Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  On 20 July 1974 Woody Mellor went to the first one-day rock festival held in the grounds of Knebworth House, 40 miles north of London in Hertfordshire. Along with 100,000 other fans he watched an impressive bill topped by the Allman Brothers Band, legendary for both their epic sets and their drug consumption, playing for the first time in Britain. Also performing, on a magically warm day, were Van Morrison, the Doobie Brothers, Tim Buckley, the Mahavishnu Orchestra and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, whose uncompromisingly theatrical style was to be an influence on many future punks, including Mick Jones and Paul Simonon. ‘We saw Joe wandering through the crowd,’ said his old schoolmate Ken Powell, who had gone along to the event with Adrian Greaves. ‘His personality had changed. You couldn’t get close to him: he certainly wasn’t totally with us. His teeth were terrible. His speech was different. He had a pretty ordinary middle-class accent when he was at school. Now it was as though he was trying to make his speech be street-cred, like Mick Jagger did.’ (My take on Joe’s voice change is that the influences on it were more international; the accent he came up with is an Englishman trying to emulate Bob Dylan’s laconic Midwest cadences.

  Not much later Andy Ward, by now drummer with Camel, had an experience not too dissimilar to Ken Powell. ‘The next time I ran into him was when he was playing a gig with the 101’ers somewhere off the Portobello Road. I was a full-on long-haired hippie by then, playing with a prog-rock band. He really scared me: he was dishevelled and toothless – his teeth were awful. He was calling himself Woody. He asked me to come to the gig and I didn’t go. Later I saw him at a party and he said, “I’ve got a bone to pick with you.” Paul Buck told me Joe said that I’d snubbed him. But I didn’t let on that the reason I didn’t go to the gig was because I was too scared.’

  By 1974 the British music scene was splintering into factions. Heavy Rock – the Who, Led Zep, the Rolling Stones; Progressive Rock – Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes and Genesis; Glam-Rock – David Bowie, Roxy Music. To like one almost precluded you from liking another. This sense of division increased sharply when the American group, the New York Dolls, who looked like hookers from Manhattan’s Lower East Side and whose blasting, double-lead guitar wall of sound was an amalgam of early Rolling Stones, the MC5 and the Shangri-Las, burst upon the scene. An immense influence on punk rock, the New York Dolls wore lipstick, high heels, satin and leather, as though they had stepped out of the Stones’ poster for ‘Have You Seen Your Mother’. David Johansen, the singer, was like a clone of Mick Jagger; his songwriting partner, Johnny Thunders, similarly established himself as a cartoon version of Keith Richards. Not only were the Dolls’ songs sharp and very short, but they also had suitably precise titles: ‘Pills’, ‘Personality Crisis’, ‘Subway Train’, ‘Bad Girl’, to name just a few.

  Woody Mellor had watched the Dolls on their only British television performance, in 1974 on the BBC’s weekly progressive show The Old Grey Whistle Test. Bob Harris, the programme’s avuncular presenter, had dismissed their appearance as ‘mock rock’. ‘I’ll never forget watching Johnny Thunders on that programme on BBC2, the Whistle Test,’ said Joe to Mal Peachey. ‘Johnny Thunders and his crew – the Dolls – played two numbers. I remember all the musicians in Newport and all the students in the Union bar watching it on the television there, and it just wiped everybody out: the attitude, the clothes, it was different from all this earnest musician-worshipping nonsense that had come in with progressive rock. When the Dolls played that British TV show that just gave us legs and arms, and the spirit to really get into it.’

  Something was afoot. A shift in the culture of the British music scene was reflected by the rise of the New Musical Express – soon to be widely known simply by its NME initials – over the Melody Maker, which since 1967 had been required reading for music fans. Modelled on semi-underground music publications from the United States, and featuring a scathing satirical humour, the NME’s sales overtook those of Melody Maker. ‘It was the house rag at 101, the NME,’ said Patrick Nother.

  An indication that change was underway came in the late summer of 1974, when the NME put Dr Feelgood on its cover, a new group who so far had had no record success, emerging from the grassroots movement of the London pub-rock scene: a number of pubs had turned themselves into venues at which largely unsigned groups played. A good-time scene fuelled by beer, pub-rock still had its star acts, among them Dr Feelgood.

  The Feelgoods, as they were invariably known, featured a part speed-freak, part intellectual guitarist called Wilko Johnson; a gruff but inspired singer in Lee Brilleaux, his skinny ties a trademark; bass-player John B. Sparks; and drummer John ‘The Big Figure’ Martin. What set the Feelgoods aside from virtually every group in the country was that their set-list consisted entirely of choppy R’n’B songs, classics and originals, that lasted no more than three minutes; they wore their hair short and dressed in tight-trousered suits with shirts and ties; and their stage-act was fantastic. Wilko soared about the stage as though he was propelled along tramlines, brandishing his Telecaster like a rifle; Lee Brilleaux grunted and growled at the front of the stage, leaning into his mike and smoking cigarettes; and the rhythm section just held it all down, anchoring the two frontmen so they wouldn’t float away. Despite their surly appearance, the Feelgoods had an aura of approachability, one of us. Dr Feelgood were the first steps of British punk; without them, that crucial cultural movement, still more than two years off from altering the entire aesthetic dynamic of the last quarter of the twentieth century, might never have happened. They were a very important group indeed, as noted by no less an unexpected authority than the rising reggae star Bob Marley; on his 1977 single ‘Punky Reggae Party’, extolling the punk-reggae link, one line ran: The Jam, the Clash, The Feelgoods too.

  Dr Feelgood were still a pub-rock group, but one that proved so inspirational to Woody Mellor that Wilko Johnson’s Telecaster weapon-wielding was the reason that the future Joe Strummer purchased that make of guitar. He had decided that he also could form such a group. ‘Pub-rock was going on and we sort of fell into naturally playing rhythm and blues because it was easy, or we thought it was,’ he told me. ‘Although the 101’ers was really a squat band formed in a squat in the summer of 1974. During this time I held down jobs, you know. I worked for three months in Hyde Park, trying to save money for the group, trimming flower beds, cutting hedges.’

  ‘Park work’, with its opportunities for smoking spliffs on the job, was at that time considered desirable summer employment. ‘Oh, it was horrible. Yeah, horrible because the hedge goes on forever, you know that. You know, the hedge it ain’t never gonna end, because Hyde Park is vast. It’s like painting the Forth Bridge – you never get to the end of it. I just hated that.’

  At the end of the summer Woody took another job, doing general maintenance and cleaning at the English National Opera in St Martin’s Lane by Trafalgar Square: ‘It was kind of a much better job ’cause you could go and hide away in this huge Victorian building. I used to take my guitar into work and put my brown coat on and then disappear off up into the upper attic in these little cubby-holes so no one could ever find you, and practise the guitar. I quite liked it, but I’ve hated opera from hearing opera constantly, all day long, for three months. I’ve always hated opera since that time.’ At the end of three months Woody Mellor was discovered hunkered away practising his guitar, and was fired. He managed to obtain financial compensation and walked out of the job with £120.

  One day on his way to ENO Joe had gone into central London with Jules Yewdall, who was heading for the London School of Printing, where he studied photography. ‘We went into town early in the morning. It was about 7.30 and he was standing on Trafalgar Square by the steps at St Martin’s church. I was rolling up a joint and saying, “I really want to travel around the world and see what’s going on out there.” He said, “I want to be a rock’n’roll star. That’s what I want to be.”’

  This would conflict with the reasons that Woody later offered f
or getting a group together. The 101’ers, Joe told me, ‘was really formed because busking had become too heavy. They started to put microphones and speakers down in the subways. I mean, at the best of times you had to run from the Transport Police. But when I saw the microphones and speakers installed in Leicester Square, or Oxford Circus, I thought, Ah … You know, a group of squatters trying to live over the summer. We saw it as maybe we can keep body and soul together if we can get a few gigs in these Irish pubs. I never really saw it as something to do permanently. It was like a stop-gap measure. I couldn’t really see what I was going to do with my life. I stood outside the Elephant and Castle pub on Elgin Avenue, watching this Irish trio through the window – we were banned from the pub ’cause we were dirty squatters. I thought, “I could do that, you know, me and my mates. Surely we could do that.” We put it together in the squat with just odds and ends. I borrowed money for a small PA off a drug dealer.’

  This was not true. The origins of the PA were far from this. Woody Mellor actually got money for it from Arabella Churchill, great-granddaughter of Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister, whom he’d met at Glastonbury in 1971. The money was a loan: in 1997 Joe Strummer finally wrote her a cheque to repay it, but Arabella never banked it. Part of this PA had formerly belonged to Pink Floyd. ‘For some reason Pink Floyd had like a hundred speakers in their PA system and they were selling it off – I don’t know why,’ he told me. ‘And we managed to get one of the bass-bins which we used as a bass speaker from their PA. I took a drawer I found in a skip and cut a hole in it and mounted a speaker in the drawer. And I used to stand the drawer up and place a Linear Concorde amp on top.’

  Pat Nother shared a basement room at 101 Walterton Road with Woody, each sleeping on a ‘scummy, horrible’ mattress. ‘When he was sleeping, he used to grind his teeth so much that it sounded like an underground train,’ Pat said. ‘He had this James Dean hairstyle, although at first he had fairly long hair, and he wore this tacky leather jacket with a Latin tag on the back that read, in Latin, “I’m no chicken.” He picked up on the leather jacket a long time before that stuff was in vogue. I don’t know if it was just a Jim Morrison influence, Joe got into everyone. Although he was into the Doors at that time, that doesn’t mean that that enthusiasm lasted. He’d have stripped the carcass of everything he could get off it, he’d have eaten the head, and he’d have sucked the bones of the Doors whilst he was interested in them: there’s a lot of meat and juice there to take on, and he’d have tried his best to get as much out of it as possible. That’s what he was about everything.’

  The other room in the basement became the musical practice room. ‘We used to piss on our fingertips to make them hard so that we could play our guitars. He was a huge fan of Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence – Lawrence of Arabia. I had the impression it was one of the only books he’d read at the time. In the Lawrence of Arabia film Peter O’Toole lets matches burn down to his fingers, and Joe would do that to prove his fingers were strong enough to play the guitar. I remember Joe woke me up in the middle of the night and said “Patrick: I’ve got the new Elmore James riff!” And he played me this Elmore James riff on the record and he was so thrilled he could do it on the guitar as well.

  ‘I’d loved rock’n’roll as a teenager, and then I just thought it wasn’t happening, although I would listen to Van Morrison. But with Joe in the basement I used to sit up late and it would be, “Have you ever tried 12-bar?” And he’d get out his steel-string guitar, and we’d boogie along for about a dozen songs, and go and sit on the staircase in 101. “Do you know what?” he really did say to me at one point. “I’m going to be a rock’n’roll star. Do you want to be one too? We can be rock’n’roll stars.”’

  Might you not fear you were tempting fate by publicly proclaiming your imminent stardom? In the case of the future Joe Strummer it seems that by laying his cards on the table he was seeking to motivate himself. ‘The guy just planked out this incredible energy ’cos he knows what he’s doing, and he’s got the reserves to do it, and he puts his all into it, and that’s why everyone likes Joe,’ said Pat Nother. Pat also recalled Woody seeing the pair of rock’n’ roll movies, That’ll Be the Day and its sequel Stardust, both of which he found inspiring. Pat remembered him becoming wide-eyed with awe when he met Wishbone Ash’s lighting man. ‘He was so into the whole rock’n’roll thing, he absolutely loved it: it was an almost childish delight at the whole spectacle. He couldn’t really play the guitar, but he wrote bloody good songs. He put his heart into it, which is the essence of the bloody thing.’

  In the basement of 101 Walterton Road, filthy old mattresses rescued from skips ranged around the walls as ‘sound-proofing’, Woody Mellor assiduously rehearsed with the musicians he had enlisted to assist him in fulfilling the personal dream he had revealed to Pat. Pat himself was pulled in to play on the bass borrowed from Dick the Shit, despite never having previously picked up such an instrument. Simon Cassell had an alto saxophone he had bought in Portobello Market some time before; naturally he was promptly enlisted. On drums was Antonio Narvaez, on a kit borrowed from someone in a nearby squat. The most accomplished of those rehearsing was Alvaro Pena-Rojas, who had played professionally as a tenor sax-player in Chile, chalking up a trio of hits before he and Antonio fled the country after the 1973 coup. You may note that in this line-up of what would become the 101’ers, a crucial rock’n’roll element is absent: that of lead guitar – sometimes it seemed Woody Mellor needed to create situations to work against.

  By the end of the summer of 1974 these musicians had a set-list of half a dozen songs, all R’n’B and rock’n’roll covers: two Chuck Berry songs, ‘No Particular Place to Go’ and ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, Larry Williams’s ‘Bony Maronie’ and Van Morrison’s ‘Gloria’, which Woody still adored. Now they were ready to test themselves at a live show, a benefit for the Chilean Resistance. Originally scheduled for 14 September 1974, the show was suddenly moved to Friday 6 September, at the Telegraph, a music pub at 228 Brixton Hill, close to Brixton prison, another outsider part of London. Two weeks before the original date, Antonio decided to leave London on holiday. Although he had never played drums – he owned a pair of bongos and a clarinet – Pat Nother’s brother Richard was immediately brought in on the instrument.

  When the gig was moved forward, Richard Nother was left with only five days of rehearsal. ‘I was playing bongos, and they asked me to play the drums, which I had never played before. Then the gig was moved forward a week: my first gig!’ Richard Nother acquired a new name, bestowed by Woody. When I first met him I assumed that someone called Richard Dudanski must be Polish, noting his Slavic cheekbones, high forehead and slicked-back hair. But Richard Nother is of quintessential English stock; Joe had picked up what I perceived. Proprietorially, Woody bequeathed him a second nickname, inspired by his thin and wiry appearance: Richard ‘Snakehips’ Dudanski. This random scattering of sobriquets is very affectionate – they are almost pet-names, rather than nicknames, a very honest, intimate and exclusive way of greeting friends, putting them at ease straight away. But it is also a method of contol.

  ‘People said he wanted to be a star,’ said Richard Dudanski. ‘He did, but we just wanted to get a working band together. He had strong ambition. I don’t think he necessarily knew the hows or the whats, but he wanted to get there. The whole myth of the life was attractive to him.’

  Woody went down to Warlingham to pick up his father’s demob suit for his stage outfit. For the Telegraph gig the group was billed as El Huaso and The 101 All Stars: ‘El Huaso’ is Spanish for ‘countryman’, referring to the group’s remaining Chilean, Alvaro Pena-Rojas. They were the support act to the Reggae Men, who would shortly mutate into Matumbi, one of the most influential reggae acts to come out of England. El Huaso and The 101 All Stars turned up at the Telegraph on 6 September with neither drums nor amps, assuming they could borrow these from the headline act. Joe told Paolo Hewitt: ‘We didn’t know how to play, you kno
w. None of us knew, and Matumbi lent us all their gear, and I’ve never come across that since. Can you believe that? And they were really late. Their van broke down and they were two hours late and there was hardly time for them to do their set. But they still lent us their drum kit and their amps. I thought that was great and I’ve always supported Matumbi since.’

  ‘They were crap!’ said Clive Timperley, Woody’s old friend from Vomit Heights. ‘Strummer with this mad suit and shaking leg, fantastic. That was it really. No lead guitar. They were crap but fun.’

  To Anne Day, ‘Woody’ was evidently still allowed to be ‘Johnny’. (Anne Day)

  Pat Nother agreed: ‘About four or five times we turned up with instruments. To call them gigs is stretching it. My memories are more of things like standing in a cinema [a squat by That Tea Room] in puddles of water, very worried about the effect on the electricity power supply. We played at parties in houses, which involved basements being turned into venues. I mucked around a few times with Joe – that was it, and then it collapsed for me.’

  As a very amused Joe said of Pat Nother to Paolo Hewitt, ‘He said to me in a pub, “I can’t believe that we’re in a group.” And I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “I can’t believe we are in a group. So I’m going to leave.” He said that to me!’ Before he left the band, Pat revealed, they rehearsed all the time. ‘We would play all day long in the basement of 101 and people would come and watch us. But one day the saxophone got ripped off. This was terrible. “It’s been stolen. We need it for our group. Where’s it gone?” So Joe and myself went on this two-day trip to the nether regions of West London.’

  Eventually they retrieved it from another squat; but the thief, clearly disturbed, killed himself two days later. Imagining you were an outlaw from society had its drawbacks. ‘Joe’s street-punk thing was just blagging. Once Joe pissed off some teddy boys with a flick-knife. These guys got him at University College, London. There was a gig there, and me and Joe certainly weren’t going to pay. We climbed through the loo window, and these Teddy Boys came in as we were climbing in, and came up to Joe. He pulled out his flick-knife, and they pulled out their flick-knives, and he does a ballet dance. I was stuck in the window watching this thing. He was very good: it was all bluff on both sides – it was as though it was choreographed. Eventually everyone backs off, and honour is saved. No one was going to knife anyone.’