by Tot Taylor
And I hear that you already have another grand project in mind after this one?
[sniffs] I don’t know… I… I don’t know how these things work out really… [smiles]… I’ve been reading some John Donne poems again… who I was very… sort of keen on… when I was at school. And I’m thinking about doing something… on quite a big scale… [rubs his eyes furiously] Possibly using some of his poem-letters as lyrics. And multiplying everything, y’know… forwards… backwards… upside down… Well… every which way… In threes. Very ‘numerological’, I guess. To the power of three… The Father, the Son… the Holy Ghost. Kind of a… a… a… like a Requiem… maybe that sounds a bit…
A Requiem Mass?
No… well… No… don’t think it’ll be a… a ‘Mass’ exactly. It’s just an idea. [stifles a long yawn] It’ll be something on… maybe a bit of a… a grand scale.
I heard mention of an opera?
Opera? [laughs, and coughs] Don’t think so. No, no. [looks surprised] Couple of years ago I was looking at… Woman of the Dunes… It’s a Japanese film, by… [frowns] Just the sort of… really good… subject matter for an… you know. Sand everywhere… [laughs]
Why is the number three so important to you? I understand that everything you’ve ever recorded has had a… three-word title?
[producer makes ever-more frantic hand signals, desperate to wind it up]
It’s not… a ‘gimmick’ or anything. It’s because I actually like it, the rhythm and everything, I mean. It gives balance… form… which feels natural to me. Makes everything… God the Father, God the Son – all that. Three primary chords, three secondary chords in music… verse, middle, chorus… and… sonata form… the spiritual triangle… Numerology works in threes as well – apparently. Three primary colours, three secondary… the family unit – it’s all ‘three’, isn’t it? Seems to be. Kind of balanced unit… Three notes in each triad… chord. ‘Veni, vidi, vici!’ Everything! All in three. When you think about it. The whole world. Principal Fixed Stars, Grantchester Love Chronicle, Ape Box Metal… Mink whatever it is… whatever it’s… gonna be. The… well, the perfect sort of… ‘only child’ family as well.
You were an only child yourself.
Yes I was.
And even in your Grantchester days all of your songs were in three time, weren’t they?
[thinks] Pretty much. ‘Peachfruit Love Parchment’, ‘Free School Lane’… ‘Lavender Girl’… those too. All in ‘three time’ as well.
Waltzes?
Not waltzes! [laughs faintly now, becoming rather exhausted] Just divisions of three… 6/8… 7/8, a four bar, then a three bar. ‘All You Need is Love’ is in 7/4 – the time signature – you know… pretty weird for a big hit record. It’s a little bit like… some of the Indian music. Ravi Shankar… Miles Davis uses it. They all have these endless… rhythms, ragas… talas… falling… tumbling rhythms, and if you… If you keep using these odder rhythms… like Dave Brubeck or something – he does it in a simple way – it literally becomes… well, a time signature.
I don’t know if you are aware of this but we’re going to be hearing from Pink Floyd on the programme next week and their upcoming LP is apparently called Atom Heart Mother.
Heard about that! And it’s obviously… ‘another story entirely’… [blushes]
Well, it’s been very interesting – and enjoyable – to speak with you, John Nightly, and I wish you all the very best of luck with the Ape Box Metal long-player and of course with your live concerts… John… Nightly… Thank you for coming in and speaking to BBC ‘Music Live’.
[blank look]
* In the early 1960s piano-smashing contests were a fixture at every village show, fête and fayre.
1 Other notable Cambridge groups of the period were the Utopians, the Redcaps, the Chequers, the Fen Four
2 ‘Zigging & Zagging’ hit the Number 1 spot in the US Hot 100, March 1968, as performed by the Bellbottoms, an English ‘Carnaby-style’ quartet from Auburn, California (American Jukebox – Ultimate Record Index, 1979), which featured drummer/vocalist Dandy Rich (Daniel Groderich) later of Kiss followers Angels of Destruction (later still he was the drummer in thrash-metallists Black Oak Death). Groderich is currently CEO of the record industry’s number-one metal merchandising online service: mortenoir.com
The one time John Nightly walked as slowly as he possibly could when he walked around Grantchester was when he made a detour past a house set back from the High Street. The sound of a piano trio – violin, cello, piano – could be heard from at least a hundred yards away.
The Feathers’ modest semi phased in and out as the boy approached. The house had an aura; it beamed ‘ahimsa’ – sensation, vibration, ‘creation’, liberation … renunciation – and countless other ‘ations’ whatever they stood for or were meant to symbolise.
A zen arrow winged its way from the upstairs bedroom straight into John Nightly’s indented forehead. Hearing the family accompany Yehudi Menuhin on the gramophone, the boy became a delinquent worshipper as he mooched past the front door several times that evening.
John Nightly could only guess at the cultural exchanges taking place at the home of the emigré maestro and his family. The recital over, the record and the players might break into self-deprecating applause and a silhouette holding a violin might appear at the window. In the cold city street that night John felt something he wasn’t used to feeling, something warm and tender, cascading in and out. Vagrant comet, well-meaning, innocent, life-giving.
The teenager had been obsessed about finding a ‘girlfriend’ – someone musical, i.e. cultured, elevated, hopefully ‘foreign’ – as a concept, or more probably fantasy, long before he’d actually met or even set eyes on the pre-teen Jana; Cambridge schoolgirl swot, virtuosic violinist, chela and deshiki, the presence and counsel he would always refer to as “the violin girl”.
Rosevean Beach, St Mary’s, North Cornwall. Summer 1955.
1-2-3-4-5-6-7
1-2-3-4-5-6-7
1-2-3-4-5-6-7
1-2-3-4-
1-2-3-4-5-6-7
1-2-3-4-5-6-7
1-2-3-4-5-6-7
1-2-3-4-
1-2-3-4
1-2-3…
‘John… what on earth are you doing?’
Frieda hated any interruption while she was sunbathing. ‘Counting the… -1-2-… waves, Mummy… -3-4-…’
‘But there are quite a lot of them, darling… are you going to count them all?’
‘Timing them, Mummy… the frequency – 2 – 3 – the regu… – 4 –… larity of them.’
‘Oh God…’ Frieda lifted her sunhat from her face and propped herself up on the hard granite. ‘And why is that, dear…?’
-2-3-4
1-2-3-4
1-2-3-4-5-6-7
1-2-3-4-5-6-7…
‘There’s definitely a… -1-2-… pattern, Daddy…’
The boy stood on the edge of a rock pool, school exercise-book held tightly in one hand, a dead starfish in the other. John noted down the sequences, as the waves lapped onto the sand and gulls picked over morsels in the foam.
‘I’m doing important scientific research for the Queen, Mummy.’
‘God…’ Frieda sighed again.
-2-3-4…
1-2-3-4
1-2-3-4-5-6-7
‘John… you sound 57, not seven. We’re on holiday, darling…’
-2-3-4-5-6-7
1-2-3-4-5-6-7
1-2-3-4
1-2-3-4
1-2-3-4-5…
As the boy’s father tried in vain to get comfortable in his deckchair, the pages of Practical Wireless shielding his forehead from the sun, Frieda turned over on her towel and applied another dollop of lotion to her pink Scandinavian arms. John Snr opened the magazine.
‘There’s an article here about Marconi, John. You know he made one of his first discoveries very close to this beach…’ The news aggravated an already fidgety wife.
‘You d
on’t mean Cornwall?’
‘Poldhu Cove, apparently… he sent a signal from there all the way to St Johns, Newfounland.’ The news was too much for Frieda.
‘Father, now you know that is nonsense. Marconi was Italian. He certainly did not do his discovering in Cornwall!’
It was obvious to Frieda that Practical Wireless was full of mistakes.
‘He liked it because of the clear space out to the sea, Daddy… For the signals…’
…2-3-4
1-2-3-4
1-2-3-4-5-6-7…
Frieda huffed and puffed some more.
‘Do you think you could count a little bit more… silently, darling?’
Golding Constable’s Flower Garden John Constable, oil on canvas, 1815, 13 x 20 ins (Colchester and Ipswich Museum Service, Suffolk)
‘When I look at a mill painted by John, I believe that it will go round’
Golding Constable, John Constable’s elder brother, 1830
Listening to pop music can be bad for you…
The Times, London: ‘Music and the Arts in Secondary Education’, April 1966.
Councillor John Seaward, head of music at the St John Regis School, Huntingdon, and advisor to the school-curriculum board in the Cambridge and Isle of Ely area, has stated that listening to pop music and pop groups can be bad for young people. Speaking at a regional conference in St Neots at the weekend to discuss secondary teaching in the subjects of music and art, Cllr Seaward said he believed that youngsters who spent their time listening to pop music were depriving themselves of the deeper emotional experience that could be gained from a study of the classics. ‘Beethoven, Mozart and Bach are the 3Rs because of the deep, emotional experience they can deliver to young people. The music and words of pop groups are simplistic, basic and often ugly. This music does not warrant repeated listening. In my opinion this music will not last and, indeed, I believe it can also be a disruptive influence in our schools. It is for this reason that I propose the banning of pop music and its related culture from secondary schools in the Cambridge area.’
Listening to pop music can be good for you…
Ekstra Bladet, Copenhagen: ‘Pop! Today’s Modern Language’, April 1966.
Dr Johannes Drewaes, speaking at a symposium in Copenhagen last weekend on new methods of teaching, commented in his opening address that ‘listening to pop music can be an excellent way for our young people to learn English. Particularly simple phrases and new, up-to-the-minute vocabulary. The music of the Beatles, for example, is very beautiful and modern. Its expression is heartfelt and simple, yet can be deeply emotional and profound. If you have a favourite pop song it is a very good way to learn English words, sentence structure and everyday modern usage and also to understand how the words are put together in a poetic form of expression.’ Dr Drewaes quoted from songs by Bob Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Feelin’ Groovy’ as other examples.
The Post Office, Peneed, West Cornwall: Mrs Diana Kitty Cardew, sub-postmistress. Letters arrive from Truro RSO at 10.20am, dispatched at 2.15pm, weekdays only. Postal orders issued but not paid. Letters add RSO. Cornwall. Telegraph office. Postmark 18.5.1986
Dear Mr Daly,
Regarding your letter dated 15th May, which I hereby acknowledge, I’m afraid that I now have to give you formal notice that as of today’s date this sub-Post Office will no longer accept or be able to store horticultural items and plants posted from abroad and addressed to yourself. I have discussed this matter with you at length before, and have done my utmost to be of assistance, but I hope you will understand that because of the nature of the potential problems I outlined on the telephone this morning, this is the Post Office’s final notice to you that any further plant specimens received in the mail addressed to Trewin Farm shall be returned to sender without explanation or further notice to yourself. I hope that I may be of assistance with any other matters in the future.
Yours faithfully,
Diana Cardew, Postmistress
For the first four years, John didn’t leave Porthcreek. He didn’t leave the house. Having decided that Trewin was to be his haven, his savenheer, place of refuge from the outer world, he must have sensed that it would also be his salvation. As it was, it took this length of time for the vicarage to be adapted to the needs of not one but two dysfunctional travellers. To have papers drawn up and obtain planning permission for the solar houses took all of two and a half years alone, give or take a few weeks. It was a slow start. But after that, with the building reshaped and extended and all of the surrounding area cleared and the woodland replanted, things soon came together.
John Nightly knew damn all about gardening. Apart from a few visits to the local Botanic Gardens as a child with Frieda and John Snr and the botanical chit-chat of the Everyman, he had never shown any interest whatsoever in matters of horticulture. It was actually all RCN’s idea. The nurse remembered his friend returning to Queen Square from the aborted South African tour, his tour bag stuffed with what he assumed was some kind of thick-stalked vegetable. But what John had in his bag were cannas, a subtropical hybrid brought to England from the West Indies and South America by Victorian plant hunters. With its tall stems and broad-leaved foliage, the canna behaves like an exotic princess from far-off parts. Its scarlet and yellow flowers and red-purple leaves immediately stand out in any garden. Starch is produced from its tuberous roots, which helps maintain an almost continuous flowering cycle. RCN recalled how careful John was with these awkward, sticking-out monsters. He’d never known John Nightly take care of anything like he did the tall-stemmed exotics; not his music or his instruments, certainly not his girlfriends nor even himself. But there he was each morning, gently cleaning their foliage with leaf wipes and gauze, feeding them liquid tomato food, carefully checking each stem for fly and disease.
John was forever rearranging the pots around the glass veranda of the rooftop apartment so that the plants would eventually find the perfect aspect and achieve what he liked to call ‘plant happiness’, and later on, when the stalks shot up and became tipped with intensely coloured bellflowers, John put the by now deliriously happy cannas on the inside of his balcony window with no one being allowed to go near. Not even Iona, the only person he trusted with anything.
The three specimens, now renamed ‘Luxus’, ‘Lucifer’ and ‘Mortada’, as he’d managed to quickly lose the original labels, were also the only things the whacked-out addict took with him when he was admitted to SUMHA.
In that six-year void the extinguished star managed to propagate thousands of the things. The tall, gladioli-like perennials adorned every room and unit in the centre, each corner of the continually extended common parts, every cubbyhole of each long, forbidding corridor; John being the only one allowed to water and care for them. An activity that would occupy most of his days in the sanatorium, this new horticultural interest a therapeutic and time-consuming substitute for the hours per day he’d previously spent creating music.
Each wing at SUMHA was canna colour co-ordinated. So, after the purchase of Trewin, the first thing RCN considered was the possibility of a nursery. The idea being to create a working garden – a big one; one that might even turn a profit someday – from scratch. His keeper knew full well from the way John Nightly’s mind worked that ‘big’, no matter how big, would never be quite big enough for his boss. Any undertaking would have to be something huge, a project on a monumental scale, in order to feed the obsessive hunger his employer had for grand projects and bigness in general. So, when John St Just & Partners of St Austell, the architects commissioned to redesign the property, came up with the layout and plans for the general scheme, the old vicarage was reconstructed to accommodate the maximum number (meaning tens of thousands) of exotic plants. Maximum R’n’B. Or ‘the undergrowth’, as RCN referred to it. A mere 18 months later, with the help of St Just and a groundsman, Robert Kemp (a local man with his own small-holding at Twelveheads), where there had once been unfertile wasteland there were n
ow agave and gunnera thickets, long swathes of voodoo lilies, a fairway of Magnolia stellata, slopes of nemesias and wide aisles of strelitzias setting off smaller beds of geraniums and cardoons.
Then the sunhouses went up, and Trewin Farm took on the look of a commercial nursery. The whole complex having been built for plants – their wellbeing, their habits and requirements – not people. It seemed wrong, indulgent even, to both Johns, that they should concern themselves or care very much about the needs of people. Their own needs.
Both realised that they were, in a sense, ruined men. But that nonetheless they had to continue; they had to exist. Maybe they felt happiest in the gully between the inner and outer worlds, the reason they focused on passive matters, i.e. plant life. Maybe they kidded themselves, but the propagation of tropical exotics became the main interest for Daly and Nightly. The main event. The Carn Point varieties were almost divine creatures: untouchable, all-encompassing, the beneficiaries of long-term accumulative investment. Affection, hard work and money aplenty had been lavished upon them. These adopted sons and daughters glowed with health – unlike their sponsors. The plants created their own community. To look down upon the paddocks and meadows from high above the sea wall, against the backdrop of the ocean’s haze, was like attending a school or college Open Day as the community proudly displayed its annual and ongoing achievement. The pupils – the plants – were truly magnificent. It was just a shame that no one ever came to look at them.