Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer. Chris Salewicz

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СКАЧАТЬ scandal had billowed through the school when a girl had been expelled for possession of a small lump of hashish. John Mellor became partial to smoking joints whenever he possibly could – he and Ken Powell had got high that year before they went to their first rock concert, the American blues revivalists Canned Heat, at the Fairfield Hall in Croydon, travelling up from the Mellor house just to the south. Richard Evans also remembered going with Johnny Mellor to the same venue to see a show by the group Free.

      ‘Messing about in the study at school, everything seemed to relate to music,’ said Powell. ‘John would play a game in which he would mime different artists. Two of these I can remember distinctly: he put his hands over his head like an onion-shaped dome, and then he put them out again, as though they were shimmering like water. Who is he referring to? Taj Mahal, of course! Then he mimed some very humble, Uriah Heep-like behaviour, and then tapped his bum – the Humblebums, which was Billy Connolly’s group.’

      In the school summer holidays the next year Johnny Mellor, Ken Powell and Paul Buck went to the Jazz and Blues Festival held at Plumpton race track in south-east London, convenient for Upper Warlingham. Among the other Jazz and Blues acts on the bill were those avatars of progressive rock, King Crimson and Yes, and Family, featuring the bleating vocals and manic performance of Roger Chapman, for long a favourite of Johnny Mellor. ‘We slept on the race track in sleeping-bags,’ remembered Ken Powell. ‘The festival ran for three days. We ate lentils from the Hare Krishna tent: we were hardly the types to take food with us.’

      That summer was eventful for Johnny Mellor. Richard Evans had long noted Johnny’s skills as a visual artist, endlessly drawing and doodling. ‘He was good, a hugely talented cartoonist. Cartoons were his thing – he had that creativity to do Gerald Scarfe-type satire. Even when very young he had a political awareness in what he was drawing.’ Several of his friends and relatives assumed this was the direction in which Johnny Mellor would pursue a career. Increasingly influenced by pop art and notions of surrealism, as well as by the consumption of cannabis and occasional LSD trips, the youngest Mellor boy would sometimes disappear into creative flights of fancy. One of the most imaginative of these, which created a major furore at 15 Court Farm Road, was when – assisted by Richard Evans – he took a can of blue emulsion paint into the garden and painted all the apples on the trees blue. ‘His father went mad. But we thought it was great. We spent days over this, painting blue emulsion on these apples.’ Before Ron Mellor discovered what his son had done, Johnny took photographs of the trees; later he included them as an example of his work in his application to art school.

      By now Richard Evans was known more usually as ‘Dick the Shit’; the sobriquet was not a character assessment – ‘shit’ was a contemporary term used to describe cannabis and marijuana. After taking his O-levels, Dick the Shit had left school, joining a computer company in Croydon. He had just enough money to buy the cheapest available ‘wreck of a car’, a black Austin A40. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to paint the vehicle a more interesting colour? suggested Johnny Mellor. ‘When he said that, I thought of going to the shop and picking out something like metallic silver. But Joe wasn’t having any of that. He was on a different planet.’ Johnny had a better idea: that they use up the rest of the gallon of blue emulsion he had bought to paint the apples; to add some variety he produced more paint, white emulsion this time. ‘We literally just threw this paint over the car. It went rippling down it, in a Gaudi-esque pattern. We painted in the windows like round TV screens. So now I had this blue and white car. Joe signed it, on the front, just above the window-screen.’

      That summer Pink Floyd played a free concert in London’s Hyde Park. The pair of Upper Warlingham boys drove up to it in the blue-and-white Austin. ‘We didn’t bother parking, we just drove over the grass and got out of it. It was like art, we just left it,’ recalled Richard Evans. Predictably stoned, they were heading home across the King’s Road and over Albert Bridge when the car’s unusual paint scheme drew the attention of a police vehicle. ‘A policeman says to Joe, “We can do this the easy way or the difficult way. Where’s the acid?” The car hasn’t got any acid in it, but there’s dope. Joe says, “OK, officer, it’s a fair cop. It’s in the battery.” They searched us and the car, but they never found the hash.’

      Had the visit to Plumpton festival and the Hyde Park one-day event been a test-run for Johnny Mellor? At the end of those 1969 school holidays the Isle of Wight festival was held, an epic event that had Bob Dylan topping an extraordinary bill, among them the Who, and attracted an audience of a quarter of a million. Johnny went with Dick the Shit in the psychedelic Austin. ‘We went to the Isle of Wight a week before, like the way Joe would go to Glastonbury later,’ said Richard Evans. ‘And we stayed there afterwards. We lived there for at least two weeks, building a little camp. It was great.’ The Isle of Wight festival marked Johnny Mellor’s first long-term immersion in an alternative existence. He found that he liked it. And the next year, which featured an equally stellar bill, culminating in the last performance in Britain by Jimi Hendrix, he and Dick the Shit went back again. This time the musical extravaganza ended in a state of nearanarchy as Ladbroke Grove agit-prop hippie group Hawkwind established an alternative festival on a hill overlooking the site. Johnny Mellor liked that even more: Hawkwind became for long one of his favourite groups.

      Late in 1969 Ron and Anna Mellor returned to Britain from their posting in Malawi. From now on Ron, who was now fifty-three, would travel daily up to the Foreign Office in Whitehall: in the 1970 New Year’s Day honours list he received an MBE. That Christmas of 1969 Johnny Mellor persuaded Ron and Anna to let him throw a party at 15 Court Farm Road, the only one he held there. The event turned out to be a little different from the social events with which his parents had been familiar at overseas diplomatic functions. Their son photocopied invitations describing how to get to the Mellor family home. Like any apprehensive host he was concerned that the event would run smoothly. Anxiously he wrote to Paul Buck, who had left CLFS the previous summer, at his home in East Sussex. He’d invited ninety people, he told his friend, before getting to the heart of his worries: ‘“How long does it take to drink a pint of beer? About 10 minutes,” he said. So he’s imagining the whole party running dry in ten minutes. It didn’t.’

      ‘By 8.30 in the evening no one was left standing,’ said Ken Powell, ‘not because of alcohol or other substances, but because of romantic inclinations. People were all over each other: there wasn’t a single space on the couch, or on the floor.’ Ron and Anna kept discreetly out of the way, until at the end of the evening there was some disagreement between Ron and his youngest son. ‘I remember at the end,’ said Paul Buck, ‘his father wasn’t happy about something, and Joe said, “Yeah, well it’s my pigeon now, isn’t it?” I can remember that phrase, because I hadn’t heard it before.’

      Earlier that year Adrian Greaves had also thrown a party. By now Joe had a steady girlfriend at CLFS, ‘a lovely girl called Melanie Meakins, with curly black hair and freckles and fresh skin, who was younger than him’. Johnny Mellor spent his entire time at the party in the garden, snuggled up with Melanie inside the tent he had pitched that afternoon. ‘Sexual relationships were mainly between the boarders,’ said Ken Powell. ‘You didn’t have any parental control. And there would be people you were close to, with hormones running around. A highly charged and exciting situation. Nice, really. We were all on heat.’ Johnny Mellor told his friends that he lost his virginity on another weekend visit to Adrian Greaves’ parents’ house. (It is not clear whether or not this was with Melanie.)

      In the summer of 1969, when Johnny Mellor was still sixteen, he had gone with his family to the wedding of Stephen Macfarland, a cousin on his father’s side. The Macfarlands lived in Acton in west London. Another guest at the wedding was Gerry King, another paternal cousin, a pretty girl: ‘John was there, and I had never met him before. He was about sixteen, and I was about twenty-four. We were chatting, and hit it off. We spent the whole wedding day together. In the evening, after all the other guests had left, we all stayed together behind at Stephen’s, all the young people. I really, really liked him. I could feel his charisma. I could feel that he was different. He told me about all his dreams, that he was СКАЧАТЬ