Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer. Chris Salewicz
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played an iconic LP of the time, John Mayall’s 1966 Blues Breakers album, featuring Britain’s first guitar hero, Eric Clapton. Soon he was seeking out the available American imports by Robert Johnson, the godfather of rural blues, as well as records by the British-based American blues artists Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. He was already in awe of the work of another American expatriate, Jimi Hendrix. When Clapton quit the Mayall group to form Cream with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, John Mellor bought all their releases. Other records became part of his daily diet: the iconoclastic first LP by the Velvet Underground, Blood, Sweat and Tears’ Child is Father to the Man, and, the next year, the first album by Led Zeppelin.
Secreted away in their Surrey school, the boarders were not entirely removed from the modern world. There was, for example, that access to a television set: ‘We got a special dispensation,’ remembered fellow diplomat’s son Ken Powell, ‘to watch The Frost Show when the Stones performed “Sympathy for the Devil”.’ On Saturday evenings they were permitted to watch whichever film – usually a war movie or Western – was being screened. ‘Joe and I were allowed one night to watch Psycho. I can remember being terrified in this cavernous room. I can also recall how I once brought back from Cape Town – where my father had been posted – this shark’s tooth that I would wear around my neck. The next thing I saw he was wearing it. And then I reacquired it. He saw this, and a week later he reacquired it. Then I did. This went on for possibly a year. We never discussed it.’ The shark’s tooth drew attention to Johnny’s own teeth. He refused to ever clean them, or visit a dentist. ‘I’ve decided,’ he announced, ‘to let them fall out, then get false ones. It’ll save time.’
Intriguingly, at this zenith of apartheid, Johnny Mellor never questioned Ken Powell about the political situation in South Africa. ‘We weren’t big into social commentary – it was more girls and music,’ said Adrian Greaves. ‘But Johnny Mellor did have a poster up saying, “I’m Backing out of Britain”.’ This poster, a twist on Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s ‘I’m Backing Britain’ campaign, was fixed to the wall of the study that Greaves by now shared with Mellor and Paul Buck. The psychedelic poster images of the Beatles that formed part of the British packaging of The White Album also adorned the study’s walls after the record’s release in autumn 1968. Whatever his thoughts on the collective output of John Lennon’s group, Johnny Mellor was taken with the man himself, the ‘difficult’ Beatle forever firing off his judgements on injustice or his thoughts on great rock’n’roll, his hip attitudinizing filtered through a patchouli-oil-stained cloak of state-of-the-art psycho-babble. The study’s facilities included a mono record player, ‘a portable plastic thing, with a speaker in the lid,’ recalled Paul Buck, who remembered the affection that he and Mellor had for Elmer Gantry’s Velvet Opera and for Frank Zappa’s protégé Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, who had been championed by John Peel when his Safe as Milk album was released in 1967. By the time he was in the Sixth Form John Mellor had suffered a personality change, not necessarily for the better. ‘He had become a distinct Dramatic Society arty type, a bit Marlon Brando-like, a sneer to his lip, no respect for convention,’ remembered Adrian Greaves. ‘When he was around eighteen I found him rather obnoxious. He and Paul Buck got on well, because they were both sneerers.’ Greaves remembered Paul Buck and John Mellor falling for an underground myth by drying banana skins over a Bunsen burner before attempting to smoke them in an effort to get high, to no discernible benefit.
In 1968 a brief scandal had billowed through the school when a girl had been expelled for possession of a small lump of hashish. John Mellor became partial to smoking joints whenever he possibly could – he and Ken Powell had got high that year before they went to their first rock concert, the American blues revivalists Canned Heat, at the Fairfield Hall in Croydon, travelling up from the Mellor house just to the south. Richard Evans also remembered going with Johnny Mellor to the same venue to see a show by the group Free.
‘Messing about in the study at school, everything seemed to relate to music,’ said Powell. ‘John would play a game in which he would mime different artists. Two of these I can remember distinctly: he put his hands over his head like an onion-shaped dome, and then he put them out again, as though they were shimmering like water. Who is he referring to? Taj Mahal, of course! Then he mimed some very humble, Uriah Heep-like behaviour, and then tapped his bum – the Humblebums, which was Billy Connolly’s group.’
In the school summer holidays the next year Johnny Mellor, Ken Powell and Paul Buck went to the Jazz and Blues Festival held at Plumpton race track in south-east London, convenient for Upper Warlingham. Among the other Jazz and Blues acts on the bill were those avatars of progressive rock, King Crimson and Yes, and Family, featuring the bleating vocals and manic performance of Roger Chapman, for long a favourite of Johnny Mellor. ‘We slept on the race track in sleeping-bags,’ remembered Ken Powell. ‘The festival ran for three days. We ate lentils from the Hare Krishna tent: we were hardly the types to take food with us.’
That summer was eventful for Johnny Mellor. Richard Evans had long noted Johnny’s skills as a visual artist, endlessly drawing and doodling. ‘He was good, a hugely talented cartoonist. Cartoons were his thing – he had that creativity to do Gerald Scarfe-type satire. Even when very young he had a political awareness in what he was drawing.’ Several of his friends and relatives assumed this was the direction in which Johnny Mellor would pursue a career. Increasingly influenced by pop art and notions of surrealism, as well as by the consumption of cannabis and occasional LSD trips, the youngest Mellor boy would sometimes disappear into creative flights of fancy. One of the most imaginative of these, which created a major furore at 15 Court Farm Road, was when – assisted by Richard Evans – he took a can of blue emulsion paint into the garden and painted all the apples on the trees blue. ‘His father went mad. But we thought it was great. We spent days over this, painting blue emulsion on these apples.’ Before Ron Mellor discovered what his son had done, Johnny took photographs of the trees; later he included them as an example of his work in his application to art school.
By now Richard Evans was known more usually as ‘Dick the Shit’; the sobriquet was not a character assessment – ‘shit’ was a contemporary term used to describe cannabis and marijuana. After taking his O-levels, Dick the Shit had left school, joining a computer company in Croydon. He had just enough money to buy the cheapest available ‘wreck of a car’, a black Austin A40. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to paint the vehicle a more interesting colour? suggested Johnny Mellor. ‘When he said that, I thought of going to the shop and picking out something like metallic silver. But Joe wasn’t having any of that. He was on a different planet.’ Johnny had a better idea: that they use up the rest of the gallon of blue emulsion he had bought to paint the apples; to add some variety he produced more paint, white emulsion this time. ‘We literally just threw this paint over the car. It went rippling down it, in a Gaudi-esque pattern. We painted in the windows like round TV screens. So now I had this blue and white car. Joe signed it, on the front, just above the window-screen.’
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