Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer. Chris Salewicz
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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