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