by Tot Taylor
Yes, I went to school when I was a youngster but
you can keep your maths and GCEs.
Now the only thing that makes me feel better
is the London Social Degree
‘London Social Degree’, Billy Nicholls, 1968
(Immediate 009)
Without his model girlfriend, John Nightly would have been little more than an outsider in London. But with Iona he zoomed. The shy, unsure-of-himself Nightly became sociable; joining the swinging elite at the highest level. And because the in-people desired the company of Iona – starchild, note-perfect hippie; ‘girl of the moment’ (Trend); ‘She’s the ultimate Face, the one we all copy’ (Harpers & Queen); Model of the Year ’68 (Great British Fashion Awards) – a face which lit up every room, entrancing both young men and old, and setting fire to quite a few… Because people wanted all that, they got the company of John.
On the loose, Iona would have been pursued by every eligible young bachelor of the parish. Fey dandy types, actors and speed-obsessed racing-drivers chased after her. Car mechanics taped her photograph to their toilet doors, pop stars and playboys sent flowers to fashion-shoots, employed ex-policemen to obtain her phone number, invited her for weekends in Biarritz and Barbados. But Iona wasn’t on the loose and never would be. The girl was already tied up. Iona had made a commitment to something early on and that thing, that one crazy thing, the only object she herself ever truly desired, longed for, but most certainly did not need, and never should have bothered herself with IN THE FIRST PLACE, was John Nightly.
The love of John Nightly was all that she craved. The want of John Nightly. Iona never did consider anyone else romantically, almost from the moment they met. And so, with such a desirable prize on his arm, this particular parish boy was able to gain entry to the kind of society that included great names and – as always in England – their willing, clinging patrons; privileged hangers-on. With Iona, John Nightly went straight to the heart of the old, existing establishment. He made himself comfortable there, which in turn made things more comfortable for him. One evening John found himself mixing with acid freaks from San Francisco or working-class, underprivileged kids from Newcastle or Manchester – they just happened to be world-famous musicians. There he was, the still nervy youth, lounging in the corner with his whiskey and smokes, deep in conversation with fellow royalty.
John had on what he called his ‘Mr Zen’ gear while Iona paraded her own homemade yarns entwined with ribbons and small bells. Viewed objectively they wore fancy dress; subjectively they were no doubt satisfied that they appeared ‘newfangled’ – somehow.
Introduced by Iona, half-jokingly, as ‘My… bohemian boyfriend’; the boy did look a little ruffled, with his unruly hair and mismatched togs, whereas in reality nothing could’ve been further from the truth. There was nothing at all bohemian about John Nightly. John was a typical village boy; socially inept, naive and unworldly, not in any way a ‘people person’. Although his thrown-together appearance and eccentric manner didn’t do him any harm, because Society… polite, English Society, loves a bohemian – particularly a fake one.
The door to these worlds was opened because of his beloved partner. It was obvious to those who knew the couple that ‘Free School Lane’, the song he’d written just after meeting Iona, was actually about the Danish model and not a 17th century Cambridge free school, as John stated in interviews. The lyrics forewarned of his own later circumstances while telling of being so suddenly, unaccountably in love after meeting someone for the very first time. John Nightly had knowingly put himself in a vulnerable place while tragically, this new, earth-shattering romance was being played out, in the early days at least, while he was supposedly still committed to his childhood sweetheart Jana, the ‘love of his life’, left abandoned in Cambridge during the first year of her Architecture degree. As with Picasso’s discarded lovers, those who live on in his paintings, frozen in the Master’s loving embrace, Jana’s place in the annals of popular music was assured because of the songs John had composed about her before meeting Iona.
How on earth did John intend to deal with this impossible state? The situation lingered on, with John’s inability to cope with either ‘practicals’ or ‘personals’ coming to bear on his attitude to his own morals each time a new temptation came along, which, given his occupation and his status within it, was often.
John Nightly did not score many points in this respect. For, as Lee Hide pointed out, if John had spent as much time on his music as he did in keeping up with various females wants’ and desires, he’d have been ‘bleedin’ Beethoven by now’ – or at least Bob Dylan. A cursory look at Dylan’s workload during this period, an inhuman amount of hours taken up by writing, recording, filming, touring, promoting, plotting and generally creating, gives some idea of the amount of hours one needs to put in in order to continue to dominate the market. John Nightly put in a tenth of these hours – but talent is an elemental force; and therefore, it has to be said, he didn’t do at all badly.
During the next few months John and Iona became a very visible couple at every pop-historical event of the period: the Stones at the Albert Hall in September, the launch of International Times in October and Hendrix at the Bag O’Nails in November – the night that Jimi, his guitar swooping through a particularly trippy ‘Hey Joe’, fixed Iona in his sights, glaring at her from the stage in front of a visibly unsettled John. Luckily for the boy, there were already a handful of willing hopefuls waiting in the wings – and in the dressing room – for the ‘black Elvis’.
December saw the Psychedelia versus Ian Smith concert at the Roundhouse, a cause John later became involved with, and by the time January came around again, bringing with it further social developments, they were an inseparable pair. The Age of Aquarius, full-on Flower Power and the era of protest and disillusionment were about to dawn, but the happy couple were more or less oblivious to it all, lost as they were in their own little capsule. John had great success with Principal Fixed Stars. The album was unanimously well received, with features in the Sunday Times’ colour section, the Telegraph, Times, Listener, Melody Maker, Disc & Music Echo, New Musical Express and others as well as the underground press, where he was interviewed by IT and Grass and in the US by the Village Voice and the East Village Other along with Cashbox, Variety and the Los Angeles Times.
As things worked out, Mosaic/EMI never did release either ‘Free School Lane’ or ‘Lavender Girl’ as a single in the UK. They didn’t need to, for events had overtaken them. Behind his back, John’s former associates, the Everyman, had gone ahead and recorded their own version of ‘Zigging & Zagging’ with producer and Ready Steady Go! stalwart Johnny Johnson, scoring a Top 5 hit with a track that anticipated the bubblegum explosion on its way from America courtesy of records such as ‘Mony Mony’1 and ‘Simon Says’2. The disc, licensed around the world by Decca, became a Stateside smash, giving the Cambridge botanists a whiff of temporary celebrity while assuring their place in the history books but (because they hadn’t written it) very little in the way of cash remuneration – the real money went straight to JCE and John Nightly. Just twelve months on, Vernon, Colin, John and Clem were back in Bateman Street re-potting, re-planting and fretting about the weather.
Another reason the idea of a single had been ditched was Vanessa Frye. The one-time (underage) girlfriend of John Pond, sixteen-year-old Vanessa hit the Number 1 spot with a bullet – a ska-inspired, impossible-to-dislike cover of ‘Mu Mu Tea’ – and stayed there for four weeks. John Nightly disliked it, of course, and donated the first batch of ‘Mu Mu’ royalties to anti-apartheid groups in South Africa via his local North London ANC group.
In Sweden and Denmark, the Nightly version of the song – different chords, more modal tune – remained in the Top Ten for twelve weeks, spurring a craze for the muddy beverage in Scandinavia.
By Christmas, the Nightly band was busy preparing for its first live dates in Europe. Concerts in Paris and Brussels before going on to p
lay Munich, Amsterdam, Rotterdam – the circuit – with one-off dates in Italy, Spain and Greece. John had a new band (for whom no one could be bothered to think of a good name) and a simple business set-up run by his now close friend and constant advocate John Pond, with John Daly always there in the background to watch over the boy’s day-to-day affairs.
After that, John Nightly planned a return to Cambridge, which would turn out to be the last for another fifteen Christmases, in order to spend a few days at home with John Snr and Frieda. This time the vacation would be a rare solo trip as Iona was off to spend the holidays with her father in Denmark.
John Nightly had done good. He had succeeded in building on an early, more or less immediate acceptance of his music while maintaining a sense of his own musical identity. He understood the course he had embarked upon and his group had a growing reputation for their live performances. John Nightly was an artist very much of the moment, but with a good deal more integrity attached to him than was the case with many of the era’s common-or-garden performers. With the fashion already moving from a singles-dominated sales format towards a more album-orientated market, the non-appearance of any kind of single release didn’t appear to have done him any harm.
PROFILE: John Pond. Born: Keynsham, Bristol,14 June 1945 (age 21). Unmarried. Music executive, JC Enterprises. Lives: Soho, London. Educated: Bristol University. Clubs: Scotch of St James’s, Bag O’Nails, Dolly’s. Restaurants: Rules, the Chanterelle. Clothes: Mr Fish, Simpson’s, Charles Stevens (tailor). Hair: Vidal Sassoon. Drinks: Smirnoff vodka with lemonade. Smokes: Sobranies, Rothman’s. Holidays: Greece, Turkey. Photo: Syndication International/London Features
Sales of Principal Fixed Stars to Christmas 1966 stood at 181,000 copies in Great Britain alone. In twelve months time, after the royalties had come in, John Nightly was going to be a wealthy young man. He wasn't the only one. Iona's earnings soon became supplemented by her appearances in several high-profile television commercials, most notably, Vosene, Knight’s Castile soap, and Kit-Kat. Her impact on the, mainly children's TV audience, for Cadbury's cheap chocolate wafer meant that by the third nationwide campaign she was well known to schoolchildren everywhere - as well as being fancied by Dads in every household up and down the country – as ‘the Kit-Kat girl’. A too frivolous title for the outwardly sophisticated young woman, but an epithet which she would never quite manage to live down. It was said that families would switch to ITV in the middle of a BBC serial “in case the Kit-Kat girl comes on”. Even in the Times obituary for her husband, landowner and philanthropist Gerald St. John Firmin (June 2005), his wife was still referred to as ‘sixties fashion model and Kit-Kat girl, Iona Sandstrand’. If John wanted to annoy her, which he often did, all he had to do was to call her ‘Kit-Kat’.
The couple’s combined income meant that they could easily afford the four-bedroom, two-reception fifth-floor mansion flat in Queen Square that became, over the next twelve months, the happiest of happy homes. A Georgian terrace adjacent to Regent’s Park, Queen Square was one of those tree-lined London enclaves deserted for most of the year due to the fact that almost all of its inhabitants were gentrified seasonal folk who lived outside of the capital, most likely in the home counties, keeping one of the luxurious townhouses or apartments lining the square as their London base. Here the couple would spend much of their time staying in bed all day, billing and cooing, or generally mooching about the flat, floating, drifting, dreaming; just being hopelessly in love with each other and themselves.
Sometime around mid-afternoon, as the sun moved in slow motion across the panorama of church spires and construction cranes, John would ‘swing into action’ as he termed it; locking himself in the boxroom and getting down to some serious writing and composing. As well as assembling tape collages and over-dubbing on his 4-track, he’d spend a good deal of time staring into his new obsession: a prototype dream-machine, the flicker-lantern presented to him by cut-up pioneer Brion Gysin, which John claimed relaxed his mind, making it possible for him to ‘get psychedelic’ without drugs and therefore able to stay completely focused on his composing. He also used his new six inch solid-tube reflector telescope, a Christmas present from John Snr, in order to keep up to date with the ever-changing, ever more light-polluted (and therefore difficult to see) London night sky.
When she wasn’t being paid a fortune to eat chocolate biscuit on TV, Iona would spend her afternoons at the Earth Centre in Portobello and her evenings at Shiatsu classes in Belsize Park. She began consulting sessions with pop psychiatrist Ronald Laing and spent her free weekends learning all about macrobiotic cookery. If she were at home, Iona would either be sunbathing on the balcony or exercising on her Japanese prayer mat in order to keep herself in tip-top condition so that the lucrative high-profile work would keep coming in.
Both kept themselves individually busy. The boy was constantly motivated, on a kind of quest it seemed, while Iona stayed more occupied than she ever needed to be as a way of dealing with her partner’s apparently limitless ambition. They also took a lot of drugs.
‘Cut up everything in sight. Make your whole life a poem. you can’t lose, man. You can’t lose because you’ve got nothing to lose but that worthless junk you’re sitting on. Get out of that blue Frigidaire and live. You’ll know everything. You’ll hear everything. And you’ll see everything that’s going on. Really make the entire scene. Not many chicks will. Say they know plenty already. They do. Try it. Be a Poet. Be a Man.’ Brion Gysin
* * *
1 Tommy James and the Shondells (Roulette A7103)
2 The 1910 Fruitgum Company (Buddah A24)
In terms of Society, January 1967 brought an ending and also a beginning. Firstly, the premature death of Swinging London, now established worldwide via its mass-produced Union Jacks, Mini Coopers, RAF targets and reproductions of Lord Kitchener and Queen Victoria. Originally fuelled by the consumer boom and in reality shortlived and centralised on the capital; by summer ’66 most of Swinging London’s leading lights were upgrading or dropping out, slowing down the communal pendulum as they morphed into flower people and hippies.
Over-commercialisation, a saturated aesthetic which had become a cliché in itself, and the dawn of a supposedly more ideological society had made the Swinging London scorch mark almost a liability. The counter-culture was gearing up and in just a few months would be in full swing. John Nightly was again lucky professionally in that the combination of his ‘acid-pop’ mini-masterpieces mixed with more avant-garde musical meanderings, hippie wallowings and very non-commercial, ‘experimental’ nothings would prove to be the perfect soundtrack for what lay ahead.
Musically, the Beatles were the catalysts. In their early recordings, up to and including A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, a batch of simple but inventive songs were presented and packaged as Pop Product. In this first flush the Beatles were apparently as disposable as Bobby Vee or Russ Conway. Then, without the group themselves attempting to promote it as such, the product, perhaps the best example of the demon Art in any medium representative of the period, quickly transformed into Pop Art; each new release was eagerly awaited, pre-ordered and purchased unheard by massed consumers worldwide. The disciples were fiercely loyal, confident that with each new recording their idols would come up with something extraordinary. The Beatles would never disappoint. But the doubt, introspection and questioning which surfaced on Rubber Soul and continued into Revolver and Sgt Pepper meant that as the Beatles themselves grew up, their music becoming more profound, and they themselves becoming more cynical, their audience did too. There were no more clicky off-the-cuff quips, fewer fast-volleyed witticisms. The Beatles, searching like young people everywhere for meaning and direction, were thinking from the outside, about the world and their position in it, not just about themselves at the centre of things. Because of their all-pervading influence the group lent their collective voice to any cause that happened to float by, from Vietnam to Oxfam. While Flower Children placed long-stemmed African ma
rigolds into the rifle-barrels of the US Marine Corps and Dylan criticised everything under the sun before withdrawing from public view, the Beatles, because of their responsibility to their audience, maybe the world itself, were forced to carry on, but tried to find their collective soul away from the spotlight.
Summer 1967 saw a bearded and stoned fab four in Rishikesh dressed in what the British newspapers of the day referred to as ‘rags’, along with their associates the Beach Boys, Donovan, Marianne Faithful and Mia Farrow. John and Iona spent the Summer of Love in Marylebone. John working on a dance piece for the London Contemporary Dance Theatre that would debut at the Roundhouse in October, and Iona on designs for her own ‘ethnical’ fashion line.
The rise of CND, anti-Vietnam movements, Women’s Liberation, Gay Liberation and anti-racist organisations in South Africa and the US, along with enterprises such as Shelter, Release, BIT, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and Amnesty, pointed towards the new cosmos. A peaceful, free-thinking, free-loving adventure playground. A reality concerned with artistic and spiritual expression and the distribution of that expression. The New Age was still about commerce, though structured towards artistic freedom rather than profit. The message was to stay clear of corporations and governments – the answer being entrepreneurial DIY, a visionary mix of artist-controlled endeavour. Record labels owned or part-owned by the artists, free live gigs and open-air concerts, book publishing using small presses to produce pamphlets and limited editions, director-led film and theatre projects and the growth of experimental film-making with student unions staging almost weekly events and rallies to promote ‘the message’. With boutique and specialist cinemas and, in the print media, alternative bookshops selling censorship-free magazines like Frendz, Oz, Ink and IT, this ship of hope seemed to be coming ashore on one big frontline breaker to represent the beginnings of what most people seemed convinced would become the new highway; truly a new, New Alternative.