. And his poor parents when we went down to see them that summer of 1971 and had Sunday lunch with them – I had no idea they might be in mourning. There was no alcohol, and it was rather formal, like Sunday lunches were in those days – I was terrified.

  ‘His mother and father were very sweet. His father was very eccentric – I had the impression he would have been like Woody, if he hadn’t existed in such a conventional, formal occupation. I remember him showing me his tiny vegetable patch, about as big as a table, and his experiments with cross-breeding carrots.’

  The extra-curricular activities of the occupants of 18 Ash Grove led to Woody Mellor renaming it ‘Vomit Heights’, although not necessarily because of the effects of alcohol consumed. ‘There wasn’t that much drinking,’ said Helen. ‘A lot of dope, and sometimes some acid.’ ‘It was very suburban,’ remembered Richard. ‘The poor bastard who was the neighbour had these people move in next door which must have been a bloody disaster for him. He was getting all these sleepless nights because these hippies have moved in. We would still be ranting and raving at 3 o’clock in the morning.’

  ‘At Ash Grove,’ confirmed Deborah Kartun, ‘we were nightmare tenants. We played music lo
udly until 4am. One morning Woody went out and put all his transistor radios in the garden and started banging dustbins to keep us awake. But we were all too stoned to get out of bed.’

  At Ash Grove, said Helen, was when she really got to know Woody Mellor: ‘Joe was like a big mischievous child. He was a great personality to live with, and he used to have a lot of pillow fights with me. We also used to arm-wrestle: even though I was a girl, because I was doing sculpture I could easily push his arm down. I could always win on arms. We had quite a boisterous relationship. But he would never hurt me, it was just very close. There was a lot of hugging, a lot of touching.’

  When Woody Mellor mutated into Joe Strummer, this tactile aspect of his personality was always very apparent. In fact, among all of the Clash there seemed to be a ceaseless need to emphasize empathy through physical contact: a flick of the finger on the arm to emphasize a point; a lightly bunched fist to the shoulder to underline the punchline of a joke; a touch to the back of the neck to express sympathy. Did such un-English behaviour extend to Woody’s diet? ‘He did say that his favourite family dish was curry,’ said Helen Cherry. ‘He always went on about his mother’s curry – and it wasn’t that natural for someone like him to really love curry. I felt there had been a certain strictness around Woody that he was always trying to press against and throw out of the window, a bit of a strict household. His father seemed an elderly gentleman, with a very nice posture and white hair – very middle-class.’ I pointed out to Helen that Ron Mellor was then only in his mid-fifties: ‘Really? He seemed to me like a pensioner. I think he was very proud of Woody though.

  ‘When I went to stay there, his dad said to both of us, what did we want to make of ourselves, and Woody said, “I want to be a rock-’n’roll star.” His dad said, “After one year of art college you want to do this?” He said to me, “What do you want to do?” I said, “I just want to run through long grass.” He said, “That’s not much of an ambition, my lady.” The father didn’t really like these wild things that we said we were going to do with our lives in our late teens: he thought we had our heads right up in the clouds.’ Clearly, Woody Mellor’s expression of an ambition to become ‘a rock’n’roll star’ seems noteworthy. Not only is this the first announcement of any such idea, but he is telling it to his father.

  Helen Cherry’s 3D tutor at Central ran an organization called Action Space, a kind of peripatetic playgroup for deprived children which travelled around London. It was, said Helen Cherry, ‘arty sculptural stuff. There was a group of us that went around with inflatables, being stupid and dressing up for children. It was some of the first inflatable work that was done in playgrounds. Our 3D tutor used to use students as cheap assistants. Joe used to sometimes come along.’

  At one such event, at West End Green in the hardly deprived area of Hampstead, a game of ‘imaginary cricket’ was organized for the benefit of the children who came along to watch. Essentially this consisted of the Action Space students miming a game of cricket, like the mimed game of tennis in which a group of London students participate at the end of Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-up, a staple work of art-house cinema that was almost a way of thinking about how to live in London. A visitor to this quasi-happening was one Tymon Dogg.

  Two years older than Woody Mellor, the Liverpudlian Tymon had been something of a teenage musical prodigy: a multi-instrumentalist, he was already on his way to becoming a masterly violin player. Very shortly he would become considered by Woody as something of an inspirational mentor. He had even had a record released on the Apple label, founded by the Beatles: when he realized that they wanted to market him as a singles artist, Tymon stuck to his principles and walked out on his deal.

  Tymon ended up living at 18 Ash Grove. He was making a living of sorts by busking and playing the occasional small gig, and saw Joe’s interest. ‘He would turn up, if I was doing something in some poxy folk gig. There was a crypt in the basement of St Martin’s church in Trafalgar Square where they had folk gigs. I went down there to try out a few new songs. I remember seeing this car coming into Trafalgar Square, and the door opening, and Woody rolling out like a tumbleweed. “Hi Tymon, when are you going on?” Deborah Kartun insisted that 18 Ash Grove ‘was named Vomit Heights after this reggae-like song he and Tymon wrote together that had this line Chuck it in a bucket.’

  As the academic year progressed at Central School of Art, Woody Mellor had continued to study, but not enthusiastically. ‘I realized they weren’t teaching us anything,’ he told Mal Peachey. ‘They were teaching us to make arty little marks on paper. They weren’t teaching us to draw an object, they were teaching us how to make a drawing that looked like we knew how to draw the object. And then we got hold of acid, and started to take acid, and then it looked even more transparent. And that was it, really: I had to peel off and it was either work for a living or play music.’

  Iain Gillies, who would shortly enter Glasgow School of Art, had noticed that his cousin was already cynical about formal art training by the time he visited him in March 1971. ‘I remember at Ralph West I mentioned the term “negative space”. Woody was scornful of this type of thing. He said, “Huh, that’s the sort of shit they talk about at art college.” I don’t think he liked art being dissected and he didn’t want to know about technique: he just wanted it to flow and be spontaneous. Maybe dope and acid had also increased his disenchantment with institutionalized “art”. Tymon said that Woody had used one of Tymon’s drawings in his end-of-Foundation-Year show at the Central School of Art, a doodle of a horse smoking a cigarette. I think most of Woody’s show was in this vein and the professors didn’t see the joke.’

  Richard Evans remembered another aspect of Woody’s end-of-Foundation-Year show: ‘He went into the ladies loos and got all the used Tampaxes for a collage, and that was the last straw. Whether he got kicked out or not I’m not sure. But the essence of Joe was always eight years old.’

  To an extent Deborah Kartun had to share him with the other women friends he had during this time, like Helen Cherry – although she insists that theirs was not a sexual relationship: ‘He also had a lot of genuine women friends who he valued. I’ve never had a man be a friend with me the way he was when we were living in Ash Grove – just really there for you. He was quite sympathetic.’

  ‘I’d done terribly in my foundation year,’ said Deborah Kartun, ‘so I went to Cambridge which did a two-year course, and went into the second foundation year there. It was really old-fashioned, the opposite of Central where everything was conceptual. Woody would come up at weekends or I’d go down to London. We were still very much girlfriend and boyfriend.’

  Woody Mellor was secretly distressed that he and Deborah were not together all the time. He wrote to Annie Day: ‘Last time you told me you had had a romance upset but I expect you got over that. Remember: NEVER GET HUNG UP ABOUT ANYTHING!’

  ‘Woody was a truly exceptional person,’ said Deborah Kartun. ‘He could be very endearing. But he could also be very nasty to people. On the other hand, I could be horrible to him. He announced quite early on that he was going to be a famous pop star. It must have been when I was at Cambridge. He wrote to me on lavatory paper telling me this. But when we were near the end I would be horrible about this: “You’re never going to be a famous pop star. This was because I really thought he couldn’t achieve it. I was disparaging towards him about going down what I thought was the wrong road: I thought he should stick to art. And I was also worried for him: I thought it seemed such a hard life. At the time I think he was briefly working as a dustman.’

  ‘Woody’ Mellor – as he now was – with Deborah Kartun, his art-school love. (Pablo Labritain)

  8

  THE BAD SHOPLIFTER GOES GRAVEDIGGING

  1971–1974

  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.’