Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer

In the summer of 1971 the second Glastonbury festival took place, with a very special guest. Michael Eavis, a dairy farmer who on his own land held the Glastonbury festival, for which admission was £1, was contacted by the devotees of the Guru Maharaj Ji and his Divine Light Mission: ‘We’ve got God in town: can we bring him to the festival?’ ‘It was very odd,’ Eavis told the writer Mick Brown for his book The Spiritual Tourist. ‘Somebody said God had arrived and could we put him on stage, and my thought was: Well, the festival’s for everybody really, so why not? By the time he went on stage everybody in the audience was completely stoned out of their minds, and you could hear this ripple going around, “Wow! That’s God!” Then he started preaching against drugs, which I think everybody there found a bit disconcerting.’ Guru Maharaj Ji, a pudgyfaced 13-year-old Indian boy, had been whisked down to Glastonbury in a Rolls-Royce rented to honour him by those who were already his followers.

Maharaj Ji’s unique selling point was the promise of ‘inner peace’ through the practice of meditation techniques known as ‘Knowledge’. As this is also a term for the rigorous training undertaken by London taxi-drivers, I can never hear the term in a Maharaj Ji context without visualizing fleets of black cabs. Maharaj Ji now lives in some splendour near Zuma beach, north of Malibu, in southern California.

That 1971 Glastonbury festival was the moment at which the Divine Light Mission planted itself in the (un)consciousness of potential followers in the UK. One of them was Woody Mellor, who had been a visitor to the 1971 Glastonbury festival. Helen Cherry said: ‘Like me, Joe got into Guru Maharaj Ji and we used to go to that a lot.’ I recall telling Joe Strummer during the time of punk how I’d once done a course in Transcendental Meditation and him surprising me by replying, ‘Yeah, I did something like that.’

This interest in Maharaj Ji was not a fleeting craze for Woody Mellor. For over a year the eastern religion filtered ceaselessly through to his brain via the habitual haze of marijuana smoke around him: the following year Iain Gillies visited Woody at his next address, at Ridley Road in Harlesden, and his cousin asked Iain the question, ‘Who are you Scots into?’ ‘I said I liked the artist Egon Schiele and Dylan Thomas. Woody pointed to a poster on the wall of Guru Maharaj Ji: “We’re into him. We think he’s cool.”’ This revelation of his cousin’s mystical leanings startled Iain: ‘I said, “You’re into him?”’ The next day Iain came across Woody in the kitchen explaining to someone how to rob a nearby bank.

Don’t we naturally wonder if Woody Mellor’s fascination with Guru Maharaj Ji could have been a consequence of the death of David? Doesn’t tragedy often oblige those left in its wake to seek an answer in some form of religious figurehead? Or was Woody simply infected with the ubiquitous mystical spirit of the times?

Richard ‘Dick the Shit’ Evans, also became an adherent of Maharaj Ji. ‘Helen had a huge spiritual side to her. I think we got sucked in. I learnt a lot of things, like breathing techniques, that I still use today. There would be emphasis on things like, “I want you to think of nothing,” and you just can’t. Woody and I did it for about a year. It suddenly occurred to us that it wasn’t that interesting.’

Woody was not ‘fanatical’ about the Divine Light Mission, Helen Cherry said, but would certainly meditate for the requisite hour every day. ‘Guru Maharaj Ji had a big function in Central Hall, in central London, the first public meeting in London. Joe saw him, but I don’t think he met him personally. He would hang around the ashram in north London a bit, but not as much as me.’ Deborah Kartun did not approve or participate in this allegiance to Maharaj Ji: ‘I’d been brought up in an atheist family.’

Something else had happened to Woody Mellor at that Glastonbury festival. During the set by Arthur Brown, the self-proclaimed ‘God of Hellfire’, a rooster called Hector had flown up and perched himself atop an imposing crucifix, part of the stage dressing, at the very moment it was about to be set alight during Brown’s performance highlight of his hit song ‘Fire’. Hector was almost instantly incinerated, the ultimate fast food. From that moment on Woody became a vegetarian: he decorated a soap tin for Helen with drawings and the adage: ‘We love to eat nuts and honey.’ (‘I lost it, and I nagged him that I couldn’t live without one, so the next one he did said, “Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette.”’) Shortly afterwards, returning home from a party towards breakfast time, Woody Mellor picked up a pint of milk that had just been delivered to a doorstep and was promptly arrested by a passing policeman: in court the next morning he was fined a few pounds, earning a criminal record for petty theft. Did this lead to a certain amount of musing on the nature of drinking cow’s milk? Soon he announced to all and sundry that the drinking of milk was a con trick by the Milk Marketing Board: ‘He thought milk was very bad for you,’ said Helen. ‘He felt that people should have never been persuading children in the 1950s to drink milk.’ He maintained this view for the rest of his life.

With almost painful slowness, Woody Mellor began to angle himself in the direction of the career choice he had expressed to his father. The arrival of Tymon Dogg at 18 Ash Grove, along with the presence of the accomplished guitarist Clive Timperley, proved inspirational. ‘I remember Joe singing this chorus, I’m going to be sick / I wanna puke up in a bucket of water, and trying to play it on Tymon’s ukulele,’ said Helen

Soon their time at Vomit Heights was at an end. ‘Ash Grove was falling apart after we’d lived there for a year,’ said Helen. ‘There was a bit of damage: there had been so much dancing at one party the kitchen ceiling had come down, and Tymon somehow destroyed the garden.’ It was time to move.

In September 1971 the Vomit Heights crowd moved into a second-floor, three-bedroom flat at 34 Ridley Road, Harlesden, rented from an Irish couple; with occasional exceptions, Woody’s subsequent London addresses would draw closer and closer to Notting Hill until he was living in the area proper. For some reason, Woody Mellor always insisted that his new address was in Willesden, although that is at least a mile to the north. Was this because Harlesden was considered an almost unmentionably rough area, an underclass immigrant district locked away into its own world because it was so badly served by public transport? Helen lived there with her boyfriend Robert Basey; Woody shared a room with Kit Buckler, a friend from Ralph West who had booked the groups at his own college – when Kit moved out he was replaced by Dick the Shit; a Frenchman had the third bedroom, little more than a box-room; and Tymon Dogg slept in the communal living-room.

It was not a great time for Woody Mellor. No longer financially underpinned by the government grant he had received as a student at Central, he was frequently virtually destitute. He had sunk to the ocean-floor of life: the dank, threatening district of Harlesden was a long way mentally from the landscaped lawns of the City of London Freemen’s School, or the quaint village-like life of Upper Warlingham. Woody was, said Helen, ‘very lost at the end of the art college year’, although his spirits were still underpinned by his devotions to Guru Maharaj Ji. He briefly worked laying carpets, following this with flat-cleaning jobs. He attempted to start a painting and decorating business called HIC, which stood for Head in the Clouds, but this attempt at business stalled almost from its inception.

Iain Gillies came to stay a few times, and he and Woody would stay up all night: ‘On a couple of occasions, as I was making my way to bed at 8 o’clock in the morning, Joe would say that he had to go off to do a flat-cleaning job.’

In a letter to Annie Day, Woody gives his impression of the district in which he is living: ‘This pad is in a pretty GRIM area like goods yards etc etc Oh yeah loads of spades like this:’ He has illustrated this thought with a distinctly politically incorrect cartoon of a black man wearing a sweater emblazoned with the slogan OOGA BOOGA, dancing in front of a house that bears the number ‘34’. Out of the top window peers a character with a question-mark emerging from the top of his head, who you assume can only be the letter’s signatory – who in this instance is ‘Johnny Red’. Stuck next to the cartoon black guy is a celebrated frame from the then renowned underground press cartoon strip ‘The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers’, in which the stoned hero holds a handful of joints and is mouthing the speech bubble, ‘Well, as we all know, DOPE will get you through times of NO MONEY better than MONEY will get you through times of NO DOPE!’ (It is worth noting that in hip circles of the time in Britain to call black people ‘spades’ was considered a sort of cool political correctness … )

Poverty meant that Woody would occasionally stoop to shoplifting, at which he was not very good. ‘One time,’ said Helen, ‘we were in this bakery, and I could tell that he was going to go for this mince pie. He ordered some bread and as this poor woman turned round to get it, he stole this mince pie off the top of the counter and put it into the big dirty old fur coat that he had. But he’d forgotten that it had no pocket in it, and so this mince pie came tumbling out by his foot on the floor, and the woman spotted it. It was so embarrassing that I just couldn’t stop laughing as we followed him out of the door, trailing crumbs behind him. He was just no good as a thief, made a complete balls-up of it. He hadn’t thought it out at all. He was better at dressing up as a poor boy and putting it on for the greengrocer, he was quite good at that. He would help me in the kitchen so long as it was something he wanted to eat, so long as it was carrots and sweetcorn. He seemed to eat sweetcorn every day.

‘He was a very sincere person, and you were very lucky if you had him as a friend, because he had an energy, a spark. Sometimes we’d spend whole evenings by getting out a piece of wallpaper and having drawing fights. We’d have battles: he’d imagine something and he’d draw it, and say, “This is coming to get you.” I’d have to do a drawing back to put his men down and send in another missile. I remember him getting hold of one of my sketchbooks and starting in felt-tip in the corner, “This is Gonad”: it was all about this poor chap called Gonad. He was very good at starting some of the titles, but the endings … No, he didn’t get a lot of endings.’

Woody’s missive to Anne Day from 34 Ridley Road – soon he would be physically ejected from the property. (Anne Day)

On visits to his parents, John Mellor would gloss over the hand-to-mouth existence he was living. ‘Woody tried to reassure his father that he was on the correct career path by announcing that he had secured a desk job,’ said Iain Gilles. ‘A few seconds later he added that he would be sweeping up for a Warlingham cabinet maker. Ron thought that this was very funny.’

In a letter that he sent to Paul Buck in December 1971, Woody included a centre-spread poster of Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant – whose first albums he had loved at CLFS – from the weekly music paper Sounds. He had satirically improved the picture of this archetypal rock-god, including a speech-bubble that read, ‘Look at me, I’m wonderful,’ and adding drawings of holes in the singer’s arm with one word appended to them: ‘heroin’. The letter contains instructions for a then current urban myth about a method of getting high, on a par with – but probably much more dangerous than – their efforts to smoke banana-skins at CLFS: it consisted of boiling toadstools in red wine, the drinking of which was alleged to promote an interesting trip. ‘I don’t know: I’m afraid,’ he admitted in his letter. ‘But there’s plenty of guinea pigs here. I had a hair cut last Monday, hope you’re still in this room 8 of yours, otherwise you are not going to get this poster. Why don’t you come up? Love the Wood Bird.’

By early spring of 1972 Woody had begun to accompany Tymon Dogg down to the West End on his busking expeditions in the tiled corridors of the London tube system. They would hit the underground in the late evening, ‘when we judged everyone in town was drunk’. At first Woody Mellor simply acted as Tymon’s ‘bottler’, his money-collector; their regular pitch was at Green Park, where the Piccadilly and Victoria lines converge. ‘That’s how I got into playing, following Tymon Dogg around in the London underground and first collecting money for him like a Mississippi bluesman apprentice.’ Then Woody moved up in the world: ‘I bought a ukulele, ’cos I figured that had to be easier than a guitar, having only four strings.’ The instrument, for which he paid £2.99, came from a Shaftesbury Avenue music shop: ‘I began to learn Chuck Berry songs on the ukulele, and go out on my own, down in the London underground.’ One night when Tymon Dogg decided to try his luck one stop up the Victoria line at Oxford Circus, he left Woody at Green Park with his ukulele. ‘The train emptied at one end of the corridor. One second the corridor was empty, the next it was packed with people streaming through. It was like, now or never, playing to this full house. That was the first time I remember performing on my own.’ Realizing how crucial it was to grab the attention of his prospective audience in seconds, an attitude he developed in the future, Woody came up with a repertoire of Chuck Berry songs: ‘Once I was playing “Sweet Little Sixteen” on the ukulele and an American happened to walk past and he stopped in front of me and went, “I don’t believe it, I can’t believe it,” and he began smacking his forehead, and staggering around, and nearly fainting, and I stopped playing and said, “What? What?” And he went, “You’re playing Chuck Berry on a ukulele!” And I hadn’t considered it to be odd at all. I only started to think it was a bit odd after this American had, like he was nearly banging his head on the subway wall with the ridiculousness of it. And so I just carried on with that, and eventually I got a guitar.’

Then they were evicted from their flat. The Irish landlady’s displeasure with her tenants seems to have been based on a number of factors that had equal weighting; but they mainly focused on the fact that Woody had taken in a mentally distressed black tramp, giving him his bed.

Helen Cherry had a certain sympathy with the response of the woman and her husband: ‘I mean, we did make a terrible mess of 34 Ridley Road, and they could probably see that this was all a bit anarchic. “What is going on in our place?” So they kicked us out really badly. They just turned up, let themselves in and started dragging people down the stairs and putting everything in black bags and throwing it out of windows. They were larger than we were, and took everyone by surprise. My boyfriend was dragged down the steps. All our stuff was just thrown out in bags.’ ‘We were paying rent,’ said Dick the Shit, ‘but the landlord and his wife came up, with a couple of Irish mates, and they physically threw all our stuff out of the house, onto the road.’ After being manhandled down the stairs and pushed out of the house, Woody stood on the pavement in a state of shock, absolutely stunned that this had happened.

The effect of this eviction, at the end of April 1972, was for Woody’s shocked stupefaction to almost immediately transmute into furious anger. It strongly politicized his view of the property-owning classes, even though his landlord oppressors were working-class Irish. ‘I’ve been fucked up the arse by the capitalist system,’ he later told Sounds. ‘Me, personally. I’ve had the police teaming up with landlords, beating me up, kicking me downstairs, all illegally, while I’ve been waving Section 22 of the Rent Act 1965 at them. I’ve watched ’em smash all my records up, just because there was a black man in the house. And that’s your lovely capitalist way of life: “I own this, and you fuck off out of it!”’

Luckily for Helen Cherry and Tymon Dogg, Helen’s parents had a flat they used in London in Miles Buildings, a five-storey tenement walk-up between Church Street and Bell Street, close to where the beginning of the Westway crosses Edgware Road. It wasn’t available at first, however. In another two-room flat in the building lived Dave and Gail Goodall, who sewed tops and skirts that they sold at a weekend clothing stall at the then tiny Camden Market, close to Chalk Farm. At first the Ridley Road collective moved into Dave and Gail’s flat. ‘They’d put down a bed in their living room. But there would be three or four of us. I remember once even sleeping at the end of their bed. They were very generous and giving,’ said Helen.

Dave Goodall, a Jewish Marxist from Manchester who smoked ceaseless quantities of hash but could always be relied upon to come up with food or supplies of electricity, would join with Tymon Dogg in forming the two biggest influences at this time on Woody Mellor; whereas Tymon informed Woody’s musical education, Dave was at the heart of his political instruction. Coming after the unpleasant eviction from 34 Ridley Road, Dave found in Woody a candidate ripe for schooling in the possibilities of more radical means of accommodation. ‘There was a hierarchy of articulateness,’ said Jill Calvert, a cousin of Gail Goodall, ‘and Joe wasn’t necessarily at the top of it.’ He also was not that certain about himself. ‘I remember having a conversation with him in Dave and Gail’s place,’ said Helen Cherry, ‘and him saying very seriously, “Look, I want to be a guitarist, but maybe I can’t be because I should have been starting at thirteen or fourteen. I can’t just pick it up now. I’m not going to be good enough.” And my saying, “No, go for it, if that’s what you really want to do.”’

As though to drive home Dave Goodall’s lessons about the iniquities of the property-owning classes, there was no real room in his and Gail’s Miles Buildings flat, and any lodgers had to crash where they could until Gail and Dave got up in the morning – at which point Woody was always the swiftest to take their bed. In a postcard to Annie Day, dated simply ‘May 1972’, with an address given only as ‘Warrington Lane’, he tells her of his problems: ‘I have been evicted so don’t send no letters to 34 Ridley Road. At the moment I’m hitching to Wales planning to stay there. Just been to Bickershaw Festival, it rained a lot but had a pretty good time. I’ll send you my new address when I’ve got one or if not I’ll write in 2 weeks. Writing this with 1 hand standing up. Love John.’

‘Between my visits in Easter 1972 to Ridley Road and summer 1972 to Edgware Road, he had started busking in the tube with Tymon,’ remembered Iain Gillies. ‘He had his ukulele at Edgware Road, but he had plans to play some serious guitar, first left-handed and then right-handed. I said something to him about him being left-handed and he said, “Don’t worry, ’cos my left hand’s on the fret and it’s shit hot …”’

Once the guitar had arrived, Dick the Shit accompanied Woody on a couple of busking expeditions. ‘I bought this bass, so we were kind of playing: we were just learning how to do it. I used to tune his guitar for him, ’cause he couldn’t physically do it. When we were busking together all Joe could play was “Johnny B. Goode”, with a twang in his voice. I had a huge issue about this. I’d say, “We’ve got to play something else. We’re just frauds: all we can play is half a dozen chords – it’s just appalling.” He said, “Look, they’re just walking through. Nobody ever hears the second song!” He was absolutely right. He didn’t give a shit. I did, but he was right.’

‘Tymon and Woody went off to Holland to do some busking,’ said Iain. ‘But they were back in London within a day or so, having been deported as undesirables. Woody suggested that they could try again after disguising their instruments as bags of golf clubs.’

Woody Mellor was still pretty much financially destitute. Later he told Gaby Salter that at this stage of his life he was often driven to scavenging around the rotting fruit and vegetables discarded in the gutters of Soho’s Berwick Street market to find something to eat. (‘Around that time,’ said Iain Gillies, ‘Aunt Anna told me, “We let John have a little money.” Those exact words. So he had a little allowance at this “financially destitute” time.’) But soon an episode occurred on the London underground that disturbed Woody sufficiently for him to decide to abandon busking altogether as a career choice. While he was performing on his patch at Oxford Circus, a loudspeaker blasted out above his head, commanding him to stop playing and advising him that the Transport Police had been despatched to arrest him. As he told Paul Morley in the NME, ‘This guy walked past, and I screamed at him, “Can you hear that? This is 1984!” And he gave me a funny look, and rushed off. I thought, “Ah, fuck it,” and packed it in.’

At this point, early in the summer of 1972, several of the former Ridley Road collective also said ‘Ah, fuck it’ to London. The father of a friend owned a farm outside Blandford Forum in Dorset, 140 miles to the west of London and for the last nine or so months Woody and his friends from Ridley Road, with the addition of Deborah Kartun, would frequently hitchhike down there for a few days’ respite from London. But now, because of their lack of permanent accommodation in London, a planned ’weekend in Dorset’ turned into a stay of two months. As, according to Dick the Shit, ‘there was all sorts of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll’ going on, a blind eye needed to be turned by the farm owner, who happened to be the local Justice of the Peace. The fact that an Indian tepee, in which Woody frequently slept, had been set up by the visitors on his grounds was no doubt considered only an aesthetic embellishment. Deborah Kartun joined him there for the duration: ‘the Tepee, which we shared, was really tiny. It wasn’t a “Tepee People” thing, it was one from a child’s toyshop.’

When Deborah went away for a couple of weeks on a family holiday, Woody wrote to her in a letter that fully expresses his tender feelings for her:

Dear Debbie,

My arms and legs are aching and there is straw in my hair. I have been working all day on this farm – it’s really good work because its [sic] “in time with the seasons” if you know what I mean.

I just got your letter … it was lovely. I really enjoyed reading it, and it put me in a good mood. I hope you don’t look like that drawing! Oh yeah last night we were all standing around after work getting paid when who should drive up but Ken Turner! Later on when we passed around the joints he got pissed off a bit and left. I can imagine the house and fields and woods from when we went there last time. I can see you wandering about like this.

I really would like to be with you – two weeks isn’t long at all, but I’m a bit better off than you because I’ve got something to do re work but you’re on holiday.

Love

Love

Love

Woody XXX

I LOVE YOU

Woody’s loving cartoon of Deborah Kartun. (Deborah van ber Beek, née Kartun)

But from the bottom of his heart Joe also cared for and loved his male friends. ‘Drug cocktails’ were such a specialty of the house that Dick the Shit began to develop what Woody Mellor considered to be a dependency on amphetamines. ‘He solved that problem for me by sitting me down in a room and repeatedly playing Canned Heat’s “Speed Kills”. He was being a real friend, and sorted that out for me.’

The assembled collective made ends meet by haphazardly labouring on the farm. ‘We made a life-size replica of Stonehenge out of straw bales. We all got severe bollockings for that.’

But the last straw was when Helen Cherry went down to answer the door to the postman with no clothes on. ‘He runs back to the village and announces, “There’s sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll up there.” We all got kicked out. Joe went back to town.’

For her part Deborah Kartun went off to Cardiff Art School, to begin a three-year degree course in ceramics. ‘That was when I dumped Woody. I had to split up with him: he was dropping out quite seriously, and doing a lot of speed and acid. He was becoming quite wild, and was difficult to live with – you’d make an arrangement and he’d turn up four days late.

‘But I don’t know if he realised I adored him. But we were both acting parts very much, part of that art-school thing. You know how he always acted. I remember he went to an early Gilbert and George show, and was bowled over by it. We went to a fancy-dress party where I dressed up as a vampire tough woman, gorgeous fifties’ dress, but with plastic vampire teeth. He got very upset.

‘But the acting thread ran through everything all of us did: it was play-acting, like children, all a continuation of dressing up as kids. Even his cowboys and Indians thing was part of this conceptual approach to life.’

But Woody Mellor had friends at the art school in Newport, a few miles from where Deborah was studying in Cardiff.

In November 1972 he wrote to Annie Day from Upper Warlingham at what in hindsight we may see as a pivotal point in his life; although he writes on a greetings card, which bears the image of a blue elephant – shooting flowers out of its trunk – under the light of a full moon in a floral jungle, he packs both sides with his neat italic script; the envelope is postmarked ‘Croydon Surrey, 10.45am 15 Nov 1972’, and he has appended the phrase ‘Tutti Fruti Mail Service’ by the stamp.