Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer

That summer Pink Floyd played a free concert in London’s Hyde Park. The pair of Upper Warlingham boys drove up to it in the blue-and-white Austin. ‘We didn’t bother parking, we just drove over the grass and got out of it. It was like art, we just left it,’ recalled Richard Evans. Predictably stoned, they were heading home across the King’s Road and over Albert Bridge when the car’s unusual paint scheme drew the attention of a police vehicle. ‘A policeman says to Joe, “We can do this the easy way or the difficult way. Where’s the acid?” The car hasn’t got any acid in it, but there’s dope. Joe says, “OK, officer, it’s a fair cop. It’s in the battery.” They searched us and the car, but they never found the hash.’

Had the visit to Plumpton festival and the Hyde Park one-day event been a test-run for Johnny Mellor? At the end of those 1969 school holidays the Isle of Wight festival was held, an epic event that had Bob Dylan topping an extraordinary bill, among them the Who, and attracted an audience of a quarter of a million. Johnny went with Dick the Shit in the psychedelic Austin. ‘We went to the Isle of Wight a week before, like the way Joe would go to Glastonbury later,’ said Richard Evans. ‘And we stayed there afterwards. We lived there for at least two weeks, building a little camp. It was great.’ The Isle of Wight festival marked Johnny Mellor’s first long-term immersion in an alternative existence. He found that he liked it. And the next year, which featured an equally stellar bill, culminating in the last performance in Britain by Jimi Hendrix, he and Dick the Shit went back again. This time the musical extravaganza ended in a state of nearanarchy as Ladbroke Grove agit-prop hippie group Hawkwind established an alternative festival on a hill overlooking the site. Johnny Mellor liked that even more: Hawkwind became for long one of his favourite groups.

Late in 1969 Ron and Anna Mellor returned to Britain from their posting in Malawi. From now on Ron, who was now fifty-three, would travel daily up to the Foreign Office in Whitehall: in the 1970 New Year’s Day honours list he received an MBE. That Christmas of 1969 Johnny Mellor persuaded Ron and Anna to let him throw a party at 15 Court Farm Road, the only one he held there. The event turned out to be a little different from the social events with which his parents had been familiar at overseas diplomatic functions. Their son photocopied invitations describing how to get to the Mellor family home. Like any apprehensive host he was concerned that the event would run smoothly. Anxiously he wrote to Paul Buck, who had left CLFS the previous summer, at his home in East Sussex. He’d invited ninety people, he told his friend, before getting to the heart of his worries: ‘“How long does it take to drink a pint of beer? About 10 minutes,” he said. So he’s imagining the whole party running dry in ten minutes. It didn’t.’

‘By 8.30 in the evening no one was left standing,’ said Ken Powell, ‘not because of alcohol or other substances, but because of romantic inclinations. People were all over each other: there wasn’t a single space on the couch, or on the floor.’ Ron and Anna kept discreetly out of the way, until at the end of the evening there was some disagreement between Ron and his youngest son. ‘I remember at the end,’ said Paul Buck, ‘his father wasn’t happy about something, and Joe said, “Yeah, well it’s my pigeon now, isn’t it?” I can remember that phrase, because I hadn’t heard it before.’

Earlier that year Adrian Greaves had also thrown a party. By now Joe had a steady girlfriend at CLFS, ‘a lovely girl called Melanie Meakins, with curly black hair and freckles and fresh skin, who was younger than him’. Johnny Mellor spent his entire time at the party in the garden, snuggled up with Melanie inside the tent he had pitched that afternoon. ‘Sexual relationships were mainly between the boarders,’ said Ken Powell. ‘You didn’t have any parental control. And there would be people you were close to, with hormones running around. A highly charged and exciting situation. Nice, really. We were all on heat.’ Johnny Mellor told his friends that he lost his virginity on another weekend visit to Adrian Greaves’ parents’ house. (It is not clear whether or not this was with Melanie.)

In the summer of 1969, when Johnny Mellor was still sixteen, he had gone with his family to the wedding of Stephen Macfarland, a cousin on his father’s side. The Macfarlands lived in Acton in west London. Another guest at the wedding was Gerry King, another paternal cousin, a pretty girl: ‘John was there, and I had never met him before. He was about sixteen, and I was about twenty-four. We were chatting, and hit it off. We spent the whole wedding day together. In the evening, after all the other guests had left, we all stayed together behind at Stephen’s, all the young people. I really, really liked him. I could feel his charisma. I could feel that he was different. He told me about all his dreams, that he was really going to do something with his life – though he didn’t say what. He seemed very restless, and he was very articulate. At the end he gave me a coral necklace that he had with him.’

Sixteen-year-old Johnny Mellor, at the wedding of his cousin Stephen Macfarland – Anna Mellor, his mother, is on the left. (Gerry King)

At the wedding reception John Mellor learnt that his cousin had been to school with the Who’s Pete Townshend, and that an early version of the Who had even played in the basement of the house in which the wedding reception was held; Jonathan showed his cousin an acoustic guitar he owned, on which he said Townshend had occasionally played. Johnny Mellor took the guitar back to school and tried out rudimentary chords, notably those of Cream’s version of blues master Willie Dixon’s ‘Spoonful’; although Paul Buck made a bass guitar in woodwork, and would attempt to play with Johnny in their joint study, the Mellor boy was defeated by the need for assiduous practice. But he acquired another ‘instrument’, a feature of his corner of the CLFS study, a portable typewriter, an unusual possession for an English schoolboy: in later life a portable typewriter would often accompany him. Its acquisition at this stage could be an indication that he saw some form of writing as his future.

John Mellor spent the summer of 1969 suitably fuelled on pints of bitter and quid-deals of Lebanese hash, with Paul Buck and two of his friends, Steve White and Pete Silverton, cruising the pubs and lanes of Sussex and Kent in Steve White’s Vauxhall Viva van, close to Pete Silverton’s home town of Tunbridge Wells, looking for parties and girls. ‘It was always good fun,’ remembered White, ‘going to these parties where you’d end up staying for three or four days, lying around in gardens and fields, especially after The Man had come up from Hastings with the gear.’ (Another friend, Andy Secombe, recalls, ‘I remember fetching up in a field in Betchworth in Surrey – I’ve no idea why – at about 2 a.m., and he was jumping up and down with a Party 7 beer can and being very “lit up”.’) ‘I’ve no visual memory of what Joe looked like when I first met him,’ said Silverton, ‘except his hair was long. We all had long hair. This was the late 1960s. But I can remember him writing and doodling in this curled way, with his left hand. He and Paul Buck would incessantly play Gloria by Them, as though it was the only record in the world.’

Like his new crew of compadres, Johnny Mellor was attired in the uniform of the day: flared jeans and jeans jackets, worn with coloured, often check shirts and reasonably tight crew-neck sweaters; an army surplus greatcoat was considered highly desirable, as was a second-hand fur coat, preferably moth-eaten: Johnny Mellor went out of his way to acquire one of these.

Significantly, both Steve White and Pete Silverton remembered being introduced to Johnny Mellor as ‘Woody’. ‘Paul Buck was known as Pablo then,’ added Silverton. ‘He didn’t suddenly become Pablo Labritain in the days of punk – that was something that was going on since he was sixteen.’ Later, Paul Buck – Pablo, as he still prefers to be known – gave me an explanation, suggesting Steve and Pete might be slightly inaccurate. ‘All Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band changed their names. So we did. My name was Pablo, and he was Woolly Census. Next time I saw him after he’d left school, he said “No, no: I’m Woody now.” It was just kids’ stuff.’

In the mythology of Joe Strummer, his ‘Woody’ nickname has always been said to be a tribute to the great American left-wing folk-singer Woody Guthrie, which Joe was happy to go along with – but there seems to have been a much simpler, rather less romantic explanation. It’s easy to see how ‘Woolly’ could mutate to the more direct ‘Woody’ – to Pablo, Johnny Mellor wrote letters signed ‘Wood’. Such nicknaming is an everyday feature of public school life, almost part of a rite of passage in which pupils are given a new identity – as Johnny became ‘Mee-lor’, for example.

Years later, in 1999, Pete Silverton bumped into Joe Strummer in a pub in Primrose Hill. ‘He started telling stories about when I first knew him, which he remembered in great detail, but I don’t. Many of these involved drug-taking in teenage years and police raiding parties – that sort of normal thing. Specifically, he remembered a party at which I convinced the police that nothing untoward was taking place while being totally off my head. Joe remembered that I explained very logically and convincingly to the police there was nothing going on out of the ordinary despite the fact that Pablo was in the bath with his girlfriend. Perhaps that was why the police prolonged the interview, on the grounds that there was a naked woman in the place.’

With Woody, Pablo and Steve White, Pete Silverton gatecrashed parties throughout the summer of 1969. It was, he said, ‘the kind of area where you count the staircases: most of the parties we went to were in two-staircase houses. None of us were rich, but we went to rich girls’ homes on the edge of the country. We were always welcome gatecrashers, but also always over in the corner with the drugs. There was lots of hash around, lots of acid.’ The consumption of drugs, in fact, seemed to take precedence over sex. ‘There was not a high level of sexual activity,’ according to Pete Silverton. ‘A bit, but not a lot. It was more people having sex with their girlfriends, and even then not everybody.’

I mentioned to Silverton that in the opinion of Adrian Greaves Johnny Mellor had by this time become sardonic and sneering, an attitude in which he shared companionship with Paul Buck. ‘That explains how they fitted in with our circle. In our circle they were warm, generous people. There was a sense of superiority amongst all of us of being the coolest people around.’

In a class below Johnny at CLFS was Anne, or Annie, Day, from an army family based in Germany. By the time Annie got to know John in the school choir, he was in the Sixth Form, known as either ‘Woody’ or – another nickname – ‘Johnny Red’. Annie Day became a ‘sort of girlfriend’ of Johnny Mellor: ‘We snogged a bit, but we weren’t full on.’ Perhaps the state of his teeth held him back: ‘When he kissed you he didn’t quite open his mouth. He was always really embarrassed about his teeth.’ There was a considerable age gap between Annie Day and Johnny Mellor; as he matured into the character of Joe Strummer, this became a pattern.

‘We clicked. We just got on well. I think what really cemented our friendship was that every Wednesday afternoon at school, every single class did games. I was excused from games pretty much the whole of the summer. Instead of Joe doing games, he was given free range to use the art department whenever he liked: he was in the Upper Sixth, doing his art A-level, so he used to spend all his time in the art room. At the time he was doing a 27-foot-long painting, and I became his artist’s assistant. I thought he was a really talented artist. I had a conversation with him where I said: “You are going to be really famous and I think you will be famous for your art.”’

For the Christmas celebrations in his final year at CLFS, Johnny Mellor did a series of pop-art-style, comic-strip-like paintings which were put up on display in the school dining-hall. In the manner of Roy Lichtenstein, whose examples of the genre were widely popular, he adorned them with speech bubbles bearing such Marvel-type utterances as ‘BIFF!’ and ‘POW!’ These did not meet with the approval of Mr Michael Kemp, the headmaster. The paintings were only passed for public consumption after each one of them had been altered to the more seasonal ‘Happy Christmas!’

In the Lent edition of The Ashteadian (‘The Journal of City of London Freemen’s School’), in his last year at the school, ‘J.G. Mellor’ is listed as one of the nine boys and eight girls who are school prefects. On page 10, beneath the heading of ‘Dramatic Society’, there is a brief appeal: ‘Again I would like to make a strong plea for material, in the form of songs, sketches or jokes which should be handed into the prefects’ room,’ signed, ‘JOHN MELLOR (Chairman)’. Elsewhere, John Mellor is listed as ‘School cross-country running champion’; surprisingly, as he was hardly the tallest of competitors, on Sports’ Day he also won the high jump. But his approach to school games was flexible; he picked the volleyball teams on the basis of whoever he felt like hanging out and talking with, perfunctorily playing the game whenever teachers turned up.

On Saturday nights he would put on entertainments, ‘off-the-wall things’, said Ken Powell. One such evening was clearly influenced by a parody of The Sound of Music as regularly performed by the then highly popular Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. It proved inspirational for Andy Secombe: ‘I’d never seen anything like it: it was really fantastic, hysterically funny.’ Adrian Greaves recalls Johnny Mellor appearing alongside him in a production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. ‘He also had a small role in Sandy Wilson’s Free As Air, with one line, “Dinner is served,” delivered in a French accent.’

In Reaction: The School Poetry Magazine, Number 1 (‘A selection of the poems from Reaction will be printed weekly in the Leatherhead Advertiser,’ the reader is advised.), published early in his final year at CLFS, John Mellor has written a poem entitled ‘Drunken Dreams’ – aptly enough, one might think with the benefit of hindsight. It is short, only four lines long, and telling: ‘And the pebbles fight each other as rocks / And my father bends among them / Two hands out-stretching shouting up to me / Not that I can hear.’

In his obituary of Joe in the Washington Post, Desson Thomson, a writer on the paper, recalled his years spent at CLFS. John Mellor, Thomson recalled, was very unlike the other prefects at the school. He had, he said, ‘a fantastic, surrealistic and absurd sense of humour’. ‘Prefects never gave us the time of day, except to beat us or force us to polish their shoes. John Mellor was the one with the implied twinkle. Always playing pranks, mind games. Not as cruel as the others. Always funny. I suddenly remember that he once wore a T-shirt with a heart on it. It said: “In case of emergency, tear out.” … “Thomson, you’re in for the high jump,” he thundered one night, after catching me talking in the dormitory after lights out. I was shaking. Even Mellor could be like the rest of them, at times. This was going to hurt. Solemnly, he made me stand in front of my bed. Withdrew a leather slipper from his foot and told me … to jump over my bed. End of punishment.’ And every single night John Mellor would make the eleven-year-old Desson Thomson sing the Rolling Stones’ Off the Hook. ‘He made me recite the names of the band members. Who plays bass? Bill Wyman, I told him. What about the drummer? Charlie Watts. Right, he said. Who’s your favourite band? The Rolling Stones! Not the poxy Beatles.’

7

THE MAGIC VEST

1970–1971

Towards the end of the 1960s the ever withdrawn David Mellor began to assert his identity in an unexpected way. An extreme inner change in his personality was externally expressed in the visual world he erected around him. When Richard Evans went round to 15 Court Farm Road not long after David’s eighteenth birthday, he was very surprised: ‘I went into his bedroom and David had completely changed it. It had been just a normal boy’s room and now it had Nazi pictures all around it, swastikas and images of Hitler: he had become extremely extreme. Very strange. It seemed to happen in about a day. He’d gone off on this extreme tangent.’ Perhaps as a rebellion against the fervour of left-wing revolutionary thought, and Ron Mellor’s socialism, David Mellor had joined the National Front, the extreme right-wing British political party. ‘That was the point at which both Joe and I were aware something was going on we didn’t understand. At that point I felt closer to Joe than to David. But what was going on with David, I just didn’t understand.’

David Mellor left CLFS in July 1969; to the consternation of his family and Richard Evans, he had decided to become a chiropodist, treating foot ailments such as corns and bunions. ‘It made no sense. But he insisted. And off he went to college in London.’ ‘David was studying chiropody, Johnny was going to be a cartoonist,’ Iain Gillies was told. In September, David Mellor moved up to London into a hostel on Tottenham Court Road in the West End.

Towards the end of his first year at chiropody college he severed contact with his parents and brother, not telephoning or staying in touch. His mother believed him to be in the grip of depression, which she attributed to anxiety over exams. Johnny Mellor was very concerned for his elder brother. Many an artist is given the dubious blessing of a gift that can be defined simply as intuitive or – more complex and loaded – as ‘psychic’; one theory insists this is the consequence of early trauma and that such predictive insight is an inbuilt defence mechanism. By the early summer of 1970 Johnny Mellor had a presentiment that something about his brother was not right. Then the Mellor family learnt that David had been missing from his hostel for a week. Deeply worried, Johnny Mellor set off with Richard Evans to find his brother. They scoured their old play-haunts, especially a nearby abandoned World War II aerodrome, sprinkled with wartime pill-boxes like the one that sits at the gate to Carnmhor. ‘At that point Joe and I became twins. All I remember is that we knew something had happened to David. At the aerodrome was this pill-box, with a rusty old door, it’s dark and dank. We went in but found nothing.’

On 31 July 1970 David Mellor was found dead on a bench on an island on a lake in Regents’ Park, not far from the hostel in which he was staying. The cause of death was given as aspirin poisoning, following the ingestion of 100 of the tablets. The verdict was suicide.

David’s self-inflicted death cast a pall of depression over the remainder of the lives of Ron and Anna Mellor. They would never recover. Johnny was equally afflicted. He said the worst day of his life was when he had to identify the body of his brother, which had lain undiscovered in a park for three days. Surviving members of families in which suicide has occurred are frequently blighted by the endless nagging fear that they may also succumb to taking their own lives. ‘Does it run in the family?’ is a deeply rooted fear.

On two occasions I spoke to Joe Strummer about the death of David. I felt a professional need to do this, to get something on the record about what seemed a cathartic moment in his life. But each time I asked him, I wished that I hadn’t, so great was Joe’s recoil into himself, every defence mechanism instantly raised, the atmosphere suddenly spiky. The first time was in his hotel room in Aberdeen in July 1978, where he was on tour with the Clash. Then he admitted that David’s death ‘happened at a pretty crucial time in my life … He was such a nervous guy that he couldn’t bring himself to talk at all. Couldn’t speak to anyone. In fact, I think him committing suicide was a really brave thing to do. For him, certainly. Even though it was a total cop-out.’

Then, twenty-one years later, in November 1999 in Las Vegas, I tried again – I sincerely felt that the death of David must have been such a great issue in his life that there must be more to be found out about it, especially as Joe had just admitted to me that for years he had been in a state of depression. Joe told me he was sixteen when David died, and that he had been in the National Front.

‘And it just did his head in?’

‘Well, I don’t know if that did. Who knows? You can’t say, can you? But I don’t think it was being in the NF that did his head in.’

‘Was your brother’s suicide a catalyst? How did it affect you?’

‘I don’t know how it affects people. It’s a terrible thing for parents.’

That was it: Joe paused for a long, long time – I couldn’t tell whether he was being deeply thoughtful, or indicating the end of this line of questioning.

Richard Evans says that he and Johnny never once talked abut the death of David. Paul Buck says it was the same with him. People around Johnny describe his response as having been, essentially, no response. Richard Evans, however, feels there was a discernible shift in his friend: ‘I think he … maybe he did change a bit, but only in terms of more focused.’ This would hardly be surprising: tragedy in the family often acts as a spur for other members. ‘All I know is that within a year Joe had gone to Central School of Art. We’re still reeling from David, and Joe went off to Central.’

Johnny Mellor’s response to David’s death was no different from that of his parents: for them it became an unmentionable subject, an indication of the terrible grief and shock that they were suffering. As we know the Mackenzies were always very ‘close’ when it came to family secrets, and Anna, though grief-stricken beyond belief, toed the familiar line, Ron going along with this. Anna’s family in Scotland had noted that the previous year the Mellors hadn’t been in touch, failing to send their habitual Christmas cards. ‘As a small boy and later, I remember my mother reading out the greetings from the Mellors’ annual Christmas card, always from somewhere far away and overseas,’ said Iain Gillies. ‘I enjoyed this seasonal ritual. My mother was puzzled that we had not received a Christmas card from the Mellors in December 1970. She commented on this.’

It was not until over two months later, when Iain Gillies hitch-hiked down to London to check out an art school he was thinking of attending, that the story came out. ‘I went to London to apply to St Martin’s School of Art in early March 1971. I hadn’t seen Aunt Anna and Uncle Ron and cousins David and Johnny in seven or eight years and I wanted to reconnect with them. In the mid-afternoon of the 9th of March 1971 I went to their house and found no one at home. Their neighbour asked me what I wanted. I told her who I was and she said I’d better come across to her house.

‘On her front step I mentioned that Uncle Ron and Aunt Anna had two sons, my cousins. “They’ve only got one son now,” she said. I asked what she was talking about. In a very dramatic and hushed voice she said, “David … he took his life.” Those exact words. She invited me into her house where I sat stunned for maybe an hour or so, my mind flicking back to my memories of David. For a few moments I thought she might be deranged and was making this up. Eventually Ron arrived home next door. Ron thanked his neighbour for her hospitality to me.

‘Ron was welcoming. As we went into his house Ron said that his neighbour was very kind but I should not start thinking they’re all like that. Meaning, I suppose, the population of the Home Counties. Ron and I sat in the living room. He surmised very quickly that I had been told about David. We then left to collect Anna from her nursing job at the local hospital.

‘Anna was surprised to see me. She was friendly and said it was a welcome surprise to have me visit. She told me they had been in contact with David a few days before he died, saying they were going to meet him somewhere in London, but he called to say he had to return to his hostel to pick up a bag. Their meeting didn’t take place. Within five to ten minutes Anna said she couldn’t talk about it any more. Later that evening Aunt Anna said that David had liked to spend time out in “no man’s land”, the bushy area just over their back garden fence. It was indeed a difficult time. I felt very sad for them and all of us. They told me what John was doing. Aunt Anna and Uncle Ron had some charmingly detailed naïf paintings that Johnny had done in Malawi. They said Johnny had enjoyed being there and meeting the people who lived in the mud hut dwellings that were in his paintings. Uncle Ron told me that David had found Malawi to be “troubling”. I stayed the night in David’s old bedroom, which had remained as David had left it. I stayed awake far into the night.’

Ron and Anna Mellor’s ghastly difficulties over David did not end with his death. Acting with its characteristic blend of insensitivity and profound hypocrisy about the death of one of its parishioners, the local Anglican church at first refused to bury David as he had committed the sin of suicide. ‘Anna had to fight to get David buried,’ remembered Richard Evans. ‘Eventually he was buried in Warlingham.’ Along with Keith Wellsted, a friend of Johnny Mellor with whom he would sometimes stay at half-term at his parents’ home in Suffolk, Ken Powell from CLFS went to the funeral with Johnny to offer support. Some twenty or so mourners were present. ‘I’m sure it affected him, but he wasn’t in pieces,’ said Ken. ‘Whereas Joe was quite ebullient, his brother wasn’t. I can remember going to the house after the funeral, thinking how dreadful it must be for his parents. At the house the sadness was all-pervading.’

Iain Gillies told me Joe had shown him David’s suicide note: ‘It was the evening of Anna’s funeral, about the 3rd or 4th of January 1987, that Joe and I went up to the loft at Court Farm Road. He passed me a few things to look at and then a piece of folded paper. It was David’s suicide note. I had not known of its existence and I was very surprised at Joe showing it to me. I read it silently, sighed, and handed it back to him. Neither of us said a word about it. We went back downstairs. Thinking back to that day, 9 March 1971, when I was first sitting alone with Uncle Ron in his living room, he did say something about David leaving a note. By the time Joe showed it to me sixteen years later I had forgotten about this and also presumed, perhaps naïvely, that it would have been destroyed. I was asked not to repeat its contents.’

Two weeks after David’s suicide, his younger brother went on an already planned holiday with Paul Buck. You can imagine the hushed, tearful conversations between the desperate Ron and Anna: ‘Best for him to get out of the house, let’s try and let things get back to normal.’

Johnny Mellor had booked two ‘berths’ for four nights, beginning on 13 August 1970, for £1 at the Cuckmere camping site near Newhaven in East Sussex. ‘He rang me up and he said his brother had committed suicide and I was shocked,’ said Paul Buck. ‘I think he just wanted to blank off from it. He didn’t really talk about it on that camping trip. Except for one time he came back to the tent and he said, “I’ve just washed with my dead brother’s soap.” I don’t know whether he felt guilty or not. People do, don’t they, family?’

Johnny ‘Woolly’ Mellor outside a shop in Horam, East Sussex, in 1970. (Pablo Labritain)

The two teenagers spent a nice time on their camping trip, hitch-hiking the sixty or so miles to the south coast and extending the four days for another three. (‘We weren’t that grown up because I rang my mum and asked if she minded if we stayed a bit longer.’) Yet Paul Buck was aware of the shadow of death that lay over the holiday: ‘Certainly at the time he was in denial. They turned their backs on what had happened to David, but not in a callous way. While we there, all the time we heard this Joni Mitchell line, “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone,” from Big Yellow Taxi. That bothered him.’

There is a picture Paul has of Johnny on the shoreline, looking happily miserable, seeing the irony of the mistake he has just made: he has run into the sea, straight into a submerged boulder, and banged his shin. There’s another one with a nameless pretty girl who had been at CLFS and happened to be staying on the campsite. Johnny and Paul had a little hash with them, and in the evenings would drink in the local pubs and try and get off with girls.