Following that one gig at the Telegraph, Richard ‘Snakehips’ Dudanski went on holiday and was replaced by the original drummer, Antonio Narvaez, now back in London. In mid-October there was a benefit for the Chilean Resistance at the Royal College of Art in Kensington Gore. It was a logical event for the 101 All Stars to play, and Alvaro promptly offered their services. Having started off with the rock’n’roll classic ‘Bony Maronie’, the group were two numbers into their set before the audience turned against them: ‘Get this capitalist rock’n’roll out of here,’ as Joe remembered it. As though proof of that old adage that no act of kindness goes unpunished, the squat-rockers – who could hardly have lived a life more untainted by capitalism – were booed off the stage.
Pat Nother was replaced by a character known as Mole (actually Maurice Chesterton); efficient on guitar, he had never previously played bass. There was another new member: Julian ‘Jules’ Yewdall was briefly brought in on lead vocals and harmonica, leaving Woody free to concentrate on his rudimentary rhythm guitar playing, while still contributing the occasional vocal.
But where could the 101’ers play? In November an approach was made for a residency to the landlord of their local pub, the Chippenham, a rambling rough pub popular with Irish labourers; ornately decorated with rococo plasterwork and with a central semi-circular bar, the ‘Chip’ had the ambience and character of a Wild West saloon.
The group were told that, for a rental of £1, they could play upstairs in a room with its own small stage. Joe recalled their first gig there, on Wednesday 4 December 1974: ‘We never really got off the ground until we rented that room above the Chip. Because we couldn’t play, how could we get any gigs? The only thing we could do to learn to play was to start our own club up. I’d go to gigs with two bricks in a shoulder bag,’ said Joe to Mal Peachey, ‘and these bricks were to sit in the deck of a record player, upturned with a broom handle screwed in it which was the mike stand. And the mike was taped on the top, and the bricks were there to drop into the record-player to keep the thing steady so the mike didn’t fall over. I mean, we built our equipment, and we booked our own club. No one was going to book us. Can you imagine what we looked like? A bunch of crazed squatters. We found a pub with a room upstairs and we rented it for a quid for the evening, and that’s how we learnt to play, by doing it for ourselves – which is like the punk ethos. I mean, you gotta be able to go out there and do this for yourself, because no one is gonna give it to you. We clawed our way in.’
The residency was named the Charlie Pigdog, after a dog of the same name, a brown and white Jack Russell, who lived at 23 Chippenham Road, the pet of Dave and Gail Goodall. Charlie Pigdog would from time to time wander onstage during the group’s sets. As would musicians outside of the core of Woody Mellor, Simon Cassell, Alvaro Pena-Rojas, Antonio Narvaez, and the new members Jules Yewdall and Mole. From time to time, Tymon Dogg would play. Clive Timperley came along to the second night, on 11 December 1974. ‘Bring your guitar next time,’ Woody told him.
‘It got really jumping, ’cos all the squatters from all over Maida Hill, Maida Vale, West London would come down,’ said Joe, ‘and it soon became like a real big mash-up, and gypsies would come and rip everybody off and throw people’s coats out the window, and mayhem broke loose. We were onstage playing and the police raided the place. We carried on playing, and it was like playing a soundtrack to this crazy thing going on everywhere. The police rushed in – they didn’t know who to search or what, with all these filthy squatters and gypsies and God knows what in this room. And like we keep playing, and I think we were doing “Gloria” – that’s when we started to extend it into a twenty-minute jamdown.’
Around this time a severely second-hand hearse was found for sale, priced £50. All the 101’ers clubbed together and bought it. Now they had something in which to transport their equipment. Later it was exchanged for a van. Both vehicles were somewhat erratic, and for local gigs the 101’ers would often walk to the venues, pushing the equipment in an old pram.
The absence of a lead guitarist was about to be resolved. Clive Timperley was yet another character in the life of Woody Mellor who fulfilled a role of mentor and tutor. He had moved on from the student life at Vomit Heights and was living in the extremely well-heeled environs of Hans Place in Knightsbridge, just behind Harrods, in a flat that belonged to his brother. A boring day-job gave him the freedom to play with groups in the evening. As far back as Ash Grove he had been playing with Foxton Flight, who had once supported Medicine Head at the Marquee, a gig which Woody came to see, at Clive’s invitation (‘He was chuffed he was on a guest list at the Marquee. But he was almost over-impressed. I think it galvanized him more into wanting to become a musician.’).
There was always a rudimentary element to Joe‘s understanding of the guitar. (Lucinda Mellor)
By the time he saw their second Charlie Pigdog Club date, the 101’ers had got much better, thought Clive, who found himself frequently tutoring Woody. At around 10 or 11 in the evening Clive’s phone would ring. ‘What are you doing?’ would demand Woody’s gruff vocal inflections, before he jumped in a minicab for the ten-minute ride down to Knightsbridge across Hyde Park. ‘He used to come over with his guitars, four or five at a time, a steel-string acoustic, an electric, solid electric, and this Hoffner Verithin. We’d have a guitar workshop into the early hours of the morning.’
Then Woody made Clive Timperley an offer. ‘He rang me up and said, “We’d like you to join the 101’ers.” I thought, “Good, they’re gigging every week.” I’d wanted a regular gig. I joined them.’ As soon as Clive joined the 101’ers Woody Mellor renamed him, by reversing the letters of his Christian name: and mild, studious Clive became ‘Evil C’ Timperley. ‘Clive had strong musical knowledge,’ said Helen Cherry, ‘and put a lot of it together musically for them, helping it be in tune and in rhythm and in time, to get a tough rock’n’roll thing, which is what Joe wanted. He was after a particular sound, but I don’t know if he knew how to get it.’
Richard Dudanski and his new Spanish girlfriend Esperanza Romero had returned to London before Christmas 1974 and moved into 86 Chippenham Road. When Esperanza’s sister Paloma turned up in London, Richard told her of a free room at 101 Walterton Road. Pat Nother remembered her arrival at 101, when he happened to be sitting with Woody: ‘The first time I saw Paloma she walked in the door and he said to me: “Agi agam aggo aging tago magake hager miagne.” All the boarding-school and grammar-school boys spoke ago-pago. Ag in front of every vowel sound. Joe was saying, “I’m going to make her mine.” He fell in love with her when she walked in the door.’ ‘I had a Bolivian boyfriend called Herman,’ said Paloma. ‘We were breaking up. Joe kept asking me out. We went to see Chuck Berry in London somewhere, but he to me was nothing after seeing the 101’ers. We went to see Lou Reed and he was very boring. Before punk we were together for about two years.’
Woody Mellor and Paloma Romero became an item, and she moved with him into the vacant room at 101, at the front of the first floor. With an interest in international relations, Woody even claimed to Helen Cherry that he had ‘figured out Spanish: you just put “o” on the end of every word’.
The two Romero sisters could not legally remain in Britain. What could be done? They would have to get married to British citizens. When it became clear during the summer of 1975 that the girls were liable to be deported, Richard Nother married Esperanza; they remain married to this day. But between Woody Mellor and Paloma there was a complication. For Woody was already married. On 16 May 1975 there had been a wedding at St Pancras Registry Office between himself and one Pamela Jill Moolman, a South African girl who wanted to stay in Britain; Pamela was a friend of a girl who had been living at 101 Walterton Road. For helping her out, she paid Woody £120, with which he promptly bought a Fender Telecaster, precisely the instrument wielded by Wilko Johnson with Dr Feelgood. Although her boyfriend had the guitar of his dreams, this was no help to Paloma: accordingly, Richard’s brother Pa
t Nother stepped into the breach and married her – with no fee involved. ‘People did that all the time then,’ said Jill Calvert. Paloma’s relationship with Joe allowed him to open up, perhaps for the first time. ‘He told me about David – he said that his brother had chosen death and he had chosen life: he had decided to go for it entirely. For his parents, he said, “What a horrible thing – that shatters a family.”’
Now came a rush of creative energy. Woody Mellor began to write his first songs for the group. Was he inspired by being in love? This was evident from the words of the first song he wrote for the 101’ers, ‘Keys to Your Heart’.
‘All of us in the 101’ers were very intense rhythm’n’blues freaks – you know, really intense,’ Joe said about that first song that he wrote for the 101’ers. ‘We had a great knowledge of blues and rhythm’n’blues, and we just pulled our music out of that. And then, like in any group’s life, I realized we had to start writing our own material. So I wrote Keys to Your Heart, and I was just overjoyed that it came out good, and we could put it over in the set at the Chippenham. And people would still keep leaping around the room and dancing to it.’
Jules Yewdall has a set of the words of ten of the 101’ers’ songs, typed out by Joe on his own typewriter, accompanying a cassette recorded as the songs on the lyric-sheets were played live in the damp, mattress-soundproofed basement of 101 Walterton Road. The ten songs on the tape are staples of the 101’ers’ live set, and show the speed at which new songs had developed in less than six months: tunes such as ‘Motor Boys Motor’, ‘Keys to Your Heart’, ‘Mr Sweety of the St Moritz’ and ‘Standing by a Silent Telephone’.
These ten demo songs were specifically recorded by Joe Strummer to be placed in a bank vault by Jules Yewdall, to secure his legal status to their copyright. In that oh-so-familiar, adenoidal voice, whose tone manages both a grin and just the suspicion of a smirk, he ensures that each song is specifically identified. ‘That was “Motor Boys Motor”, and this is “The Keys to Your ’Eart”,’ the ‘H’ dropped so hard you can hear it fall.
The simplicity and directness of the songs is very apparent, and much of the material has the loose jamming feel of later Clash material. It is also perfectly clear that, despite an occasionally wonky delivery, Joe Strummer has found his voice in the often hilarious narrative structure of the lyrics. It is evident that right back in 1975, so many of those creative aspects we might have believed only developed in the Clash were already present: that melodic moodiness of style, that drive of energy arrowing straight from the heart. These early songs show you that almost everything Joe would do in the Clash he was already attempting with the 101’ers: that odd discordant gruffness in his voice, the chopping rhythm guitar, the ironic asides. ‘Mr Sweety of the St Moritz’ is fantastic in its lyrical, almost certainly autobiographical complexity, the sort of words he might well have written with the Clash; the song was written as a kind of note of criticism to the owner of the St Moritz nightclub in Wardour Street in London’s Soho, where the 101’ers played a total of three times, starting on 18 June 1975.
hey mr. sweety of the saint moritz we re cashing in all our chips life wont be so funny without your money but we re sick of playing all these hits
More personal is ‘Standing by a Silent Telephone’. The song is disguised as Joe’s lament to ‘Suzie’, ‘I was living just for loving just from you.’ But she’s not around, and doesn’t call: Standing by a silent telephone, me and bakelite all alone. ‘Me and bakelite all alone’ – a small stroke of Joe Strummer genius.
The ability to make people smile in their hearts and on their faces was always one of the talents of Joe Strummer. And many of these lyrics are frankly hilarious, evidence of a highly intelligent wit. On the Bo Didelys’ [sic] ‘Six Gun Blues’, the words are built around a perfect narrative structure: But kettles don’t boil if you watch em / And suns don’t rise on demand.
Significantly, on the card inlay in the tape’s box, the man formerly known as Woody has scratched out the name ‘John Mellor’ and replaced it with a new one: ‘JOE STRUMMER’. Somewhere around May of 1975 Woody Mellor decided to become Joe Strummer, unwilling to answer to any other name. Although ‘Joe’ would insist that his contemporaries at 101 Walterton Road address him by his new name, it was more complex for those he had known longer: ‘Dave Goodall was allowed to still call him Woody,’ said Jill Sinclair. ‘In terms of the male hierarchy, the pecking order, Tymon and Dave were above Joe. Joe was a bit of a kid. He did want us to call him Joe, but he wouldn’t make an issue of it with us.’ ‘Somewhere through the 101’ers,’ remembered Helen Cherry, ‘he was like, “I’m Joe,” and you couldn’t call him Woody – he’d be angry.’
Things were falling into place for the 101’ers. In April 1975 Allan Jones, Joe’s old friend from Newport art college, had given the group a minute mention in Melody Maker’s Hot Licks gossip column. Jones contrasted New York act Television with ‘a really exciting band like the 101ers, with a stack of AC30s playing gigs like the Charlie Pigdog club for a packet of peanuts and half a bitter’. Tiny as this piece of publicity was, it served its purpose, as Joe later told Mal Peachey: ‘Dr Feelgood came along, and there was a group called the Michigan Flyers, and there was us. And those three groups were fantastic. We fell into that scene, and we began to rock at the Elgin. ’Cos in Newport one of the students there was Allan Jones, who later began to edit Melody Maker, and he wrote a paragraph in Melody Maker when he was a cub reporter, about how the 101’ers could really rock, ’cos one day he came down to the Charlie Pig Dog club, and I took this cutting – and after I cut it out it was like three lines long and I should have left it on the page – but anyway I cut it out and it looked kinda like a postage stamp. And I took this, and some of the group, and we went around pubs in West London, and eventually at the Elgin [in Ladbroke Grove] I put this cutting on the bar, and the gingerheaded landlord picked it up and he went, “All right: a fiver, Monday.” And that was when we first broke out of our own scene, and soon that became like a hotspot, us playing the Elgin in the back room.
‘We used to push our gear there in a pram, and one night the pram got nicked while we were playing. I remember standing outside the pub going, “This is a hard world. They’ve stolen the pram that we used to pile the amps up on.” And we’d push it back over the hill into Maida Vale. And then because he was doing such good business he switched us to a Thursday.’
10
‘THIS MAN IS A STAR!’
1975–1976
One by one the houses in Walterton Road were being demolished by the council – it was as though a wartime ghetto was being relentlessly razed. Finally, the only house remaining – everything else around it a state of almost unidentifiable rubble – was 101 Walterton Road, tucked away down at the bottom of the street. Much as there had been problems with the property – the outside toilet, the lack of hot water, the fleas – the house and its inbuilt difficulties had become a defiant energy power-point. Not only had it bonded together a group of musicians and given them somewhere to live and rehearse, it had supplied the name of their group. But the relatively settled existence at 101 Walterton Road was about to end. It too was scheduled for demolition.
By the middle of the summer life at 101 Walterton Road was over. They had found a squat in a house at 36 St Luke’s Road, three streets to the east of Portobello Road, by the West Indian ‘front line’ of All Saints Road.
On 26 July 1975 Melody Maker published a full-length article by Allan Jones about the 101’ers, pushing the group up to a new level. Slanted extremely favourably towards his old friend Joe Strummer and mythologizing their underclass street existence, Jones began, ‘It was some time back in February that I first saw the 101’ers. They had residency in the Charlie Pigdog Club in West London. It was the kind of place which held extraordinary promises of violence. You walked in, took one look around, and wished you were the hell out of there.’
Jones described the mayhem as assorted gypsies and Irishmen kn
ocked seven bells out of each other while the group played their twenty-minute version of Van Morrison’s ‘Gloria’. ‘The band tore on, with Joe Strummer thrashing away at his guitar like there was no tomorrow, completely oblivious of the surrounding carnage. The police finally arrived, flashing blue lights, sirens, the whole works. Strummer battled on. He was finally confronted by the imposing figure of the law, stopped in mid-flight, staggered to a halt and looked up. “Evening, officer,” he said …’
Jones’s article considerably moved on the cause of the 101’ers: it helped the group secure a booking agency, Albion, specializing in alternative pub-rock-type acts; from now on they rarely were stuck for dates to play.
The dateline reads ‘Madrid’. Woody Mellor (as he still is to his old pals) writes to his old friend Paul ‘Pablo Labritain’ Buck:
Dear Pablo,
May the summer be with you. I’m in Espana but it is not green but brown. The food is greasy, good selection of switch-blades. Hopefully will get one for you. How is life and drums? Write me at 36 St Lukes Road, W11. We’re having trouble. Probably get kicked out. Rock’n’roll taking a two week break. You must keep playing: that is the secret. Play for today and play for tomorrow. What this world needs is more rock. Relaxation I cannot find in fact. I’m strung out due to family barny here. Hope to escape to Morocco for a few days, but knowing the diplomatic relations between this country and that I’m not sure that’s true. Love to Roz and your father. I think of green Sussex in this dry land. Must have another Coca Cola. Picking up the lingo a bit. Love Woody. If you get a packet for Peter Treetrunks it’s for you.
Redemption Song Page 15