The Story of John Nightly

by Tot Taylor

  ‘Ah! The real answer! So you do have one of these…’ John cast his eyes to the ground. ‘And I guess she is very… pretty girlfriend?’

  John looked up. ‘I’m sure you… well… that you have…’

  ‘I don’t as a matter of fact. I didn’t, John. No girlfriend at all! Maybe a couple of boyfriends…’

  It was obvious to John that with Iona he would have to get used to her quickly moving in this direction or that. One minute serious, the next playful. Perceptive and focussed one second, completely empty-headed the next.

  ‘And will you be writing these songs tomorrow as well?’

  ‘I’m writing songs all the time. In my head, of course. Then I’m recording all the ideas I have for the LP. Thirty-two songs so far, you see. At Regal, like I…’

  ‘And where is your… Reegal? Regent Street?’

  ‘… Denmark Street.’

  ‘Ah… London confusion. It’s never in the place it says? But I’m doing TV commercial tomorrow anyway, so…’

  John smiled in agreement.

  ‘For English milk… Drinka Pinta Milka Day. Drinka witha Iona you see. That’s what they want, n’est-ce pas?’

  The boy picked up his bag.

  ‘And will you go to Marquee?’ Iona twirled her hair around her finger, excited at the prospect of another ‘date’. ‘To see Who next week. Shall we go with us?’

  ‘The Who? Well… that’d be…’

  ‘Then you can meet Monika – she really like you – and you can meet some more friends people. Who always in Marquee Club Tuesday.’

  ‘… think I do really have to go back…’

  “John… You go back and do your music” Iona sparkled, “I’ll go back and do my make-up!”

  And with that she was gone. Red shawl tossed over her shoulder as she dashed past foppish Chelsea Cobbler types and chic French Lycée types whose eyes followed her out of the room, out of the bistro and out of the microcosmic ‘happening’ little bubble. Out of this world. John Nightly thought so anyway.

  ‘I want to get some thigh-length boots while I’m here. No, better than that, waist-length. Just like Robin Hood!’

  Bob Dylan. London, April 1965

  PROFILE: Bazaar. 46 Brompton Road, London SW3; KNI 5300. Tube: Knightsbridge for Brompton Road; Sloane Square for King’s Road. Opening hours: Mon–Fri 9.30–6pm (Thurs 1pm close); Sat 9–6pm. Stocks: Mary Quant-designed clothes. Prices: 1s to £15.

  BBC Radio 3, Broadcasting House, Portland Place, London W1. ‘Music Live’, John Nightly talking to Nicholas Campbell-Johns. Friday, 7 September 1970.

  Along a narrow hallway, a young man in a bubblegum-pink cravat and goat-skin sandals sits tight. In the corner opposite, a researcher in a camel-coloured midi-dress is nonchalantly polishing her nails.

  ‘Anything I can get you?’

  The young man looks up as if slightly dazed, but says nothing.

  ‘Have you had a cup of tea?’

  No response.

  ‘Well, would you like another?’

  The young man stares into space.

  ‘I can hear him finishing off…’

  The girl smiles, gets up and gently pushes open a heavy soundproofed door into a small studio where a long-haired, middle-aged, side-parted presenter sits shuffling papers.

  The young man takes his seat and shakes his head theatrically, trying to wake himself up. The presenter, winding up the previous item, motions for John to say something into the mike and test it for level.

  Just a little test for level now… John Nightly… are you there?

  … in a manner of speaking… yeh… [The presenter gives John a silent thumbs-up]

  John Nightly, welcome to Music Live on Radio 3, our annual celebration of live music in and around the British Isles. And thank you for coming in on the eve of your tour; I’m sure you must be very busy at the moment.

  [yawns]

  Before we talk directly about your music I wanted to begin by asking you about your background – and specifically about the move from Cambridge, where you were born, to London. It is said that the spirit of the Swinging Sixties is long gone; and as we prepare for the challenges of a new decade I wonder if that period was an exciting time for you?

  [twists on his chair, as if trying to get comfortable] uh… [clears his throat] hmm… well… [swallows] In… uh… Cambridge I was working so hard on music… had a head full of… plans… everything… [coughs] whole life – ‘musical life’ – mapped out… Where I saw myself [coughs] fitting in… [yawns again] p’haps I didn’t… feel the need for normal things, friends and…

  Was there a particular reason for that, do you think? Did you seek friends?

  [fumbles around for a cigarette] …don’t suppose I… did… maybe. Didn’t exactly ‘seek them out’, I guess. I wasn’t… interested in things and I didn’t know… cars… football… normal… those kinds of… Couldn’t really go to the pub, you know? [laughs] But it changed when I got to be… 14, 15. My… musical mind… sort of… turned on… full on… I had these… ‘classical’ performances going on in Cambridge and my… music being played. Then people did take notice. [accepts a light from the studio engineer] People at school were… ‘surprised’ – I was gonna say impressed! – when I could just… sort of… pick out any old tune… That week’s Number 1 or… play it on the piano… while they were all struggling with their chord sheets… scales. Was a little bit of magic that I carried with me. Something I could do… that they couldn’t… understand, earned me a bit of… ‘status’… sort of important in a school… institution-type situation. But I knew I didn’t fit in there, and they knew it as well.

  This was partly because of you spending so much time alone on music?

  [stares straight into space] I’d spent so much time away from school, at home a lot… playing music… I’d lost that school… continuity. Difficult not to be thought of as an… outsider when you go back after time away. But… I really didn’t do well at it – ‘academically’ I mean. Only when we had Music or Art – not even that sometimes – that I showed any… knowhow. The music we had to learn at school was… basic… you know… ‘Bobby Shaftoe’…

  I remember it well. [presenter smiles]

  [interviewee smiles] Yeh, there was all that kind of… y’know. You really couldn’t get into it. What they should have been doing was getting us all together and playing through… ‘Telstar’ or something… [laughs] At the time I’m talking about anyway. Or a Shadows track, anything that was happening at the time. Something that the kids… we… were excited about. That would have been good… and… but at the time, in that atmosphere… it was folk songs about… ploughing… and all that. We were surrounded by it anyway – farming, I mean. Cambridge was surrounded by land. Fenland. All these little villages. We didn’t need to be singing about the ploughboy as well! [smiles as though exasperated and gestures as if finally waking up]

  Thing was that… there we were… living in a… the whole culture was… ‘exploding’, in a way. But the education authorities didn’t want to… recognise it. You can understand that… in a way, as well. [clears his throat] But even conversation was discouraged. You weren’t allowed to talk when you walked through the corridors of the school – the public areas – meant that in a school of, 500 boys, 500… manic people, the communal places; the corridors, quad, playing fields… they were completely silent. The school… as a place of learning – it was a silent place.

  You didn’t find school a particularly inspiring place?

  It’s the memory I have of it. The other thing was that in Grantchester everyone knew each other. They knew who I was and where I’d come from, descended from… So if I walked around with a bit longer hair than usual or… pink socks – something like that – one of the neighbours would… well, probably make a comment to my mother! It was tight, y’know – the local piano-teacher was also the winner of the local piano-smashing contest!* I’m sure it’s changed now… guess everywhere has. But I always made sure I
walked fast when I walked around Grantchester.

  Your parents were very supportive of you, weren’t they?

  The people who saved me were my parents. Can hardly believe they let me get on with what I had to do… [pauses for a moment to consider]

  The other people who made a lot of difference were my girlfriend’s parents. So good to have them there. Really musical people… both so… uh… musical. Jani… Dr Feather… my music teacher at school, showed me… many things. But it’s my mother who really has all of the music in her that I inherited. Not that she’d ever touched an instrument in her life or anything like that, but she had that dreamy, self-contained… that atmosphere about her. Thing that dreamers, music people, have. [stubs out his cigarette] My mother was a listener. You could feel a change come over her when she listened to music. That did affect me. Made me always listen very… seriously. Properly, I mean. My Dad, my father, could do it to some extent and we had all of the equipment and all that at home because of his work and all that.

  He was a recording engineer, wasn’t he?

  He wasn’t a recording engineer, no. He was… still is – though he’s retired now – a radio engineer. ’Cos Pye – radios and record players; other things they made, TVs – were based in Cambridge, we had this equipment, sort of ‘on hand’… tape machines in the house; I used it all the time.

  But she could really hear… and listen. She always turned to me when I played a good chord and she’d smile: ‘that’s a good one.’ She’d always sing back, sometimes unconsciously, even the weirdest things I was coming up with.

  Sometimes I’d be at the piano for hours… be in my kind of… ‘trance’… [laughs] If you want to call it that. Got into this thing of trying to sort of receive music, rather than try to really write it… ‘invent’ it or anything. I waited for it to just come down to me… from, well, I don’t know where it comes from… Somewhere, you know… [the interviewer smiles politely as the speaker carries on in earnest] That must have been pretty painful, in a way, for my parents to have to listen to, ’cos I was just… weirdly, horribly ‘improvising’. Trying to keep myself away from the normal daytime and stay in my… ‘dream’. They – my parents – understood that. So they didn’t force me to do anything else, not even the household… chores… washing-up, mowing the lawn… Never had to waste my time on anything like that [from behind the glass the producer motions to wind-up the interview].

  So in fact they rather… spoilt you?

  [laughs wryly] Not really. If they did, they spoilt me for a reason. My parents weren’t concerned with normal ideas, normal… social ideas… ‘conditioning’ or whatever you want to call it…

  We are often led to believe that Cambridge was a… hotbed of talent in the early sixties. You don’t seem to have been a part of that.

  [pulls a face] I wasn’t… but that’s because it was all centred around the university. Like everything in the town. There wasn’t much in Cambridge for the people… [scratches his head] It was all owned by the colleges anyway, even the housing. You couldn’t buy a nice house, not in the centre or anything, unless your family already owned one… all the property was owned by the colleges. The social life… it all took place in the colleges. Actually, there was always a lot of vandalism in Cambridge. [looks round for another cigarette]

  What about the music scene in the town? Did you feel part of that at all?

  Wasn’t much of a scene there… in Cambridge… You had bands… ‘groups’… doing things and gigs in pubs… but they were mainly playing other people’s material… hits of the day… I never wanted to do that. Really would’ve been a waste of my time. [lights up and accidentally hits the microphone] Oh… sorry… [carefully moves the mike back to its original position] Sorry ’bout that… [laughs] People talk about Syd Barrett, I only remember him being in a band that used to play at a pub close to my parents’ house. Pink Floyd hadn’t got going then, and… well… Jonathan King, I s’pose… Though that was after I left. [picks up a glass of water, careful to avoid the microphone]

  Pink Floyd were a band called Jokers Wild. There were others… The Original Sins… The Prowlers… The Quaynts – funny names. The Bridegrooms, that was an early one. The Soulbenders, the Free Winds. I had a friend in the Boston Crabs – from Boston – and then there was my friend John’s band… The Huntsmen – from Huntingdon – well… [laughs]1 It was all a bit like that. [laughs again] The music thing in Cambridge really wasn’t big at all.

  You had already written a hit record for your group the Everyman?

  [grimaces] I sat down for five minutes one afternoon and… knocked out… the kind of thing I thought the judges would want to hear. [sighs] Not putting it down or… I had no idea it could actually be… a… well, a ‘hit’. [makes a face] And certainly not as… as big or… ‘hitty’… as it eventually went…

  Zigging & Zagging?

  I know. [raises his eyebrows] Does sound incredibly… ‘simplistic’ now. But… [smiles] It was a… a kind of… a song for that year… thing of its time. [‘Zigging & Zagging’ by the Everyman fades up in the background]

  And a huge hit around the world?2 [track becomes louder…]

  Zigging and zagging and zigging and zagging and zigging

  Zigging and zagging and zigging and zagging and zigging

  Zigging and zagging and zigging and zagging and zigging…

  […before fading out]

  Sounds weird to me now… Never do that again, obviously. Write something like that. Well… I really only write things for myself.

  Doesn’t that comment imply that you simply don’t care about the audience?

  Not at all. Not that you don’t, or I don’t, ‘care’ about them. It’s that… you have to write things for yourself… please yourself. All artists know that. If you aren’t true to yourself, then who are you true to? And if you do write some kind of… thing… and the people that you’re writing it for don’t actually like it. Well… where does that leave you… creatively? You’re nowhere, you know? And also… you’ve… you’ve let yourself down, so… That kind of thing really does not… well…

  You have an LP coming out to coincide with the tour, I believe?

  It’s called… yeh… Ape Box Metal.

  And apparently this recording consists of more than 3,000 segments… sections… of cut-up music and speech’

  [seems genuinely surprised] Makes it sound like a tin of oranges! [looks sheepish] I suppose it… haven’t actually counted them myself or… [deep intake of breath] Is that how many it is?

  And the record, as I understand it, has taken… two whole years to make, which is quite a… a phenomenal amount of time. Mainly, I understand, because of all the copyright clearances necessary in order to get the permissions from the various… participants, to reuse and release their work.

  … that’s not something I personally… the record company… my managers and…

  Let me ask you this, then. What do you say to people who say that – not to put too fine a point on it – this is by way of another term for… ‘stealing’? As I say, for want of a better phrase. Because what people will say to you is that you are reusing other musicians’ work. Their music and their words, and sometimes – as I understand it – this is completely ‘intact’? So that this is a completely different approach to the one you described earlier, that of ‘receiving inspiration’ in the way in which you would refer to it?

  [looks at the sound engineer for another cigarette] okay… Firstly… it is not ‘completely intact’, as you say. That gives a very… a… an incorrect impression. It’s not… any of it, ‘intact’ at all, in fact. Not… no. Sometimes it’s just a… sound… a ‘fragment’ of a sound. A syllable. Something… so small you wouldn’t hear it – or you hardly would. But it is a completely… different approach… so… [reaches across the table for the cigarette and lighter]

  I use something like a… a millisecond of something… a very small… ‘sliver’. Then… then I… put together… all of th
ese milliseconds and bits and… and make a… a cluster till that collective sound, repeated – or ‘looped’, if you like – becomes the start of a… a completely new rhythm track, which I can then improvise over. The method I’ve always used… sometimes mixed up with a level of… ‘pure’ composition. But apart from the time it takes to get the permission to use the copyrights – the bits of music – this is also in itself a very involved and detailed kind of… trial-and-error process. Laborious as well: we have to edit everything, all these… particles… and the larger sections… by hand. So, yeh… physically, it does take a long time.

  What about the point that you’re reusing other’s ideas?

  …the point is that… that this is the age of the ‘cut-up’, you know… well, it’s supposed to be, anyway… the ‘post-modern’ period… ‘era’, isn’t it? [looks for a glass of water] You take things from here and there… different times, different eras… You mix them up… turn it into a… a sort of ‘tapestry’ – or quilt. A new thing. Something completely new, out of them. You make them connect somehow. It’s like a quilt or… [stubs out his cigarette] ‘rearranging the stars in the sky’. [makes a mocking, grand gesture with his hands] And what I do as a… well… as a composer, is to try to present and represent my mind and my ideas… and… and… the age I’m living in.

  [from behind the glass the producer motions to wind up the interview again]

  And you think it important to be… of your era?

  It’s a… confused time we’re living in now… an… age that seems to be… running out of… steam… Running out of time – everything else – in a way, as well. We’ve just come through an… optimistic period. Kind of revolutionary period. What the ‘Swinging Sixties’ were. It was optimism that was behind it. Well… there are… there’s, about… ‘the bomb’… all that stuff… still… and war… and everything… still. So many things going… that surely if we… all got together – all the countries and everything – we could… do something about it. That’s what people don’t understand. Why this never happened. Why we haven’t all got together by now, you know? Because we’ve had long enough to think about it, I think. But governments don’t actually want to do that, anyway – I don’t think they do. Or it would have happened… by now. And there are new things to ‘worry about’, as well… Like, how we can keep ourselves… and the world… going… ’Cos if oil… the coal… runs out, which it will, then… well, what do we do after that? In terms of… carrying on?