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

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СКАЧАТЬ him, but to appreciate his work. One of the tutors at Central was Derek Boshier, a pop artist of considerable renown – he appears, dancing the twist, in Pop Goes the Easel, a Ken Russell documentary about pop art. ‘He was very friendly with the girl students. He used to get off with them, though,’ added Carol Roundhill, ‘not with me.’ You also wonder if he might not have been a model for the type of rock-star artist that Woody became as Joe Strummer, when he was not disinclined to behave in a similar manner. Woody and Derek got on well. ‘Derek Boshier was a very sensitive and intuitive man, and he was very sympathetic and friendly towards Woody, particularly friendly with him,’ said Carol.

      Derek was a Trotskyite. ‘I connected with Woody over politics,’ he recalled, indicating that the mood of the times, and perhaps Ron Mellor’s incessant left-wing rants, had finally found a sympathetic home in the soul of Woody Mellor. ‘The atmosphere then was very open to politics. The courses I taught were always mind-opening, not academic. I was into appropriation, a big art movement of the time: for example, I asked my students [a previous one was Caroline Coon, who by now was a doyenne of the hippie underground and ran Release, a charity that provided legal assistance for people who had been busted for drugs] to get hold of a map of the London underground and replace the stations with people’s faces or images that seemed appropriate.

      ‘When I knew him, he was called Woody. He was a good worker. He had this sort of white man’s Afro haircut, not too long, and was a jeans and sweater sort of person. I was aware that there had been something troubling in his past.’ Derek insists that Woody would often ‘do his own thing’, bringing a guitar with him to art college, no doubt the one he had been given by his cousin the previous year: ‘He’d sit there with a guitar, playing things like “Blowing in the Wind”, during the morning break. He was a huge fan of Bob Dylan. Sometimes it would be hard to get him back to work after that.’

      ‘Doing his own thing’ included Woody Mellor’s extra-curricular activities while at college, specifically the smoking of joints on the building’s roof. (‘I think he was more into smoking hash than I realized,’ said Carol Roundhill. ‘I used to carry it for him, in case he was stopped and searched.’ Iain Gillies recalled trudging round Surrey lanes near Ron and Anna’s house with Woody: ‘“This must be the definition of impossibility,” he said to me. “Trying to score dope at midnight in Warlingham on Christmas Eve.”’)

      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, СКАЧАТЬ