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

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      Johnny’s completed art school application form. (Deborah van der Beek, née Kartun)

      On his first day at the art college, in the vast studio room where the ‘fresher’ students collected nervously to meet up, ‘Woody’ Mellor encountered another new student, a girl called Helen Cherry. ‘On the first day we made friends,’ she said. In what would become increasingly typical of him, Johnny was drawn to her because of her eccentric, quirky personality; although her striking prettiness was probably also an attraction: tall and lanky, Helen Cherry would swan through Central in sweeping long dresses. Later that first term John Mellor and Helen Cherry worked together on a cartoon that was published in the college newspaper. Considering what he had so recently endured with David, its theme was telling: ‘It was about this bloke,’ she said, ‘who fell in love with a picture of an air hostess on a poster on the tube. And then in a state of depression he thinks he can find her by jumping on the tube line – and dies.’ Yet at no point during Woody’s time at Central was there any mention of David Mellor, that other depression sufferer, and what had happened to him. Another Foundation student, Celia Pyke, said Woody’s demeanour was such that until I told her about it she had had no knowledge at all of the tragedy: ‘My impression was that he wasn’t somebody who had anything hanging over him. He was so lovely, so funny, so charismatic. A girl I’d met had told me to watch out for him when I got to Central. She said he was one of her best friends – I think she’d been at school with him – and that he was not only a really great person but that he was someone who would do something really great.’ (Later at Central Celia would discover one aspect of Woody’s greatness – that he was ‘a really great snogger’.)

      Helen Cherry had been born only days before Woody Mellor, on 10 August. ‘When he first met me and found out that I was born in 1952 that seemed to be a definite advantage to being his friend: “It’s a really special year!” He had funny little phobias about things. Sometimes in a group of people he’d need to pick on somebody: I felt that was a downer side of his character. But he was a very lively, warm person, and really good fun, a laugh a minute. We’d never walk down the street: we’d have to run. He’d say, “We’ll be old when we can’t run down streets. We must run down streets and skip. It’ll be the end of us if we walk.” A very vibrant personality.’

      When Iain Gillies came down to London in March 1971 for an interview at art school, he immediately got a sense of his cousin’s life in the hall of residence. ‘He let me – illegally – crash in his room at Ralph West. We collaborated on some artworks in his room. There was paint, glue, cardboard, broken glass and other assorted detritus stuck and smeared over most of the floor. He seemed to approve of this at first but then to my surprise he decided I was making too much mess and he terminated the art projects.’ (Iain was so untidy that he nearly got Joe thrown out of his room.)

      ‘At Ralph West,’ continued his cousin, ‘he had a picture or two of Jimi Hendrix stuck on his wall, along with the date of Hendrix’s death. He said that Hendrix was his favourite. He also told me that he’d been to the Isle of Wight pop festival. He was very enthusiastic about it and had written out a reminiscence for either a school or college project. He had a few, short, absurdist poems he had written lying around in his room. One poem was called “I’m Going to Getcha”: I’m going to getcha/ You can run into the garage.’

      In an evident effort to mark out an identity for himself, Woody would carry a small, battered suitcase with him everywhere that he went; as well as his work materials for the day, it also contained various items of sentimental value: a bus ticket from his favourite bus ride, for example, and the stub from the most enjoyable cigarette he had smoked. But this seems to have been the full extent of any personality that he carried about him. One student, Carol Roundhill, remembered him being dressed in clothes only on the very periphery of fashionability: ‘too short corduroy trousers, a sleeveless knitted pullover, and a short-sleeved shirt and big Kickers shoes. He used to swap things: he had a shirt of mine he used to wear, a little short-sleeved aertex games shirt from my grammar school.’ Helen Cherry found him another second-hand fur coat, of the sort affected by some student boys aspiring vaguely at hipness, a look by now a little out of date. Carol Roundhill’s initial impression of Woody Mellor, in fact, was that ‘he was like a lot of boys: he wasn’t that attractive. He had very dry skin, very curly hair, and dandruff. He struck me as a little lost. It seemed to me sad that someone would move to London and live where he was – although there were a bunch of boys from Central in the same place. He reminded me of one of Peter Pan’s lost boys. The other boys were very focused. Most came from public school and were very self-assured: lots of them knew what they wanted to do before they’d even done the course. But he definitely didn’t. Yet he was really, really friendly. Everybody really loved him. He didn’t have any false exterior and was totally approachable. He wasn’t at all ambitious. I’m amazed he did get it together in the end to work out his talent, because he didn’t seem that bothered at all at art school. He seemed to be in the wrong place.’

      Joe Strummer later was characteristically thoroughly dismissive of his time at Central. ‘Well, if you’re in the position I was, there’s only one answer to what you’re going to do after school, and that is art school, the last resort of malingerers and bluffers and people who don’t want to work basically,’ he declared to Mal Peachey, with what you may feel is something akin to false modesty. ‘I applied to join Central Art School, in Southampton Row, and I was amazed when I got in. And then when I turned up I realized that all the lecturers were lechers. All the lecturers were horny, and they had chosen twenty-nine girls and ten blokes to make up the complement of forty [sic]. I just got in there as one of the ten blokes that they needed to make it look not so bad. They had chosen – obviously – twenty-nine of the most attractive applicants from the female sex, and then they spent all year hitting on them. And that was art school.’

      ‘Maybe it would have been better for him if he’d done fine art, or if he had been able to work out his own ideas,’ considered Carol Roundhill, on the same course. ‘In the graphics studio the work you had to do was very prescriptive, not very creative. It was literally learning how to make letters of the alphabet. It wasn’t his thing.’ This was not what Helen Cherry saw as being the experience of Woody Mellor at Central. ‘A lot of the information about Joe’s life at Central isn’t correct – that he was pushed out of art school, or that he dropped out. He didn’t: he really enjoyed his first year at art college. He liked it!’ СКАЧАТЬ