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

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СКАЧАТЬ drum kit and the ukulele.’ Later Woody came to collect his drum kit, but seemed to forget about the ukulele. When the Clash played a show in Bristol at the end of 1977, Joe Strummer spotted Richard Frame in the audience. ‘Hey, Frame,’ he hollered out in between numbers. ‘Where’s my fuckin’ ukulele?’ Richard Frame also has a tape of Woody Mellor singing a song entitled ‘Bumblebee Blues’, probably the first song he recorded, a grumbing 12-bar blues. At the beginning of it Woody is asking someone called Martin, who also plays guitar on the tune, if he is putting his fingers in the right place on the fretboard of his guitar.

      Woody Mellor wrote to Carol Roundhill about the group.

      I’m playing in a Rock’n’Roll band called the Vultures. It’s a funny sort of band, one minute we’ll be hating each others guts and splitting up the band, and the next we’ll be as close as brothers getting drunk together. At the moment we’re in one of the former states. I’m doing a few cartoons and a bit of writing. Recently I’ve been taking everything about Dylan Thomas out of the library and reading till dawn. I think I know everything there is to know about him, except for one thing – I can’t find a book of his poems! There’s 101 books on ‘The Art of Dylan Thomas’ or ‘The Life of Dylan Thomas’ or ‘The Storys [sic] of Dylan Thomas’ or ‘The Broadcasts of Dylan Thomas’ but not one book of poems. I think they expect every Welsh home to already have one. I’ve got a really nice sunny room. It seems to catch the sun all through the day except for the late evening, and I spend a great deal of time with my feet on the window ledge watching nothing in particular. Deborah lives 10 miles down the road in Cardiff. I go and see her once in a blue moon, but she’s really tough and mean now! Grr Grr!

      Woody was not a great success as a gravedigger; he was not particularly strong and did not prove good at digging six-feet-deep holes in the ground. He was soon transferred to the less arduous task of clearing the cemetery of rubbish and general debris. ‘I wasn’t strong enough to dig graves,’ he said. ‘The first morning they’d told me to dig a grave and when they came back I’d gone down about three inches. And so they said, “Oh, that’s useless.” So they set me on just cleaning up the cemetery. A really, really, really big one. And they told me to go and pick up every glass jam jar or piece thereof. The cemetery was enormous, and they’d been leaving jam jars with flowers in them there since the Twenties. In the winter of ’72–’73 I was working in the graveyard. That was a really tough winter too.’

      Tymon Dogg drove down from London, arriving in Newport in the morning, and went to the graveyard, where ‘I went and had a cup of tea with these gravediggers. They called him Johnny. It was funny, they thought Johnny never really got involved in anything. I think they thought he was a bit slow or something, because he wasn’t interested in stone and talking about it, so they knew he was a bit different.’

      The money he earned in the cemetery gave Woody greater scope for his generosity; when Jill Calvert was depressed, he bought her a pair of new trousers. At the time he was experimenting with further names; Johnny Caramello and Rooney were two of these.

      On one visit to London from Wales, his cousin Iain Gillies saw Woody briefly; he felt that his time in Newport had brought about a change and was doing him good: ‘He was all Farmer Giles sideboards and flashing smashed, decrepit teeth. He had a new level of liveliness that I had not seen before. Anna, his mother, would tell us about Joe’s comings and goings. She told me in 1973 they were giving Joe a year to decide what he was going to do.’

      This decision of Ron and Anna to let their son run with his freedom seemed to be paying off, although not every appearance of the Vultures fully hit the spot: ‘We played obviously the art school dance or whatever. And we had made it to the Granary in Bristol, but we were godawful and they bottled us off. We were playing the Who’s “Can’t Explain”, “Tobacco Road”, and also anything that was popular at the time. I think we had a version of “Hocus Pocus” by Focus that the lead guitarist wanted to play, because it was obviously all lead guitar or whatever. We were trying to play anything that wouldn’t get us bottled off, really.’

      At this stage in his life Woody Mellor was not a great drinker. ‘He despised people on benders,’ said Jill Calvert. ‘We couldn’t stand the hippies who were deadbeats. He had contempt for them too. He’d take what was going but he was fuelled and driven.’ Jill saw a lot of Woody as she and Mickey Foote were not always getting on; she would end up going over to Woody’s at 12 Pentonville: ‘We’d have mushrooms and toast and I taught him about Van Morrison who he didn’t seem to know anything about: Astral Weeks was a very important record to be into, but he’d never heard it. And we became friends and sort of confidantes. I had one brief conversation with him about David. In those days it would be considered extremely uncool to admit to indulging in any sort of self-reflection. All your life was about the now. That was particularly Joe’s thinking.’ Jill Calvert was known for being an extremely pretty young woman. So it is hardly surprising that between her and Woody there was often, as she puts it, ‘a kind of suggestion’. Such a semi-platonic relationship with a member of the opposite sex fits the precise pattern of Woody Mellor’s relationships with women at this time. Later, he confided to the photographer Pennie Smith that he had believed that women weren’t really interested in him, and felt, as he put it to her, ‘like the ugly duckling’. As we know, the ‘ugly duckling’ of fairy-tale legend turned into a beautiful swan. But this would not happen for some time, and in the process Woody would undergo a complete volte-face on his previous more innocent attitudes. All the same, Jill Calvert received a shock when Woody told her that he had found a new flat: ‘It’s next door to where you live. I thought, “Well, that’s a bit odd. Because you won’t be able to sneak round to see me then.”’

      This flat, next door to Jill Calvert and Mickey Foote, was at 16 Clyffard Crescent. Not long after that, early in 1974, ‘he suddenly didn’t have any flat at all’, said Jill. Woody had omitted to pay the rent. ‘And then he lived in our place.’ Woody slept in the living-room: ‘The return for him living in our place was that he’d write Mickey’s thesis.’ Although Mickey Foote was studying Fine Art, his final-year thesis was on a subject familiar to Woody Mellor: pop music. ‘Woody sat at the typewriter with a note on the door saying, “3,000 words, 4,000 to go.” It was no problem for him to write this. We fed and housed him.’

      In May 1974 Woody Mellor moved back to London. ‘I realized that we weren’t going to get anywhere in Newport,’ Joe said. ‘The lead guitarist was wanting to go up the valleys and settle down with a woman, and everything was wrong with the group. So I left Newport, and went back to London.’

      9

      PILLARS OF WISDOM

      1974–1975

      When Woody moved back to London he had to sort himself out with somewhere to live. Direct from Newport, Woody Mellor arrived on the doorstep of the new house that Tymon Dogg, Helen Cherry, Dave and Gail Goodall were sharing, at 23 Chippenham Road, London W9, on Maida Hill off the Harrow Road.

      ‘When he came back to London in 1974 he crashed there,’ said Tymon Dogg. ‘I had two rooms, and in one I’d put a grand piano – I played all the time. It was up at the top of the house and he came and slept in the other room.’

      23 Chippenham Road was not a squat but a ‘short-life’ house (i.e. one scheduled for demolition because of its rundown state) acquired by London Student Housing, which found homes for people involved in further education in the capital; as Helen and Gail were both still students they qualified. ‘There was a minimal rent to pay,’ said Helen. ‘23 Chippenham Road was Dave Goodall’s castle,’ said Jill Calvert, who moved into the property at the beginning of 1975 with Mickey Foote. ‘He could plumb and secure leaks: we had this series of plastic sheets to stop the rain coming in. Dave – who Joe always called Larry, for some reason – was a provider. СКАЧАТЬ