With almost painful slowness, Woody Mellor began to angle himself in the direction of the career choice he had expressed to his father. The arrival of Tymon Dogg at 18 Ash Grove, along with the presence of the accomplished guitarist Clive Timperley, proved inspirational. ‘I remember Joe singing this chorus, I’m going to be sick / I wanna puke up in a bucket of water, and trying to play it on Tymon’s ukulele,’ said Helen
Soon their time at Vomit Heights was at an end. ‘Ash Grove was falling apart after we’d lived there for a year,’ said Helen. ‘There was a bit of damage: there had been so much dancing at one party the kitchen ceiling had come down, and Tymon somehow destroyed the garden.’ It was time to move.
In September 1971 the Vomit Heights crowd moved into a second-floor, three-bedroom flat at 34 Ridley Road, Harlesden, rented from an Irish couple; with occasional exceptions, Woody’s subsequent London addresses would draw closer and closer to Notting Hill until he was living in the area proper. For some reason, Woody Mellor always insisted that his new address was in Willesden, although that is at least a mile to the north. Was this because Harlesden was considered an almost unmentionably rough area, an underclass immigrant district locked away into its own world because it was so badly served by public transport? Helen lived there with her boyfriend Robert Basey; Woody shared a room with Kit Buckler, a friend from Ralph West who had booked the groups at his own college – when Kit moved out he was replaced by Dick the Shit; a Frenchman had the third bedroom, little more than a box-room; and Tymon Dogg slept in the communal living-room.
It was not a great time for Woody Mellor. No longer financially underpinned by the government grant he had received as a student at Central, he was frequently virtually destitute. He had sunk to the ocean-floor of life: the dank, threatening district of Harlesden was a long way mentally from the landscaped lawns of the City of London Freemen’s School, or the quaint village-like life of Upper Warlingham. Woody was, said Helen, ‘very lost at the end of the art college year’, although his spirits were still underpinned by his devotions to Guru Maharaj Ji. He briefly worked laying carpets, following this with flat-cleaning jobs. He attempted to start a painting and decorating business called HIC, which stood for Head in the Clouds, but this attempt at business stalled almost from its inception.
Iain Gillies came to stay a few times, and he and Woody would stay up all night: ‘On a couple of occasions, as I was making my way to bed at 8 o’clock in the morning, Joe would say that he had to go off to do a flat-cleaning job.’
In a letter to Annie Day, Woody gives his impression of the district in which he is living: ‘This pad is in a pretty GRIM area like goods yards etc etc Oh yeah loads of spades like this:’ He has illustrated this thought with a distinctly politically incorrect cartoon of a black man wearing a sweater emblazoned with the slogan OOGA BOOGA, dancing in front of a house that bears the number ‘34’. Out of the top window peers a character with a question-mark emerging from the top of his head, who you assume can only be the letter’s signatory – who in this instance is ‘Johnny Red’. Stuck next to the cartoon black guy is a celebrated frame from the then renowned underground press cartoon strip ‘The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers’, in which the stoned hero holds a handful of joints and is mouthing the speech bubble, ‘Well, as we all know, DOPE will get you through times of NO MONEY better than MONEY will get you through times of NO DOPE!’ (It is worth noting that in hip circles of the time in Britain to call black people ‘spades’ was considered a sort of cool political correctness … )
Poverty meant that Woody would occasionally stoop to shoplifting, at which he was not very good. ‘One time,’ said Helen, ‘we were in this bakery, and I could tell that he was going to go for this mince pie. He ordered some bread and as this poor woman turned round to get it, he stole this mince pie off the top of the counter and put it into the big dirty old fur coat that he had. But he’d forgotten that it had no pocket in it, and so this mince pie came tumbling out by his foot on the floor, and the woman spotted it. It was so embarrassing that I just couldn’t stop laughing as we followed him out of the door, trailing crumbs behind him. He was just no good as a thief, made a complete balls-up of it. He hadn’t thought it out at all. He was better at dressing up as a poor boy and putting it on for the greengrocer, he was quite good at that. He would help me in the kitchen so long as it was something he wanted to eat, so long as it was carrots and sweetcorn. He seemed to eat sweetcorn every day.
‘He was a very sincere person, and you were very lucky if you had him as a friend, because he had an energy, a spark. Sometimes we’d spend whole evenings by getting out a piece of wallpaper and having drawing fights. We’d have battles: he’d imagine something and he’d draw it, and say, “This is coming to get you.” I’d have to do a drawing back to put his men down and send in another missile. I remember him getting hold of one of my sketchbooks and starting in felt-tip in the corner, “This is Gonad”: it was all about this poor chap called Gonad. He was very good at starting some of the titles, but the endings … No, he didn’t get a lot of endings.’
Woody’s missive to Anne Day from 34 Ridley Road – soon he would be physically ejected from the property. (Anne Day)
On visits to his parents, John Mellor would gloss over the hand-to-mouth existence he was living. ‘Woody tried to reassure his father that he was on the correct career path by announcing that he had secured a desk job,’ said Iain Gilles. ‘A few seconds later he added that he would be sweeping up for a Warlingham cabinet maker. Ron thought that this was very funny.’
In a letter that he sent to Paul Buck in December 1971, Woody included a centre-spread poster of Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant – whose first albums he had loved at CLFS – from the weekly music paper Sounds. He had satirically improved the picture of this archetypal rock-god, including a speech-bubble that read, ‘Look at me, I’m wonderful,’ and adding drawings of holes in the singer’s arm with one word appended to them: ‘heroin’. The letter contains instructions for a then current urban myth about a method of getting high, on a par with – but probably much more dangerous than – their efforts to smoke banana-skins at CLFS: it consisted of boiling toadstools in red wine, the drinking of which was alleged to promote an interesting trip. ‘I don’t know: I’m afraid,’ he admitted in his letter. ‘But there’s plenty of guinea pigs here. I had a hair cut last Monday, hope you’re still in this room 8 of yours, otherwise you are not going to get this poster. Why don’t you come up? Love the Wood Bird.’
By early spring of 1972 Woody had begun to accompany Tymon Dogg down to the West End on his busking expeditions in the tiled corridors of the London tube system. They would hit the underground in the late evening, ‘when we judged everyone in town was drunk’. At first Woody Mellor simply acted as Tymon’s ‘bottler’, his money-collector; their regular pitch was at Green Park, where the Piccadilly and Victoria lines converge. ‘That’s how I got into playing, following Tymon Dogg around in the London underground and first collecting money for him like a Mississippi bluesman apprentice.’ Then Woody moved up in the world: ‘I bought a ukulele, ’cos I figured that had to be easier than a guitar, having only four strings.’ The instrument, for which he paid £2.99, came from a Shaftesbury Avenue music shop: ‘I began to learn Chuck Berry songs on the ukulele, and go out on my own, down in the London underground.’ One night when Tymon Dogg decided to try his luck one stop up the Victoria line at Oxford Circus, he left Woody at Green Park with his ukulele. ‘The train emptied at one end of the corridor. One second the corridor was empty, the next it was packed with people streaming through. It was like, now or never, playing to this full house. That was the first time I remember performing on my own.’ Realizing how crucial it was to grab the attention of his prospective audience in seconds, an attitude he developed in the future, Woody came up with a repertoire of Chuck Berry songs: ‘Once I was playing “Sweet Little Sixteen” on the ukulele and an American happened to walk past and he stopped in front of me and went, “I don’t believe it, I can’t believe it,” and he began smacking his forehead, and staggering around, and nearly fainting,