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

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      7

      THE MAGIC VEST

      1970–1971

      Towards the end of the 1960s the ever withdrawn David Mellor began to assert his identity in an unexpected way. An extreme inner change in his personality was externally expressed in the visual world he erected around him. When Richard Evans went round to 15 Court Farm Road not long after David’s eighteenth birthday, he was very surprised: ‘I went into his bedroom and David had completely changed it. It had been just a normal boy’s room and now it had Nazi pictures all around it, swastikas and images of Hitler: he had become extremely extreme. Very strange. It seemed to happen in about a day. He’d gone off on this extreme tangent.’ Perhaps as a rebellion against the fervour of left-wing revolutionary thought, and Ron Mellor’s socialism, David Mellor had joined the National Front, the extreme right-wing British political party. ‘That was the point at which both Joe and I were aware something was going on we didn’t understand. At that point I felt closer to Joe than to David. But what was going on with David, I just didn’t understand.’

      David Mellor left CLFS in July 1969; to the consternation of his family and Richard Evans, he had decided to become a chiropodist, treating foot ailments such as corns and bunions. ‘It made no sense. But he insisted. And off he went to college in London.’ ‘David was studying chiropody, Johnny was going to be a cartoonist,’ Iain Gillies was told. In September, David Mellor moved up to London into a hostel on Tottenham Court Road in the West End.

      Towards the end of his first year at chiropody college he severed contact with his parents and brother, not telephoning or staying in touch. His mother believed him to be in the grip of depression, which she attributed to anxiety over exams. Johnny Mellor was very concerned for his elder brother. Many an artist is given the dubious blessing of a gift that can be defined simply as intuitive or – more complex and loaded – as ‘psychic’; one theory insists this is the consequence of early trauma and that such predictive insight is an inbuilt defence mechanism. By the early summer of 1970 Johnny Mellor had a presentiment that something about his brother was not right. Then the Mellor family learnt that David had been missing from his hostel for a week. Deeply worried, Johnny Mellor set off with Richard Evans to find his brother. They scoured their old play-haunts, especially a nearby abandoned World War II aerodrome, sprinkled with wartime pill-boxes like the one that sits at the gate to Carnmhor. ‘At that point Joe and I became twins. All I remember is that we knew something had happened to David. At the aerodrome was this pill-box, with a rusty old door, it’s dark and dank. We went in but found nothing.’

      On 31 July 1970 David Mellor was found dead on a bench on an island on a lake in Regents’ Park, not far from the hostel in which he was staying. The cause of death was given as aspirin poisoning, following the ingestion of 100 of the tablets. The verdict was suicide.

      David’s self-inflicted death cast a pall of depression over the remainder of the lives of Ron and Anna Mellor. They would never recover. Johnny was equally afflicted. He said the worst day of his life was when he had to identify the body of his brother, which had lain undiscovered in a park for three days. Surviving members of families in which suicide has occurred are frequently blighted by the endless nagging fear that they may also succumb to taking their own lives. ‘Does it run in the family?’ is a deeply rooted fear.

      On two occasions I spoke to Joe Strummer about the death of David. I felt a professional need to do this, to get something on the record about what seemed a cathartic moment in his life. But each time I asked him, I wished that I hadn’t, so great was Joe’s recoil into himself, every defence mechanism instantly raised, the atmosphere suddenly spiky. The first time was in his hotel room in Aberdeen in July 1978, where he was on tour with the Clash. Then he admitted that David’s death ‘happened at a pretty crucial time in my life … He was such a nervous guy that he couldn’t bring himself to talk at all. Couldn’t speak to anyone. In fact, I think him committing suicide was a really brave thing to do. For him, certainly. Even though it was a total cop-out.’

      Then, twenty-one years later, in November 1999 in Las Vegas, I tried again – I sincerely felt that the death of David must have been such a great issue in his life that there must be more to be found out about it, especially as Joe had just admitted to me that for years he had been in a state of depression. Joe told me he was sixteen when David died, and that he had been in the National Front.

      ‘And it just did his head in?’

      ‘Well, I don’t know if that did. Who knows? You can’t say, can you? But I don’t think it was being in the NF that did his head in.’

      ‘Was your brother’s suicide a catalyst? How did it affect you?’

      ‘I don’t know how it affects people. It’s a terrible thing for parents.’

      That was it: Joe paused for a long, long time – I couldn’t tell whether he was being deeply thoughtful, or indicating the end of this line of questioning.

      Richard Evans says that he and Johnny never once talked abut the death of David. Paul Buck says it was the same with him. People around Johnny describe his response as having been, essentially, no response. Richard Evans, however, feels there was a discernible shift in his friend: ‘I think he … maybe he did change a bit, but only in terms of more focused.’ This would hardly be surprising: tragedy in the family often acts as a spur for other members. ‘All I know is that within a year Joe had gone to Central School of Art. We’re still reeling from David, and Joe went off to Central.’

      Johnny Mellor’s response to David’s death was no different from that of his parents: for them it became an unmentionable СКАЧАТЬ