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