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.
6
BLUE APPLES
1965–1969
When the two Mellor boys went out to Tehran in the summer of 1965, Johnny came across a Chuck Berry EP that included the great American R’n’B performer’s version of a song that he thought was a Beatles’ original on their For Sale album, released the previous Christmas. ‘I remember putting on Chuck Berry’s “Rock’n’Roll Music” and comparing it to the Beatles and being a bit surprised that they hadn’t written it,’ Joe said. Discovering that both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones spoke openly of their allegiance to American R’n’B, Johnny Mellor, who had just turned thirteen, further investigated Berry’s music when he returned to the UK, also discovering the unique shuffling sound of Bo Diddley. He loved these artists.
After a brief stint back in London, in 1966 Ron was promoted to Second Secretary of Information and despatched to Blantyre, Malawi, in southern Africa, where he and Anna would spend the next two years. In Malawi, Johnny discovered the BBC World Service which kept him in touch with the new big releases. He was also very interested in the local Malawian musicians. A stamp in his passport also shows a visit to Rhodesia. ‘Ron and Anna quite liked Malawi,’ said Jessie. ‘But then independence came and they came back to England, pretty much for good. They used to say that Johnny had really liked Malawi. But David found it somehow troubling and unsettling.’
In memories of Johnny Mellor at CLFS an etiolated, almost spectral figure stands off to one side, indistinct, passive and vague. It is David Mellor, Johnny’s older brother. At CLFS the younger Mellor boy spent little time with his elder sibling. Later, according to Gaby Salter, he had regrets over this. But no one really seems to have any sense at all of David Mellor, even those who shared living accommodation with him. ‘Although we were in the same boarding house for two years, we hardly spoke at all,’ admitted David Bardsley. ‘Dave Mellor was very quiet, very shy, very introverted – the complete opposite to John. I suspect David was put upon by the world in general.’ ‘David was in my elder brother’s year,’ Andy Ward told me. ‘He was floppy-fringed and quiet, although he wasn’t someone who was bullied. But no one remembers much about him.’
In the cloistered bowels of the British Museum, where he now works as a clock conserver, Paul Buck produces a photograph of David Mellor; my heart leaps as he hands it to me, as though I have made a great find. But the teenage boy in the photograph seems shrouded in gloom and so indistinct as to be almost transparent; his image is so imprecise that he looks like a ghost, or at least a man who isn’t there. My elation vanishes and instead a chill runs through me. In a set of five photographs of the Mellors at Court Farm Road in 1965, the mystery is repeated: in three of them, taken as the family work in the back garden, David is turned away from the camera – all you see is an anonymous back. In the one picture of the two boys with Anna and Ron, Johnny squats between his parents, while David stands, leaning off to one side of Anna. In the printing process a tiny blue smudge has appeared in his right eye, like a tear, a portent.
‘I do have to agree with what most people say about David Mellor,’ considered Adrian Greaves. ‘I didn’t talk to him much at first. He was a nice chap, but you had to initiate the conversation. He seemed very calm but very shy.’ They both read the works of Cyril Henry Hoskins, who wrote, he claimed, under the direction of the spirit of a deceased lama, Lobsang Rampa: a mishmash of occult, theosophical and meta-physical speculation dressed up in a Tibetan robe, his books read like adventure stories, and enjoyed great popularity during the 1960s. David Mellor devoured them. In 1999 Joe Strummer had mentioned to me his brother’s fondness for bodice-ripper black magic novels like those of Dennis Wheatley. But would he have included Lobsang Rampa among the occult works that fascinated David Mellor in what Joe referred to as ‘a cheap paperback way’?
The interests of the younger Mellor boy were also broadening. When he was fifteen, studying for his ‘O’ level GCEs in the fifth form, John Mellor was a member of the school’s rugby Second XV team, playing in the line, either as a winger or a three-quarter, a reflection of the stamina that he would later show on stage and which was already evident in his ability at cross-country running: he was developing into one of the most accomplished long-distance athletes in the school. Perhaps he should have devoted more time to his studies. When he sat his ‘O’ levels in July 1968, he only passed four subjects, English Literature and History (both of which he scraped with the lowest acceptable grade, a 6, which meant 45 to 50 per cent), Art (one grade higher), and a more respectable grade 3 – 60 to 65 per cent – in English Language; in the November re-sits that year, he added a grade 6 in Economics and Public Affairs, giving him a total of five ‘O’ levels, the minimum requirement for further education.
By the time ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Penny Lane’ were released as a double A-side in February 1967, John Mellor’s fondness for the Beatles had evaporated. Now he hungrily devoured both the latest ‘underground rock’ music and its early blues progenitors, much of it from revered DJ John Peel’s late-night Perfumed Garden show on Radio London; every week he read Melody Maker from cover to cover, the former jazz-based music weekly having reinvented itself to find a new readership with long articles about ‘serious’ album