This time the musical extravaganza ended in a state of nearanarchy as Ladbroke Grove agit-prop hippie group Hawkwind established an alternative festival on a hill overlooking the site. Johnny Mellor liked that even more: Hawkwind became for long one of his favourite groups.
Late in 1969 Ron and Anna Mellor returned to Britain from their posting in Malawi. From now on Ron, who was now fifty-three, would travel daily up to the Foreign Office in Whitehall: in the 1970 New Year’s Day honours list he received an MBE. That Christmas of 1969 Johnny Mellor persuaded Ron and Anna to let him throw a party at 15 Court Farm Road, the only one he held there. The event turned out to be a little different from the social events with which his parents had been familiar at overseas diplomatic functions. Their son photocopied invitations describing how to get to the Mellor family home. Like any apprehensive host he was concerned that the event would run smoothly. Anxiously he wrote to Paul Buck, who had left CLFS the previous summer, at his home in East Sussex. He’d invited ninety people, he told his friend, before getting to the heart of his worries: ‘“How long does it take to drink a pint of beer? About 10 minutes,” he said. So he’s imagining the whole party running dry in ten minutes. It didn’t.’
‘By 8.30 in the evening no one was left standing,’ said Ken Powell, ‘not because of alcohol or other substances, but because of romantic inclinations. People were all over each other: there wasn’t a single space on the couch, or on the floor.’ Ron and Anna kept discreetly out of the way, until at the end of the evening there was some disagreement between Ron and his youngest son. ‘I remember at the end,’ said Paul Buck, ‘his father wasn’t happy about something, and Joe said, “Yeah, well it’s my pigeon now, isn’t it?” I can remember that phrase, because I hadn’t heard it before.’
Earlier that year Adrian Greaves had also thrown a party. By now Joe had a steady girlfriend at CLFS, ‘a lovely girl called Melanie Meakins, with curly black hair and freckles and fresh skin, who was younger than him’. Johnny Mellor spent his entire time at the party in the garden, snuggled up with Melanie inside the tent he had pitched that afternoon. ‘Sexual relationships were mainly between the boarders,’ said Ken Powell. ‘You didn’t have any parental control. And there would be people you were close to, with hormones running around. A highly charged and exciting situation. Nice, really. We were all on heat.’ Johnny Mellor told his friends that he lost his virginity on another weekend visit to Adrian Greaves’ parents’ house. (It is not clear whether or not this was with Melanie.)
In the summer of 1969, when Johnny Mellor was still sixteen, he had gone with his family to the wedding of Stephen Macfarland, a cousin on his father’s side. The Macfarlands lived in Acton in west London. Another guest at the wedding was Gerry King, another paternal cousin, a pretty girl: ‘John was there, and I had never met him before. He was about sixteen, and I was about twenty-four. We were chatting, and hit it off. We spent the whole wedding day together. In the evening, after all the other guests had left, we all stayed together behind at Stephen’s, all the young people. I really, really liked him. I could feel his charisma. I could feel that he was different. He told me about all his dreams, that he was really going to do something with his life – though he didn’t say what. He seemed very restless, and he was very articulate. At the end he gave me a coral necklace that he had with him.’
Sixteen-year-old Johnny Mellor, at the wedding of his cousin Stephen Macfarland – Anna Mellor, his mother, is on the left. (Gerry King)
At the wedding reception John Mellor learnt that his cousin had been to school with the Who’s Pete Townshend, and that an early version of the Who had even played in the basement of the house in which the wedding reception was held; Jonathan showed his cousin an acoustic guitar he owned, on which he said Townshend had occasionally played. Johnny Mellor took the guitar back to school and tried out rudimentary chords, notably those of Cream’s version of blues master Willie Dixon’s ‘Spoonful’; although Paul Buck made a bass guitar in woodwork, and would attempt to play with Johnny in their joint study, the Mellor boy was defeated by the need for assiduous practice. But he acquired another ‘instrument’, a feature of his corner of the CLFS study, a portable typewriter, an unusual possession for an English schoolboy: in later life a portable typewriter would often accompany him. Its acquisition at this stage could be an indication that he saw some form of writing as his future.
John Mellor spent the summer of 1969 suitably fuelled on pints of bitter and quid-deals of Lebanese hash, with Paul Buck and two of his friends, Steve White and Pete Silverton, cruising the pubs and lanes of Sussex and Kent in Steve White’s Vauxhall Viva van, close to Pete Silverton’s home town of Tunbridge Wells, looking for parties and girls. ‘It was always good fun,’ remembered White, ‘going to these parties where you’d end up staying for three or four days, lying around in gardens and fields, especially after The Man had come up from Hastings with the gear.’ (Another friend, Andy Secombe, recalls, ‘I remember fetching up in a field in Betchworth in Surrey – I’ve no idea why – at about 2 a.m., and he was jumping up and down with a Party 7 beer can and being very “lit up”.’) ‘I’ve no visual memory of what Joe looked like when I first met him,’ said Silverton, ‘except his hair was long. We all had long hair. This was the late 1960s. But I can remember him writing and doodling in this curled way, with his left hand. He and Paul Buck would incessantly play Gloria by Them, as though it was the only record in the world.’
Like his new crew of compadres, Johnny Mellor was attired in the uniform of the day: flared jeans and jeans jackets, worn with coloured, often check shirts and reasonably tight crew-neck sweaters; an army surplus greatcoat was considered highly desirable, as was a second-hand fur coat, preferably moth-eaten: Johnny Mellor went out of his way to acquire one of these.
Significantly, both Steve White and Pete Silverton remembered being introduced to Johnny Mellor as ‘Woody’. ‘Paul Buck was known as Pablo then,’ added Silverton. ‘He didn’t suddenly become Pablo Labritain in the days of punk – that was something that was going on since he was sixteen.’ Later, Paul Buck – Pablo, as he still prefers to be known – gave me an explanation, suggesting Steve and Pete might be slightly inaccurate. ‘All Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band changed their names. So we did. My name was Pablo, and he was Woolly Census. Next time I saw him after he’d left school, he said “No, no: I’m Woody now.” It was just kids’ stuff.’
In the mythology of Joe Strummer, his ‘Woody’ nickname has always been said to be a tribute to the great American left-wing folk-singer Woody Guthrie, which Joe was happy to go along with – but there seems to have been a much simpler, rather less romantic explanation. It’s easy to see how ‘Woolly’ could mutate to the more direct ‘Woody’ – to Pablo, Johnny Mellor wrote letters signed ‘Wood’. Such nicknaming is an everyday feature of public school life, almost part of a rite of passage in which pupils are given a new identity – as Johnny became ‘Mee-lor’, for example.
Years later, in 1999, Pete Silverton bumped into Joe Strummer in a pub in Primrose Hill. ‘He started telling stories about when I first knew him, which he remembered in great detail, but I don’t. Many of these involved drug-taking in teenage years and police raiding parties – that sort of normal thing. Specifically, he remembered a party at which I convinced the police that nothing untoward was taking place while being totally off my head. Joe remembered that I explained very logically and convincingly to the police there was nothing going on out of the ordinary despite the fact that Pablo was in the bath with his girlfriend. Perhaps that was why the police prolonged the interview, on the grounds that there was a naked woman in the place.’
With Woody, Pablo and Steve White, Pete Silverton gatecrashed parties throughout the summer of 1969. It was, he said, ‘the kind of area where you count the staircases: most of the parties we went to were in two-staircase houses. None of us were rich, but we went to rich girls’ homes on the edge of the country. We were always welcome gatecrashers, but also always over in the corner with the drugs. There was lots of hash around, lots of acid.’ The consumption of drugs, in fact, seemed to take precedence over sex. ‘There was not a high level of sexual activity,’ according to Pete Silverton. ‘A bit, but not a lot. It was more people having