The Story of John Nightly

by Tot Taylor

  Lee introduced John and Iona to the regulars. There was Velda – ‘another model acquaintance’, Lee announced as he presented Iona – and Velda’s friend, Gert, an olive-skinned youth with Cary Grant shades, decked out in his uniform of white cotton shirt and white pressed Levi’s. Gert was, Lee explained, ‘friendly with a lot of politicians and business people…’

  In the Berwick Street corner stood Marko, the former St Martin’s graduate who by day worked on the market alongside Lee’s other ‘best mates’, Peter (Grant) and Marc (Feld). Opposite Marko was Cherry, who had another related business operating out of the one-at-a-time passage between Berwick Street market and Wardour Street itself.

  In the opposite corner across the cobbles stood ‘Fruity’ Fritz and his dog Larry who was fond of sniffing excitedly at fur-lined parkas and go-go boots. Fruity would not only sell you the biggest variety of poppers on the market but was also happy to put you in contact with other branches of his business in Curzon Street and Lancashire Court.

  ‘’Mazin’,’ said Lee.

  Wardour Mews was a hive of activity. With art students, actors, designers, waiters and waitresses, journalists and every type of musician or ‘head’ joining the lowlife to buy a high life, sometimes in bulk, from these reliable unreliables. Most would then head off to the Marquee or the Flamingo, or for the more jazz-orientated Ronnie Scott’s or Dinky’s, to mingle with other faces and catch up on the latest sounds. Later on there’d be queues at Dolly’s, Sybilla’s and the Bag O’Nails in Kingly Street, where more of a model/photographer/film-star clientele would assemble, and there was the possibility of the occasional visitation by a Beatle or Stone.

  Iona and Monika’s regular night-time supplier was the gruffly-spoken but sweet-hearted Lenny, known to all and sundry as The Bear because of his hairy neck and extreme barrel chest. Lenny’s usual attire was a mechanic’s one-piece boiler suit unzipped to the waist. He carried his wares in a small metal toolbox with a leather tool belt strapped to his belly. But the usual screwdrivers, spanners and carpet tacks had had to make way for a variety of pastel-coloured pep pills and the new big thing, LSD – sheets of it.

  It was a frantic market. The mods would ‘’lude out’ on Mandrax or Quaaludes and other painkillers, sedatives and tranquilisers; then, later on, get trippy with the new product, little gelatine squares, sheets or ‘windowpanes’, as they were known – 1,000 micrograms, usually referred to by the customers as White Lightning or Purple Haze.

  John and Iona bade farewell to a disappointed Lee at Beak Street and Golden Square, deciding to walk through the park so as to come down from the exhilarating rush surrounding the speed freaks – or ‘motorheads’, as they became known – of Soho. The pair was headed back to Iona’s flat in deepest Fulham, a world away from the quick hit of the West End, though likely just as drug-oriented.

  On the doorstep of 45 Old Brompton Road they encountered a lonely soul. Huddled together with a small white dog inside a caravan blanket sat Alice, Iona’s flatmate and local ‘slumming it’ debutante who had managed to lock herself out after taking Koko, the girls’ attention-seeking fox terrier, for a midnight stroll. Alice’s unforeseen presence immediately removed any possibility John may have been hoping for in terms of a sexual liason that evening and with Koko deliriously happy to see Iona and therefore barking non-stop without letting go of her coat, they opened the door and entered the laboratory-warm five-roomed conversion.

  Iona and Alice’s whitewashed living space was adorned with shawls and textiles, posters, rush mats, beads, coloured glass and abstract canvases. It was the first time John had been into a home with anything like what he might have identified as real modern art. In Iona’s Danish kitchenette hung a large oil by the CoBrA artist Asger Jorn, all green squirls and messy red knots, while in the hallway was a set of three gouaches by Corneille, given to Iona by her father, the art collector Dr Jonas Sandstrand, on the occasion of her eighteenth birthday. John admired the paintings and made a promise to himself to invest in some art as real as this as soon as John Pond had gotten his contract through and found him a place to stay.

  This twilight ending to an eventful and productive day was to be an important one for John Nightly for another reason. As they decamped to the kitchen, where Alice made mu tea and brought flapjacks followed by Iona’s homemade hash cake from the fridge, Iona, perched high on a stepladder, lifted the latch on the roof light, sat down and began to roll one.

  John turned off the flickering, crackling television, left on for the past five hours while Alice had stepped out for five minutes. He picked up one of the copies of Vogue and Queen from the piles strewn haphazardly across the floor. The corners of the pages featuring Iona had been neatly folded down, with Alice herself having put in an appearance, in Country Life, as the about-to-come-out debutante daughter of Isabella, ex-deb and now wife of Colonel Jonty Latimer, of Venn House, Nineveh, Cornwall.

  ‘Alice hunts and events and will read philosophy and art history at Oxford after travelling to India as a volunteer with the Sri Bhagwan Foundation’, announced here. Alice’s mother, the former Bella Kaminsky, was from Lithuanian stock, which is where Alice had gotten her peasant-girl looks – as confirmed by John from the picture on the mantelpiece, Mama Bella at the Berkeley Square Ball, spring 1948.

  As Donovan’s LP played on the stereo and Alice served more tea for three, Iona selected six sugar lumps from a wooden bowl and laid them out in a perfect semicircle. She opened a small box, from which she took out a phial and casually dripped two drops of lysergic acid diethylamide onto each one, saturating the sugar until it began to crumble; then took a small teaspoon and placed a cube on her tongue before asking John and Alice to ‘Open up’.

  And so it was that in the early hours of 13 June 1966, the same night that the giant star Zuse exploded in a supernova, seeding the universe with tangles of gas and dust that would later create new stars, John Nightly blasted into his own Space, his own celestial oblivion, when he embarked upon his first LSD expedition, his orange-sunshine voyage of discovery, in a Scandinavian cabin kitchen in South Kensington courtesy of Miss I. Sandstrand and an ex-heating engineer known as Lenny the Bear.

  Derived from a parasitic fungus that grows on rye, lysergic acid diethylamide is mixed with volatile diethylamide (used in vulcanising rubber), then frozen. The LSD is extracted by using chloroform or benzene for fractional distillation, or else by means of a simple vacuum evaporator. Available in pill form or else as a soluble crystalline powder (the liquid-dunked sugar cubes of yesteryear are out), LSD produces an 8-to-12-hour trip highlighted by profound changes in thought, mood and activity. Colours become heightened, sounds take on preternatural shades of meaning or unmeaning; the trip passenger feels that he can see into his very brain cells, hear and feel his blood and lymph coursing through their channels. It is this sense of intense perception that stays with most hippies and, in part, sustains their fondness for bright colours, flowers and bells. Yet, for all its reputed ability to make a man aware of his true ‘nature’, LSD has demonstrably damaging qualities as well. Mood changes can range from tears to laughter to intense anxiety, panic, and a psychedelic paranoia that duplicates psychosis to the last dotted shriek – and can go on indefinitely.

  ‘The Flower Children’, The Hippies. Times Inc. New York, 1967.

  Sweet silver angels over the sea

  Please come down flyin’ low for me

  ‘Jesus Was a Cross Maker’, Judee Sill, 1972

  (Asylum AYM502)

  September tides. A regular seven-second breaker rolled into the bay at Carn Point as a handful of surfer kids bobbed up and down in the foam, trying to stay vertical if only for a few seconds. September tides are supposed to be calm. John Nightly ought to know. He’s been studying them long enough, using the same stopwatch and sliderule bought for him by his father while he was still at St John’s Secondary. Way back, in another world, another time. Back before everything went haywire, bonkers, completely nuts. Way, way back, before
all the zigging and zagging and swinging and swaying led to, well… it led to oblivion.

  John often sat up here, high above the white-water, the highest point of the Nightly property, on this same, familiar patch of flattened grass. Windcheater zipped right up to his chin, cap and goggles wrapped tight around his skull, as he monitored the movements of neaps and springs comforted by the warmth of the sun but irritated by the swirling sand that every now and then would suddenly stir up around him, graze his face, and sweep into his nose and ears.

  John had once remained on this spot for six whole days as he listened to the lapping waves and the surfer’s distant cries, meticulously timing each ebb and flow, checking the accuracy of the predictions in Her Majesty’s Tide Tables HMSO0296. They were close enough, but he knew that he could have done a better job for her. Today, he compiled his findings, drawing out a few basic charts before RCN appeared with coffee, Club biscuits and Jaffa cakes – the Johns’ preferred mid-afternoon combination. Mostly there’d be little said, but every now and then RCN would stay awhile and sit down if there was something special to look at – ghostly shapes in the clouds, a horsehead nebula; a double or even triple rainbow, a truly spectacular sight and on these occasions they’d maybe chew the breeze, and the sand (literally), and chat about the view, the weather, the rain, tides, post from abroad, irrigation systems, insecticides, plant catalogues… The usual things. Never anything important. And never anything to do with the old days. God no, not that. Never that. Nobody wanted to hear about the old days anymore; not those kinds of days, whichever ones they were or might happen to have been – neither the good nor the bad.

  One morning (it was a Monday, because RCN had gone to St Just to do the week’s errands) Carn Point was enduring the third week of an almost continuous sandstorm. Everyone thought of this part of the South West as a sunny place, and it was, but when the bad weather arrived it was not only extremely wet, with the rain coming down in huge globules without leaving any gaps for running across roads or under trees, but the enormous storm power of the gales meant that it was also very dangerous. Local-radio reports told of giant conifers uprooting themselves on the spur of the moment and of houses giving up the ghost and falling down on people. The wildflower meadows surrounding Trewin Farm had been transformed into treacherous mud rinks and you wouldn’t want to be up on the coastal path in a million years, not even in the most sheltered of spots. No structure was safe from the relentless, uncompromising wind. It wasn’t for nothing that the district of Pendeen, one of the original tithed ‘Hundreds’, as they used to be known, directly translated from the Cornish as the ‘Headland of Slaughter’.

  For this reason John Nightly was having a day in. We find him hunched over his new aluminium PowerBook G7 running Pro Tools, Version 2.4 MasterCode, with Bluetooth, Vision, Cyberex and Notator. That’s right. This is probably going to come as something of a shock, but from sometime around April 2002 John Nightly spent quite a lot of his waking hours actually doing music. Or, rather, redoing it. Specifically, he was reassembling MBR, his very own ‘lost masterpiece’: the Mink Bungalow Requiem. The sequence of events that brought us to this wholly unexpected scenario went something like this…

  In December 2001, during that dead spot between Christmas and New Year, both Johns were paying a seasonal visit to the Tregan Garden Centre just outside Penzance. No one ever went to garden centres in these few dead days. That’s why they were there.

  While waiting for a trailer to be loaded with industrial amounts of cactus grit, loam and potash, the odd couple were approached by the owner’s son, Julian Tregan – university dropout, champion surfer, local male model and trainee customer-services assistant. The young man explained to RCN that his surfer-dude compadre, Mawgan, a huge fan of the man loitering over there near the children’s cacti garden, was currently employed as trainee recording engineer at Sandy Sound, a small residential music studio at Sandy in Bedfordshire. Sorting through the tape store one day, with a view to having a clear-out, Mawgan had come upon six or seven boxes of old multitrack reels.

  On the labels there was little to identify the artist or the sessions, though a list of studios including Trident, Regal Sound, Sound Techniques, Kingsway Hall and St John’s Smith Square identified whatever was inside as a late ’60s/early ’70s recording. More importantly, the engineer recognised these five facilities as the locations used to record one of his favourite, most sought-after and impossible to get hold of pieces of music – ‘Adagio Mortada’ – the slower-than-slow Remembrance section from the Requiem. But what really set him buzzing was Box 4.

  Inside the torn cotton slipcase between the mouldy inner sleeve and the tapereel itself sat a grubby scrap of paper: Free Expression and Tin Mine Presents… The Gliderdrome Amphitheater, SmokeStack Entertainments, Inc., San Francisco, Calif. 10909. Tourdate, May 28 1972 Symphonia da Requiem for Group, Orchestra and Choir

  Jotted down on the yellowed page in blunt pencil was a list of timings: ‘Allegro: T1 00: T2-03+T3-019’ and so on. Sync points. The count-ins of each movement, directions for keeping the onstage performers – three orchestras, five choirs and various groups of rock, jazz and folk ensembles – in sync throughout the event using the recorded rhythm tracks as a backdrop to what was being played live. Without this, ‘Allegro Castor’, ‘Adagio Mortada’ and ‘Fantasia Capella’ would be even more ‘all over the place’ than they were already on the momentous, historic day of that final, seven-hour performance inside a scorching-hot baseball stadium in downtown San Francisco.

  But it meant nothing unless you knew something and Mawgan Hall, collector of weird and wonderful audio product: shaped-discs, 8-track cassettes, acetates, scratch ‘n’ smell sleeves, triple-LP boxed sets and quadraphonic bootlegs, knew quite a lot. There, inside the fourth box, chinagraph-marked and edited to red leader, were the original 2ins rhythm tracks, along with crumpled track sheets for the live recordings and the 2-track stereo master of collage FX for the live concerts. There were even two lighting-cue sheets, one for the Royal Albert Hall and one for the Shrine Auditorium, Santa Monica. The music inside wasn’t the ‘final’ mixes that John Nightly had spent every waking moment of the last three years of his career getting nowhere at all with; but the raw tracks, the rough material, the unmixed fabric. Amazingly, all more or less intact, apart from one seven-minute interlude recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra at St John’s Church, a classical-music venue in Smith Square, Chelsea, which had served as a basic 2-track master on which to overdub an audience in Atlanta, Georgia, four months later. The label stated that it was inside, but no… £60,000 worth of expensive orchestral recording had gone astray.

  Here then was the much-talked-about lost masterpiece. Staple of every self-respecting music lover’s search list. Subject of endless mentions in broadsheet know-it-all rock’n’roll supplements and Dadrock music mags, with hundreds of listings on record collectors’ want lists, track-finder websites, eBay and all the rest. Wow… was this really it? Was this the gold that had contributed to the demise of at least four characters in the Nightly tale? As well as the withdrawal from the real world of its very creator…

  The train of events leading up to the discovery wasn’t unusual. Following the untimely death of John Pond, Nightly’s legal representatives had tried in vain to secure the whereabouts and ownership of said multitracks; but, with the liquidation of the former management and the scattering of those in its employ, John Nightly had either more or less given up or was so far out of it himself by that point that he could never imagine wanting to hear one note of his beloved magnum opus again.

  Could what this loopy kid was saying be true? Thirty years on? Probably not, thought RCN, though the faithful nurse asked for the dude’s telephone number and said they’d be in touch. Three weeks later an apprehensive-looking Mawgan Hall accompanied by six heavy 2-inch boxes of multitrack tape arrived at Trewin Farm. On this occasion the dude still did not meet with his idol, who had decided to spend the day up on the coastal path r
ather than confront the possibility of his monstrous past coming back to haunt him, but Mawgan did meet with RCN, who, during an extended debriefing session, managed to extract the remainder of the story before the both of them carefully examined each reel of tape, checking for corrosion, rust, mildew and other damage to the outer layers of the ionised masters.

  ‘Hello, Mawgan… John Daly…’ The nurse paused for a second. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Oh hi… Yeah. I’m good thanks… Thanks, man.’ The voice on the other end sounded somewhat relieved. ‘I was gonna phone you anyway,’ it continued, ‘just to say it was amazing to meet you and to see your place… Awesome place, by the way… Thanks so much for letting me see everything… really… an amazing day.’

  RCN put the handset closer to his ear; the kid’s voice sounded lazy, half-asleep. ‘Mawgan… It was a pleasure to meet you and I just wanted to say that John was so grateful to you for finding these recordings in the first place… then of course for taking the trouble to come all the way down here. As you know, he was sorry that he wasn’t able to meet with you himself that day, it’s just that… Well, he just happened to be particularly busy on that… particular day, mainly because he…’ again RCN paused. ‘He does a lot of gardening, as you know… hell of a lot… and… well, as you also know… it’s a time-consuming business.’ RCN popped a cough candy into his mouth and lodged it in his cheek.

  ‘I know it is, man… my Mum’s a big gardener and… she’s doing it all the time. So… I can see you got a lot of flowers in your place… lot of garden there, a real lot… foliage as well…’