by Tot Taylor
In the capital there were establishments such as Indica, the art gallery and bookshop evolving from Better Books, which became one of the meeting places for the counter-culture, along with Jim Haynes’ Arts Lab in Drury Lane, which presented films, plays, music and various happenings. There were other enterprises: project spaces, vegetarian restaurants, alternative-medicine and counselling centres pointing away from the frivolity and instant hit of pills and alcohol towards the new consciousness. But this new ‘soul’ had its own sedatives.
The daily consumption of drugs – cannabis, hash, pot, grass, LSD and other psychedelics – would sometimes become the whole raison d’être itself. For many in the higher echelons (those who could afford it) heroin and cocaine in the form of speedballs and mescaline, codeine and other Class A mind-altering substances became the day-to-day solution.
John and Iona were a couple typical of the late sixties. Beautiful People thinking themselves far more radical and effective – and beautiful – than they actually were. The pair adopted a vegetarian, vegan, fruitarian and finally an uncompromising macrobiotic diet of miso, soya, seaweed and little else, which kept their hair shiny and their complexions clear, while at the same time throttling themselves silly with grass, weed, mushrooms and other hallucinogens obtained from contacts at the short-lived World Psychedelic Centre (WPC) in Belgravia, if not in bulk from JCE.
Somehow they managed to survive the physical assault on their systems and still maintain a level of creativity. But then, they were young: both just nineteen years during the Summer of Love and John barely so. The reason John was able to do as he pleased and behave in such a manner was because he had been so fortunate in terms of the business planning of his chosen profession. John Nightly had never had to pay his dues. He had never bumped up and down the M1 in a transit van like most of his contemporaries nor had he been ripped off by Tin Pan Alley.
In the faithful and constant John Pond, from the first day of their meeting, John Nightly had benefitted from the professional services of a creative collaborator who believed in his client beyond the need to make money and, most importantly, cared about his wellbeing. John Nightly would never be forced to record anything he didn’t want to, or perform in venues he didn’t wish to. With the help of the now permanent Lee Hide, John was able to self-produce his own recordings, having the pick of London’s top session men and world-class orchestras if he so desired. Almost uniquely, the boy did have absolute artistic freedom, which he continued to enjoy, and take for granted, during the whole of his six active years, simply because he actually shifted units.
Touring was extremely comfortable. Even in America, John never had to endure the ignominy of UK package tours with journeymen like Herman’s Hermits or Freddie & the Dreamers. John Nightly recorded what he wanted, where he wanted. His product was designed, packaged and marketed exactly how he envisaged.
Apart from the sleeve to Principal Fixed Stars, which would have benefitted from proposed designs (by John Latham then David Hockney blocked by both Pond and EMI), John had more or less conceived all of his album artwork himself. Each of his three LPs featured facsimiles of 17th-century volvelles, the lunar-clock and astronomical problem-solvers, drawn by his guitarist and stargazing chum Justin. A legacy of the both of them spending long hours with Jana in the library of Trinity Hall, Cambridge.
Justin, who had always displayed more visual artistic prowess than John, acted as art director and illustrator. The three albums they created covers for are now considered high points of late-sixties graphic design: a 17th-century astronomical template serving as a blank canvas for colourful, acid-inspired ornamentation and lettering. Like his heroes, John Nightly never went for what was going; he went for what wasn’t going. John Nightly was always thinking long term. And so, when neo-hippie kids and grunge dudes like Mawgan Hall and Julian Tregan began to trawl the Nightly catalogue in the mid ’90s, the recordings themselves appeared neither ‘ ’60s’ nor retro in any way and neither did the sleeve designs. If the covers resembled anything at all it would have been a psychedelicised local-parish record; a tripped-out churchwarden’s journal. The volvelles were handmade, cut up from medieval sources but overlaid with colour ways that didn’t exist in 1650, the modern design update being a cleanliness of line far removed from the elaborate decoration from the time of Galileo or Newton, giving the circles a freshness and instant ‘branded’ appeal loved by students and record collectors up and down the country whose walls they adorned.
The Nightly albums, their covers produced in limited editions of 10,000 before reverting to the standard printed sleeve, soon became collector’s items. Physically, the jackets consisted of two boxboard circles mounted on a central spindle so that they could be rotated and the colours and type matched or mismatched. The cartons resembled little pop-up cakes. There was certainly nothing like them in terms of album artwork, one reason being the enormous cost incurred in printing the things. John Nightly, being the fool that he was, probably at some time in the past, had put his name to some hidden, bottom-of-the-page, record-company sub-clause agreeing to absorb such expenses. He was paying for it now. Although never expecting to make money from his music, the one thing he truly loved in the first place, the boy reasoned that he might as well end up with the package he wanted, exactly as he’d imagined it – if only to have a copy for himself.
Of course, what happened was the reverse. Like so many ephemeral items of the times, most of the original volvelles were destroyed, or at best survived in tatty, worn-out condition; a little like their perpetrator. But those wily types who purchased multiple copies, in order to hive away four or five in mint condition, were able to capitalise on their investment twenty five years later when copies of Principal Fixed Stars and Quiz Axe Queen, lovingly preserved in acid-free tissue by fan-club members, still folded in their red and white HMV record bags – and signed by the artist – were sold at Christie’s, South Kensington, for £42,000 each.
item: ‘Pond Life – Today’s Young Entrepreneurs’, the Daily Telegraph. Monday, 6 March 1969.
It would be hard to imagine a more successful or flamboyant young entrepreneur than 23-year-old John Pond. The Bristol-born graduate has quickly established himself at the forefront of today’s burgeoning pop-music scene – now one of our biggest exports – almost equalling Britain’s annual revenue from tin and steel. With the loss of Mr Brian Epstein, and with a question mark hanging over the business empires of both Mr Andrew Loog Oldham and Mr Larry Parnes, it seems that Mr Pond, who heads the JCE music-management team, is currently the most visible and visibly successful of the pop scene’s ‘young meteors’ of a few years back.
‘It’s not as if Benjamin Britten has groupies…’ John reasoned during a 4am bout of general malaise.
‘And how do you know this?’ asked Iona, taking another puff from her herb pipe. ‘Me and you don’t know enough about Benjamin Britain to know…’
This was of course true. But it was also true that the more you knew about John Nightly, the more you realised there was very little to him. Little of anything left within the bones and sheckles after the music had been carefully extracted. No accompaniment or background noise. Certainly nothing that might interfere with his ambition, the purity of his mission. Throughout this journey, the boy remained magnificently empty. His vessel echoed with a vast nothingness, except for his magnificent gift. A gift nonetheless appreciated by many. As John Nightly’s fame spread, there grew up several armies of followers, disciples, acolytes, hangers-on and groupies ready to sacrifice themselves at the altar of Nightly. This prospect, which had alarmed the boy early on, was now a reality. Whatever amount of time John Nightly deemed reasonable to allocate to his fans would never be enough. The fans gave their money, but John Nightly gave his nervous system*.
John was hunted and haunted by his followers; the extreme fan worship existing because of the very nature of the Nightly oeuvre. Conceptual, pseudo-philosophical and, in the later years, more and more pretentious lyrically
and therefore appealing to the intellectual, most likely gifted and impressionable listener. Although he hated it to be described as such, John Nightly’s music somehow also managed to have an ‘instant commercial appeal’, inviting the listener to enter a special world, or to view the existing world from a secret vantage point, down a long corridor, through a clearing in the wood – much like Charles Dodgson, Sam Clemens or James Hilton invited their readers to peek into their very particular flights of fancy so that after the temptation of a sandalled toe on a stepping-stone, the reader would be captured and held hostage. This creation of an evocative, private and generally nostalgic world attracted the kind of… obsessive individual who might be apt to take things just a little too seriously.
To the John Nightly fan club, they were known as ‘Johnnies’. John Pond referred to them as ‘nutters’. Or was that just the record-buying public? Inventing and inverting, finding meaning in everything and nothing. Reading lyrics and liner notes upside down, adding and subtracting release dates, track listings and catalogue numbers. Hand-winding whole LPs backwards from beginning to end, in order to discover what may be ‘revealed’ within. What hidden meanings and messages might come out of this pointless exercise. The Nightly albums invited that sort of involvement. John Nightly asked you to ‘Step right this way’. He held the curtain open. His records spoke to their audience: ‘This is the way I see things… This is what I believe in. This… is who I am.’
In the early days, the adulation took the form of everyday fandom. The immediate popularity of ‘Free School Lane’ and ‘Lavender Girl’ (or, ‘Lavatory Girl’, as the band performed it live) resulted in massive album sales and a rush on brightly coloured neckwear from Ryder & Amies, the supplier of Saxony wool scarves to the inmates of Cambridge University.
Carnaby Street was awash with teenagers proud of the fact that they were Fellows of Trinity Hall or Magdalene, Rugby ‘blues’ or coxswains in the St John’s boat-race team without actually realising it. It didn’t take long for Lord John, Mr Pimpernel, Miss Scarlett, Gear, Lady Faye and all the other high-street purveyors of Swinging tat to jump on the bandwagon. John Pond always said that it was entirely possible that his client could have made more income from scarf merchandising than he ever would from sales of records. But this essential item of neckwear during the long fenland winter did become characterised as something of a Nightly signature and therefore his followers took it up – along with most of London’s narcissistic mod population to whom the ‘college-scarf’ became, and remains, a staple of the uniform.
It was ironic, of course, because John himself never did have the faintest clue about style and he certainly knew nothing of fashion. As so often happened in John Nightly’s career, the boy hit upon something at random; he caught a spark and the audience blew it up into a forest fire.
* * *
* A quote by George Harrison referring to his group’s mass popularity.
Queen Square, Regent’s Park, London NW1. Sunday, 1 May 1967.
The noonday sun seeped into the room like thermal plasma. A saucerful of mellow yellow. The air was completely ‘stuck’, as Iona would say, the bedroom a hothouse. Through the balcony window, tubes of smoke billowed from the chimneys of Euston and King’s Cross as LEB power cables and TV antenna emerged like steel ferns in the huge craterful of sky. The blue, blue sky. Boeing 707s trailed pink ribbons across it as they encircled Central London in a vertical stack that Air Traffic Control could barely control. Even now, with the swinging about to stop, it appeared that just about everyone was making their way to the city.
It was a perfect morning any way you cared to look at it. The teenager squinted in the sunlight, threw off the kimono-silk covers of his king-size divan and stumbled zombie-like over to the wall-length window into the panoramic view. From inside his Sunday-morning fug he felt an overwhelming and quite unexpected sense of bliss. The distant murmur of the capital going about its business was put into strict tempo by the repeated scratch of an LP stuck in last night’s grooves. The boy pulled back the heavy sliding doors in order to un-stick the air as quietly as possible, then stepped out onto the crumbling masonry and a mess of raffia mats, chawans, sandals, pamphlets, tarot cards, star charts, Shiva beads and joss sticks scattered among the fashion magazines and drug paraphernalia. Beyond this domestic junk the tin-blue haze rising from traffic exhausts and factory emissions slowly cleared to reveal the arc of the city’s most heavily manicured green space. The sight that greeted John Nightly on this chill, bright morning resembled nothing more than a Disneyfied recreation of the properly royal Regent’s Park.
The white terraces of John Nash’s York Gate formed a perfect picture-book vista with the Corinthian portico of Marylebone Church. John and Iona looked forward to the peal of its communion bell. The image on the box top of John’s Mattel London jigsaw, a birthday present from Sindre and Steinar still packed away somewhere in his studio room. From this elevated POV John Nightly’s ‘second state’ tuned in to the traffic’s hum, the sonic floor of the locale, until the spell was broken by a workman’s transistor in the next-door flat. The BBC lunchtime news reported a disaster at Land’s End in Cornwall involving the Torrey Canyon oil tanker. An environmental catastrophe which was to dominate the headlines for months, bringing home the reality of industrial destruction on Britain’s supposedly protected coastline.
On the adjoining balcony two jackdaws fought it out over the remains of Iona’s hash cake; on the ground below, the citizens of Regent’s Park walked their dogs up and down, admiring the fragrant Queen Elizabeth roses and the freshly mowed lawns, while dedicated royal groundsmen tended the beds and dealt with aphids, thrips and blackspot armed with knapsack hand sprayers dispatching Karathane and DDT. The boy gazed back into the bedroom, finger-combed his hair with his anaemic digits and shook the sleep from his limbs. While one of the world’s most desired women slept soundly in his bed, he stopped for a moment to consider his situation, the condition of his inner and outer worlds, a regular flash back and forwards he often succumbed to, fading slowly in and out of his perceived and seemingly on-course lifetime trajectory.
John Nightly felt good. He should. Apart from all that he surveyed, the material rewards of his achievements to date and all that he had been informed was likely to come his way in the near future, he was in great shape artistically and creatively too. He was in amazing shape. The everyday money worries that had dogged his parents, influencing their every move, would never trouble him. The conventions of financial and social status, possessions, the search for a mate, family life, the nine to five and seven-days-a-week drag were of no concern. That ‘conditioning’ which, he reasoned, placed individuals within a foldaway, common-life structure, a structure which soon became a trap, one within which they could more easily be controlled by the system. John Nightly wasn’t seeking or expecting anything at all within the safety net that his fellow travellers – those ‘un-weird’ people he often referred to – seemed to crave.
Taking a look around him, and taking a deep breath in – as deep as his smoke-filled lungs would allow – while looking out as far as he could see, then maybe just that little bit further, as if he were riding on the milkiest of milky ways, the boy surely had it made. His accountants and lawyers told him so. John Nightly was extremely comfortable, and conventional, in his nonconformity. Here he was, still only nineteen summers, named as ‘one of the songwriters of his generation’ by the venerable Melody Maker. The Times’ review of Principal Fixed Stars stated that as a vocalist he was ‘gifted beyond compare’. His Silhouette for Double String Orchestra had been premiered on the BBC Third Programme, Six Second Echo was being performed next week at St John’s, Smith Square, while the current LP was a heavily rotated powerplay on pirate radio weeks before its release.
And that was just the records. Yesterday, John’s manager had taken a call from Jean-Luc Godard’s production company about a potential film, and earlier in the week Pond had waved a telex in front of the boy’s eyes from Robe
rt Evans in Los Angeles. John Nightly was undoubtedly golden. In addition, the BBC was in production with a profile piece around the Quiz Axe Queen LP, Pond having received news from America that advance orders there were approaching 100,000 copies – a previously unheard of figure for a new act from Britain. The boy was truly sensational. A sensation indeed. John Nightly really had zoomed this time.
Twelve months was all it had taken. Twelve ’mazin’ months, since he and Pondy had set to work.
Then there was Iona.
The Danish model was now one of the most sought-after faces. On call for Thea Porter, Jean Muir, Mr Fish and Ossie Clark as well as the TV companies and ad agencies. Now that she was pregnant the couple were making plans to look for somewhere outside London, to escape the treadmill of this place, maybe with Iona’s aunt who lived on an abandoned stretch of beach in Cornwall, where she said it was always warm and sunny. The pair were off to investigate this far-off spot next week, their first trip together outside the capital. But this morning the priority was to meet with management and record label about John’s new album sleeve. A plan had been hatched for John and Justin to deliver a cover based on a medieval clock face. There would be no ‘pop-star pix’ of John or his group, the design concept being as far as could be imagined from the vogue for distorted visuals and bubbly typefaces. Although both Pond and EMI worried about what they might be getting into if John Nightly’s ‘anti-promotional’ ideas came within breathing distance of a commercial record.