Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer. Chris Salewicz
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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.
An indication that change was underway came in the late summer of 1974, when the NME put Dr Feelgood on its cover, a new group who so far had had no record success, emerging from the grassroots movement of the London pub-rock scene: a number of pubs had turned themselves into venues at which largely unsigned groups played. A good-time scene fuelled by beer, pub-rock still had its star acts, among them Dr Feelgood.
The Feelgoods, as they were invariably known, featured a part speed-freak, part intellectual guitarist called Wilko Johnson; a gruff but inspired singer in Lee Brilleaux, his skinny ties a trademark; bass-player John B. Sparks; and drummer John ‘The Big Figure’ Martin. What set the Feelgoods aside from virtually every group in the country was that their set-list consisted entirely of choppy R’n’B songs, classics and originals, that lasted no more than three minutes; they wore their hair short and dressed in tight-trousered suits with shirts and ties; and their stage-act was fantastic. Wilko soared about the stage as though he was propelled along tramlines, brandishing his Telecaster like a rifle; Lee Brilleaux grunted and growled at the front of the stage, leaning into his mike and smoking cigarettes; and the rhythm section just held it all down, anchoring the two frontmen so they wouldn’t float away. Despite their surly appearance, the Feelgoods had an aura of approachability, one of us. Dr Feelgood were the first steps of British punk; without them, that crucial cultural movement, still more than two years off from altering the entire aesthetic dynamic of the last quarter of the twentieth century, might never have happened. They were a very important group indeed, as noted by no less an unexpected authority than the rising reggae star Bob Marley; on his 1977 single ‘Punky Reggae Party’, extolling the punk-reggae link, one line ran: The Jam, the Clash, The Feelgoods too.
Dr Feelgood were still a pub-rock group, but one that proved so inspirational to Woody Mellor that Wilko Johnson’s Telecaster weapon-wielding was the reason that the future Joe Strummer purchased that make of guitar. He had decided that he also could form such a group. ‘Pub-rock was going on and we sort of fell into naturally playing rhythm and blues because it was easy, or we thought it was,’ he told me. ‘Although the 101’ers was really a squat band formed in a squat in the summer of 1974. During this time I held down jobs, you know. I worked for three months in Hyde Park, trying to save money for the group, trimming flower beds, cutting hedges.’
‘Park work’, with its opportunities for smoking spliffs on the job, was at that time considered desirable summer employment. ‘Oh, it was horrible. Yeah, horrible because the hedge goes on forever, you know that. You know, the hedge it ain’t never gonna end, because Hyde Park is vast. It’s like painting the Forth Bridge – you never get to the end of it. I just hated that.’
At the end of the summer Woody took another job, doing general maintenance and cleaning at the English National Opera in St Martin’s Lane by Trafalgar Square: ‘It was kind of a much better job ’cause you could go and hide away in this huge Victorian building. I used to take my guitar into work and put my brown coat on and then disappear off up into the upper attic in these little cubby-holes so no one could ever find you, and practise the guitar. I quite liked it, but I’ve hated opera from hearing opera constantly, all day long, for three months. I’ve always hated opera since that time.’ At the end of three months Woody Mellor was discovered hunkered away practising his guitar, and was fired. He managed to obtain financial compensation and walked out of the job with £120.
One day on his way to ENO Joe had gone into central London with Jules Yewdall, who was heading for the London School of Printing, where he studied photography. ‘We went into town early in the morning. It was about 7.30 and he was standing on Trafalgar Square by the steps at St Martin’s church. I was rolling up a joint and saying, “I really want to travel around the world and see what’s going on out there.” He said, “I want to be a rock’n’roll star. That’s what I want to be.”’
This would conflict with the reasons that Woody later offered for getting a group together. The 101’ers, Joe told me, ‘was really formed because busking had become too heavy. They started to put microphones and speakers down in the subways. I mean, at the best of times you had to run from the Transport Police. But when I saw the microphones and speakers installed in Leicester Square, or Oxford Circus, I thought, Ah … You know, a group of squatters trying to live over the summer. We saw it as maybe we can keep body and soul together if we can get a few gigs in these Irish pubs. I never really