Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer

Dear Anne I’m doin’ a cartoon strip at the moment called ‘GONAD SLEEPS IN LATRINES’. I have to because in a flash moment I said I’d do it for the college I used to go to’s magazine. This girl was supposed to do it but she couldn’t be arsed and I saw a chance to get my famous character in print but now in the early hours of the morning I begin to weary and the cigarette smoke drifts into my eyes but with a few tons of SELF CONTROL I should finish in about 3 hours. I’m down at my parents home for the weekend and tomorrow I’m going back to London, then on Wednesday I’m going down the M4 to Newport in Wales. I’ve decided to settle down there HA-HA for a while at least. The stinking press of humanity drives me from London. I wonder how yer college education is getting on. What are you learning anyway? Will you accept belated thanks for that last letter of yours? Cut your hair? I’ve just had mine done. I wanted it Futuristic so at the moment its like the Queen’s. Last week I had a great rocknroll quiff but it takes a lot of sweat to keep it like that. Maybe I gotta use Brylcreem again. I’m playing the guitar a lot now and I’m goin down Newport to practice and get shit hot. May take a year or too [sic]. Well now, you got any young men chasing you? It might make life more interesting but NEVER believe a word they say. What do you think of the picture on the front? I got it because it looks just like a bad copy of ROUSSEAU which I suppose it is. Some of that guy’s paintings are really OK. Do you know that one with a tiger asleep in a desert with a full moon? Its my favourite, makes you want to cry if you’re drunk. And I think he was a bank clerk during the day and doing these really weird pictures at night. I got a real NIGHT scene set up here at the moment with Radio Lux just turned up dead faint so you can hardly hear the guy say “DATELINE – friendship, love and EVEN marriage”! I’m sittin at my drum kit with a drawing board on the snare drum and a spotlight on the side Tom Tom because it’s the only “table” available but I have to be careful not to tap the bass drum pedals when some rock n roll comes on because it will wake the P. and M. In one of your letters you say you were listening to the Doors, well funny you should say that because I’ve been living with a guy whose nuts on the Doors and he puts on ‘Riders of the Storm’ and I’ve been thinking it’s real good because before I didn’t reckon on them. ‘LA Woman’ that’s good too. It’s a pity Jim Morrison died he was OK. Have you heard ‘Runnin Blue’? That’s neat. Ah Kid Jensen [the Radio Luxembourg disc jockey] puts on the crummy records! I’m staying with a friend when I get to Newport but when I get a place I’ll send you the address straight off OK? I was goin to draw you a souvenir picture of Gonad but I can’t now. All my lovin John. PS. You heard Buddy Holly? Keep well XXX’

Of course, the most interesting information in this revealing missive is John Mellor’s announcement of his ability with the guitar: ‘I’m playing the guitar a lot now, and I’m goin … get shit hot. May take a year or too.’ Clearly he had decided to follow a musical course with complete dedication.

‘I ended up in Wales, after I had served my apprenticeship with Tymon Dogg, and there didn’t seem to be any way of making a living in London or surviving … and I followed a girl to Cardiff Art School, who I’d known in London, and she told me that she wasn’t interested, and I started to hitch back to London, and the first town you come to is Newport in South Wales … And then I got a job in the graveyard, got a room, crashed my way into art school, although I wasn’t at the art school, into the art school rock band, and that was really great, to learn your chops with some really kind people who let me sleep on the floor at first, and yeah that gave me a whole heap of help.’

The ‘really kind people’ were Jill Calvert, Gail Goodall’s cousin, and her boyfriend Mickey Foote. Mickey Foote had got into Newport art school ‘by accident’, said Jill. ‘He drove someone else down for an interview and got in. He was very talented.’ There was also a practical reality about this move, as Joe later told his friend Keith Allen: ‘I went there because there wasn’t any room in London. That’s why I went there. I was sleeping on someone’s floor, for a few months, in their kitchen, in a two-room flat, and you outstay your welcome. And I had a girlfriend at Cardiff Art College. So I thought I’d hitch down there and rekindle the romance. And I hitched down to Cardiff and she told me to shove off. And so I started to hitch back and the first stop off was Newport, and I had some friends there at Newport, ‘cause these were all people I’d met at the foundation year in London at Central. And I hadn’t made it into any other course so I was kind of on the lam.’

‘Suddenly,’ said Jill Calvert, ‘Joe turned up in the corridor of Newport College of Art, a massive public building, with his guitar on his back, and that was that. He was standing there, and I was very surprised. He wasn’t into Divine Light any more. Helen Cherry says he walked around at Central with a white sheet on. But when he came down to Newport he wasn’t into religion. He left all that behind him. He came with that guitar on his back and Divine Light wasn’t going to do it for him.’

Woody Mellor at first stayed with a friend from Central School of Art called Forbes Leishman, now a student at Newport, who’d taken him to the Students’ Union building on Stow Hill. At first Woody moved in with him; we get a glimpse of his life in Newport from a letter that he sent to Paul Buck:

So I’m living in Newport Mon[mouthshire]. I’m sending you a letter and want to buy you a guitar. £10 – yeah. You are getting a bass before you get a car. I don’t have my room here, but my address is Wood c/o Sir Forbes Freshman, 18 North Street, Newport, Wales. Forbes is the guy I’m staying with in Newport and I want to do this all winter: chasing women and playing guitar. Maybe that fearsome rock and roll band the Juggernauts might rise from the ashes of the 20th century. I went to see Deb, oh I need her, she don’t need me. Oh my darling can’t you see. I’m going to be a kitchen porter during this hard hard winter. I’ve got access to a piano but I know next to nothing about it. Well it could be better, it could be worse, we could be all be riding in a hearse. We could be ailing and screaming, we could be dying and bleeding, have you never seen a witch mutter her curse. The only thing for us to do is to sit down and play away hazy man til our dying days. Love Wood.

Newport, a mining district, had a strong local branch of the Communist Party. ‘They wanted to recruit Joe and me and Mickey into the Communist Party,’ remembered Jill Calvert. ‘Their main recruitment method was through dope. Joe and I went along to one of their meetings, and they cooked us a meal except that it was meat, and he was vegetarian, and I don’t think I ate anything either. So he smoked a lot of their dope that evening, but we didn’t join the Communist Party.’ Somewhat enamoured of a girl who was a party member, Woody did occasionally participate in some of its more grassroots activities. ‘Toeing any line is obviously a dodgy situation, or I’d have joined the Communist Party years ago,’ Joe Strummer said later. ‘I’ve done my time selling the Morning Star at pitheads in Wales, and it’s just not happening.’

The Communist Party was not the only form of marginal entertainment in Newport. The town was ten miles from Cardiff’s Tiger Bay district, a notorious anything-goes area that had been taken over by Africans and Afro-Caribbeans. In Newport docks there was a club called The Silver Sands, a Jamaican shebeen, run by a Mr and Mrs White, who were black. After paying the 10p door entrance to the wheelchair-bound Mr White, it was obligatory to buy a can of Colt 45 from Mrs White before proceeding two floors down; here a sound system had been set up with speakers as big as packing-cases from which reggae boomed and batted out, some of the Jamaican customers taking it in turns to ‘toast’ on a mike to this somewhat alien music. Woody would come along to it most Friday or Saturday nights, and it seems this was where he was first fully exposed to Jamaican music. Later he talked about how reggae’s rhythms had at first not made sense to him, until he spent an entire Christmas in Newport on acid listening to Big Youth.

In early 1973 Forbes helped Woody find somewhere to live: a friend at Newport Art School called Alun Jones, also known as Jiving Al, needed someone to share his flat. 12 Pentonville was supported by metal rods that held up the house: ‘the flat had an absolutely filthy kitchen,’ said Richard Frame, another Newport student who took over Woody’s room from him. Frame remembered scouring specialist record shops in Cardiff with Woody. ‘He was looking for Woody Guthrie records,’ he said, as though John Mellor was now trying to source the origins of his nickname.

Jiving Al Jones was a significant addition to the life of Woody Mellor. He was bass-player with a rock’n’roll group called the Rip Off Park All Stars, who covered original rock’n’roll songs with considerable dedication to showmanship. In Newport there was a big scene of teddy-boys and teddy-girls sporting the necessary accoutrements of brothel-creeper shoes and bouffant hair. By the time Woody Mellor had arrived in Newport, the Rip Off Park All Stars had run their allotted time and the group was hardly playing. Jiving Al and Rob Haymer, the group’s guitarist, decided to form another group, working with similar material. A drummer was found, a local mortuary attendant called Jeff Cooper. And who else might Jiving Al think of as front-man for this new, as yet unnamed group but his flatmate? ‘He’d just bought a guitar and taught himself to play in three to six months. He was a really determined man,’ said Jiving Al. But Woody was still a neophyte on guitar, and his voice was distinctly untutored. Yet he had a way into the group: ‘They had a drummer in the art school group but they didn’t have a drum kit, so I blagged my way into the group by saying, “You can have my drum kit, or use it, if I’m the singer.” So I blagged my way into the group like that.’

He was in Newport for almost a year before the musicians really began to gel as a group. In a letter to Paul Buck, he talked – among other things – about their rehearsals:

I’m working in a cemetery filling in graves getting £15.50 a week. We’ve got a new band together which might be OK if I don’t get thrown out for my voice. It’s so futuristic. They won’t let me play guitar because I can’t move my fingers fast enough. But screw that, so I’m practising at home and just singing with them whenever we get together for a practice. But you’ve got a bass. Every minute counts between now and next year. I’ll be at the same address next month. Are you going abroad? I’m trying to save money but I’m just getting out of debt. If the band gets going OK we’ve got a gig in February, I think I’ll hang around and pay my dues. You remember Chris? Blond Chris Payne. Last night he came up with his guitar for a go. I got my drums up here too. Next Friday I am going to take Deb to the flicks. I fancy going somewhere in Spring or Summer … We’re 20 years old, halfway through. Love Wood. When I’m out of debt in maybe seven weeks I’ll come to see you, okay. Johnny is a drum. Name and address of sender – American Sam.

The next letter to Paul Buck is dated 24 October 1973.

Dear Pablo, great stuff about bass and it looks good too. What make is it? A Fender? I thought you had half a million saved up, to put the down payment on a transcontinental sleeper bus or something. About 3 weeks ago I had a £30 quid tax rebate and this typewriter cost £10 and as for the other fucking £20 who knows. I’ll give you a quick rundown on what’s been going on down here. This is how it is. This band is called Deus Ex Machina, and there’s four of us. The lead guitarist is called Rob and he’s an egomaniac like myself and he’s OK. Then there’s Al on the bass and he’s a bit neurotic, you know, a bit dodgy baby, and Rob, I suppose he’s the guy who makes the decisions, and he told me that he had a secret plan to get rid of him on account of his neurosis, although he’s a nice bloke maybe he’s not strong enough to stand the pace. Then there’s Geoff the drummer who’s much older than us with a bit of experience but again he gets a bit down about chicks etc. But he’s bloody good but maybe he’ll go too in time. So there you have it. Oh yeah, and there’s me doing the sort of Mick Jagger bit and a bit of acoustic. We did four gigs last week. The first one was playing at the student union disco which we played good although I was shitting because it was my first gig but I learnt much there. And the next day we went to play in a party in a hotel in Shrewsbury, one of the bass-player’s friends’ 21st. That was a rub out because the hotel manager turned the main fuse off – ha ha. Then on the way back the van ran out of petrol and me and Rob walked 7 miles back into Newport at 3 o’clock in the morning. The typewriter nearly broke down back there. After that it gets better and better. We played the famed Kensington Club which is a big club where people like Dr John play on tours and on Monday nights where they have a crud night where they only charge 15p and bands trying to make it play. We were the only band on and there was 776 people there. The manager said after it was great. There was all these teenage typists and smooth trendy guys and we came on looking dead rough and went straight into Tobacco Road and Can’t Explain etc. I was sweating like a pig and I had black nail varnish on with me leathers. Rob was wearing an old dressing gown with an Elvis t-shirt underneath with braces. Then we played at the Arts College Dance supporting Good Habit who charged £100 which is a fuck of a lot. I was completely drunk and wearing clowns trousers and we played really good. We even whipped out Johnny Be Good which we’d never played before. So that’s how it is. We’re just practicing at the moment. Thank you for your letter. There ain’t much to do except be a rock and roller and maybe get a little drunk and type all through the night. I’m still working sort of but I don’t go in much now. Well they won’t sack me. Good pictures. Here’s one of me in a graveyard. [He encloses a photograph of himself, with shoulder-length hair.] I’d been up the pub with the diggers and they drank 3 pints with an empty belly in 25 minutes so I was drunk. And there was a pretty girl with a camera so I got her to snap me and send me a print. Come on, keep playing bass. Love from me to you. Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States. PS I’m going to marry Princess Anne, I’m going to sing for a big old band, toot my flute til the bird-seeds fly and I’m going to get old and die.

Shortly after, Deus Ex Machina was renamed with the less complex moniker of the Vultures. Richard Frame still has a poster for the group ‘with a picture of a flock of vultures flying along, drawn by Woody, and faces of the group. I had Joe’s room when he moved out. He left the 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. And so in Chippenham Road there was hot water, a telephone, there was always food, there was a fire.’ Dave Goodall was also a gardener; among the vegetable plots he grew what had the reputation of being the best weed in West London. Occasionally crashing at 23 Chippenham Road, from their home town of Manchester, were the members of a satirical rock group of considerable and justified acclaim called Alberto y Los Trios Paranoias, a festival crowd-pleaser; Tymon Dogg played with them on one of their albums. ‘The Albertos were fantastic,’ Joe once told me, to my surprise. The ‘Albertos’ were managed by two former socialist university lecturers, Peter Jenner and Andrew King, who had looked after the early career of Pink Floyd.

Maida Hill enjoyed considerable notoriety as a principal squatting district of London. At this time squatting was a common means of securing accommodation in many parts of London for young people: 300 people lived in squatted houses in one street alone. The Greater London Council, the GLC, had purchased large tracts of semi-slum housing, intending to demolish the buildings and replace them with council estates. Although many of these properties had been bought by the GLC in the late 1960s, work on most of them was yet to begin. The combination of free housing and cash from unemployment benefit contributed to the British music explosion of the mid-1970s.

There was another attraction for Woody Mellor: within the very notion of the squatting movement there was something of a political act, even though it might have been only the politics of outlaw idealism.

Dave and Gail Goodall ran That Tea Room, a wholefood restaurant situated a few hundred yards away, close to Westbourne Park tube station on Great Western Road. Most days Joe would eat at That Tea Room where he would only smoke joints rolled with herbal tobacco, himself using a brand that tasted like little more than air.

After he had arrived at 23 Chippenham Road, Tymon Dogg introduced Woody to some new friends, Patrick Nother and Simon Cassell. A year before Woody Mellor arrived at 23 Chippenham Road Patrick Nother, Simon Cassell and Nigel Calvert, the brother of Jill, had ‘opened’ a house at 101 Walterton Road, which crossed Chippenham Road: Dave and Gail Goodall had pointed out the derelict house to them. Patrick’s brother Richard, who was studying for a degree in Zoology, had also lived there for some six months, but the chaotic ambience distracted him from his final-year studies and he moved to a room at 86 Chippenham Road: as this house was largely occupied by bikers who regularly smashed the house to pieces at night before repairing it the next morning, this was not the most considered relocation. ‘Me and Joe were over there one night,’ remembered Pat Nother, ‘and whilst we were there the bikers not only destroyed the house but they cordoned off the street. They were quite polite about it: “Are you alright in there?” “Yeah, we’ll be alright.” Joe and myself sat smoking dope while the house was destroyed around us by these biker gangs who turned up on a massive orgy of destruction. We had the door locked and just sat there. In the morning we woke up as they were banging nails boarding up the broken windows and beginning to repair the house. Mad. They just took it apart. We thought, “This is life.”’

101 Walterton Road was eventually the last surviving house on its side of the road – until it, too, was finally demolished. (Julian Yewdall)

Dave Goodall, who had directed Woody in political matters, also ‘ran’ 23 Chippenham Road. As Tymon Dogg, who had tutored him in musical matters, was also living there, it made sense for Woody to move round the corner to 101 Walterton Road, evading the assessing eyes of this pair of mentors. So very shortly after moving back up to London Woody Mellor moved into the only vacant room, in the basement of the house. By now he had a collection of guitars which he had ‘acquired’, sometimes nefariously. ‘In ’74 it did seem like life was in black and white,’ he said to Mal Peachey. ‘There didn’t seem to be any colour in life. There were rows and rows of buildings boarded up by the council and left to rot – for what reason I don’t know. So the only thing to do was to kick in these abandoned buildings and then live in them. And thank God that happened, because if it hadn’t I would have never been able to get a group together, because you’re in a situation where you’re absolutely penniless. I mean, if we hadn’t have had the squats, (a) for a place to live, and (b) so that we could set up a rock’n’roll group and practise in them …’

The basement of 101 Walterton Road had an earth floor, which later became the rehearsal space for the 101’ers. Outside in the back yard was the property’s only working toilet. In the kitchen there were no cups. ‘You just had jam jars for drinking your tea out of and cold water to wash in,’ remembered Jules Yewdall, a friend of the Nothers from their home town in the Midlands. This can’t have affected Woody Mellor too much: as his cousin Iain Gillies told me, ‘Joe never liked washing. He never saw the point in having baths.’ But the house-dwellers clubbed together and bought a tin tub that they would fill from pans boiled on the gas stove. Bicycles were kept in the bathroom – people collecting or leaving them would walk in, say hello to whoever was bathing, and leave. 101 Walterton Road was severely flea-infested. ‘You could feel them coming up to your waist,’ said Jill Calvert. ‘In the summer it got really out of control.’

Deborah Kartun, who continued for the next couple of years to sporadically see Woody after he had returned to London, thought 101 Walterton Road was ‘squalid’. Woody looked homewards when it came to hygiene. ‘His mother told me that Joe would bring his laundry down from London and once she washed eighty-seven socks and not one of them matched another,’ recalled Iain Gillies.

Down in Upper Warlingham Woody’s parents had recovered themselves to some extent from the shock of David’s death. Some visitors felt that Anna was anaesthetizing herself with alcohol. Disappearing to bed early each evening, Anna would miss the sight of her husband letting his hair down as cocktails were made and drank, keeping his visitors in stitches with his humour, the laughter growing louder as the hours wore on. ‘Ron had a really wicked humour,’ said his niece Maeri. ‘He would wind up poor Aunt Anna something terrible. He would provide these gin cocktails that were about seventy-five per cent gin. He couldn’t stand a gin-and-tonic without lemon: “Are you sure you have a lemon?” he’d demand.’

‘You never knew when he was putting people on,’ said Alasdair Gillies. ‘He would make mock-disparaging comments towards women about feminism to get an argument going. He was very enigmatic, but very entertaining. He was also very insecure: he felt that he’d been abandoned when he’d been sent off to school. He believed no one wanted to know him or talk to him. He was very well informed and very left-wing. A pukka Englishman, but also almost Marxist. Later I thought Joe was becoming like his father, an eccentric Englishman.’

The contrast of 101 Walterton Road with home was clear to Woody. ‘No one would have lived where we lived,’ he told Mal Peachey. ‘It was an abandoned bombsite from the war. I had a guy come in. He was expert at connecting us to the mains electricity. I’ll never forget this: he came in, this guy with overalls on and a welder’s mask, and huge, huge gauntlets. And he just advanced up the basement corridor, and thrust his power cable into the mains electricity. He reconnected the house into the National Grid, and I’ll never forget the shower of sparks was like twenty feet long – blue sparks flew down the corridor, and blew him backwards. But he jammed the bloody leads into the mains electricity, and then we could plug in and start playing. It was that kind of situation we were dealing with.’

On July 9 1974 Woody Mellor wrote to Paul Buck:

Dear Pablo, I got your letter and I was just trying to whip off a quick reply when I got two more. I’ve got the rock’n’rolling bug again and am at this moment trying to hustle up money for some twelve-inch speakers for a cabinet I just made. I’m living in a basement too at 101 Walterton Road, W9, around the corner from 23 Chippenham. There’s a drum kit in the next room and I’ve rigged up a stack for two guitars and we’ve been having a few sessions lately so we’re talking about forming a group. I’ve been getting into slide guitar, another guy plays alto sax, and another plays rhythm guitar and another plays drums. We’ve got no bass or lead guitars yet. We’ve tried out a Danish guy on lead guitar but we really get into the music something chronic and he was very flash but a bit cold. None of us can play bass except for that bass line which goes Dum-e-Dum-De-Dum in rock’n’roll anyway. I’m going to borrow Dick’s bass off him. Talking of drums, I went to Newport and arranged to meet a Transit there, but the drum keeper left for Nottingham one hour before and his house was locked. Tough shit. I’ll be down within a couple of weeks. I might have to work a week in a factory to get money for the twelve-inch speakers. Also going to buy some machine-heads and maybe a bridge for my slide guitar. See you in two weeks. Come up any time you want. Wait until I get more stacks ready. Love Wood.

On 20 July 1974 Woody Mellor went to the first one-day rock festival held in the grounds of Knebworth House, 40 miles north of London in Hertfordshire. Along with 100,000 other fans he watched an impressive bill topped by the Allman Brothers Band, legendary for both their epic sets and their drug consumption, playing for the first time in Britain. Also performing, on a magically warm day, were Van Morrison, the Doobie Brothers, Tim Buckley, the Mahavishnu Orchestra and the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, whose uncompromisingly theatrical style was to be an influence on many future punks, including Mick Jones and Paul Simonon. ‘We saw Joe wandering through the crowd,’ said his old schoolmate Ken Powell, who had gone along to the event with Adrian Greaves. ‘His personality had changed. You couldn’t get close to him: he certainly wasn’t totally with us. His teeth were terrible. His speech was different. He had a pretty ordinary middle-class accent when he was at school. Now it was as though he was trying to make his speech be street-cred, like Mick Jagger did.’ (My take on Joe’s voice change is that the influences on it were more international; the accent he came up with is an Englishman trying to emulate Bob Dylan’s laconic Midwest cadences.

Not much later Andy Ward, by now drummer with Camel, had an experience not too dissimilar to Ken Powell. ‘The next time I ran into him was when he was playing a gig with the 101’ers somewhere off the Portobello Road. I was a full-on long-haired hippie by then, playing with a prog-rock band. He really scared me: he was dishevelled and toothless – his teeth were awful. He was calling himself Woody. He asked me to come to the gig and I didn’t go. Later I saw him at a party and he said, “I’ve got a bone to pick with you.” Paul Buck told me Joe said that I’d snubbed him. But I didn’t let on that the reason I didn’t go to the gig was because I was too scared.’

By 1974 the British music scene was splintering into factions. Heavy Rock – the Who, Led Zep, the Rolling Stones; Progressive Rock – Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes and Genesis; Glam-Rock – David Bowie, Roxy Music. To like one almost precluded you from liking another. This sense of division increased sharply when the American group, the New York Dolls, who looked like hookers from Manhattan’s Lower East Side and whose blasting, double-lead guitar wall of sound was an amalgam of early Rolling Stones, the MC5 and the Shangri-Las, burst upon the scene. An immense influence on punk rock, the New York Dolls wore lipstick, high heels, satin and leather, as though they had stepped out of the Stones’ poster for ‘Have You Seen Your Mother’. David Johansen, the singer, was like a clone of Mick Jagger; his songwriting partner, Johnny Thunders, similarly established himself as a cartoon version of Keith Richards. Not only were the Dolls’ songs sharp and very short, but they also had suitably precise titles: ‘Pills’, ‘Personality Crisis’, ‘Subway Train’, ‘Bad Girl’, to name just a few.

Woody Mellor had watched the Dolls on their only British television performance, in 1974 on the BBC’s weekly progressive show The Old Grey Whistle Test. Bob Harris, the programme’s avuncular presenter, had dismissed their appearance as ‘mock rock’. ‘I’ll never forget watching Johnny Thunders on that programme on BBC2, the Whistle Test,’ said Joe to Mal Peachey. ‘Johnny Thunders and his crew – the Dolls – played two numbers. I remember all the musicians in Newport and all the students in the Union bar watching it on the television there, and it just wiped everybody out: the attitude, the clothes, it was different from all this earnest musician-worshipping nonsense that had come in with progressive rock. When the Dolls played that British TV show that just gave us legs and arms, and the spirit to really get into it.’

Something was afoot. A shift in the culture of the British music scene was reflected by the rise of the New Musical Express – soon to be widely known simply by its NME initials – over the Melody Maker, which since 1967 had been required reading for music fans. Modelled on semi-underground music publications from the United States, and featuring a scathing satirical humour, the NME’s sales overtook those of Melody Maker. ‘It was the house rag at 101, the NME,’ said Patrick Nother.