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

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      8

      THE BAD SHOPLIFTER GOES GRAVEDIGGING

      1971–1974

      In the summer of 1971 the second Glastonbury festival took place, with a very special guest. Michael Eavis, a dairy farmer who on his own land held the Glastonbury festival, for which admission was £1, was contacted by the devotees of the Guru Maharaj Ji and his Divine Light Mission: ‘We’ve got God in town: can we bring him to the festival?’ ‘It was very odd,’ Eavis told the writer Mick Brown for his book The Spiritual Tourist. ‘Somebody said God had arrived and could we put him on stage, and my thought was: Well, the festival’s for everybody really, so why not? By the time he went on stage everybody in the audience was completely stoned out of their minds, and you could hear this ripple going around, “Wow! That’s God!” Then he started preaching against drugs, which I think everybody there found a bit disconcerting.’ Guru Maharaj Ji, a pudgyfaced 13-year-old Indian boy, had been whisked down to Glastonbury in a Rolls-Royce rented to honour him by those who were already his followers.

      Maharaj Ji’s unique selling point was the promise of ‘inner peace’ through the practice of meditation techniques known as ‘Knowledge’. As this is also a term for the rigorous training undertaken by London taxi-drivers, I can never hear the term in a Maharaj Ji context without visualizing fleets of black cabs. Maharaj Ji now lives in some splendour near Zuma beach, north of Malibu, in southern California.

      That 1971 Glastonbury festival was the moment at which the Divine Light Mission planted itself in the (un)consciousness of potential followers in the UK. One of them was Woody Mellor, who had been a visitor to the 1971 Glastonbury festival. Helen Cherry said: ‘Like me, Joe got into Guru Maharaj Ji and we used to go to that a lot.’ I recall telling Joe Strummer during the time of punk how I’d once done a course in Transcendental Meditation and him surprising me by replying, ‘Yeah, I did something like that.’

      This interest in Maharaj Ji was not a fleeting craze for Woody Mellor. For over a year the eastern religion filtered ceaselessly through to his brain via the habitual haze of marijuana smoke around him: the following year Iain Gillies visited Woody at his next address, at Ridley Road in Harlesden, and his cousin asked Iain the question, ‘Who are you Scots into?’ ‘I said I liked the artist Egon Schiele and Dylan Thomas. Woody pointed to a poster on the wall of Guru Maharaj Ji: “We’re into him. We think he’s cool.”’ This revelation of his cousin’s mystical leanings startled Iain: ‘I said, “You’re into him?”’ The next day Iain came across Woody in the kitchen explaining to someone how to rob a nearby bank.

      Don’t we naturally wonder if Woody Mellor’s fascination with Guru Maharaj Ji could have been a consequence of the death of David? Doesn’t tragedy often oblige those left in its wake to seek an answer in some form of religious figurehead? Or was Woody simply infected with the ubiquitous mystical spirit of the times?

      Richard ‘Dick the Shit’ Evans, also became an adherent of Maharaj Ji. ‘Helen had a huge spiritual side to her. I think we got sucked in. I learnt a lot of things, like breathing techniques, that I still use today. There would be emphasis on things like, “I want you to think of nothing,” and you just can’t. Woody and I did it for about a year. It suddenly occurred to us that it wasn’t that interesting.’

      Woody was not ‘fanatical’ about the Divine Light Mission, Helen Cherry said, but would certainly meditate for the requisite hour every day. ‘Guru Maharaj Ji had a big function in Central Hall, in central London, the first public meeting in London. Joe saw him, but I don’t think he met him personally. He would hang around the ashram in north London a bit, but not as much as me.’ Deborah Kartun did not approve or participate in this allegiance to Maharaj Ji: ‘I’d been brought up in an atheist family.’

      Something else had happened to Woody Mellor at that Glastonbury festival. During the set by Arthur Brown, the self-proclaimed ‘God of Hellfire’, a rooster called Hector had flown up and perched himself atop an imposing crucifix, part of the stage dressing, at the very moment it was about to be set alight during Brown’s performance highlight of his hit song ‘Fire’. Hector was almost instantly incinerated, the ultimate fast food. From that moment on Woody became a vegetarian: he decorated a soap tin for Helen with drawings and the adage: ‘We love to eat nuts and honey.’ (‘I lost it, and I nagged him that I couldn’t live without one, so the next one he did said, “Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette.”’) Shortly afterwards, returning home from a party towards breakfast time, Woody Mellor picked up a pint of milk that had just been delivered to a doorstep and was promptly arrested by a passing policeman: in court the next morning he was fined a few pounds, earning a criminal record for petty theft. Did this lead to a certain amount of musing on the nature of drinking cow’s milk? Soon he announced to all and sundry that the drinking of milk was a con trick by the Milk Marketing Board: ‘He thought milk was very bad for you,’ said Helen. ‘He felt that people should have never been persuading children in the 1950s to drink milk.’ He maintained this view for the rest of his life.

      With almost painful slowness, Woody Mellor began to angle himself in the direction of the career choice he had expressed to his father. The arrival of Tymon Dogg at 18 Ash Grove, along with the presence of the accomplished guitarist Clive Timperley, proved inspirational. ‘I remember Joe singing this chorus, I’m going to be sick / I wanna puke up in a bucket of water, and trying to play it on Tymon’s ukulele,’ said Helen

      Soon their time at Vomit Heights was at an end. ‘Ash Grove was falling apart after we’d lived there for a year,’ said Helen. ‘There was a bit of damage: there had been so much dancing at one party the kitchen ceiling had come down, and Tymon somehow destroyed the garden.’ It was time to move.

      In September 1971 the Vomit Heights crowd moved into a second-floor, three-bedroom flat at 34 Ridley СКАЧАТЬ