Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer

‘On the first day,’ Joe Strummer said in an interview with Record Mirror in 1977, ‘I was surrounded and taken to the bathroom where I was confronted by a bath full of used toilet paper. I had to either get in or get beaten up. I got beaten up.’ In a Melody Maker article written in 1979 by Chris Bohn, he continued this theme: ‘I was a dwarf when I was younger, grew to my normal size later on. But before then I had to fight my way through school.’

During his first year at CLFS, the nine-year-old Johnny Mellor tried to run away from the school with another boy. ‘We got about five miles before a teacher found us. I remember being taken back to school and the vice-headmaster came out and shouted at us for not wearing our caps. I was thinking, “You idiot. Do you really think we’re going to run away with our caps on?” I just couldn’t believe it.’

Years later Sara Driver, the American film director, told me of how she saw Joe behaving at the end of the 1980s: ‘He was very much wallowing in darkness and talking about growing up and being beaten up at public school when he was a kid and how rough that was.’ As time went by Joe worked out a standard line on his school days: ‘I had to become a bully to survive.’

Paul Buck dismisses this self-assessment: ‘He wasn’t a bully. He was full of life and very funny.’ Nor, he says, was John Mellor a participant in the fights that are often a feature of coexisting adolescent boys. ‘I might have forgotten or maybe I wasn’t there, but it certainly wasn’t “Oh, Mellor’s in a fight again.” No way. He was boisterous but he wasn’t dominant. He was one of us.’

As though making a statement to Ron and Anna, Johnny Mellor refused to participate in school-work for much of his time at CLFS; his mystification at having been taken away from his parents seemed to have created a befuddle of stubbornness that simply did not allow him to find any interest in his studies; he had had an exciting and exotic family life which overnight had stopped: why? Like a punishment, he would never post the letter to his parents that he was compelled to write once a week. The self-confident persona seen by Paul Buck at that entrance exam was a front, something that the quietly sensitive and sometimes easily hurt Johnny Mellor had learnt as a social art on the diplomatic cocktail circuit. When Gaby Salter went through Ron Mellor’s papers at 15 Court Farm Road, she found that almost every year until the Sixth Form the headmaster had written to Johnny’s father, apologizing for the school’s failure to make any headway with his academic progress – he flunked his GCE ‘O’ levels, and had to repeat them.

Although Paul Buck was a year below John Mellor, the boy – who also had an older brother at the school – was to become one of his closest friends, a relationship that continued into the early days of the Clash. ‘He was his best friend,’ the writer Peter Silverton, friends with both of them, confirms of Buck’s relationship to Joe. ‘I saw him and thought, “Oh, I remember you at that entrance exam,”’ said Paul Buck, who formed a double-act with John Mellor, bound together by an absurdist view of life and a common love of music. ‘I remember getting on with him all through school. We were as thick as thieves.’ At first, John would be referred to – as were all junior boys in the school – by his surname, Mellor, frequently contorted into the jokey Mee-lor.

But how did the other Mee-lor boy, whose personality seemed the diametric opposite of his younger brother, fit into this dog-eat-dog world? ‘My brother and I were sent to school,’ Joe Strummer told Mal Peachey for Don Letts’ Westway To The World documentary, ‘and it was a little strange in my case because my brother was very shy. He was the opposite of me – I mean the complete and utter opposite. The running joke in school was that he hadn’t said a word all term – which was more or less true. He was really shy, and I was the opposite, like a big-mouthed ringleader up to no good.

‘I often think about my parents,’ he continued, ‘and how I must have felt about it, because being sent away and seeing them only once a year, it was rather weird. [He misses out the Christmas trips here.] When you’re a child you just deal with what you have to deal with, and it really changed my life because I realized I just had to forget about my parents in order to keep my head above water in this situation. When you’re a kid you go straight to the heart of the matter. There’s no procrastination. I mean, I feel bad now because I was a bad son to them. When they came back to eventually live in England, I’d never go to see them, and I feel bad about that.

‘I would say that going to school in a place like that you became independent. You didn’t expect anybody to do anything for you. And that was a big part of punk: do the damn thing yourself and don’t expect anything from anybody.’

The boy boarders were lodged in four dormitories, according to age. For the younger boys bedtimes were strict: they had to be in bed by 7.30. The seniors did not have an official bedtime. The junior dormitory, where John Mellor first slept, lodged ten boys and two prefects. The dormitory had fifteen-feet-high windows, from which the more adventurous pupils, like Mellor, would climb out onto the building’s flat roof.

Life for CLFS boarders was regimented: day-pupils had to arrive at 8.45 a.m. for assembly, held in the main hall that doubled as diningroom; by then the boarders already had gathered for ‘Boarders’ Assembly’, at which they had to account for what they would do at the end of that day’s lessons, which started at 9.00. Games or homework were all that were on offer. ‘We usually put down games, as this would get us out of the school buildings,’ said Adrian Greaves, who had joined the school the year after Johnny Mellor, also as a boarder. While a ‘Grub’, as Juniors were known, John Mellor wore short trousers for two years and was so diminutive in stature that he was known as ‘little Johnny Mellor’. At first he remained in the fantasy world of small boys in which role-playing games are a norm; in the grounds of the school Adrian Greaves remembered Johnny and himself making ‘tiny villages of mud huts with twig people. He was very normal – bright, enthusiastic and mixed well.’ As a member of the school’s Boy Scout troop, Johnny Mellor learnt to put up a tent and sleep the night outdoors, a skill he would later harness to enhance his love of the festival outdoor life; his woodwork classes had given him the facility to knock up lean-tos and small sheds. Adrian Greaves recalled how even as a ‘Grub’ Johnny would immerse himself in the world of art that had led to the cowboy painting that hung on the wall at Carnmhor: ‘Johnny was very good at drawing. I can remember as early as 1962 him drawing cartoon-strips on long rolls of paper. They were good stories, cowboy and Indian stuff. Certainly I didn’t expect him to be a musician. He would often be in the art-room. I think the art teacher had a lot of time for him.’

In 1962 Ron Mellor had been given another overseas posting, to Tehran, the capital of Persia, a Moslem state ruled in a feudal manner by the king-like Shah, whose family had been installed by American oil interests. Ron and Anna drove down to CLFS and spent a Saturday afternoon with their two sons, explaining where they would be living for the next two years. In the interview he gave to Caroline Coon in November 1976, Joe vented anger at the notion of boarding school: ‘It’s easier, isn’t it? I mean, it gets kids out of the way. And I’m really glad I went, because my dad’s a bastard. I shudder to think what would have happened if I hadn’t gone to boarding school. I only saw him once a year. If I’d seen him all the time, I’d probably have murdered him by now. He was very strict.’

The ‘old bear’ had plenty of spirit, however. He decided that he and Anna would get to Persia by driving, taking the boys with them during the summer holiday. While they were traversing Italy, Anna’s suitcase slipped from where it was strapped to the top of Ron’s Renault: they had to go to a children’s shop to find replacement clothes that would fit her slight stature. In Tehran Ron and Anna lived in an embassy compound. But Anna was not at all taken with the country. ‘She didn’t like Tehran,’ said her sister Jessie. ‘She said she had been spat at in the street. The locals didn’t like her walking out on her own.’ Unfortunately for Anna, Ron was stationed in Tehran for almost four years. During school holidays and even for the half-term break, she would often return to Britain. The next time that David and John went to Persia, they flew. Arriving in a taxi at their parents’ residence, they climbed out of the vehicle to pay their driver, at which point he drove off, stealing their luggage. John Mellor thought this was hilarious, spluttering as he recounted the story back at school.

John (right) and David Mellor (left) share a donkey ride in Tehran with an unknown friend. (Phyllis Netherway)

In 1963 John Mellor and Adrian Greaves appeared together onstage at a school drama evening; previously, John had performed in an ensemble, playing recorder onstage at the age of ten. Inspired by the satire craze of the time, the evening’s performance took current television advertisements and twisted them into skits. A regular appearance during ‘commercial breaks’ was an ad for indigestion tablets called Settlers, which concluded with the catch-line ‘Settlers bring express relief’. Johnny Mellor and Adrian Greaves took to the stage in cowboy outfits as they acted out a scene in which they were part of a wagon-train besieged by Indians. ‘What we need is some settlers,’ said Adrian. ‘Settlers bring express relief,’ Johnny delivered the punchline. At the carol service that Christmas, Johnny and Adrian sang ‘In the Deep Midwinter’ to the tune of ‘Twist and Shout’, a recent hit for The Beatles.

By the autumn of 1963, in the sports’ changing-rooms and in the showers after games, Johnny Mellor, Adrian Greaves and their cohorts would join in off-key spontaneous renditions of a song that had swept the country late that summer, ‘She Loves You’ by the Beatles. ‘We’d all sing along to “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah,”’ remembered Paul Buck. ‘The first record I bought would have been probably “I Want to Hold Your Hand” by the Beatles,’ said Joe Strummer of the follow-up to “She Loves You”. Throughout Britain the image of the Fab Four was ubiquitous by the end of that year; and at CLFS John Mellor’s illustrative skills played a small part. ‘He had a job drawing The Beatles on the covers of everyone’s rough book,’ said Buck. ‘And he’d get the guitars the right way round.’ Plugging earphones into their tinny transistor radios, the boarders would listen in bed to the newest pop sounds on Radio Luxembourg’s evening English service, sailing through the airwaves and clouds of static from the European royal principality; this was especially popular on Thursday nights, to drown out the weekly bell-ringing practice in the nearby church. There was greater listening choice after Easter 1964 and the launch of Radio Caroline, from a converted fishing-boat anchored outside the three-mile limit of the British legal restrictions, pumping out the British ‘Beat Boom’ non-stop; soon Caroline’s 24-hour pop service, a symbol of rebellion for teenagers against the staid BBC, was joined by a flotilla of competitors, including Radio London, Radio City and Swinging Radio England, whose name alone defined the cultural change taking place. On Sunday afternoons the boarders could watch the ATV pop programme Thank Your Lucky Stars, presented by Brian Matthew. ‘That’s the first time I saw the Stones, way down the bill on Thank Your Lucky Stars in the sort of dead-end slot, singing “Come On” by Chuck Berry,’ Joe told Mal Peachey. ‘And we just flipped when we saw it: the whole school was sort of gathered in the day room to watch it and we didn’t need anyone to tell us this was the new thing. We all flipped, and likewise with the Beatles. In fact, I can’t imagine how we would’ve got through being at that school without that explosion going off in London: the Beatles, the Stones, the Yardbirds, the Kinks. Without that rock explosion, I don’t think we would have been able to stand it. It just got us through. Every Friday a new great record. We couldn’t have survived without that music, definitely. We were very young at the time this really happened, and the older boys would bring in the records and on Saturdays they’d let them play them on this huge radiogram that had speakers all over the hall.’

It was not the Beatles or other avatars of the ‘Beat Boom’ who inspired Johnny Mellor to become obsessive about popular music. This came through the California group who became great rivals to the Liverpool quartet, the Beach Boys. ‘Johnny came back to school one term with a copy of a Beach Boys’ Greatest Hits compilation. It knocked him and me out,’ says Paul Buck. John Mellor began to try and grow his hair as long as he could, which was not very long at all, tucking it behind his ears to avoid the attention of teachers.

The boarders’ communal room, a small, badly heated square space intended for the reading of improving books and serious newspapers, also contained a Grundig mono record-player and a large valve radio, both put to purposeful use by Johnny Mellor and his cohorts. Another contemporary, Andy Ward, recalls hearing ‘Little Red Rooster’ by the Rolling Stones blasting out of the window, Johnny Mellor silhouetted in the frame as he mimed exaggeratedly to the Stones’ cover of the blues classic. (‘Johnny Mellor was actually a strong little man, a tough little bugger with a quiet strength,’ he said. ‘He would surprise people, because he was small.’)

In 1988 Joe Strummer told the NME’s Sean O’Hagan that one record had changed his life, the Rolling Stones’ ‘Not Fade Away’, which came out in February 1964, about a year before ‘Little Red Rooster’: “Not Fade Away” sounded like the road to freedom! Seriously. It said, “LIVE! ENJOY LIFE! FUCK CHARTERED ACOUNTANCY!”’ Later he expanded on this: ‘I remember hearing “Not Fade Away” by the Rolling Stones coming out of this huge wooden radio in the day-room. Very loud – they always kept it on very loud. And I remember walking into the room and that’s the moment I thought, “This is something else! This is completely opposite all the other stuff we’re having to suffer here.” It was really a brutal situation. That’s the moment I think I decided here is at least a gap in the clouds, or here’s a light shining. And that’s the moment I think I fell for music. I think I made a subconscious decision to only follow music forever.’

Although Johnny Mellor was a willing participant in the annual school dances, held in the dining-hall, this was the extent of the boy’s musical education: ‘I was non-musical all my childhood. I wasn’t in any choir, didn’t learn any instrument, couldn’t be more completely away from the music. But we were fervent listeners and it was only after I left school that I began to think that I could actually play. I mean, I had a big problem with getting over that, which is why I called myself Joe Strummer. Because I can still only play six strings or none, and not all the fiddly bits. That was part of my make-up, that it was really impossible to play music, and so when I managed to get some chords together I was chuffed. That’s all I ever wanted to do: play chords. Jimi Hendrix said that if you can’t play rhythm guitar you can’t play lead, and I think he’s right, but I haven’t got to the lead guitar playing. But, still, rhythm guitar-playing is an art.’

Anne Day, who was two years below him, insists John Mellor was a member of the fifteen-strong school choir who sang in St Giles church on Sunday mornings – he also seems to forget his ability with the recorder. There were advantages to being a choir member. ‘You had about half an hour’s start on everyone in going over to the church and having a sneaky cigarette if you were in the choir,’ she said.

One abiding memory of life at City of London Freemen’s for Adrian Greaves was the appearance in 1964 of him and John Mellor ‘as woodland sprites in The Merry Wives of Windsor: it was just an excuse to get off school. He was very keen on amateur dramatics. Especially from around fifteen upwards.’ The plays would be staged in the Ashtead Peace Memorial Hall, off Ashtead High Street, and parents would be invited – though Johnny Mellor’s could never attend.

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