Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer

An indication that change was underway came in the late summer of 1974, when the NME put Dr Feelgood on its cover, a new group who so far had had no record success, emerging from the grassroots movement of the London pub-rock scene: a number of pubs had turned themselves into venues at which largely unsigned groups played. A good-time scene fuelled by beer, pub-rock still had its star acts, among them Dr Feelgood.

The Feelgoods, as they were invariably known, featured a part speed-freak, part intellectual guitarist called Wilko Johnson; a gruff but inspired singer in Lee Brilleaux, his skinny ties a trademark; bass-player John B. Sparks; and drummer John ‘The Big Figure’ Martin. What set the Feelgoods aside from virtually every group in the country was that their set-list consisted entirely of choppy R’n’B songs, classics and originals, that lasted no more than three minutes; they wore their hair short and dressed in tight-trousered suits with shirts and ties; and their stage-act was fantastic. Wilko soared about the stage as though he was propelled along tramlines, brandishing his Telecaster like a rifle; Lee Brilleaux grunted and growled at the front of the stage, leaning into his mike and smoking cigarettes; and the rhythm section just held it all down, anchoring the two frontmen so they wouldn’t float away. Despite their surly appearance, the Feelgoods had an aura of approachability, one of us. Dr Feelgood were the first steps of British punk; without them, that crucial cultural movement, still more than two years off from altering the entire aesthetic dynamic of the last quarter of the twentieth century, might never have happened. They were a very important group indeed, as noted by no less an unexpected authority than the rising reggae star Bob Marley; on his 1977 single ‘Punky Reggae Party’, extolling the punk-reggae link, one line ran: The Jam, the Clash, The Feelgoods too.

Dr Feelgood were still a pub-rock group, but one that proved so inspirational to Woody Mellor that Wilko Johnson’s Telecaster weapon-wielding was the reason that the future Joe Strummer purchased that make of guitar. He had decided that he also could form such a group. ‘Pub-rock was going on and we sort of fell into naturally playing rhythm and blues because it was easy, or we thought it was,’ he told me. ‘Although the 101’ers was really a squat band formed in a squat in the summer of 1974. During this time I held down jobs, you know. I worked for three months in Hyde Park, trying to save money for the group, trimming flower beds, cutting hedges.’

‘Park work’, with its opportunities for smoking spliffs on the job, was at that time considered desirable summer employment. ‘Oh, it was horrible. Yeah, horrible because the hedge goes on forever, you know that. You know, the hedge it ain’t never gonna end, because Hyde Park is vast. It’s like painting the Forth Bridge – you never get to the end of it. I just hated that.’

At the end of the summer Woody took another job, doing general maintenance and cleaning at the English National Opera in St Martin’s Lane by Trafalgar Square: ‘It was kind of a much better job ’cause you could go and hide away in this huge Victorian building. I used to take my guitar into work and put my brown coat on and then disappear off up into the upper attic in these little cubby-holes so no one could ever find you, and practise the guitar. I quite liked it, but I’ve hated opera from hearing opera constantly, all day long, for three months. I’ve always hated opera since that time.’ At the end of three months Woody Mellor was discovered hunkered away practising his guitar, and was fired. He managed to obtain financial compensation and walked out of the job with £120.

One day on his way to ENO Joe had gone into central London with Jules Yewdall, who was heading for the London School of Printing, where he studied photography. ‘We went into town early in the morning. It was about 7.30 and he was standing on Trafalgar Square by the steps at St Martin’s church. I was rolling up a joint and saying, “I really want to travel around the world and see what’s going on out there.” He said, “I want to be a rock’n’roll star. That’s what I want to be.”’

This would conflict with the reasons that Woody later offered for getting a group together. The 101’ers, Joe told me, ‘was really formed because busking had become too heavy. They started to put microphones and speakers down in the subways. I mean, at the best of times you had to run from the Transport Police. But when I saw the microphones and speakers installed in Leicester Square, or Oxford Circus, I thought, Ah … You know, a group of squatters trying to live over the summer. We saw it as maybe we can keep body and soul together if we can get a few gigs in these Irish pubs. I never really saw it as something to do permanently. It was like a stop-gap measure. I couldn’t really see what I was going to do with my life. I stood outside the Elephant and Castle pub on Elgin Avenue, watching this Irish trio through the window – we were banned from the pub ’cause we were dirty squatters. I thought, “I could do that, you know, me and my mates. Surely we could do that.” We put it together in the squat with just odds and ends. I borrowed money for a small PA off a drug dealer.’

This was not true. The origins of the PA were far from this. Woody Mellor actually got money for it from Arabella Churchill, great-granddaughter of Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister, whom he’d met at Glastonbury in 1971. The money was a loan: in 1997 Joe Strummer finally wrote her a cheque to repay it, but Arabella never banked it. Part of this PA had formerly belonged to Pink Floyd. ‘For some reason Pink Floyd had like a hundred speakers in their PA system and they were selling it off – I don’t know why,’ he told me. ‘And we managed to get one of the bass-bins which we used as a bass speaker from their PA. I took a drawer I found in a skip and cut a hole in it and mounted a speaker in the drawer. And I used to stand the drawer up and place a Linear Concorde amp on top.’

Pat Nother shared a basement room at 101 Walterton Road with Woody, each sleeping on a ‘scummy, horrible’ mattress. ‘When he was sleeping, he used to grind his teeth so much that it sounded like an underground train,’ Pat said. ‘He had this James Dean hairstyle, although at first he had fairly long hair, and he wore this tacky leather jacket with a Latin tag on the back that read, in Latin, “I’m no chicken.” He picked up on the leather jacket a long time before that stuff was in vogue. I don’t know if it was just a Jim Morrison influence, Joe got into everyone. Although he was into the Doors at that time, that doesn’t mean that that enthusiasm lasted. He’d have stripped the carcass of everything he could get off it, he’d have eaten the head, and he’d have sucked the bones of the Doors whilst he was interested in them: there’s a lot of meat and juice there to take on, and he’d have tried his best to get as much out of it as possible. That’s what he was about everything.’

The other room in the basement became the musical practice room. ‘We used to piss on our fingertips to make them hard so that we could play our guitars. He was a huge fan of Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence – Lawrence of Arabia. I had the impression it was one of the only books he’d read at the time. In the Lawrence of Arabia film Peter O’Toole lets matches burn down to his fingers, and Joe would do that to prove his fingers were strong enough to play the guitar. I remember Joe woke me up in the middle of the night and said “Patrick: I’ve got the new Elmore James riff!” And he played me this Elmore James riff on the record and he was so thrilled he could do it on the guitar as well.

‘I’d loved rock’n’roll as a teenager, and then I just thought it wasn’t happening, although I would listen to Van Morrison. But with Joe in the basement I used to sit up late and it would be, “Have you ever tried 12-bar?” And he’d get out his steel-string guitar, and we’d boogie along for about a dozen songs, and go and sit on the staircase in 101. “Do you know what?” he really did say to me at one point. “I’m going to be a rock’n’roll star. Do you want to be one too? We can be rock’n’roll stars.”’

Might you not fear you were tempting fate by publicly proclaiming your imminent stardom? In the case of the future Joe Strummer it seems that by laying his cards on the table he was seeking to motivate himself. ‘The guy just planked out this incredible energy ’cos he knows what he’s doing, and he’s got the reserves to do it, and he puts his all into it, and that’s why everyone likes Joe,’ said Pat Nother. Pat also recalled Woody seeing the pair of rock’n’ roll movies, That’ll Be the Day and its sequel Stardust, both of which he found inspiring. Pat remembered him becoming wide-eyed with awe when he met Wishbone Ash’s lighting man. ‘He was so into the whole rock’n’roll thing, he absolutely loved it: it was an almost childish delight at the whole spectacle. He couldn’t really play the guitar, but he wrote bloody good songs. He put his heart into it, which is the essence of the bloody thing.’

In the basement of 101 Walterton Road, filthy old mattresses rescued from skips ranged around the walls as ‘sound-proofing’, Woody Mellor assiduously rehearsed with the musicians he had enlisted to assist him in fulfilling the personal dream he had revealed to Pat. Pat himself was pulled in to play on the bass borrowed from Dick the Shit, despite never having previously picked up such an instrument. Simon Cassell had an alto saxophone he had bought in Portobello Market some time before; naturally he was promptly enlisted. On drums was Antonio Narvaez, on a kit borrowed from someone in a nearby squat. The most accomplished of those rehearsing was Alvaro Pena-Rojas, who had played professionally as a tenor sax-player in Chile, chalking up a trio of hits before he and Antonio fled the country after the 1973 coup. You may note that in this line-up of what would become the 101’ers, a crucial rock’n’roll element is absent: that of lead guitar – sometimes it seemed Woody Mellor needed to create situations to work against.

By the end of the summer of 1974 these musicians had a set-list of half a dozen songs, all R’n’B and rock’n’roll covers: two Chuck Berry songs, ‘No Particular Place to Go’ and ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, Larry Williams’s ‘Bony Maronie’ and Van Morrison’s ‘Gloria’, which Woody still adored. Now they were ready to test themselves at a live show, a benefit for the Chilean Resistance. Originally scheduled for 14 September 1974, the show was suddenly moved to Friday 6 September, at the Telegraph, a music pub at 228 Brixton Hill, close to Brixton prison, another outsider part of London. Two weeks before the original date, Antonio decided to leave London on holiday. Although he had never played drums – he owned a pair of bongos and a clarinet – Pat Nother’s brother Richard was immediately brought in on the instrument.

When the gig was moved forward, Richard Nother was left with only five days of rehearsal. ‘I was playing bongos, and they asked me to play the drums, which I had never played before. Then the gig was moved forward a week: my first gig!’ Richard Nother acquired a new name, bestowed by Woody. When I first met him I assumed that someone called Richard Dudanski must be Polish, noting his Slavic cheekbones, high forehead and slicked-back hair. But Richard Nother is of quintessential English stock; Joe had picked up what I perceived. Proprietorially, Woody bequeathed him a second nickname, inspired by his thin and wiry appearance: Richard ‘Snakehips’ Dudanski. This random scattering of sobriquets is very affectionate – they are almost pet-names, rather than nicknames, a very honest, intimate and exclusive way of greeting friends, putting them at ease straight away. But it is also a method of contol.

‘People said he wanted to be a star,’ said Richard Dudanski. ‘He did, but we just wanted to get a working band together. He had strong ambition. I don’t think he necessarily knew the hows or the whats, but he wanted to get there. The whole myth of the life was attractive to him.’

Woody went down to Warlingham to pick up his father’s demob suit for his stage outfit. For the Telegraph gig the group was billed as El Huaso and The 101 All Stars: ‘El Huaso’ is Spanish for ‘countryman’, referring to the group’s remaining Chilean, Alvaro Pena-Rojas. They were the support act to the Reggae Men, who would shortly mutate into Matumbi, one of the most influential reggae acts to come out of England. El Huaso and The 101 All Stars turned up at the Telegraph on 6 September with neither drums nor amps, assuming they could borrow these from the headline act. Joe told Paolo Hewitt: ‘We didn’t know how to play, you know. None of us knew, and Matumbi lent us all their gear, and I’ve never come across that since. Can you believe that? And they were really late. Their van broke down and they were two hours late and there was hardly time for them to do their set. But they still lent us their drum kit and their amps. I thought that was great and I’ve always supported Matumbi since.’

‘They were crap!’ said Clive Timperley, Woody’s old friend from Vomit Heights. ‘Strummer with this mad suit and shaking leg, fantastic. That was it really. No lead guitar. They were crap but fun.’

To Anne Day, ‘Woody’ was evidently still allowed to be ‘Johnny’. (Anne Day)

Pat Nother agreed: ‘About four or five times we turned up with instruments. To call them gigs is stretching it. My memories are more of things like standing in a cinema [a squat by That Tea Room] in puddles of water, very worried about the effect on the electricity power supply. We played at parties in houses, which involved basements being turned into venues. I mucked around a few times with Joe – that was it, and then it collapsed for me.’

As a very amused Joe said of Pat Nother to Paolo Hewitt, ‘He said to me in a pub, “I can’t believe that we’re in a group.” And I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “I can’t believe we are in a group. So I’m going to leave.” He said that to me!’ Before he left the band, Pat revealed, they rehearsed all the time. ‘We would play all day long in the basement of 101 and people would come and watch us. But one day the saxophone got ripped off. This was terrible. “It’s been stolen. We need it for our group. Where’s it gone?” So Joe and myself went on this two-day trip to the nether regions of West London.’

Eventually they retrieved it from another squat; but the thief, clearly disturbed, killed himself two days later. Imagining you were an outlaw from society had its drawbacks. ‘Joe’s street-punk thing was just blagging. Once Joe pissed off some teddy boys with a flick-knife. These guys got him at University College, London. There was a gig there, and me and Joe certainly weren’t going to pay. We climbed through the loo window, and these Teddy Boys came in as we were climbing in, and came up to Joe. He pulled out his flick-knife, and they pulled out their flick-knives, and he does a ballet dance. I was stuck in the window watching this thing. He was very good: it was all bluff on both sides – it was as though it was choreographed. Eventually everyone backs off, and honour is saved. No one was going to knife anyone.’

Following that one gig at the Telegraph, Richard ‘Snakehips’ Dudanski went on holiday and was replaced by the original drummer, Antonio Narvaez, now back in London. In mid-October there was a benefit for the Chilean Resistance at the Royal College of Art in Kensington Gore. It was a logical event for the 101 All Stars to play, and Alvaro promptly offered their services. Having started off with the rock’n’roll classic ‘Bony Maronie’, the group were two numbers into their set before the audience turned against them: ‘Get this capitalist rock’n’roll out of here,’ as Joe remembered it. As though proof of that old adage that no act of kindness goes unpunished, the squat-rockers – who could hardly have lived a life more untainted by capitalism – were booed off the stage.

Pat Nother was replaced by a character known as Mole (actually Maurice Chesterton); efficient on guitar, he had never previously played bass. There was another new member: Julian ‘Jules’ Yewdall was briefly brought in on lead vocals and harmonica, leaving Woody free to concentrate on his rudimentary rhythm guitar playing, while still contributing the occasional vocal.

But where could the 101’ers play? In November an approach was made for a residency to the landlord of their local pub, the Chippenham, a rambling rough pub popular with Irish labourers; ornately decorated with rococo plasterwork and with a central semi-circular bar, the ‘Chip’ had the ambience and character of a Wild West saloon.

The group were told that, for a rental of £1, they could play upstairs in a room with its own small stage. Joe recalled their first gig there, on Wednesday 4 December 1974: ‘We never really got off the ground until we rented that room above the Chip. Because we couldn’t play, how could we get any gigs? The only thing we could do to learn to play was to start our own club up. I’d go to gigs with two bricks in a shoulder bag,’ said Joe to Mal Peachey, ‘and these bricks were to sit in the deck of a record player, upturned with a broom handle screwed in it which was the mike stand. And the mike was taped on the top, and the bricks were there to drop into the record-player to keep the thing steady so the mike didn’t fall over. I mean, we built our equipment, and we booked our own club. No one was going to book us. Can you imagine what we looked like? A bunch of crazed squatters. We found a pub with a room upstairs and we rented it for a quid for the evening, and that’s how we learnt to play, by doing it for ourselves – which is like the punk ethos. I mean, you gotta be able to go out there and do this for yourself, because no one is gonna give it to you. We clawed our way in.’

The residency was named the Charlie Pigdog, after a dog of the same name, a brown and white Jack Russell, who lived at 23 Chippenham Road, the pet of Dave and Gail Goodall. Charlie Pigdog would from time to time wander onstage during the group’s sets. As would musicians outside of the core of Woody Mellor, Simon Cassell, Alvaro Pena-Rojas, Antonio Narvaez, and the new members Jules Yewdall and Mole. From time to time, Tymon Dogg would play. Clive Timperley came along to the second night, on 11 December 1974. ‘Bring your guitar next time,’ Woody told him.

‘It got really jumping, ’cos all the squatters from all over Maida Hill, Maida Vale, West London would come down,’ said Joe, ‘and it soon became like a real big mash-up, and gypsies would come and rip everybody off and throw people’s coats out the window, and mayhem broke loose. We were onstage playing and the police raided the place. We carried on playing, and it was like playing a soundtrack to this crazy thing going on everywhere. The police rushed in – they didn’t know who to search or what, with all these filthy squatters and gypsies and God knows what in this room. And like we keep playing, and I think we were doing “Gloria” – that’s when we started to extend it into a twenty-minute jamdown.’

Around this time a severely second-hand hearse was found for sale, priced £50. All the 101’ers clubbed together and bought it. Now they had something in which to transport their equipment. Later it was exchanged for a van. Both vehicles were somewhat erratic, and for local gigs the 101’ers would often walk to the venues, pushing the equipment in an old pram.

The absence of a lead guitarist was about to be resolved. Clive Timperley was yet another character in the life of Woody Mellor who fulfilled a role of mentor and tutor. He had moved on from the student life at Vomit Heights and was living in the extremely well-heeled environs of Hans Place in Knightsbridge, just behind Harrods, in a flat that belonged to his brother. A boring day-job gave him the freedom to play with groups in the evening. As far back as Ash Grove he had been playing with Foxton Flight, who had once supported Medicine Head at the Marquee, a gig which Woody came to see, at Clive’s invitation (‘He was chuffed he was on a guest list at the Marquee. But he was almost over-impressed. I think it galvanized him more into wanting to become a musician.’).

There was always a rudimentary element to Joe‘s understanding of the guitar. (Lucinda Mellor)

By the time he saw their second Charlie Pigdog Club date, the 101’ers had got much better, thought Clive, who found himself frequently tutoring Woody. At around 10 or 11 in the evening Clive’s phone would ring. ‘What are you doing?’ would demand Woody’s gruff vocal inflections, before he jumped in a minicab for the ten-minute ride down to Knightsbridge across Hyde Park. ‘He used to come over with his guitars, four or five at a time, a steel-string acoustic, an electric, solid electric, and this Hoffner Verithin. We’d have a guitar workshop into the early hours of the morning.’

Then Woody made Clive Timperley an offer. ‘He rang me up and said, “We’d like you to join the 101’ers.” I thought, “Good, they’re gigging every week.” I’d wanted a regular gig. I joined them.’ As soon as Clive joined the 101’ers Woody Mellor renamed him, by reversing the letters of his Christian name: and mild, studious Clive became ‘Evil C’ Timperley. ‘Clive had strong musical knowledge,’ said Helen Cherry, ‘and put a lot of it together musically for them, helping it be in tune and in rhythm and in time, to get a tough rock’n’roll thing, which is what Joe wanted. He was after a particular sound, but I don’t know if he knew how to get it.’

Richard Dudanski and his new Spanish girlfriend Esperanza Romero had returned to London before Christmas 1974 and moved into 86 Chippenham Road. When Esperanza’s sister Paloma turned up in London, Richard told her of a free room at 101 Walterton Road. Pat Nother remembered her arrival at 101, when he happened to be sitting with Woody: ‘The first time I saw Paloma she walked in the door and he said to me: “Agi agam aggo aging tago magake hager miagne.” All the boarding-school and grammar-school boys spoke ago-pago. Ag in front of every vowel sound. Joe was saying, “I’m going to make her mine.” He fell in love with her when she walked in the door.’ ‘I had a Bolivian boyfriend called Herman,’ said Paloma. ‘We were breaking up. Joe kept asking me out. We went to see Chuck Berry in London somewhere, but he to me was nothing after seeing the 101’ers. We went to see Lou Reed and he was very boring. Before punk we were together for about two years.’

Woody Mellor and Paloma Romero became an item, and she moved with him into the vacant room at 101, at the front of the first floor. With an interest in international relations, Woody even claimed to Helen Cherry that he had ‘figured out Spanish: you just put “o” on the end of every word’.

The two Romero sisters could not legally remain in Britain. What could be done? They would have to get married to British citizens. When it became clear during the summer of 1975 that the girls were liable to be deported, Richard Nother married Esperanza; they remain married to this day. But between Woody Mellor and Paloma there was a complication. For Woody was already married. On 16 May 1975 there had been a wedding at St Pancras Registry Office between himself and one Pamela Jill Moolman, a South African girl who wanted to stay in Britain; Pamela was a friend of a girl who had been living at 101 Walterton Road. For helping her out, she paid Woody £120, with which he promptly bought a Fender Telecaster, precisely the instrument wielded by Wilko Johnson with Dr Feelgood. Although her boyfriend had the guitar of his dreams, this was no help to Paloma: accordingly, Richard’s brother Pat Nother stepped into the breach and married her – with no fee involved. ‘People did that all the time then,’ said Jill Calvert. Paloma’s relationship with Joe allowed him to open up, perhaps for the first time. ‘He told me about David – he said that his brother had chosen death and he had chosen life: he had decided to go for it entirely. For his parents, he said, “What a horrible thing – that shatters a family.”’

Now came a rush of creative energy. Woody Mellor began to write his first songs for the group. Was he inspired by being in love? This was evident from the words of the first song he wrote for the 101’ers, ‘Keys to Your Heart’.

‘All of us in the 101’ers were very intense rhythm’n’blues freaks – you know, really intense,’ Joe said about that first song that he wrote for the 101’ers. ‘We had a great knowledge of blues and rhythm’n’blues, and we just pulled our music out of that. And then, like in any group’s life, I realized we had to start writing our own material. So I wrote Keys to Your Heart, and I was just overjoyed that it came out good, and we could put it over in the set at the Chippenham. And people would still keep leaping around the room and dancing to it.’

Jules Yewdall has a set of the words of ten of the 101’ers’ songs, typed out by Joe on his own typewriter, accompanying a cassette recorded as the songs on the lyric-sheets were played live in the damp, mattress-soundproofed basement of 101 Walterton Road. The ten songs on the tape are staples of the 101’ers’ live set, and show the speed at which new songs had developed in less than six months: tunes such as ‘Motor Boys Motor’, ‘Keys to Your Heart’, ‘Mr Sweety of the St Moritz’ and ‘Standing by a Silent Telephone’.

These ten demo songs were specifically recorded by Joe Strummer to be placed in a bank vault by Jules Yewdall, to secure his legal status to their copyright. In that oh-so-familiar, adenoidal voice, whose tone manages both a grin and just the suspicion of a smirk, he ensures that each song is specifically identified. ‘That was “Motor Boys Motor”, and this is “The Keys to Your ’Eart”,’ the ‘H’ dropped so hard you can hear it fall.

The simplicity and directness of the songs is very apparent, and much of the material has the loose jamming feel of later Clash material. It is also perfectly clear that, despite an occasionally wonky delivery, Joe Strummer has found his voice in the often hilarious narrative structure of the lyrics. It is evident that right back in 1975, so many of those creative aspects we might have believed only developed in the Clash were already present: that melodic moodiness of style, that drive of energy arrowing straight from the heart. These early songs show you that almost everything Joe would do in the Clash he was already attempting with the 101’ers: that odd discordant gruffness in his voice, the chopping rhythm guitar, the ironic asides. ‘Mr Sweety of the St Moritz’ is fantastic in its lyrical, almost certainly autobiographical complexity, the sort of words he might well have written with the Clash; the song was written as a kind of note of criticism to the owner of the St Moritz nightclub in Wardour Street in London’s Soho, where the 101’ers played a total of three times, starting on 18 June 1975.

hey mr. sweety of the saint moritz we re cashing in all our chips life wont be so funny without your money but we re sick of playing all these hits

More personal is ‘Standing by a Silent Telephone’. The song is disguised as Joe’s lament to ‘Suzie’, ‘I was living just for loving just from you.’ But she’s not around, and doesn’t call: Standing by a silent telephone, me and bakelite all alone. ‘Me and bakelite all alone’ – a small stroke of Joe Strummer genius.

The ability to make people smile in their hearts and on their faces was always one of the talents of Joe Strummer. And many of these lyrics are frankly hilarious, evidence of a highly intelligent wit. On the Bo Didelys’ [sic] ‘Six Gun Blues’, the words are built around a perfect narrative structure: But kettles don’t boil if you watch em / And suns don’t rise on demand.

Significantly, on the card inlay in the tape’s box, the man formerly known as Woody has scratched out the name ‘John Mellor’ and replaced it with a new one: ‘JOE STRUMMER’. Somewhere around May of 1975 Woody Mellor decided to become Joe Strummer, unwilling to answer to any other name. Although ‘Joe’ would insist that his contemporaries at 101 Walterton Road address him by his new name, it was more complex for those he had known longer: ‘Dave Goodall was allowed to still call him Woody,’ said Jill Sinclair. ‘In terms of the male hierarchy, the pecking order, Tymon and Dave were above Joe. Joe was a bit of a kid. He did want us to call him Joe, but he wouldn’t make an issue of it with us.’ ‘Somewhere through the 101’ers,’ remembered Helen Cherry, ‘he was like, “I’m Joe,” and you couldn’t call him Woody – he’d be angry.’

Things were falling into place for the 101’ers. In April 1975 Allan Jones, Joe’s old friend from Newport art college, had given the group a minute mention in Melody Maker’s Hot Licks gossip column. Jones contrasted New York act Television with ‘a really exciting band like the 101ers, with a stack of AC30s playing gigs like the Charlie Pigdog club for a packet of peanuts and half a bitter’. Tiny as this piece of publicity was, it served its purpose, as Joe later told Mal Peachey: ‘Dr Feelgood came along, and there was a group called the Michigan Flyers, and there was us. And those three groups were fantastic. We fell into that scene, and we began to rock at the Elgin. ’Cos in Newport one of the students there was Allan Jones, who later began to edit Melody Maker, and he wrote a paragraph in Melody Maker when he was a cub reporter, about how the 101’ers could really rock, ’cos one day he came down to the Charlie Pig Dog club, and I took this cutting – and after I cut it out it was like three lines long and I should have left it on the page – but anyway I cut it out and it looked kinda like a postage stamp. And I took this, and some of the group, and we went around pubs in West London, and eventually at the Elgin [in Ladbroke Grove] I put this cutting on the bar, and the gingerheaded landlord picked it up and he went, “All right: a fiver, Monday.” And that was when we first broke out of our own scene, and soon that became like a hotspot, us playing the Elgin in the back room.

‘We used to push our gear there in a pram, and one night the pram got nicked while we were playing. I remember standing outside the pub going, “This is a hard world. They’ve stolen the pram that we used to pile the amps up on.” And we’d push it back over the hill into Maida Vale. And then because he was doing such good business he switched us to a Thursday.’

10

‘THIS MAN IS A STAR!’

1975–1976