There is a picture Paul has of Johnny on the shoreline, looking happily miserable, seeing the irony of the mistake he has just made: he has run into the sea, straight into a submerged boulder, and banged his shin. There’s another one with a nameless pretty girl who had been at CLFS and happened to be staying on the campsite. Johnny and Paul had a little hash with them, and in the evenings would drink in the local pubs and try and get off with girls.
Did Joe take on some of his brother’s distant role when David committed suicide? People with dead siblings frequently assume something of the role of the deceased. So it is almost certain that whoever Joe was before David died, he had a bit of his brother in him after his death; and at the same time, the death of David represented losing a large part of himself.
Moreover, considering the extent to which David Mellor was influenced by the National Front and Nazism, is it any surprise that Joe Strummer should have turned so resolutely against fascism? From the time in 1978 that the Clash appeared at the Rock Against Racism concert in Victoria Park, before an audience of 80,000 people, their front-man was almost indelibly associated with the side of punk rock that had disassociated itself from those flirtations with swastikas espoused by Sid Vicious and Siouxsie. Joe changed that image of punk, becoming rather righteous in his role of tragic, vulnerable spokesman. To what degree, we may ask, was this motivated by his brother’s desperate end?
Although it could hardly compensate for the tragedy Johnny Mellor and his parents had undergone, at least there was some good news that summer.
Although his progress in his Advanced level GCEs had been as stumbling as when he had sat his ‘O’ levels – he had passed Art with an ‘E’ grade, the minimum, been given the consolation prize of a further ‘O’ level pass (one step better than a fail) for the English Literature ‘A’ level paper, and failed History – he had been accepted on the strength of his portfolio for a foundation course at Central School of Art and Design in Southampton Row in central London, by Holborn underground station – a more prestigious school than his original choices, Norwich and Stourbridge. His ambition was still to be a cartoonist, though at school he had declared he wanted to ‘be in advertising’. John Mellor’s course at Central began on 7 September 1970: it was less than six weeks since the sudden death of his brother, and one must presume he was in a state of shock. At the instigation of his grieving parents, anxious their surviving son should have some sort of support system during his further education, he moved into Ralph West hall of residence in Worfield Street by Battersea Park. On his first day at Central college he learned that his place at the art school positioned him as a member of an elite group: there had been over 400 applicants for the sixty places available on the ‘Foundation Year’, which introduced students to the disciplines of art school, preparing them for a degree course at a college of their choice. That Johnny Mellor had succeeded in getting in to Central was a tribute to his talent as an artist.
Having left school, he attempted to metamorphose into some sort of semi-adult new being. Now he announced to everyone he met that his name was ‘Woody’: this was what he was known as at Central – no one called him John or Johnny or even ‘Woolly’, or was confused that he was no longer known as that. Attracted by the cut of his jib, another new student, a girl called Deborah Kartun, overheard him in conversation with a boy who introduced himself as ‘Ollie’. ‘My name’s Woody,’ he said to him. When Deborah started talking to him, he said, ‘My name’s not really Woody: I made it up – but that name Ollie sounded so stupid.’ ‘At Central,’ said Deborah, ‘he was quite extraordinary. It was evident from the first moment I met him there: he was always at the centre of things.’
Johnny’s completed art school application form. (Deborah van der Beek, née Kartun)
On his first day at the art college, in the vast studio room where the ‘fresher’ students collected nervously to meet up, ‘Woody’ Mellor encountered another new student, a girl called Helen Cherry. ‘On the first day we made friends,’ she said. In what would become increasingly typical of him, Johnny was drawn to her because of her eccentric, quirky personality; although her striking prettiness was probably also an attraction: tall and lanky, Helen Cherry would swan through Central in sweeping long dresses. Later that first term John Mellor and Helen Cherry worked together on a cartoon that was published in the college newspaper. Considering what he had so recently endured with David, its theme was telling: ‘It was about this bloke,’ she said, ‘who fell in love with a picture of an air hostess on a poster on the tube. And then in a state of depression he thinks he can find her by jumping on the tube line – and dies.’ Yet at no point during Woody’s time at Central was there any mention of David Mellor, that other depression sufferer, and what had happened to him. Another Foundation student, Celia Pyke, said Woody’s demeanour was such that until I told her about it she had had no knowledge at all of the tragedy: ‘My impression was that he wasn’t somebody who had anything hanging over him. He was so lovely, so funny, so charismatic. A girl I’d met had told me to watch out for him when I got to Central. She said he was one of her best friends – I think she’d been at school with him – and that he was not only a really great person but that he was someone who would do something really great.’ (Later at Central Celia would discover one aspect of Woody’s greatness – that he was ‘a really great snogger’.)
Helen Cherry had been born only days before Woody Mellor, on 10 August. ‘When he first met me and found out that I was born in 1952 that seemed to be a definite advantage to being his friend: “It’s a really special year!” He had funny little phobias about things. Sometimes in a group of people he’d need to pick on somebody: I felt that was a downer side of his character. But he was a very lively, warm person, and really good fun, a laugh a minute. We’d never walk down the street: we’d have to run. He’d say, “We’ll be old when we can’t run down streets. We must run down streets and skip. It’ll be the end of us if we walk.” A very vibrant personality.’
When Iain Gillies came down to London in March 1971 for an interview at art school, he immediately got a sense of his cousin’s life in the hall of residence. ‘He let me – illegally – crash in his room at Ralph West. We collaborated on some artworks in his room. There was paint, glue, cardboard, broken glass and other assorted detritus stuck and smeared over most of the floor. He seemed to approve of this at first but then to my surprise he decided I was making too much mess and he terminated the art projects.’ (Iain was so untidy that he nearly got Joe thrown out of his room.)
‘At Ralph West,’ continued his cousin, ‘he had a picture or two of Jimi Hendrix stuck on his wall, along with the date of Hendrix’s death. He said that Hendrix was his favourite. He also told me that he’d been to the Isle of Wight pop festival. He was very enthusiastic about it and had written out a reminiscence for either a school or college project. He had a few, short, absurdist poems he had written lying around in his room. One poem was called “I’m Going to Getcha”: I’m going to getcha/ You can run into the garage.’
In an evident effort to mark out an identity for himself, Woody would carry a small, battered suitcase with him everywhere that he went; as well as his work materials for the day, it also contained various items of sentimental value: a bus ticket from his favourite bus ride, for example, and the stub from the most enjoyable cigarette he had smoked. But this seems to have been the full extent of any personality that he carried about him. One student, Carol Roundhill, remembered him being dressed in clothes only on the very periphery of fashionability: ‘too short corduroy trousers, a sleeveless knitted pullover, and a short-sleeved shirt and big Kickers shoes. He used to swap things: he had a shirt of mine he used to wear, a little short-sleeved aertex games shirt from my grammar school.’ Helen Cherry found him another second-hand fur coat, of the sort affected by some student boys aspiring vaguely at hipness, a look by now a little out of date. Carol Roundhill’s initial impression of Woody Mellor, in fact, was that ‘he was like a lot of boys: he wasn’t that attractive. He had very