year progressed at Central School of Art, Woody Mellor had continued to study, but not enthusiastically. ‘I realized they weren’t teaching us anything,’ he told Mal Peachey. ‘They were teaching us to make arty little marks on paper. They weren’t teaching us to draw an object, they were teaching us how to make a drawing that looked like we knew how to draw the object. And then we got hold of acid, and started to take acid, and then it looked even more transparent. And that was it, really: I had to peel off and it was either work for a living or play music.’
Iain Gillies, who would shortly enter Glasgow School of Art, had noticed that his cousin was already cynical about formal art training by the time he visited him in March 1971. ‘I remember at Ralph West I mentioned the term “negative space”. Woody was scornful of this type of thing. He said, “Huh, that’s the sort of shit they talk about at art college.” I don’t think he liked art being dissected and he didn’t want to know about technique: he just wanted it to flow and be spontaneous. Maybe dope and acid had also increased his disenchantment with institutionalized “art”. Tymon said that Woody had used one of Tymon’s drawings in his end-of-Foundation-Year show at the Central School of Art, a doodle of a horse smoking a cigarette. I think most of Woody’s show was in this vein and the professors didn’t see the joke.’
Richard Evans remembered another aspect of Woody’s end-of-Foundation-Year show: ‘He went into the ladies loos and got all the used Tampaxes for a collage, and that was the last straw. Whether he got kicked out or not I’m not sure. But the essence of Joe was always eight years old.’
To an extent Deborah Kartun had to share him with the other women friends he had during this time, like Helen Cherry – although she insists that theirs was not a sexual relationship: ‘He also had a lot of genuine women friends who he valued. I’ve never had a man be a friend with me the way he was when we were living in Ash Grove – just really there for you. He was quite sympathetic.’
‘I’d done terribly in my foundation year,’ said Deborah Kartun, ‘so I went to Cambridge which did a two-year course, and went into the second foundation year there. It was really old-fashioned, the opposite of Central where everything was conceptual. Woody would come up at weekends or I’d go down to London. We were still very much girlfriend and boyfriend.’
Woody Mellor was secretly distressed that he and Deborah were not together all the time. He wrote to Annie Day: ‘Last time you told me you had had a romance upset but I expect you got over that. Remember: NEVER GET HUNG UP ABOUT ANYTHING!’
‘Woody was a truly exceptional person,’ said Deborah Kartun. ‘He could be very endearing. But he could also be very nasty to people. On the other hand, I could be horrible to him. He announced quite early on that he was going to be a famous pop star. It must have been when I was at Cambridge. He wrote to me on lavatory paper telling me this. But when we were near the end I would be horrible about this: “You’re never going to be a famous pop star. This was because I really thought he couldn’t achieve it. I was disparaging towards him about going down what I thought was the wrong road: I thought he should stick to art. And I was also worried for him: I thought it seemed such a hard life. At the time I think he was briefly working as a dustman.’
‘Woody’ Mellor – as he now was – with Deborah Kartun, his art-school love. (Pablo Labritain)
8
THE BAD SHOPLIFTER GOES GRAVEDIGGING
1971–1974
In the summer of 1971 the second Glastonbury festival took place, with a very special guest. Michael Eavis, a dairy farmer who on his own land held the Glastonbury festival, for which admission was £1, was contacted by the devotees of the Guru Maharaj Ji and his Divine Light Mission: ‘We’ve got God in town: can we bring him to the festival?’ ‘It was very odd,’ Eavis told the writer Mick Brown for his book The Spiritual Tourist. ‘Somebody said God had arrived and could we put him on stage, and my thought was: Well, the festival’s for everybody really, so why not? By the time he went on stage everybody in the audience was completely stoned out of their minds, and you could hear this ripple going around, “Wow! That’s God!” Then he started preaching against drugs, which I think everybody there found a bit disconcerting.’ Guru Maharaj Ji, a pudgyfaced 13-year-old Indian boy, had been whisked down to Glastonbury in a Rolls-Royce rented to honour him by those who were already his followers.
Maharaj Ji’s unique selling point was the promise of ‘inner peace’ through the practice of meditation techniques known as ‘Knowledge’. As this is also a term for the rigorous training undertaken by London taxi-drivers, I can never hear the term in a Maharaj Ji context without visualizing fleets of black cabs. Maharaj Ji now lives in some splendour near Zuma beach, north of Malibu, in southern California.
That 1971 Glastonbury festival was the moment at which the Divine Light Mission planted itself in the (un)consciousness of potential followers in the UK. One of them was Woody Mellor, who had been a visitor to the 1971 Glastonbury festival. Helen Cherry said: ‘Like me, Joe got into Guru Maharaj Ji and we used to go to that a lot.’ I recall telling Joe Strummer during the time of punk how I’d once done a course in Transcendental Meditation and him surprising me by replying, ‘Yeah, I did something like that.’
This interest in Maharaj Ji was not a fleeting craze for Woody Mellor. For over a year the eastern religion filtered ceaselessly through to his brain via the habitual haze of marijuana smoke around him: the following year Iain Gillies visited Woody at his next address, at Ridley Road in Harlesden, and his cousin asked Iain the question, ‘Who are you Scots into?’ ‘I said I liked the artist Egon Schiele and Dylan Thomas. Woody pointed to a poster on the wall of Guru Maharaj Ji: “We’re into him. We think he’s cool.”’ This revelation of his cousin’s mystical leanings startled Iain: ‘I said, “You’re into him?”’ The next day Iain came across Woody in the kitchen explaining to someone how to rob a nearby bank.
Don’t we naturally wonder if Woody Mellor’s fascination with Guru Maharaj Ji could have been a consequence of the death of David? Doesn’t tragedy often oblige those left in its wake to seek an answer in some form of religious figurehead? Or was Woody simply infected with the ubiquitous mystical spirit of the times?
Richard ‘Dick the Shit’ Evans, also became an adherent of Maharaj Ji. ‘Helen had a huge spiritual side to her. I think we got sucked in. I learnt a lot of things, like breathing techniques, that I still use today. There would be emphasis on things like, “I want you to think of nothing,” and you just can’t. Woody and I did it for about a year. It suddenly occurred to us that it wasn’t that interesting.’
Woody was not ‘fanatical’ about the Divine Light Mission, Helen Cherry said, but would certainly meditate for the requisite hour every day. ‘Guru Maharaj Ji had a big function in Central Hall, in central London, the first public meeting in London. Joe saw him, but I don’t think he met him personally. He would hang around the ashram in north London a bit, but not as much as me.’ Deborah Kartun did not approve or participate in this allegiance to Maharaj Ji: ‘I’d been brought up in an atheist family.’
Something else had happened to Woody Mellor at that Glastonbury festival. During the set by Arthur Brown, the self-proclaimed ‘God of Hellfire’, a rooster called Hector had flown up and perched himself atop an imposing crucifix, part of the stage dressing, at the very moment it was about to be set alight during Brown’s performance highlight of his hit song ‘Fire’. Hector was almost instantly incinerated, the ultimate fast food. From that moment on Woody became a vegetarian: he decorated a soap tin for Helen with drawings and the adage: ‘We love to eat nuts and honey.’ (‘I lost it, and I nagged him that I couldn’t live without one, so the next one he did said, “Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette.”’) Shortly afterwards, returning home from a party towards breakfast time, Woody Mellor picked up a pint of milk that had just been delivered to a doorstep and was promptly arrested by a passing policeman: in court the next morning he was fined a few pounds, earning a criminal record for petty theft. Did this lead to a