Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer. Chris Salewicz
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I was very moved. He said, “You don’t get songs like that now: they last forever.”’ Lucinda had mentioned that in New York on Tartan Day the previous April Joe had insisted on marching all the way up Fifth Avenue, determined to see the pipe bands, and again he had been so moved that tears had run down his face. To the amusement of some of his relatives, Joe and Luce danced their own, not very accurate versions of the Highland ‘Skip the Reel’.
The following day, Joe visited a property called West Airdens, a croft with a startling view that belonged to his aunt Jessie and her shepherd husband Ken, an extraordinary house that seemed magical to Joe. When he learnt that Jessie and her husband Ken had decided it was time to move down to Bonar Bridge, Joe made an instant decision: ‘Let’s buy it now, all of us, all the cousins.’ ‘“For each according to his means,” he said,’ Alasdair remembered, ‘quoting Marx. I said, “What would Engels say?” And he laughed. “What would Jessie say?” I wondered. “She’ll be up for it,” said Joe. Then it was 5 p.m., and he had to go the station.’
Joe was already a day late. He had to be in Rockfield studio in South Wales, where he was to record his next album with The Mescaleros. But he had learnt something that was strongly drawing him back to Bonar Bridge: that day, 1 December, was the birthday of Uncle John Mackenzie, the brother of Anna, his mother, and the man Joe always called ‘the original punk rocker’. As he grew older Joe Strummer felt close to all his Bonar Bridge relatives, but Uncle John held a special meaning for him and touched his heart. Johnny Mellor was even christened after Uncle John. ‘In a perfect world, I wouldn’t go home,’ he stated. ‘Uncle John told me he’s 77 today. In a perfect world I’d go to the Dunrobin for the evening. Maybe I could go back tomorrow.’ ‘He knew he had to go,’ said Alasdair, ‘but didn’t want to. But at the last minute, he said, “I’d better go. In a perfect world, I’d stay. But this is not a perfect world.”’ (When we call round, Uncle John pours us each ‘a wee dram’ of the Irish whiskey that Joe had despatched up to him as a birthday gift as soon as he arrived at Rockfield.)
Minutes into Joe and Luce’s hour-long drive to Inverness station, he phoned Alasdair, fired up with enthusiasm, reminding him they had to buy the house. Moments later he called again, repeating this insistence, and – filled with the emotion of the weekend – reminding his cousin he would waste no time in tracking down the LP by the Bonar Bridge Pipe Band. ‘The Bonar Bridge magnetism holds you: you don’t want to go back to the city. On his last visit Joe exhibited all the symptoms of that condition. Then he phoned me at the station, saying he had made it, and we’d sort out the house. “Love to all,” he said. And that was the last time I saw him. The next thing I knew I got a call from Amanda Temple, the wife of Julien Temple, the film director, who lived near him in Somerset, three weeks later.
‘But those two days we were with him, I felt he’d reached a new level, reconciled both his father’s side and his mother’s Highland stuff. He was being restored to his rightful place in the bosom of the family, onwards and upwards. And it was very hard to bear, when he died.’
Sitting in his favourite armchair by the window of the living-room in the sturdy family croft of Carnmhor in Bonar Bridge, Uncle John speaks with the same lilting Highlands accent that Joe’s mother Anna never lost. ‘Johnny first came here when he was under a year. They were just back from Turkey, and came up by train.’ At one moment on the first of these fortnight-long visits to Bonar Bridge, the toddler Johnny Mellor was found standing at the top of Carnmhor’s steep stairs, shouting in Turkish for someone to carry him down them as there was no banister rail. Upstairs at Carnmhor, the bedroom in which John and his brother David stayed had big brass bedsteads, hard mattresses and bolsters. The two boys were always collectively referred to by the family as David-and-Johnny, like fish’n’chips, or Morecambe-and-Wise, or – perhaps more appositely – like rock’n’roll.
With his young nephew, uncle John Mackenzie shared certain characteristics which only increased as Johnny matured into the figure of Joe Strummer. In his almost Australian aboriginal tendency to go ‘walkabout’, Uncle John predicted behaviour that many people connected with Joe were obliged to accept: the most public example of this was his famous vanishing act in 1982 before a Clash US tour. Uncle John had that same ability to disappear. In the early 1940s, ‘Bonnie John’ – as he was known in his youth – vanished for several weeks. Assuming he was dead, Jane Mackenzie, his mother, went to bed for a fortnight. Eventually he was discovered in Inverness.
After that first visit to Bonar Bridge it was seven years (‘a long while,’ said John, with sadness in his voice) before the Mellor family returned to Anna’s home. On each of the annual visits his family paid to Bonar Bridge between 1960 and 1963, Johnny Mellor liked nothing better than running after Uncle John and his tractor. ‘David was about nine, Johnny was about seven,’ John remembered of that next visit. ‘Johnny was a very cheery, happy boy. He would just wander around the place. He was very fond of being outside. He was a young boy full of life. He did a painting of cowboys and Indians, which we hung up on the wall.’ That painting, a precursor of a theme around which much of Joe’s later drawing and painting was based, hung in the hallway at Carnmhor for many years.
David, Johnny’s older brother, was ‘much quieter’, remembered Uncle John. ‘Johnny used to wander around with me when I was working. I had cattle and sheep: he was always watching them with me. He’d help with what he called the “hoos coo”, milking it. I never saw him play a guitar. I heard his music often. I saw them on the TV as well. They were oot of my mind altogether – the young people liked them.’ But he remembered a surprise phone-call from Joe in Japan in 1982: ‘He was just blathering away. “I’m looking for a job, teaching rock’n’roll,” he said to me, joking of course.
‘He was here for a long while on the Sunday with his wife,’ said Uncle John. ‘He was very reluctant leaving. If anyone had said two words to him he’d have stayed. He said, “I’m bringing my two daughters up in the summertime.” But it never came to pass.’
The visit in the summer of 1960 marked the first time that Alasdair’s brother Iain had met Johnny. From their home in Glasgow, the Gillies family – with Joe’s four cousins Iain, Anna, Alasdair and Rona – had also gone up to Bonar Bridge, as they did every year without fail, and both families were crammed into Carnmhor. With Johnny, Iain would play in the barn, swinging on the rope and rolling on the piles of corn. Together they caught newts from the stream in jam jars, releasing those still left alive. In a pillbox concrete bunker on the farm they discovered left-over boot polish. ‘We probably showed off too much that we thought we were from somewhere else. Johnny seemed to me to be very lively, funny and inventive. David was quiet. I recall Johnny being the organizer and the one who dictated the plans for our games and general mischief-making. He was a bit pugnacious and always insouciant. On the first day we met at the croft, Johnny started a pebble-throwing fight. It was Johnny and David versus me. I was two years younger than Johnny and three younger than David, so I was a bit concerned at first. As the stone-throwing got more vicious I could tell that David’s heart wasn’t really in it, and it tailed off into a draw. Johnny said, “We won that battle, didn’t we, Dave?” In retrospect, I think, to gee David up, give him succour.’ The lines of battle, claimed Anna, were drawn between the Scots and the English. ‘Because I was a girl I wasn’t even recruited for that,’ she complained. ‘In the living room at the farm,’ said Iain, ‘Johnny recited some scurrilous rhyme that he knew, the subject matter of which concerned coating the crack of a female bottom with jam. He knew all the words and to my six-year-old mind it was very funny, slightly shocking, but exhilarating.’ Clearly by that age Johnny was indicating the mischievous humour within him that would remain all his life. But he was also revealing a slight tendency to bully, an aspect of himself that also never entirely went away. ‘On another occasion at Carnmhor,’ Iain recalled, ‘he convinced me that it would be a great idea to completely strip my sister Anna, who was about five, of all her clothes and hide them upstairs in our Uncle John’s cupboard – nobody would ever find them in there, he said. Anna came downstairs and made her grand naked entrance.’
‘I can remember going down the three steps,’ said Anna, ‘where Aunt Anna was drying clothes, and there was a tremendous hullabaloo. They couldn’t find my clothes, which were hidden in Uncle John’s