Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  Shortly after, Deus Ex Machina was renamed with the less complex moniker of the Vultures. Richard Frame still has a poster for the group ‘with a picture of a flock of vultures flying along, drawn by Woody, and faces of the group. I had Joe’s room when he moved out. He left the drum kit and the ukulele.’ Later Woody came to collect his drum kit, but seemed to forget about the ukulele. When the Clash played a show in Bristol at the end of 1977, Joe Strummer spotted Richard Frame in the audience. ‘Hey, Frame,’ he hollered out in between numbers. ‘Where’s my fuckin’ ukulele?’ Richard Frame also has a tape of Woody Mellor singing a song entitled ‘Bumblebee Blues’, probably the first song he recorded, a grumbing 12-bar blues. At the beginning of it Woody is asking someone called Martin, who also plays guitar on the tune, if he is putting his fingers in the right place on the fretboard of his guitar.

  Woody Mellor wrote to Carol Roundhill about the group.

  I’m playing in a Rock’n’Roll band called the Vultures. It’s a funny sort of band, one minute we’ll be hating each others guts and splitting up the band, and the next we’ll be as close as brothers getting drunk together. At the moment we’re in one of the former states. I’m doing a few cartoons and a bit of writing. Recently I’ve been taking everything about Dylan Thomas out of the library and reading till dawn. I think I know everything there is to know about him, except for one thing – I can’t find a book of his poems! There’s 101 books on ‘The Art of Dylan Thomas’ or ‘The Life of Dylan Thomas’ or ‘The Storys [sic] of Dylan Thomas’ or ‘The Broadcasts of Dylan Thomas’ but not one book of poems. I think they expect every Welsh home to already have one. I’ve got a really nice sunny room. It seems to catch the sun all through the day except for the late evening, and I spend a great deal of time with my feet on the window ledge watching nothing in particular. Deborah lives 10 miles down the road in Cardiff. I go and see her once in a blue moon, but she’s really tough and mean now! Grr Grr!

  Woody was not a great success as a gravedigger; he was not particularly strong and did not prove good at digging six-feet-deep holes in the ground. He was soon transferred to the less arduous task of clearing the cemetery of rubbish and general debris. ‘I wasn’t strong enough to dig graves,’ he said. ‘The first morning they’d told me to dig a grave and when they came back I’d gone down about three inches. And so they said, “Oh, that’s useless.” So they set me on just cleaning up the cemetery. A really, really, really big one. And they told me to go and pick up every glass jam jar or piece thereof. The cemetery was enormous, and they’d been leaving jam jars with flowers in them there since the Twenties. In the winter of ’72–’73 I was working in the graveyard. That was a really tough winter too.’

  Tymon Dogg drove down from London, arriving in Newport in the morning, and went to the graveyard, where ‘I went and had a cup of tea with these gravediggers. They called him Johnny. It was funny, they thought Johnny never really got involved in anything. I think they thought he was a bit slow or something, because he wasn’t interested in stone and talking about it, so they knew he was a bit different.’

  The money he earned in the cemetery gave Woody greater scope for his generosity; when Jill Calvert was depressed, he bought her a pair of new trousers. At the time he was experimenting with further names; Johnny Caramello and Rooney were two of these.

  On one visit to London from Wales, his cousin Iain Gillies saw Woody briefly; he felt that his time in Newport had brought about a change and was doing him good: ‘He was all Farmer Giles sideboards and flashing smashed, decrepit teeth. He had a new level of liveliness that I had not seen before. Anna, his mother, would tell us about Joe’s comings and goings. She told me in 1973 they were giving Joe a year to decide what he was going to do.’

  This decision of Ron and Anna to let their son run with his freedom seemed to be paying off, although not every appearance of the Vultures fully hit the spot: ‘We played obviously the art school dance or whatever. And we had made it to the Granary in Bristol, but we were godawful and they bottled us off. We were playing the Who’s “Can’t Explain”, “Tobacco Road”, and also anything that was popular at the time. I think we had a version of “Hocus Pocus” by Focus that the lead guitarist wanted to play, because it was obviously all lead guitar or whatever. We were trying to play anything that wouldn’t get us bottled off, really.’

  At this stage in his life Woody Mellor was not a great drinker. ‘He despised people on benders,’ said Jill Calvert. ‘We couldn’t stand the hippies who were deadbeats. He had contempt for them too. He’d take what was going but he was fuelled and driven.’ Jill saw a lot of Woody as she and Mickey Foote were not always getting on; she would end up going over to Woody’s at 12 Pentonville: ‘We’d have mushrooms and toast and I taught him about Van Morrison who he didn’t seem to know anything about: Astral Weeks was a very important record to be into, but he’d never heard it. And we became friends and sort of confidantes. I had one brief conversation with him about David. In those days it would be considered extremely uncool to admit to indulging in any sort of self-reflection. All your life was about the now. That was particularly Joe’s thinking.’ Jill Calvert was known for being an extremely pretty young woman. So it is hardly surprising that between her and Woody there was often, as she puts it, ‘a kind of suggestion’. Such a semi-platonic relationship with a member of the opposite sex fits the precise pattern of Woody Mellor’s relationships with women at this time. Later, he confided to the photographer Pennie Smith that he had believed that women weren’t really interested in him, and felt, as he put it to her, ‘like the ugly duckling’. As we know, the ‘ugly duckling’ of fairy-tale legend turned into a beautiful swan. But this would not happen for some time, and in the process Woody would undergo a complete volte-face on his previous more innocent attitudes. All the same, Jill Calvert received a shock when Woody told her that he had found a new flat: ‘It’s next door to where you live. I thought, “Well, that’s a bit odd. Because you won’t be able to sneak round to see me then.”’

  This flat, next door to Jill Calvert and Mickey Foote, was at 16 Clyffard Crescent. Not long after that, early in 1974, ‘he suddenly didn’t have any flat at all’, said Jill. Woody had omitted to pay the rent. ‘And then he lived in our place.’ Woody slept in the living-room: ‘The return for him living in our place was that he’d write Mickey’s thesis.’ Although Mickey Foote was studying Fine Art, his final-year thesis was on a subject familiar to Woody Mellor: pop music. ‘Woody sat at the typewriter with a note on the door saying, “3,000 words, 4,000 to go.” It was no problem for him to write this. We fed and housed him.’

  In May 1974 Woody Mellor moved back to London. ‘I realized that we weren’t going to get anywhere in Newport,’ Joe said. ‘The lead guitarist was wanting to go up the valleys and settle down with a woman, and everything was wrong with the group. So I left Newport, and went back to London.’

  9

  PILLARS OF WISDOM

  1974–1975

  When Woody moved back to London he had to sort himself out with somewhere to live. Direct from Newport, Woody Mellor arrived on the doorstep of the new house that Tymon Dogg, Helen Cherry, Dave and Gail Goodall were sharing, at 23 Chippenham Road, London W9, on Maida Hill off the Harrow Road.

  ‘When he came back to London in 1974 he crashed there,’ said Tymon Dogg. ‘I had two rooms, and in one I’d put a grand piano – I played all the time. It was up at the top of the house and he came and slept in the other room.’

  23 Chippenham Road was not a squat but a ‘short-life’ house (i.e. one scheduled for demolition because of its rundown state) acquired by London Student Housing, which found homes for people involved in further education in the capital; as Helen and Gail were both still students they qualified. ‘There was a minimal rent to pay,’ said Helen. ‘23 Chippenham Road was Dave Goodall’s castle,’ said Jill Calvert, who moved into the property at the beginning of 1975 with Mickey Foote. ‘He could plumb and secure leaks: we had this series of plastic she
ets to stop the rain coming in. Dave – who Joe always called Larry, for some reason – was a provider. And so in Chippenham Road there was hot water, a telephone, there was always food, there was a fire.’ Dave Goodall was also a gardener; among the vegetable plots he grew what had the reputation of being the best weed in West London. Occasionally crashing at 23 Chippenham Road, from their home town of Manchester, were the members of a satirical rock group of considerable and justified acclaim called Alberto y Los Trios Paranoias, a festival crowd-pleaser; Tymon Dogg played with them on one of their albums. ‘The Albertos 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 until I get more stacks ready. Love Wood.