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

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СКАЧАТЬ R’n’B, Johnny Mellor, who had just turned thirteen, further investigated Berry’s music when he returned to the UK, also discovering the unique shuffling sound of Bo Diddley. He loved these artists.

      After a brief stint back in London, in 1966 Ron was promoted to Second Secretary of Information and despatched to Blantyre, Malawi, in southern Africa, where he and Anna would spend the next two years. In Malawi, Johnny discovered the BBC World Service which kept him in touch with the new big releases. He was also very interested in the local Malawian musicians. A stamp in his passport also shows a visit to Rhodesia. ‘Ron and Anna quite liked Malawi,’ said Jessie. ‘But then independence came and they came back to England, pretty much for good. They used to say that Johnny had really liked Malawi. But David found it somehow troubling and unsettling.’

      In memories of Johnny Mellor at CLFS an etiolated, almost spectral figure stands off to one side, indistinct, passive and vague. It is David Mellor, Johnny’s older brother. At CLFS the younger Mellor boy spent little time with his elder sibling. Later, according to Gaby Salter, he had regrets over this. But no one really seems to have any sense at all of David Mellor, even those who shared living accommodation with him. ‘Although we were in the same boarding house for two years, we hardly spoke at all,’ admitted David Bardsley. ‘Dave Mellor was very quiet, very shy, very introverted – the complete opposite to John. I suspect David was put upon by the world in general.’ ‘David was in my elder brother’s year,’ Andy Ward told me. ‘He was floppy-fringed and quiet, although he wasn’t someone who was bullied. But no one remembers much about him.’

      In the cloistered bowels of the British Museum, where he now works as a clock conserver, Paul Buck produces a photograph of David Mellor; my heart leaps as he hands it to me, as though I have made a great find. But the teenage boy in the photograph seems shrouded in gloom and so indistinct as to be almost transparent; his image is so imprecise that he looks like a ghost, or at least a man who isn’t there. My elation vanishes and instead a chill runs through me. In a set of five photographs of the Mellors at Court Farm Road in 1965, the mystery is repeated: in three of them, taken as the family work in the back garden, David is turned away from the camera – all you see is an anonymous back. In the one picture of the two boys with Anna and Ron, Johnny squats between his parents, while David stands, leaning off to one side of Anna. In the printing process a tiny blue smudge has appeared in his right eye, like a tear, a portent.

      ‘I do have to agree with what most people say about David Mellor,’ considered Adrian Greaves. ‘I didn’t talk to him much at first. He was a nice chap, but you had to initiate the conversation. He seemed very calm but very shy.’ They both read the works of Cyril Henry Hoskins, who wrote, he claimed, under the direction of the spirit of a deceased lama, Lobsang Rampa: a mishmash of occult, theosophical and meta-physical speculation dressed up in a Tibetan robe, his books read like adventure stories, and enjoyed great popularity during the 1960s. David Mellor devoured them. In 1999 Joe Strummer had mentioned to me his brother’s fondness for bodice-ripper black magic novels like those of Dennis Wheatley. But would he have included Lobsang Rampa among the occult works that fascinated David Mellor in what Joe referred to as ‘a cheap paperback way’?

      The interests of the younger Mellor boy were also broadening. When he was fifteen, studying for his ‘O’ level GCEs in the fifth form, John Mellor was a member of the school’s rugby Second XV team, playing in the line, either as a winger or a three-quarter, a reflection of the stamina that he would later show on stage and which was already evident in his ability at cross-country running: he was developing into one of the most accomplished long-distance athletes in the school. Perhaps he should have devoted more time to his studies. When he sat his ‘O’ levels in July 1968, he only passed four subjects, English Literature and History (both of which he scraped with the lowest acceptable grade, a 6, which meant 45 to 50 per cent), Art (one grade higher), and a more respectable grade 3 – 60 to 65 per cent – in English Language; in the November re-sits that year, he added a grade 6 in Economics and Public Affairs, giving him a total of five ‘O’ levels, the minimum requirement for further education.

      By the time ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’ were released as a double A-side in February 1967, John Mellor’s fondness for the Beatles had evaporated. Now he hungrily devoured both the latest ‘underground rock’ music and its early blues progenitors, much of it from revered DJ John Peel’s late-night Perfumed Garden show on Radio London; every week he read Melody Maker from cover to cover, the former jazz-based music weekly having reinvented itself to find a new readership with long articles about ‘serious’ album artists. Like many other adolescent boys in Britain, he was immersing himself in ‘blues’ music, although – as with most of his contemporaries – at first it was a case of white-men-sing-the-blues: John Mellor incessantly played an iconic LP of the time, John Mayall’s 1966 Blues Breakers album, featuring Britain’s first guitar hero, Eric Clapton. Soon he was seeking out the available American imports by Robert Johnson, the godfather of rural blues, as well as records by the British-based American blues artists Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. He was already in awe of the work of another American expatriate, Jimi Hendrix. When Clapton quit the Mayall group to form Cream with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, John Mellor bought all their releases. Other records became part of his daily diet: the iconoclastic first LP by the Velvet Underground, Blood, Sweat and Tears’ Child is Father to the Man, and, the next year, the first album by Led Zeppelin.

      Secreted away in their Surrey school, the boarders were not entirely removed from the modern world. There was, for example, that access to a television set: ‘We got a special dispensation,’ remembered fellow diplomat’s son Ken Powell, ‘to watch The Frost Show when the Stones performed “Sympathy for the Devil”.’ On Saturday evenings they were permitted to watch whichever film – usually a war movie or Western – was being screened. ‘Joe and I were allowed one night to watch Psycho. I can remember being terrified in this cavernous room. I can also recall how I once brought back from Cape Town – where my father had been posted – this shark’s tooth that I would wear around my neck. The next thing I saw he was wearing it. And then I reacquired it. He saw this, and a week later he reacquired it. Then I did. This went on for possibly a year. We never discussed it.’ The shark’s tooth drew attention to Johnny’s own teeth. He refused to ever clean them, or visit a dentist. ‘I’ve decided,’ he announced, ‘to let them fall out, then get false ones. It’ll save time.’

      Intriguingly, at this zenith of apartheid, Johnny Mellor never questioned Ken Powell about the political situation in South Africa. ‘We weren’t big into social commentary – it was more girls and music,’ said Adrian Greaves. ‘But Johnny Mellor did have a poster up saying, “I’m Backing out of Britain”.’ This poster, a twist on Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s ‘I’m Backing Britain’ campaign, was fixed to the wall of the study that Greaves by now shared with Mellor and Paul Buck. The psychedelic poster images of the Beatles that formed part of the British packaging of The White Album also adorned the study’s walls after the record’s release in autumn 1968. Whatever his thoughts on the collective output of John Lennon’s group, Johnny Mellor was taken with the man himself, the ‘difficult’ Beatle forever firing off his judgements on injustice or his thoughts on great rock’n’roll, his hip attitudinizing filtered through a patchouli-oil-stained cloak of state-of-the-art psycho-babble. The study’s facilities included a mono record player, ‘a portable plastic thing, with a speaker in the lid,’ recalled Paul Buck, who remembered the affection that he and Mellor had for Elmer Gantry’s Velvet Opera and for Frank Zappa’s protégé Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, who had been championed by John Peel when his Safe as Milk album was released in 1967. By the time he was in the Sixth Form John Mellor had suffered a personality change, not necessarily for the better. ‘He had become a distinct Dramatic Society arty type, a bit Marlon Brando-like, a sneer to his lip, no respect for convention,’ remembered Adrian Greaves. ‘When he was around eighteen I found him rather obnoxious. He and Paul Buck got on well, because they were both sneerers.’ Greaves remembered Paul Buck and John Mellor falling for an underground myth by drying banana skins over a Bunsen СКАЧАТЬ