The Story of John Nightly

by Tot Taylor

  Trewin Farm, Porthcreek, Carn Point, Cornwall. Friday, 17 September 2002.

  RCN came into the music room with Alexandre trailing after him. A sacred intermezzo, more suited to the atmosphere of a chapel or cathedral, lay interred on Mawgan’s desktop. ‘Adagio Mortada’ was being burned into eternity. The bleak, angular trajectory of John Nightly’s elegiac ribbon stopped and started repeatedly as Mawgan hit PLAY and PAUSE while carefully adjusting gain and level on his virtual input. The Wizard was deep in thought.

  ‘Christ’s life.’

  RCN looked blank.

  ‘Christ’s life…’

  The nurse placed two coffee mugs on the console and handed a mu tea to the Wizard. The Wizard took the cup and stared down into the dark, creosote pool. It appeared lukewarm… medicinal; most uninviting. He turned to RCN. ‘John… I’ve not actually heard this sound for thirty years.’ It was the only time the kid ever heard the Wizard address his friend and nurse using his Christian name.

  ‘Christ’s life… his age…’

  RCN moved Alexandre’s blanket and sat down on the hard oak chair.

  ‘The duration of Christ’s life… it’s that long since I heard this piece of my own music…’

  With their hot drinks, Jaffa cakes and roll-ups, radiators and amplifiers, the Johns and their accomplice sat in reverential silence, wholly concentrated on the 30-year vintage offering that now filled the room.

  Minutes or so later they were more or less zomboid. The Master’s vision had transformed and transported them. They had all zoomed. So zonked were they – conscious, but only just – that the three of them let their facial muscles relax and droop. Their arms hung limply at their sides, their legs appeared disabled and defeated. If intruders from another world had happened to enter this airless cabinet they would’ve come not upon three hippies but three hippos, jowly and flabby, thoroughly at ease with themselves and the world as they lay beached in a hot summer brook beside a jungle clearing in this most careworn of care homes.

  The stooges lazed and slouched, totally de-concentrated and open to the vibe, or ‘flow’, as if sedated by what came streaming out of the speakers. Unwound and unbent they received and absorbed the music, listening in a way that people don’t listen anymore. Truly listening. The Kid, comatose under the desk; the Nurse, fat-bellied and fulfilled, a wide grin across his face; the Wizard, empty-eyed, castaway, tired of the wheel of life itself. Mawgan dragged himself upright, rubbed across the trackpad on his keyboard, lined up another edited segment, picked up his spliff and hit PLAY once again.

  In these nothing days, we don’t treat music very well. It’s not such an important part of our lives. No longer a stand-alone recreational activity in its own right; we tend to think of it as more of an add-on, often to another quite unrelated activity. For John and John, and a thousand other Johns, this invisible stuff, which only becomes visible, and physical, when you take spliff and hit PLAY, is life itself. To this thousand there is nothing more important, either emotionally or spiritually, than to experience that mercury flow, nothing more rewarding than the magic spell cast by the few very truly great listening experiences.

  In nothing times we listen while we’re already otherwise occupied. Making calls, paying bills, hoovering, surfing the net or exercising, getting the kids off to school or fiddling our tax returns. Self-proclaimed ‘music lovers’ listen to a recorded work with the radio or TV on in the background. We do other strange things. We buy music which we will never listen to. We flip from track to track on our pods, reducing our greatest performers to digital sludge to be sampled for a few moments only, like a taster plate, or children’s menu. There is nothing at all grown up or sophisticated about this low-grade, low-concentration experience. If we ourselves are creators, we are the victims of this approach; if we are receivers, we go along with it – for the sake of convenience. That couldn’t be said of the Kid, the Wizard or the Nurse.

  The tight little threesome, united in trying to rebuild this unwieldy and impossible-to-categorise conceptual work, listened like people used to listen. In the sixties and seventies. Good ol’ ‘something’ days. Deeply, profoundly, attentively – properly. Wanting and needing to listen. Truly receiving. Eyes closed, heads angled towards the source like ravens on a BT cable. Volume turned Up. A concentration on receiving but not on analysing. ‘Don’t analyse!’ It was one of the Master’s absolute dictats. Don’t think, whatever you do; don’t think as you receive. Just let it come… let it flow… let it come down… come like a wave… Let that gold dust, someone’s life’s work, their essence, that ribbon of a million carats, a million days, come through; respect it and pay absolute attention to it when it arrives. Let it wash, rush, rinse and wash and wash and wash over you – until you drown in it.

  In John Nightly’s experience sometimes stuff came and sometimes it didn’t. Then nothing came. But one thing John was convinced of was that some very precious golden thread had been delivered to him in that period of peaking creativity and personal crisis, January ’70 to January ’71, the gestation time for this final devastating work, and now, with the imminent release, in all of its 3 x 3 x 3 Gertrude Stein-like majesty, it would be for others, critics and audiences, and the mass of receivers out there in space, those thousands and thousands of Johns in bleak suburban cul-de-sacs from Redruth and Redcar to Far Rockaway and Venice Beach, those in small back rooms along the headland, school dorms and student bedsits, to decide whether or not the Wizard’s judgement of what to take and what to leave was still to be trusted and whether the really good stuff, God’s grade-A transcendent slub, had indeed been offered.

  ‘This is the CBS Nine O’Clock News,’ Dan Montgomery and James Hills reporting. ‘Entertainment News’ CBS Television, New York. 5.5.72

  ‘ John Nightly is Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, Igor… Stravinsky, Al Jolson, William Blake, Leonard Bernstein, Brian Wilson… That’s the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, right, Jim?’

  ‘That’s right, Dan.’ [second anchorman nods and raises his eyebrows]

  ‘… Oscar Wilde, Rudolph Nu-ri-yev, William Burroughs and Rodgers and Hammerstein all rolled into one! That’s ahm… quite a line-up!’

  ‘Now tonight, as part of the multi-platinum rock star’s New World Tour, the English rock singer John Nightly will present his seven-hour, three-part, ‘triple-screen’ mul-ti-media ‘random’ performance work, the ahm… Milk Bungalow Requiem. Not in a church, but in front of the largest crowd ever gathered together anywhere on the globe for a live rock-music concert. A world-record 300,000 people will pack into the specially constructed On-ga-ku Stadium just outside of Kyoto, Japan, this evening… to hear and see this pop, classical, jazz, film, ballet, choral, symphonic extravaganza, which features 400-plus performers and at least another 100 technical support staff and crew. Phewee!’

  The newscaster wipes an imaginary bead of sweat from his brow, mocking the ambition of a rock’n’roll eco-messiah.

  ‘One of the features of this… ‘bigger than previously’ rock-music tour is that the whole event will be powered by… re-cy-clable wave-power energy, which utilises seawater. That is, there is no mains or grid-supplied electricity used. The only lighting will be… ahm… candlelight. The performance gets through approximately 18,000 candles during its seven-hour duration’.

  The veteran newsman turns to his partner, ‘That’s a lot of candles, Jim’, before his round up’

  Jim raises his eyebrows and nods dimwittedly.

  ‘John Nightly comes to the US in two weeks’ time, when the Mink… Milk… [news anchor stops] ‘is it Milk or is it Mink, Jim?’

  ‘It’s ‘Milk’, Dan.’

  ‘… …The Milk Bungalow Requiem premieres at a specially constructed auditorium on West Jefferson Boulevard, Los Angeles’.

  ‘What do you think about that, Jim? Are you planning to go to the concert?’ Dan shuffled the papers on his desk, impatient to move on to the next item.

  ‘I am planning to go, Dan. [nods sheep
ishly]… my wife has bought tickets and we’re hoping to attend the LA date.’

  ‘And she is a fan?’

  ‘She is a fan, Dan.’

  ‘Well, it’s a long… eh… show ahm… Jim. Let’s hope they got enough bathrooms in there!’

  ‘Let’s hope so, Dan!’

  NBC News: Ten O’Clock Bulletin, 12 May 1972. Read by Joan Traddorvelis.

  Mr Bill Knoll, the oil and electricity industrialist and father of tragic heiress Myra Knoll, has said that he will serve a Federal restriction order on British pop singer John Nightly if he… ‘so much as sets foot’ on United States soil for the US leg of his upcoming world tour. Mr Nightly, whose group is due to play in Los Angeles next week, was driving the car in London, England, on the night on which Miss Knoll was tragically killed while a passenger.’

  ‘This was the work of an old young man.

  If I am older, I am now also younger.’

  R. D. Laing, The Divided Self – An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness, 1964 (preface to the Pelican edition)

  Who will buy my bright purple?

  My clump of sweet lilac

  Sweet, fragrant posy

  My Lavender Girl

  ‘Lavender Girl’, Cambridge street cry, notated by Percy North, chiropodist, Newmarket Road, Cambridge

  (courtesy The Cambridge Collection)

  John Daly began his musical career as rhythm guitarist in Huntingdon band the Huntsmen. With a Sunday-night residency at the Railway Tavern, Bishop’s Stortford, the Huntsmen seemed to be going places until they decided to transform themselves from lounge-suited modernists into a freakbeat outfit, briefly becoming the Ravens before a final line-up and name change to the Sky-Rays, after the popular Wall’s ice lolly. The group then won themselves a place in the final of the Melody Maker’s National Beat Contest, held at the Eagle Public House in Cambridge on the night of 2 January 1966.

  It didn’t look good for the Sky-Rays. Any group comprising two mods and three rockers was hardly a recipe for success in January ’66, and the song they performed, the ‘self-penned’ ‘Saturday Girl’, a tale of the drummer’s fiancée, a Saturday girl in the record department at Miller’s, lifted the stomping battle-cry of the Dave Clark Five’s ‘Glad All Over’ and grafted it, completely against its wishes, onto the chord pattern of ‘Tell Me When’ by the Applejacks.

  The Sky-Rays’ masterplan had been hastily assembled with the help of two manuals their vocalist had received that Christmas from his mother, Babs: How to Write a Hit Song by the hit-songwriter Mitch Murray and How to Run a Beat Group – a ‘day-to-day handbook for guaranteed chart success’ produced by the Hollies. Despite a scorching version of the Fentones’ ‘I’m a Moody Guy’, the Sky-Rays came last out of eight hopefuls in the competition (which the Everyman won), with just two votes of a possible forty-five cast in the group’s favour.

  After all the excitement of the day, as the members packed away their equipment and licked their wounds, Huntingdon boy Daly wandered over to congratulate the young Nightly and his rather eccentric group on their winning turn.

  ‘Just wanted to come over and say congratulations!’ John Nightly stopped what he was doing and looked up, ‘oh… thanks very much… thank you…’

  The boy turned away and attended to his guitar. John Nightly hadn’t been at all happy with his group’s performance, even though they’d won hands-down. As far as he was concerned the Everyman had underperformed and he was in no mood for taking compliments. Daly persevered.

  ‘I mean it. You were really… really good. You deserved to win it, you were… different.’

  ‘Right… well… uh…’ John Nightly paused for a second. ‘We thought you were… really good too.’ The boy spoke matter-of-factly without facing his advocate.

  ‘Thanks, mate. You’re obviously a bloody good liar as well!’ The underdog began to back away as he spoke.

  ‘If you ever needed a hand with anything, carrying stuff and that… I’m only at Huntingdon. Got a van and everything. Got a phone number if you want it…’ Daly reached into his pocket. ‘It’s my dad’s… it’s on the van there… phone me up if you…’

  The boy stared out at the bottle-green Transit backed up to the pub doorway – J. P. Daly & Son. Builder’s Merchant & General House Repairs, Huntingdon 535 painted in yellow and black on the recessed side panel. John Nightly, thinking that he might well need some practical assistance in the near future, became more welcoming.

  ‘I might do that. Might need some help. I don’t have a… a car or anything… so… well… good luck with your… career and all that.’ The boy got up and smiled, picking up his guitar and amp ready to make a move, ‘obviously…’

  And so took place the first meeting of the happy-go-lucky loser and the polite but miserable winner. A few months later, when John Nightly took him up on his offer, the ex-Sky-Rays guitarist had just begun his training at the Royal College of Nursing in London. So proud was he to have gotten through the notoriously difficult exams that he never let his friends, or himself, forget the fact, adding the letters RCN, like OBE or MBE – only partly in jest – every time he wrote down his name.

  Daly was also road managing a group from London, the Gloom, to help pay the bills while at college. The Gloom had been taken on by Carnaby Street management John Carter Enterprises, and so the two Johns’ paths crossed again when Daly organised a special London gig for his Cambridge contact. Proving his worth, particularly his ability as a problem-solver, the Huntingdon man quickly found himself engaged as the boy’s personal day-to-day nursemaid, eventually being offered a permanent job by John Pond.

  All went swimmingly well until one night at the Railway Hotel on Eel Pie Island, when the newly qualified male nurse flipped over a blonde female nurse, the too-good-to-be-true Hannah from Kiwi-land. In November 1967, during another extremely harsh winter, the pair of them left England ‘for good’, for New Zealand, where they worked as team managers in a care home in Porangahau and swam in the blue coral sea, until a long, unrewarding stint as day nurse in a primary school on the South Island and a wife gone AWOL made the Huntingdon man long for his fish-and-chip suppers and rainy days. John Daly remained in the Antipodean sunshine for exactly ten years.

  Daly wrote his former boss a spoof tidal letter from Queenstown and mailed it back to Grantchester. In the blazing-hot summer of ’77 this rather unfathomable 17th-century airmail was opened by Frieda, who, having no idea about the identity of the tidal correspondent, misread the sender’s name, referring to him as ‘John RCN’ when she forwarded the letter on to Iona, who in turn responded with a telegram to Daly asking him to return to Britain with a permanent job offer – that of keeping John Nightly on a straight and secure path after his release from SUMHA.

  Four years later, on 17 October 1981, a very tanned, very healthy-looking Huntingdon man met a deathly white, clapped-out clinically paranoid schizoid man in the reception hall of the Summer Centre outside Brampton, Hunts. John Daly drove his new/old boss the few miles back in time to Grantchester and Frieda, then booked himself into a room at the University Arms Hotel while they bided their time. Songwriting royalties, delayed due to legal disputes with John Pond’s estate, came through a few weeks later from Pacific Music in Los Angeles. In April 1982, after the purchase of Trewin Farm, both Johns made the move to Porthcreek.

  item: Monthly Cultural Notes: March

  The days move fast in March. There’s the familiar sight of daffodils, scented narcissi, cyclamen and of course tulips. Secateurs, shears and cutters should be sharpened. Half-hardy annuals can be sown in the greenhouse or on a windowsill. Take care with draughts and also night frosts. Keep an eye out for shoots of canna and gloxinia, and of course for those notorious insects.

  I am under the direction of Messengers from heaven, daily and nightly William Blake, (letter to Thomas Butts, 10 January 1802)

  London, 26 June 1806. The Royal Society, Carlton House Terrace, London SW1.

  John Pond drew shut the front doo
r to his temporary lodging at 77 Beak Street, next door to John Wilkes the rifle maker, and set the buckle of his brunette periwig, clipping it tightly onto the one remaining clump of hair still actually attached to his head. The sun beat down on the filthy thoroughfare, a hurry-scurry of coachmen, reeves, herbalists and housemaids, all at the service of the fine families of Golden Square Villas, the most exclusive corner of the St Anne’s Parish. Pond put on his pitch-black hat, newly adorned with gold-wire trim and Royal Household button, while managing to narrowly avoid a splash of slop from a nearby window. He fastened the paste-encrusted bands of his velvet tailcoat and fastidiously turned down the fine embroidered edgings of his silk blouson, then tightened up his matching breeches, glancing over to the young mistresses gossiping on the corner of the square to make sure they had not noticed him.

  The Astronomer Royal was getting fat. He coughed a croaky cough and wiped a bead of sweat from his brow as he made his way up Spring Street until he hit the smoke and gas of Regent Street and Piccadilly. He quickly crossed over, ignoring the stinking death wagons and horses, the herb simplers and lavender girls, before turning left into Sackville Street, where he momentarily paused to look into the fashionable shop window of Southeran Books before continuing on his way. Pond was headed towards the Royal Society in Carlton House Terrace, where he was due to deliver his lecture On the Declinations of Principal Fixed Stars to its honourable members.

  At the entrance to the Society he greeted the Misses Brook and Glade, daughters of his good friends and fellow members Ian and Jann. The ladies enjoyed the early morning sun and exchanged gossip by the door. He complimented both on their straw spoon bonnets, Miss Brook on her Spitalfields brocaded gown and Miss Glade on her dark-brown orphanage uniform with its white-linen detail.