by Tot Taylor
The boy gulped down his own sticky cube, more and more lost as he chewed and chewed.
Pond walked over to an empty wastepaper bin hidden under Cornelia’s chair. The manager was nearing his limit. Today he had a million other things to worry about besides the interior musings of a schoolboy from Grantchester. One of which was the fact that the Gloom’s follow-up, despite being played almost non-stop on Caroline the past fortnight, had only just made the tiniest of dents in that morning’s Top 100. The Pond-sanctioned and heavily promoted ‘Girl Tan’ was a brand-new entry at Number 99! If the record didn’t make it there would be no one to blame but himself – and the last thing JCE needed right now was a one-hit wonder on its books. Pond sat down, crumpled a cigarette packet in his hand, picked up today’s Record Scene Souvenir Pull-Out Wall Chart and tossed it into the bin.
‘SAND!’
The secretary appeared at the door, notepad and nail varnish at the ready.
‘Look…’ Pond lit another cigarette and sighed. ‘Image…’ He got up from his chair ready to pace up and down, though there was nowhere really to pace to in the pokey room.
‘Beach Boys…’ he swallowed. ‘Stripy shirts, surfboards…’ before pausing for a moment. ‘They’re kind of… all a bit… Chubby…’ Pond looked up. ‘That’s a bit of a thing in itself maybe. Fat boys… yeah. Kind of trademark… “identifier”.’
Cornelia, Sandra and John, now more or less in the swing of things, frowned in unison. Pond picked up speed. ‘California… Sun as well – that’s a… a “signifier”, sun is…’ He paused again, for effect. ‘See my point?’ The audience nodded still more solemnly. ‘Stones… again… Hairy bastards; unruly bastards. Bastards in general, probably. Mean-looking… rubber lips…’ He paused once more. ‘Jerky dancing, too…’ then gave up. ‘All this stuff is worked out, premeditated. They’ve got a manager who does know what he’s doing.’ Pond returned to his desk. ‘I rest my case – as they say in the trade.’
The manager seemed wired as he resumed his position. Rather than giving the impression of someone who had just made his point, he fidgeted and twitched as if he had suddenly been injected with idea serum. He glared at a pile of Gloom promo discs, inspecting them with disdain, as if there were a sign hanging on them saying ‘Extinct as a dinosaur’. He gazed out of the open window, picked up one of the 7” acetates and skimmed it through the narrow gap into Carnaby Street. The manager gazed down at the dingy thoroughfare, his own market square, his souk, a very un-square mile. Then, appearing extremely pleased with himself, turned to his audience once more.
‘Kinks… They’re kinky, for a start! Riding outfits, toothy grins… apeshit singer… The Who… very strong. Point being that all the big ones are.’ Pond placed his thumbs in his pockets and paraded around his desk. ‘Pop Art, mods, pills, speed, apeshit drummer…’ he stopped. ‘I… I’m not trying to…’ Cornelia fixed her hairband and wondered if she might be bold enough to ask teacher for a cigarette while the boy, visibly bored but unfazed by this kind of playacting, got up from his chair.
‘I think we get it… uh… it’s… well… you can break it down… like… theatrical costume…’ John picked up his bag. ‘But… getting back to music… and my own… the other stuff I like…’ he paused. ‘There are a couple of…’
John Nightly appealed directly to Cor and Sand, accepting that he was probably not going to be able to clinch it with the manager today. ‘I could talk about poetry. He looked inside his bag. ‘I read a lot of poetry…’
Pond walked back across the room, sat down behind his desk and grabbed the silver desk lighter. He appeared weary, as if he’d been standing up for all of his twenty-one years. He let out a huge exasperated howl…
‘CORNELIA!’
But his secretary was a million miles away. Cornelia was snuggled up in her employer’s bed, cruising along Carnaby Street in his Mini Cooper, inspecting the racks at Biba on a Saturday afternoon, awaiting her hair appointment at Rikki’s while leafing through the pages of GIRL and about to repaint her pink index nail. She jumped as if suddenly electrified in her customised car seat.
John Nightly understood very well that today’s had not exactly been what you might call a ‘helpful’ discussion. Pond answered a call as John moved towards the door. It was definitely time to leave.
‘I do see what you mean…’
The boy didn’t see what anyone meant, but when he left the offices of his patrons he began to consider what was going to be expected of him in this new environment. What exactly he’d gotten himself into. The reality of this whacked-out, supposedly swinging but precariously balanced, most superficial pendulum.
It was clear to John Nightly that the reality of the world he was about to inhabit was very different to the one he’d imagined. Though he didn’t know it yet, John was about to be zoomed into space. The teenager that he was, the child he had been (so far) was going to change, be changed. The young man he was becoming was going to be diverted. John Nightly was going to become someone new, something new, on account of events that were about to take place and the circumstances in which he was going to find himself. If it worked out he would take on a kind of ‘dual personality’, able to turn ‘the artist’ on, and hopefully off again to become himself, or his old self, once more. If it got to the point where he couldn’t manage to turn the persona off – or worse, was no longer aware that the artist needed to be turned off sometimes, like a clockwork toy does, like a lightbulb does, like a bright-eyed smile does – then we were in trouble.
It was true that newspapers and magazines did not write about music. They weren’t qualified to do so. And the readers – teenage dollies, sixth-formers becoming aware of the new world, worried mums and dads – didn’t want it anyway. So they concentrated on peripheral stuff. They wrote about people, per-son-a-li-ties, as the manager rightly pointed out. Any scandal that might lie beneath the surface. Rags-to-riches stories mainly, and… most wanted of all: failure. Preferably huge success closely followed by huge failure. The bigger the rise and fall, the better. And these days the Daily Mail’s showbiz columnists seemed just as fascinated by the men behind the glamour, the new impresarios, as by the groups themselves. As the boy came to understand more about the manipulative and mercurial nature of his own ‘boss’, it was obvious that it was the combination of the appliance of ideas and sheer hard work on behalf of the managers with the raw talent of the artists that made the wheels go round and gave certain groups a significant advantage over others.
Artist and manager were co-dependent. The managers plotted and schemed, applying whatever was required to the product to make it ‘happen’; a heavy lacquer polish or a quick shoeshine. They put the product through a filter, commercialising and standardising the material, in the process smoothing out the edges that had gotten the young innocents noticed in the first place. It was this optimum blend of the two elements, combined with co-ordinated promotion, everything going off at the same time, – the all-important week of release – that delivered the nervously awaited new-entry chart position and the hits. Closely followed by the royalties – and the writs.
The managers weren’t equipped to do the job themselves, or they would’ve; and neither were the clients. Within the heavily competitive record business and all of its spin-offs, everything about the performers, their work and their lives, would be supervised and edited. Bits chopped off, new bits added, good bits repeated, the whole spaghetti carefully scrutinised, rearranged, taken apart and reassembled again, just like a record itself. The raw material put through a sieve, mashed up, regurgitated and then spat out by these tin-god Svengalis, Epstein, Meek, Larry Parnes or Andrew Loog Oldham.
John Nightly’s approach to his chosen vocation so far had been from the point of view of a creator – of product or ‘content’. Like all great creators he was both artist and appreciator – fan. But there was a whole other pay-off further down the line, and the boy began to see, if not quite understand, how that worked. The public personas o
f many of the better-known performers were often a fabrication. Their names and backgrounds, their hairstyles, the clothes they wore, the way they behaved on and off stage, all carefully considered before record company and management deemed it safe to put the concoction in front of the toughest audience in the world: an audience untried and untested; teenage record buyers with pocket money to spend.
There was a careful manipulation of this fan base. Wives and girlfriends being written out. Everything needing to appear fresh and modern. And new. New was the most important adjective of the era. New was the only thing ‘fab’, ‘groovy’… ‘happening’ really had to say. New was the required meaning of everything. Every product, from soapsuds to real-live pop singers offered for sale to the general public, was required to be tantalisingly, heart-stoppingly NEW!
John Nightly understood from what he heard around JCE that a good deal of chart entries were ‘bought in’ to the Top 20. DJs and producers being paid or given incentives for airplay. The boy resolved never to allow anything of this nature to happen to any record released under his name. The only way John Nightly wanted any kind of success at all was if people played and bought the music because they genuinely liked it. Liked what they heard. That was the only way he wanted the music issued in the first place. Otherwise, in the boy’s simple little head, his work might be seen to be tarnished. That’s how pathetic and stupid he was. John Nightly wanted everything to be clean. But his chosen profession was a dirty one. The records went up, the records went down; and how the manager’s attitude changed when they went down. It seemed that things were about to become very gloomy indeed for the Gloom.
As he made his way along Regent Street, John began to think for the first time about these inner workings from the outside. About ‘image signatures’ and trademarks. That artists might end up being remembered solely for some non-musical stamp with which they were associated. The barefoot Sandie Shaw, Johnny Kidd’s eye patch, P. J. Proby’s ‘pants episode’. Hardly a bunch of very dignified offerings. But the records themselves stood out, and that was the point. The point the manager was trying to make was that sometimes you have to use elements outside of the music, something seemingly unrelated and seemingly insignificant, in order to promote and therefore sell the music, the ‘good’ thing, the real, right stuff itself: the absolute raison d’être.
But now it was time to get back to the Royal Lancaster and continue working on song ideas. John had brought his Eko acoustic with him; and there was a piano in his room, courtesy of Jon at DJS. When the boy arrived in the smart Kensington lobby, the concierge approached as if he’d been expecting him.
‘Extremely pretty young lady left this for you, sir.’
The man held out a folded note with a flower insignia, Mary Quant’s poppy logo. Child’s handwriting, left earlier that afternoon. It was from Iona. Remember?
‘Hello! Remember me? I heard you back in London, JCE told me about which hotel. I live in Knightsbridge too, not far, so if you have time… or you bored and like to ring me up… Iona… Ken 329.’
Suddenly the boy forgot all about promotion. Suddenly he was willing to do anything the manager asked. Suddenly he was malleable, all too happy to be manipulated in any direction whatsoever, and tremendously vibed-up. Although only last week John had read in his father’s Daily Express that his photospread sweetheart was the on/off girlfriend of Jean-Luc Zeib, the French-Canadian Grand Prix driver, he rushed straight up to his room, turned on the radio and dialled the number.
‘Radio London reminds you. Go to a church of your choice…’
‘… oh… hallo… is… I mean… could I…’
‘John! Hello John, it’s Iona! Darling… don’t you know my voice? How are you?’ There was barely space for breath. ‘Where are you?’
‘… I… well, I’m in my…’
‘In your hotel?’
‘well, yes… I’ve got to…’
‘John, I tell you what you’ve got to do…’ The voice on the other end trembled with excitement. ‘You’ve got to come out and meet me at Kassandra’s, that’s what you’ve got to do. You know where? Old Brompton Road. Number… 93, I think? Just get a taxicab, it’s not so far. I see you at 5.’
The boy was there early. A full ten minutes early. He really was clueless about matters such as whether to turn up early or late for girls. Ten minutes to five! No idea at all. Kassandra’s was easier to find than he’d imagined. Along past the Science Museum, the only London landmark known to him, then over to South Kensington tube, a sharp right-hand turn and… All you had to do was to follow the parade of teenagers floating down Old Brompton Road.
It was easy to locate the tiny bistro – ‘the scene’ – from at least half a mile away. The convergence of beautiful people to this small, magnetised café was like flood water rushing to its conduit. It confirmed that the youthquake predicted by everyone – even the Daily Express and the News of the World – had definitely arrived.
Outside the French Lycée, amid the chaos of buses and taxis, two pretty ponytails posed in their satin hipsters. The redhead swished around in a purple cape, which became entangled in her friend’s sleeves. The dark-haired one carried a bundle of heavy textbooks and waved her arms about in a very French manner. Both wore gypsy rings and bangles, with little velvet bags slung over their shoulders like ammunition.
Across the street, a girl in an impossibly tight skirt climbed out of a Mini Moke parked precariously on the kerb, oblivious to the black taxicabs speeding by within inches of her. She resembled a Jazz Age starlet in her pink bodice and crocheted hat. Her boyfriend, Stone Age hair blowing uncontrollably in the breeze, held onto his girl and his John Stephen shopping bag.
Only that morning John had been reading about John Stephen. The man who had revolutionised men’s fashion, or so it said in GIRL. The King of Carnaby – Millionaire Mod – doing for men what Quant had done for women.
On the pavement outside Kassandra’s a busker manhandled ‘House of the Rising Sun’ at twice its recommended speed while a petite blonde, arm in arm with a tight-suited mod, kept tugging at her white vinyl dress, embarrassed at the hardly-there hemline as she crossed the road to the bistro. On the opposite side of the street, in the direction of Chelsea, boys in parkas and green cords joshed each other while keenly eyeing up the talent.
The girls, who couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen years old, wore court-shoes or white plastic boots, while the boys wore Cuban heels like Billy Fury or shiny black brogues in more of a mod style, probably from Gear or the new Trend department at Simpsons. A girl on a scooter showed off her white PVC mac and her Trend carrier bag, which she held on to with both hands, guarding it as if it were the crown jewels.
This was all a bit like a street carnival to John Nightly. There were a few scenesters in Cambridge, not in the university but in the town itself. You’d see mods at United matches looking for unchaperoned greasers to beat up with a few overgrown beatniks at the occasional CND rally or poetry reading at the Union Society, but that was pretty much it in terms of street cabaret.
The Royal London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea was another world entirely. The boy realised that each time he’d made the journey to the capital the whole scene had moved on, upped a gear or two, appearing to intensify with every trip. London seemed to be going hysterical. How to describe it? The way things appeared to John Nightly, everybody and everything was suddenly aglow. Glowing with confidence. As if a wave of energy had flooded the city, covering its shabby post-war emulsion in ’60s glitter and in the process literally switching it on. Even the language had become more expressive. Caffs and cafés were now ‘bistros’. Shops ‘boutiques’, clubs ‘discotheques’; there was a zing about the streets. A rush. Adrenaline-fuelled, and – in terms of the hyperbolic Youthquake – amphetamine-boosted. To the recent arrival it seemed that everything was brighter, faster, louder, slicker, zippier and, well, ‘groovier’, if you must.
The new language already had its own clichés. Fab
, gear and groovy were adjectives that would never pass the boy’s lips, though they were an essential part of the new everyday-speak. It was an early indication that John Nightly – feeling the need to promote his music using his rather eccentric persona and his good looks, but hampered by an intense shyness and insecurity – was already in turmoil concerning his own integrity and the ‘purity’ of his mission. The interloper felt less than comfortable in this sped-up, souped-up world, but he was certainly entranced and enthralled by it. It seemed to him that not just South Kensington but the whole country, the Commonwealth, the new ‘global village’, everyone and everything you came across had suddenly blossomed, flourished, experienced a power surge; gone into Technicolor. Had gone a little haywire, suddenly gone… POP!
‘Hello, fashion model!’
‘oh…’
John got up to shake hands and make space on the bench for the Disney-faced girl.
‘Where’s your scarf?’
‘… my scarf? But… it’s not cold today, is it?’
‘John… I’m joking! You seemed to be rather… attached to it last time I saw you.’
Iona made her way through the footstools and chairs. Her see-through, lightweight skirt swept after her, taking with it the eyes of every man in the crowded basement. She settled down a few inches away from her intended, though he no doubt wished she’d have come closer. ‘They… really played that up, didn’t they?’ John immediately moved his bag, managing in the process to edge an inch or so nearer. ‘Did you… like the pictures?’
‘Like them? I loved them… and so did my girlfriends. Everybody wants to know… Who is that gorgeous man you are with, Iona?’
PROFILE: Iona Sandstrand. Born: Herning, Denmark, 5 May 1948 (age 18). Unmarried. Model, John Raymond Model Agency. Lives: South Kensington. Educated: Kongelige Academy, Copenhagen; Lucie Clayton’s, London. Clubs: Dolly’s, Sibylla’s, Scotch of St James’s. Restaurants: Bruno’s, Chez Victor, The Spot, Alvaro’s, Kassandra’s, San Lorenzo.