As the year progressed at Central School of Art, Woody Mellor continued to make his mark. ‘Not in artistic terms,’ said Helen Cherry, ‘not in terms of producing much work, definitely he didn’t. But in terms of personality everybody knew him, though some thought he was an egotist.’ Carol Roundhill added, ‘He was everybody’s friend. I thought I was very close to him, but I went to a Central reunion later, and then a lot of people were claiming to be very close to him.’
Having tired of the constraints of their respective student accommodation, Helen Cherry, Simon Winks, who had sat with Woody as an American Indian opposite the Houses of Parliament, and Eric Drennen, also at Central, did what many students did and rented a cheap property together. A suitable address was found at 18 Ash Grove in Wood Green. Richard Evans took a room. Clive Timperley, a guitarist who had a day-job working for an insurance firm, also moved in.
And there was another lodger. Interlinked with what she perceived as Woody’s indubitable charisma, Deborah Kartun, who had met him on that first day at Central, was impressed that he had spent time in Africa: she thought this to be most sophisticated. For his part, the boy from a bungalow in Upper Warlingham found her background to be equally urbane: educated at King Alfred’s, a progressive co-educational school off Hampstead Heath near her Highgate home, Deborah, blonde, bespectacled and the same height as Woody Mellor, had a Communist father who was foreign editor of The Daily Worker. ‘Woody wanted revolution,’ she said, ‘although that was the mood of the times. It was all very unspecific – none of us were at all politically sophisticated. We were both so naïve.’
In the second term at Central they had begun to become close. ‘It was very gradual,’ she said. ‘I was splitting up with this guy who had been having a nervous breakdown – he helped me through that. At first Woody and I just became friends – he could be good friends with women. I hardly dared think I might go out with him – he was at the centre of everything that was happening. Gradually we got together. At first I’d vaguely gone out with a friend of his, Tim Talent, but that was to get close to Woody.’
When Woody found the house in Ash Grove in Wood Green ‘around April or May of ’71’, Deborah, who had been born a month before him, moved in with him. He told Deborah about what had happened to David: ‘He just said he had trouble communicating, but there was an implication that he might have been gay. Because you’re young you didn’t realise how enormous a thing like the suicide of a family member might be. He was probably still in shock. And his poor parents when we went down to see them that summer of 1971 and had Sunday lunch with them – I had no idea they might be in mourning. There was no alcohol, and it was rather formal, like Sunday lunches were in those days – I was terrified.
‘His mother and father were very sweet. His father was very eccentric – I had the impression he would have been like Woody, if he hadn’t existed in such a conventional, formal occupation. I remember him showing me his tiny vegetable patch, about as big as a table, and his experiments with cross-breeding carrots.’
The extra-curricular activities of the occupants of 18 Ash Grove led to Woody Mellor renaming it ‘Vomit Heights’, although not necessarily because of the effects of alcohol consumed. ‘There wasn’t that much drinking,’ said Helen. ‘A lot of dope, and sometimes some acid.’ ‘It was very suburban,’ remembered Richard. ‘The poor bastard who was the neighbour had these people move in next door which must have been a bloody disaster for him. He was getting all these sleepless nights because these hippies have moved in. We would still be ranting and raving at 3 o’clock in the morning.’
‘At Ash Grove,’ confirmed Deborah Kartun, ‘we were nightmare tenants. We played music loudly until 4am. One morning Woody went out and put all his transistor radios in the garden and started banging dustbins to keep us awake. But we were all too stoned to get out of bed.’
At Ash Grove, said Helen, was when she really got to know Woody Mellor: ‘Joe was like a big mischievous child. He was a great personality to live with, and he used to have a lot of pillow fights with me. We also used to arm-wrestle: even though I was a girl, because I was doing sculpture I could easily push his arm down. I could always win on arms. We had quite a boisterous relationship. But he would never hurt me, it was just very close. There was a lot of hugging, a lot of touching.’
When Woody Mellor mutated into Joe Strummer, this tactile aspect of his personality was always very apparent. In fact, among all of the Clash there seemed to be a ceaseless need to emphasize empathy through physical contact: a flick of the finger on the arm to emphasize a point; a lightly bunched fist to the shoulder to underline the punchline of a joke; a touch to the back of the neck to express sympathy. Did such un-English behaviour extend to Woody’s diet? ‘He did say that his favourite family dish was curry,’ said Helen Cherry. ‘He always went on about his mother’s curry – and it wasn’t that natural for someone like him to really love curry. I felt there had been a certain strictness around Woody that he was always trying to press against and throw out of the window, a bit of a strict household. His father seemed an elderly gentleman, with a very nice posture and white hair – very middle-class.’ I pointed out to Helen that Ron Mellor was then only in his mid-fifties: ‘Really? He seemed to me like a pensioner. I think he was very proud of Woody though.
‘When I went to stay there, his dad said to both of us, what did we want to make of ourselves, and Woody said, “I want to be a rock-’n’roll star.” His dad said, “After one year of art college you want to do this?” He said to me, “What do you want to do?” I said, “I just want to run through long grass.” He said, “That’s not much of an ambition, my lady.” The father didn’t really like these wild things that we said we were going to do with our lives in our late teens: he thought we had our heads right up in the clouds.’ Clearly, Woody Mellor’s expression of an ambition to become ‘a rock’n’roll star’ seems noteworthy. Not only is this the first announcement of any such idea, but he is telling it to his father.
Helen Cherry’s 3D tutor at Central ran an organization called Action Space, a kind of peripatetic playgroup for deprived children which travelled around London. It was, said Helen Cherry, ‘arty sculptural stuff. There was a group of us that went around with inflatables, being stupid and dressing up for children. It was some of the first inflatable work that was done in playgrounds. Our 3D tutor used to use students as cheap assistants. Joe used to sometimes come along.’
At one such event, at West End Green in the hardly deprived area of Hampstead, a game of ‘imaginary cricket’ was organized for the benefit of the children who came along to watch. Essentially this consisted of the Action Space students miming a game of cricket, like the mimed game of tennis in which a group of London students participate at the end of Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-up, a staple work of art-house cinema that was almost a way of thinking about how to live in London. A visitor to this quasi-happening was one Tymon Dogg.
Two years older than Woody Mellor, the Liverpudlian Tymon had been something of a teenage musical prodigy: a multi-instrumentalist, he was already on his way to becoming a masterly violin player. Very shortly he would become considered by Woody as something of an inspirational mentor. He had even had a record released on the Apple label, founded by the Beatles: when he realized that they wanted to market him as a singles artist, Tymon stuck to his principles and walked out on his deal.
Tymon ended up living at 18 Ash Grove. He was making a living of sorts by busking and playing the occasional small gig, and saw Joe’s interest. ‘He would turn up, if I was doing something in some poxy folk gig. There was a crypt in the basement of St Martin’s church in Trafalgar Square where they had folk gigs. I went down there to try out a few new songs. I remember seeing this car coming into Trafalgar Square, and the door opening, and Woody rolling out like a tumbleweed. “Hi Tymon, when are you going on?” Deborah