Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer. Chris Salewicz
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banned from the pub ’cause we were dirty squatters. I thought, “I could do that, you know, me and my mates. Surely we could do that.” We put it together in the squat with just odds and ends. I borrowed money for a small PA off a drug dealer.’
This was not true. The origins of the PA were far from this. Woody Mellor actually got money for it from Arabella Churchill, great-granddaughter of Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister, whom he’d met at Glastonbury in 1971. The money was a loan: in 1997 Joe Strummer finally wrote her a cheque to repay it, but Arabella never banked it. Part of this PA had formerly belonged to Pink Floyd. ‘For some reason Pink Floyd had like a hundred speakers in their PA system and they were selling it off – I don’t know why,’ he told me. ‘And we managed to get one of the bass-bins which we used as a bass speaker from their PA. I took a drawer I found in a skip and cut a hole in it and mounted a speaker in the drawer. And I used to stand the drawer up and place a Linear Concorde amp on top.’
Pat Nother shared a basement room at 101 Walterton Road with Woody, each sleeping on a ‘scummy, horrible’ mattress. ‘When he was sleeping, he used to grind his teeth so much that it sounded like an underground train,’ Pat said. ‘He had this James Dean hairstyle, although at first he had fairly long hair, and he wore this tacky leather jacket with a Latin tag on the back that read, in Latin, “I’m no chicken.” He picked up on the leather jacket a long time before that stuff was in vogue. I don’t know if it was just a Jim Morrison influence, Joe got into everyone. Although he was into the Doors at that time, that doesn’t mean that that enthusiasm lasted. He’d have stripped the carcass of everything he could get off it, he’d have eaten the head, and he’d have sucked the bones of the Doors whilst he was interested in them: there’s a lot of meat and juice there to take on, and he’d have tried his best to get as much out of it as possible. That’s what he was about everything.’
The other room in the basement became the musical practice room. ‘We used to piss on our fingertips to make them hard so that we could play our guitars. He was a huge fan of Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence – Lawrence of Arabia. I had the impression it was one of the only books he’d read at the time. In the Lawrence of Arabia film Peter O’Toole lets matches burn down to his fingers, and Joe would do that to prove his fingers were strong enough to play the guitar. I remember Joe woke me up in the middle of the night and said “Patrick: I’ve got the new Elmore James riff!” And he played me this Elmore James riff on the record and he was so thrilled he could do it on the guitar as well.
‘I’d loved rock’n’roll as a teenager, and then I just thought it wasn’t happening, although I would listen to Van Morrison. But with Joe in the basement I used to sit up late and it would be, “Have you ever tried 12-bar?” And he’d get out his steel-string guitar, and we’d boogie along for about a dozen songs, and go and sit on the staircase in 101. “Do you know what?” he really did say to me at one point. “I’m going to be a rock’n’roll star. Do you want to be one too? We can be rock’n’roll stars.”’
Might you not fear you were tempting fate by publicly proclaiming your imminent stardom? In the case of the future Joe Strummer it seems that by laying his cards on the table he was seeking to motivate himself. ‘The guy just planked out this incredible energy ’cos he knows what he’s doing, and he’s got the reserves to do it, and he puts his all into it, and that’s why everyone likes Joe,’ said Pat Nother. Pat also recalled Woody seeing the pair of rock’n’ roll movies, That’ll Be the Day and its sequel Stardust, both of which he found inspiring. Pat remembered him becoming wide-eyed with awe when he met Wishbone Ash’s lighting man. ‘He was so into the whole rock’n’roll thing, he absolutely loved it: it was an almost childish delight at the whole spectacle. He couldn’t really play the guitar, but he wrote bloody good songs. He put his heart into it, which is the essence of the bloody thing.’
In the basement of 101 Walterton Road, filthy old mattresses rescued from skips ranged around the walls as ‘sound-proofing’, Woody Mellor assiduously rehearsed with the musicians he had enlisted to assist him in fulfilling the personal dream he had revealed to Pat. Pat himself was pulled in to play on the bass borrowed from Dick the Shit, despite never having previously picked up such an instrument. Simon Cassell had an alto saxophone he had bought in Portobello Market some time before; naturally he was promptly enlisted. On drums was Antonio Narvaez, on a kit borrowed from someone in a nearby squat. The most accomplished of those rehearsing was Alvaro Pena-Rojas, who had played professionally as a tenor sax-player in Chile, chalking up a trio of hits before he and Antonio fled the country after the 1973 coup. You may note that in this line-up of what would become the 101’ers, a crucial rock’n’roll element is absent: that of lead guitar – sometimes it seemed Woody Mellor needed to create situations to work against.
By the end of the summer of 1974 these musicians had a set-list of half a dozen songs, all R’n’B and rock’n’roll covers: two Chuck Berry songs, ‘No Particular Place to Go’ and ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, Larry Williams’s ‘Bony Maronie’ and Van Morrison’s ‘Gloria’, which Woody still adored. Now they were ready to test themselves at a live show, a benefit for the Chilean Resistance. Originally scheduled for 14 September 1974, the show was suddenly moved to Friday 6 September, at the Telegraph, a music pub at 228 Brixton Hill, close to Brixton prison, another outsider part of London. Two weeks before the original date, Antonio decided to leave London on holiday. Although he had never played drums – he owned a pair of bongos and a clarinet – Pat Nother’s brother Richard was immediately brought in on the instrument.
When the gig was moved forward, Richard Nother was left with only five days of rehearsal. ‘I was playing bongos, and they asked me to play the drums, which I had never played before. Then the gig was moved forward a week: my first gig!’ Richard Nother acquired a new name, bestowed by Woody. When I first met him I assumed that someone called Richard Dudanski must be Polish, noting his Slavic cheekbones, high forehead and slicked-back hair. But Richard Nother is of quintessential English stock; Joe had picked up what I perceived. Proprietorially, Woody bequeathed him a second nickname, inspired by his thin and wiry appearance: Richard ‘Snakehips’ Dudanski. This random scattering of sobriquets is very affectionate – they are almost pet-names, rather than nicknames, a very honest, intimate and exclusive way of greeting friends, putting them at ease straight away. But it is also a method of contol.
‘People said he wanted to be a star,’ said Richard Dudanski. ‘He did, but we just wanted to get a working band together. He had strong ambition. I don’t think he necessarily knew the hows or the whats, but he wanted to get there. The whole myth of the life was attractive to him.’
Woody went down to Warlingham to pick up his father’s demob suit for his stage outfit. For the Telegraph gig the group was billed as El Huaso and The 101 All Stars: ‘El Huaso’ is Spanish for ‘countryman’, referring to the group’s remaining Chilean, Alvaro Pena-Rojas. They were the support act to the Reggae Men, who would shortly mutate into Matumbi, one of the most influential reggae acts to come out of England. El Huaso and The 101 All Stars turned up at the Telegraph on 6 September with neither drums nor amps, assuming they could borrow these from the headline act. Joe told Paolo Hewitt: ‘We didn’t know how to play, you know. None of us knew, and Matumbi lent us all their gear, and I’ve never come across that since. Can you believe that? And they were really late. Their van broke down and they were two hours late and there was hardly time for them to do their set. But they still lent us their drum kit and their amps. I thought that was great and I’ve always supported Matumbi since.’
‘They were crap!’ said Clive Timperley, Woody’s old friend from Vomit Heights. ‘Strummer with this mad suit and shaking leg, fantastic. That was it really. No lead guitar. They were crap but fun.’
To Anne Day, ‘Woody’ was evidently still allowed to be ‘Johnny’. (Anne Day)
Pat Nother agreed: ‘About four or five times we turned up with instruments. To call them gigs is stretching it. My memories are more of things like standing in a cinema [a squat by That Tea Room] in puddles of water, very worried about the effect on the electricity