by Tot Taylor
In his own mind John wasn’t any kind of a control freak or anything like it. But when he had an idea for something, well… He wanted to be allowed to do it. John didn’t want to have to explain or discuss the ins and outs, justify or defend it. This very single-mindedness, a refusal to be stopped or diverted, backed up by a stream of consistently imaginative ideas – not just for the music itself, but also for alternative ways of doing things; presentation and promotion – would drive the boy’s charmed career. The need to get something done the way he saw it, and an appalling lack of interest in the financial consequences, would lead John Nightly to sign away amounts of recoupable costs that would usually be taken care of by a record or management company. A resounding ‘No’ from the record bosses was always met with, ‘Well, I want to do it anyway, so I’ll pay for it myself!’ Thereby halting further discussion and leaving the way open for the label to save on even the most basic packaging costs – printed sleeves, labels and inserts – that they would normally expect to absorb.
In the visual arts there was still a line drawn between the graphic artist – the craftsman who would design layout and type for book covers, posters and record sleeves – and the more elevated ‘fine artist’, more likely to be found in a gallery setting, raising his work above the level of commerce, seldom allowing it to be used to promote or sell a commercial product. To John’s way of thinking this was absurd. It created a prejudicial chasm between the talents of, say, Eric Gill and Jackson Pollock or between William Morris and Francis Bacon, though there were signs that attitudes were beginning to change since the appearance of Warhol and Lichtenstein in the US and Bridget Riley and Peter Blake in Britain. The argument was less clear cut. Was Andy Warhol more artist or graphic designer? For although this definitive Pop Art practitioner had the nous to actually call himself ‘artist’ there was no doubt little difference between the set up at Warhol’s Factory, Morris’s Merton Abbey Works or Gill’s Ditchling ‘community’. So the idea of the artist-craftsman had begun to make some progress by 1967; and John, who had begun to purchase real art for his walls, was determined to get the design he wanted for his sleeve.
John Nightly picked up his sandals, pulled the door closed, wandered into the bathroom and turned on the shower with his left hand while simultaneously turning on the radio with his right, as he did every morning, or afternoon.
Da, da, da, dah… da, da, da, dah… da, da, da, dah…
The staccato intro to Cat Stevens’ ‘Matthew & Son’ seemed to be everywhere that week. The song’s lyrics, if John understood them correctly, related the tale of a London apprentice whose ‘work was never done’, the track being set firmly within the idea of the pop-song vignette, clothed in images from childhood and our literary past, as in ‘See Emily Play’ or ‘Lady Jane’, a trend ignited by ‘Eleanor Rigby’ – suddenly there were herds of Emilys, Eleanors, Lucys and Samanthas running around the record stores1. While, as if to counter this whimsy, the Top 20 was filling up with disillusionment and cynicism – the impact of Dylan, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs and the other, mainly American, folk singer-songwriters – as night-time current affairs programmes in Britain began to include a singer-songwriter slot, giving a voice to Julie Felix, Tom Paxton, Cy Grant and Lance Percival and their topical, socially aware ditties.
The boy sang along with Cat until the shower head clogged and began to spit scalding hot water, causing John to miss the rest of the track while he fumbled around willing the spray to come through again. It cleared as the music segued into ‘Purple Haze’. The opening riff sounded like it came from another world and John, mesmerised by the sponge-like guitar celebrating the power of LSD, marvelled at Hendrix’s sound – how exactly did he do that? – before he flipped to the next-door station. There he found a competition between two popular young ladies, ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Ruby Tuesday’ – the latest offspring of two pop religions constantly challenging and routing each other.
Spring 1967 was a golden season for music. The Stones’ madrigal faded as Manfred Mann’s ‘Semi-Detached Suburban Mr James’ took over. Another timely disc which contained all of the elements John loved about pop music at that moment. The boy turned off the shower, grabbed a towel and held his breath. For a start, there was the title itself, which fine-tuned into the social clichés of the times, the lyrics a teaspoonful of pop philosophy railing against middle-class conformity. Then the voice of Mike d’Abo, who John admired as the writer of ‘Handbags & Gladrags’ for Rod Stewart, a favourite song of Monika’s. The record featured a chorus of wooden recorders, instruments du jour – the one musical sound in every schoolchild’s satchel. Double-tracked descants played a neat turnaround before each verse. In John’s opinion, ‘Mr James’ had the best fade out – and fade back – of any record he’d heard to date. The Manfreds even beat ‘God Only Knows’ on the fade.
And tonight, don’t forget the Radio London promotion at the Scotch of St James, where we’ll be giving away ten copies of the Kinks’ new one due for release next week… All you have to do is call the number coming up in a minute, so just stay tuned to Radio London and Emperor Rosko!
Rosko’s snakeskin drawl announced ‘Dead End Street’, a standout from the year before. The boy grabbed for the volume as a downbeat French horn segued into the vaudeville rhythm of the verse, Ray Davies’ deadpan voice giving form to the brass-band chords which accompanied it.
A culture which delivered the Kinks, Rolling Stones, Beatles, Who, Cat Stevens, the Beach Boys, Phil Spector, Burt Bacharach, the Mamas & the Papas, Lovin’ Spoonful and many of the records of so-called ‘second division’ acts – Manfred, Herman, Dave Dee, the Hollies, Herd, Mindbenders, Tremeloes, the Move and Amen Corner on a weekly basis – was a very rich culture indeed. Ten years previously, these messengers would have been angry young novelists; ten years before that they’d have been poets, playwrights or abstract painters. And now, with the rotation of single releases per group at roughly four per year, each Friday brought not just one but several trailblazing new items, all eagerly awaited by musicians and fans alike who would form a queue at start of business each Saturday morning outside the many family-run record emporia dotted around England’s towns and villages in order to make their purchases and seal the fate of hundreds of pop hopefuls from London, Manchester, Liverpool and Newcastle.
Within their compressed lyrical forms all these little slabs of art contained ideas that society at large seemed to find it easy to relate to and quickly took up, some of which supplied the rocket fuel for cultural change in the so-called ‘new age’. Importantly, though the songs themselves commented on and questioned the status quo, the tone and the performances of those delivering them sounded ever optimistic, rather than cynical. The musical and lyrical content of many of these three-minute epics seemed to draw a line beneath post-war despair, the old black-and-white world, and the new age of possibility. The sun shone on Britain through the storm clouds of the previous era and a wide, psychedelic double-, maybe even triple-rainbow appeared.
Pop – no longer just a word or a descriptive term but a new state of mind – now earned itself a different reputation. It had earned respect, to whichever format it was applied. Pop content and philosophy, not just as a bolt-on style but as an attitude or as an insight, a different way of looking at things, occurred in literature, film and visual art too of course, but seemed to find its perfect expression in music, particularly in the newly liberated popular song. In another age, John Nightly might well have been a novelist, poet or a scientist of some kind. But in his own era he could not have been anything other than a popular songwriter. Ideas were his stock in trade, and he was able to express them in this new medium, which was forever evolving, almost weekly it seemed, from hastily thrown together product with a lifespan of three weeks to a more elevated, enduring, more expressive, more ‘profound’, maybe even revolutionary ‘fine art’ form.
Like artists and writers before them, each of the groups and solo acts of the mid ’60s cultivated their own defined
musical vocabulary and language… and image. Their records, singles particularly, little globules of sound, contained all of the trademarks they and their producers invented to identify themselves and adorn each recording. The Who’s amphetamine blast, the Kinks’ music-hall vamp, the Hollies’ thrilling vocal harmonies. The more classical, Zen-like perfection of the brothers Wilson, the sweetest-sounding voice of them all in Mama Cass, the nursery freakbeat of Pink Floyd and the Move. You would never confuse the Yardbirds with the Hollies or the Move with Manfred. This spirit of revolution pushed each group to its limit, forcing ambition on all-comers, so that each would aim higher. And, for the first time in history, sound itself – electrified sound, combining sonic colour with increased hi-fidelity showcased in mono, mock-stereo, true stereo and then Quad – was now a conceptual, almost philosophical component of the popular song. It was no longer just about chords, melody and lyrics. Pop, developed from humble and unpromising beginnings, had broken out, become a kind of self-made phenomenon. Backward loops, feedback, varispeed, compression and signal distortion were now compositional features of each new release. The innovations motivating artists to outdo their peers, move forward, achieve bigger hits than their rivals – to ensure they got there before anyone else did, wherever ‘there’ might be.
John Nightly realised that invention within the confines of the three-minute opus was reaching saturation point. He himself was already expanding both the structure and fabric of the format. There were no real ‘verses’ or ‘choruses’ in Nightly recordings anymore. The standard model was about to be increased to six, seven, eight minutes and beyond. The sluice gates were about to open, leading to an oceanic swell with Yes and ELP on the one hand and Led Zep, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath on the other. Although at this point ‘MacArthur Park’*, ‘Eloise’ and ‘Excerpt from a Teenage Opera’ – the longest pop songs in history – were still to happen, in May ’67, neither these over-imagined epics nor the northern light of Sgt Pepper existed except in the minds of their creators.
Of course, any middle-of-the-night, worse-for-wear discussion of the above would automatically exclude both the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. It was impossible to consider the merits of these elemental spirits in the same breath as the other contenders, even John’s beloved Who – though the Who were certainly the most exciting live act John Nightly had ever witnessed; he was forever urging his group to ‘play it like the Who!’ or ‘make it like the Who!’.
As for the Stones, the last two years’ worth of successive, quick-fire hits, showcasing their unique approach to both the ‘rock’ and the ‘roll’, meant that they existed on a level above the other groups of the period. They behaved like it, too, lording it round the London clubs where they held court like rock’n’roll princes with an unshakable belief in their own myth. It was impossible to quantify what was going on with the Beatles. The group had long since ceased to be anything to do with mere entertainment. The Beatles recorded output, viewed within the history of creative art in Britain, widely seen as being ‘radical’ and against the mainstream, was now as popular, and quintessential, as the contributions of William Shakespeare or Lewis Carroll. When visitors from abroad thought of Britain now, they thought about the Beatles and Liverpool, the industrial seam from which the gold had been mined.
While the Rolling Stones live show represented the zenith of rock’n’roll performance, heavily premeditated ‘performance art’ as opposed to the empty sensationalism of the Who and other groups, the Beatles never bothered with a live act. In their recent shows the four of them appeared marooned onstage, bemused at the ongoing chaos out front while they rattled through their short 30-minute set. The group never seemed particularly eager to actually ‘perform’. They didn’t need to. Their very presence, like that of all holy men, was enough. They would turn up as booked, stare out at the abyss and go through the motions like they used to at the Star Club or the Indra, full of Percodan and Preludin. Except now they too were full of disillusionment.
The news was that the group was never to play live again, preferring to spend their time in the recording-studio where they felt they could realise their potential as well as on their arts-lab project, Apple. Well, the Beatles did whatever took their fancy. They were in the pre-eminent position everyone else wished to be in but never could be. The group seemed to be able to operate at a supernatural level. Cultural commentators everywhere were saying crazy stuff, insisting that the Beatles’ output could be up there with Alice in Wonderland or David Copperfield. At the entrance to the British Museum, turn left for William Shakespeare first-edition folios, turn right for Beatles handwritten lyrics. As Iona said to John, ‘My religion is clothes, yours is Beatles.’ They were indeed the perfect ‘control group’, literally what they were: an index against which everything else must be measured. And as for social influence, Harold Wilson might have thought that he was the prime minister of Britain but every British teenager knew the Beatles were really. The group itself was the prime minister of England, Britain, the Commonwealth, probably the world. The Fabulous Four still led the way, whatever anyone thought, and that’s all there was to it.
‘John… John… please turn it down a little bit, darling… not ‘off’, just ‘down’, we’ll get the compliments again…’
‘Complaints! For God’s sake…’
‘It is early, John… it is…’
‘Yes… I know it is…’
‘Are we going to the beachside, darling?’
‘No… we’re not going to “the beachside”.’ John slowly wound the amplifier down. ‘You know I have to go and meet these people.’ He stopped the tape. ‘Go back to sleep, my darling. I’ll be at the Kardomah… back as soon as I can…’
Other titled ‘ladies’ included ‘Lady Jane’ (the Rolling Stones), ‘Lady Samantha’ (Elton John), ‘Lady Godiva’ (Peter & Gordon – formerly ‘Gordon & Peter’ ), ‘Lady d’Arbanville’ (Cat Stevens) and ‘Lady Madonna’ (the Beatles). ‘Titles’ songs included ‘Mr Second Class’ (Spencer Davis), ‘Mr Pleasant’ (the Kinks), ‘Semi-Detached Surburban Mr James’ (Manfred Mann), ‘Mrs Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter’ (Herman’s Hermits). Some weekday songs: ‘Monday Monday’ (the Mamas & the Papas), ‘Ruby Tuesday’ (the Rolling Stones), ‘Wednesday’s Child’ (Matt Monro), ‘Jersey Thursday’ (Donovan), ‘Friday on My Mind’ (the Easybeats), ‘Come Saturday Morning’ (the Sandpipers), ‘Lazy Sunday’ (Small Faces) and ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’ (the Monkees).
There were plenty of ‘colour’ songs: ‘Mellow Yellow’ (Donovan), ‘The Red Balloon’ (Dave Clark Five), ‘My Little Red Book’ (Manfred), ‘Little Red Rooster’ (the Rolling Stones), ‘My White Bicycle’ (Tomorrow), ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ (Procul Harum), ‘Love is Blue’ (Paul Mauriat), ‘Black Night’ (Deep Purple), ‘Paint it Black’ (the Rolling Stones), ‘Green Tambourine’ (the Lemon Pipers), ‘Yellow Submarine’ (the Beatles). And a bouquet of Brontë-ish, fairy-tale inspired girl’s names: Eleanor, Prudence, Dandelion, Delilah, Eloise, Jennifer Juniper, Jesamine, Samantha, Martha et al.
Drug references abounded in the obvious places: ‘ Mr Tambourine Man’ (the Byrds) and ‘Purple Haze’ (Hendrix); but also in records where maybe even their makers were unaware of the connotations, as in ‘Along Comes Mary’ (the Association – ‘Mary’ being the syllable slang for marijuana), or ‘What’s the New Mary Jane?’*
Even ‘Yellow Submarine’ was suspect – who knows what damage use of the bright-yellow capsules might have done their huge audience of children? But drug references went back as far as Irving Caesar’s ‘Tea for Two’, which celebrated the tea or ‘gage’ beloved of Louis Armstrong, as well as the more current ‘Walk Right In’ by the homely, folksy Rooftop Singers. What other explanation could there be for a ‘new way of walking’ or ‘letting your mind roll on’ in 1963?
* * *
* ’MacArthur Park’, as performed by Richard Harris, written and produced by Jimmy Webb, was part of an intended cantata.
* Still unissued bu
t to be found on any number of bootlegs – e.g. Supertracks, Vol. 1, (CBM WEC 3922).
item: Monthly Cultural Notes: May.
Sharpen your tools – you’re going to need them! The garden is growing faster than you think. Take cuttings and weed out the garden and the greenhouse. Boiling water may be used to kill weed seeds before planting out your seedlings and drilling. Cover strawberry runners and harvest fruit only when in full colour. Regular watering is essential – plants may need daily attention. Night frosts are still a hazard but remember also to damp down the greenhouse or outhouse temperature during prolonged sunny spells.
BBC Six O’Clock News, BBC Television. 18 March 1967, read by Richard Baker.
The oil tanker Torrey Canyon has run aground off the coast of Cornwall while carrying 120,000 tonnes of crude oil. The supertanker is said to have broken up on the Seven Stones reef off Land’s End. Severe pollution has affected the whole of South West Cornwall; some beaches are 18 inches deep in oil. The tanker broke into three pieces and has been bombed by order of the government to try to set the oil on fire in order to disperse it.
By autumn 1968, John Nightly had spruced up his act, sartorially at least. Dispensing with his teenage windcheaters and cords, John had taken to wearing suits. Partly because the midsummer of that year merged into one continuous blur of heat and partly because it made it easier for a lazy bastard like him to get out of bed and into clothing to fit his daytime and evening needs.