by Tot Taylor
‘That’s G… G minor.’
‘E flat… Awesome… so that might work?’
‘I think that is it, actually.’ John squinted in the direction of the screen. Though he could make out very little and wouldn’t have understood it if he could, he thought it polite to show interest in what seemed to him to be a hugely skilled aspect of what the kid was doing. The digital representation of dots, the gravel of highlighted dips and recesses, resembled nothing more closely than a craggy Flintstones-like map of ancient Cornwall.
‘That’s the… crossover point, Mawgan… right there…’
Mawgan stared further into the infinity of the music. A jumble of overlapping windows; instrument lists, cue points, ticks, short scores and all of the multifarious combinations of cadence bars, beginnings and ends of phrases, sections that might join up and connect to others, and some that definitely would not – twenty or thirty possible score sheets, all notated and active, which might just make the whole thing come to life… live again. Right now, it looked more like Microsoft Corp’s cash-flow projection than the retrospective assemblage of a late-20th-century cultural landmark.
‘That’s it. I’m sure that’s it!’
‘Just… there!’ John cried. Mawgan highlighted the new, right-sounding passage and hit SAVE.
Far away in the past
In a far distant time
A more distant, benign time
Long time ago
Generations and philosophies ago
An oft-remembered time that many new philosophers still find magical
But always get completely the wrong idea about
The music swelled up.
On the stage of the Lyceum Ballroom
In the nave of St John’s, Smith Square
In the backstage bar at the Reading Jazz and Blues Festival
At Friar’s Club, Aylesbury
Manchester Free Trade Hall
Regal Recording Studios
And the vast sunken auditorium of
the Gliderdrome, San Francisco, California
The music swelled up.
In the blue-green lagoons of the white-sanded coves and on the cheap transistor radios playing in all the little fish vans travelling up and down the B3306 coast road, along the carns and zawns of the headlands of West Penwith. The music swelled…
‘Can you turn it up a bit more, Mawgan?’
The kid leaned over and wound the volume through another three or four notches. The increased surroundsound coincided with a visible crescendo in the ‘Star Mink Interlude’, one of the most thrilling and deeply moving sections of the Requiem. John Nightly relaxed back into his filthy old chair, the over-sprung back and arms soiled with grit, compost, Miracle-Gro and other plant feed, the residue of twenty years’ worth of really ‘bringing the outdoors in’, and bringing Alexandre in. Years of slop and sweat had made the once-valuable spoon-back parlour seat quite a disgrace. But that had never bothered John Nightly. He quite liked the smell of decomposition.
‘Bit more, Mawgan… bit more…’ The Master turned to Mawg and smiled, ‘sorry… just a bit, though…’
The track was already loud. And now louder. Over-loud. More bass. More treble. More overall punch and boom. More compression. More middle. More meat, more thump. Just more of everything. The loose bottom end crunched and distorted the speaker’s bass cones, rattling the racks of vintage processors and effects the kid had painstakingly assembled in order to do justice to his master’s original vision. The dude winced. His young, forensic ears resisted distortion (falseness) of any kind, but on the other side of the room the boss’s eyes lit up and a broad, transforming smile appeared on his lips. John Nightly just loved that blown-out, bombed-out sound. Reminding him of all those ’60s PA systems, speaker stacks either too big for the local dancehalls and university common rooms they were supposed to serve, or laughably small for the huge stadiums of zonked out ‘heads’ and screaming teens.
The music quickly gained momentum and swelled like a wave. A real six-footer. A long polytonal chord piled high with triads of G minor, B flat major 7th and a low-voiced inversion of D spread out against the headland like a convective stormcloud.
When he’d conceived the piece, Cornwall didn’t exist. Not in the Master’s private thought world. John had no idea about its sea-polished rocks, its sandbars, squills, zawns, coastal paths or quoits. But now the originator imagined a huge breaker crashing against the rocks, sweeping all manner of small sea creatures and other indigenous marine life before it. That was what the music was telling its maker now. This monster would hit the shore, break and shatter, ending up as a shallow layer of sparkingly clean transparent saltwater stroking the coastline, before it receded back into the ocean, and back into John Nightly’s vast, oceanic imagination. The master closed his eyes. A hand pushed up the faders on the lighting console and the auditorium, the people, the music; the music; nature itself, was right there before him. The curtain opened. Dawn’s morning light appeared along the headland. A soft crescendo from one scene into the next.
The percussion rattled and roared. Heavy timpani rolls, a bank of kettle-drums performed by two Zen masters John had picked up in Las Vegas, of all places. High on a riser towards the left of the stage these two unnamed, unremembered virtuosos attended to a large gamelan. There were tubular bells and mark-trees, two or three vibraphones, crash and ride cymbals, a series of small gongs and a tam-tam. John didn’t remember how many instruments exactly. But he did recall a whole bank of marimbas and metallophones put there just for show. The Nightly band had never managed to find anyone to actually play the things but John insisted on having them onstage anyway, so there they were. A sinful waste of musical instrumentation, treated disrespectfully by one of the most talented talents of his era. Set above that was a massive multi-timbral selection of chime-bars, glocks and celestas. The Nightly stage set resembled nothing more than a percussion factory at night-time – empty of workers and players. There was the swirling double-manual Hammond played by Jonathan Foxley, the sonorous echoes of four nine-foot Steinways, hired in at ridiculous and quite unnecessary expense to be played in unison by Justin and Ron to emulate the submerged drones John had first heard in Debussy’s La Cathédrale engloutie. Suddenly he saw it all in his head, the soft and the loud, piano and forte, the formally composed music and the hysteria. Seeing within this remembrance and flashback, both the night dream itself and the eventual realisation of the dream; the ensuing, seemingly never-ending night-mare.
More. Just a bit more. John asked of his friend, until it became just a bit too much. Although, in terms of physical volume it didn’t matter. Apart from the hound slinking away into the next room, there were no other humans or animals for at least eight or nine miles. No one within earshot at all. The two Johns, if they so desired, could have put on discos, ‘raves’, or whatever they called them nowadays, in the outhouses and barns; free concerts in the flower meadows. Even outside, with all that noise, the music would still be up against much louder stuff: the elements, the wind, the hail squalls, the sand whirls, the almost constant blow. And the birds.
The birds were actually really noisy. Mawgan thought so anyway. Ridiculously loud. And more or less continuous. The thing that most surprised him about coming to work, and live, at Trewin. It really was a racket out there. Though naturally noisy, at least. The music would still have to compete with the elements. As the group themselves had to, day to day. Compete with life itself.
The usually tolerant speakers began to protest. The massed ranks at the dawn of ‘Mink Lux Eterna’ blared out, creating an enormous blubber; exploding, lurching mass. Both the Wizard and the kid became fixed and concentrated on this new idea. Long, ambiguous, two-keyed tritones, toboggans running parallel with each other along a two-lane track. The sleds kept converging then gradually moved away again. Two streams, two passenger jets, cruising side by side. The sound of three hundred and eighty orchestral players and six jazz stickmen made the grade-A sound system play
safe. The tweeters began to woof as the woofers began to tweet. Somehow the system managed to keep up with the music.
’Mazin’ would’ve been the word. It certainly was a magnificent thing. Speedy, yet graceful. Carefree and loose, a celebration of life itself, though still elegant, literally ‘composed’ – worked out – as if Mingus had stood in with Stravinsky. The Mink Bungalow Requiem was a symphonic mash, truly a graveyard smash. Scandinavian, due to the scale of the thing. Wardour Street, because of the pulsating energy. Grantchester, in the delicacy of touch, the village stillness, and the familial human nature, the true spirituality, of the original concept itself.
Iona, Frieda, Jana, Monika, Myra and Donna. All in there somewhere. In the music’s very humanity, its grace – and its disgrace. Its fiery intelligence, its innocence, invention – and reckless ambition. The lives and times of these heroines entangled within its harmonic ambiguity. In the layers and textures and various multi-personalities and approaches configured and reconfigured in each inspirational blob, along each polytonal corridor, on each heavily layered plateau, inside each wholly unanswered question within John Nightly’s psychological melting pot.
Even presented this way, the music coming from Mawgan Hall’s ‘crappy lappy’ – unmixed, un-finessed, unfinished… the almost lost, almost re-assembled, chucked together Mink Bungalow Requiem sounded mesmerising.
RCN appeared at the door. A hesitant smile. Careful not to appear to want to turn it down, he moved casually towards the amp, bent down and notched it up one dB more; the slightly increased volume gave the track still more definition. Now there was all manner of exotic percussion being highlighted – triangles, skulls, shakers – and all manner of God-knows-who playing the bell trees, cabasas… rainsticks and cimbaloms. High-tone instruments. It moved into freeform – ‘Free Music, man!’ shouted the Wizard at the top of his voice; ‘Free Music!!’ – the scene all too familiar to RCN. Very 1972. A long fragmented passage unwound as the choir began a gradual descent, a slide, in fifths and sixths, pagan and bleak, but because of the lush orchestration supporting it, crisp and even… Warm, kindly, benign.
RCN moved to a point midway between the two monitors, listening in detail to the stereo picture, its wide double-rainbow of sound. Three primary sonic colours. Three secondary ones. The speakers delivered a faithful reproduction, perfect indexing and imaging. All of the complex detail, the subsonic low bass ‘shelf’, the supersonic highs, using the jargon salesmen at the Hi-Fi Center in Penzance liked to dazzle with. The nurse turned to the others, smiled, fixed on the boss and nodded his approval.
Then it stopped. The new slab of sound, all four minutes of it, decided to cut loose. As if a page had been ripped from its binding to prevent it being read. This abrupt stop was followed by a loud static click, gashed on to a ticking, mechanical pulse. Sync points. Next came a massed shuffling of feet and for the first time it was possible to hear the ambience of the auditorium itself.
Suddenly there was no music at all. Not a whisper… from any of the 400 or so participants gathered together by the Santa Monica Freeway… suddenly it was just the sound of the place. A sensuous, panoramic nothing. Except for the sense of being in a very large space, an auditorium or mausoleum, of vast proportions. The ambience so real that it seemed that John, John and Mawg, unwitting time travellers, really were back there. Then. Not stuck in a drystone-wall ex-vicarage in West Cornwall in the present tense… Not in these ‘nothing’ times, but back in the sold-out concert hall, the twenty-eighth day of May, 1972. West Coast grandeur. Proper ‘something’ time. Here it was at last, then; reconfigured and re-ordered. Reheated. Right here before them, the absolute zenith of rock’n’roll over-the-top-ness. All the seething, creeping, cloying, mess of creation. The Mink Bungalow Requiem was back. The Mink Bungalow Requiem was reborn. The Mink Bungalow Requiem really was the ultimate in counter-cultural, eco-revolutionary, fusion-powered, psycho-dependent musical calamity.
An expectant nothingness fell over 41,428 Californian hippies and dropouts. Paying customers and willing victims. The abrupt tacit in the music revealing the distant drone of wave generators parked out in the ocean. The hums and whispers of the over-excited performers, cola vendors, ticket-tearers, front-of-house security, police, journalists from around the globe and thousands of West Coast VIPs – oil men, land men, fund managers and corporate whizz-kids. All there to grab a piece of future memory. A token of the Wizard himself. With his attendant band members and roadies, dancers, orchestras, choirs, music copyists, groupies, drivers and candle lighters. This unexpected and quite hypnotising environmental nothingness, in its way, just as revealing as the music which came before it.
Then, from a corner of the room, extreme stage right, someone spoke… was it… Josh? – choirmaster extraordinaire, tireless campaigner for gay lib, trusted member of the Nightly inner circle – instructing the children’s choir not to hold back.
‘C’mon now, kids… Shhhh!!! Your teachers have paid a lot of money for you to be here!’ Josh laughed, though the kids didn’t. ‘So make sure you sing up next time! And for God’s sake people… enjoy yourselves!’
This rather anxious voice, encouraging the local pick-up choirs, was followed by a woman’s softer tones, so focused you could almost hear her heart ticking, her mental organisation… Thinking… counting… and tapping. An intense inner concentration; a precise, commanding delivery earnestly counting out the steps.
2-3-4-5-6-7
2-3-4-5-6-7,
2-3-4, start a-gain…
‘…Donna…’
John Nightly got up from his chair. He stood unsteadily again, suddenly old, suddenly ‘wrong’, as if he might fall down at any moment. He spoke softly… tenderly… and privately.
‘Donna…’
The voice on tape was now dissolving beneath the sound of tapsteps on floorboards as the count-in continued and someone dragged the mike away from the counting voice across to the other side of that stage.
2-3-4-5-6-7
2-3-4-5-6-7
start a-gain, 2-3-4-5-6-7,
start a-gain…
The counting voice eventually disappeared. Drowned out by a very low modular sinewave and with it a roar of applause as whatever happened live in the stadium that night – so long ago now, that none of those gathered could possibly hope to remember – happened.
‘it’s Donna… it’s Donna…’
John Nightly stared straight up at the ceiling, straight into space, away from the room, away from people, exactly as his nurse and companion said he would. He turned to the kid.
‘thanks… Mawgan… really… good. It does sound really good, man…’
The Wizard gathered up his blanket, gave another little turn of the head towards the kid, a quiet acknowledgement of all of the boy’s tremendous hard work, then… grey-faced and with all the colour of everyday suddenly sucked out of him, he swallowed, took a resigned half-breath, stared blankly at RCN, and shuffled out of the room.
item: Record Retailer Audio Guide, (37th Edition). 2006–2007.
John Nightly: b. Grantchester, England, 1948. One of the forgotten men of popular music. Nightly began his career in Cambridge beat group the Everyman in the mid-sixties. He was the first to fuse developments in ‘contemporary-classical’ via the London avant-garde of Cornelius Cardew and Harrison Birtwistle with the forward-looking, more adventurous pop music of the day. Influenced lyrically by modern poetry, his pseudo-classical debut, Principal Fixed Stars (for rock band, tape, electronics and double string orchestra) bears comparison with both Deep Purple and the Nice. His first two albums proper, Ape Box Metal (AIC JCE7036) and Quiz Axe Queen (AIC JCE7039) with their postmodern pick’n’mix approach, are now acknowledged as an influence on the progressive era that came after – as well as, perversely, the sunshine-pop revival of the mid-1990s.
The multimedia performance triple-set Mink Bungalow Requiem still ranks as the most overblown concept of the era. Yet in revisionary thought it is a sort of masterpiece.
A visionary work, essential to an understanding of the development of the pop song from three-minute wonder to quasi-symphonic tone-poem.
Nightly’s period of activity was short – by late 1972 he was finished. Addled by hallucinogens and bankrupted by the cost of an ambitious world tour played out as a ‘multimedia eco-event’. Nightly played his last note live, for Christian Action, from under a circus top courtesy of Billy Smart in Regent’s Park, London. He moved to California in the 1980s.
Won-Der-ful Ra-di-o 1! Steve Rich on Sunday Morning, BBC Radio 1. Sunday. 17 January 2006.
[Lionel Ritchie’s ‘Hello’ fades into the background]
Now… a very special request this Sunday morning for Mr and Mrs John and Edie Hope from Ely, in Cambridgeshire… went there once I think, didn’t I? [speaks off mike to imaginary ‘gang’] Think I did, anyway. That is a beautiful town, isn’t it? Ely? In… Cambs, was it? Now… John and Edie, Edie from Ely! Right! Your son John – oh, he’s called John as well is he? Run out of names down there in Ely have you, guys? [the intro to an ’80s Hit-pick bubbles in the background] Your… y’son says you’ll be celebrating your sixtieth – yes, that’s 60 times 365 days together, everyone – wow… So that’ll be your… [listens to the feed in his ear] Diamond wedding anniversary today then, my darling! [cue canned cheering] This is a request from your son John… who wants to say thank you for being such a great mum and dad… [canned audience: ‘aaaaaahhhh…’] And also for never asking him to turn the radio down, ha, ha… [cue massed canned laugh] Well, that’s always a good thing, isn’t it, Mum? ’Specially when you’re tuned to good old Radio 1! [cue ‘Ra-di-o Won-der-ful’ jingle for the fifth time] So… let’s not get started. Now, John – ‘Dad’, that is – your son says that you will be 89 on um… Monday, so… er, well done, mate! Apart from anything else! Shall we have a round of applause in the studio for John? [four people clap] And Edie, who is… Well, you’ll be 87 in February! I hope you don’t mind me revealing your age, my darling! [cue football-crowd sound effect, followed by extremely distorted fuzz-guitar riff] And here’s a record… chosen by your son, ’specially for you both… with memories of a very happy childhood in the sixties… It’s the… the Jimi Hendrix Experience and ‘Purple Haze’!