The Story of John Nightly

by Tot Taylor

  John Nightly’s choice of attire wasn’t the demob two-piece favoured by his manager, but fine tailoring from a previous swinging decade – 1920s America. A natty, Jazz Age outfit that might have been worn by a Duke or a Cab or one of Tennessee Williams’ grandees. Soon, John had a wardrobe of white cotton. Gatsby suits, he called them – and indeed he was becoming something of a Gatsby character himself.

  After John Nightly appeared in public in his new persona for the first time, at the October premiere of Pitfall, with his sun-bleached hair and other accessories – St Tropez tan, suede crocodile belt, orange string bracelet and his ever-present draw bag – the ‘look’ quickly caught on. Lightweight cotton and silk jackets featured in the catwalk shows of every French and Italian designer eager to capitalise on an elegant town-wear style they’d been promoting for years.

  It wasn’t easy for the average Nightly fan to contemplate a Paris-or Milan-designed man’s suit but British street style once again came to the rescue. A month after John was photographed for Rave, his ensemble topped off by a wide-brimmed fedora borrowed from Iona, the lords and ladies of Carnaby Street were in production with their £19/11d, drip-dry alternatives. Most London mods were growing out their helmet cuts and adopting Nightly’s English Boy look – a two-piece day suit with finely-creased slacks, no turn-ups, three-button jacket, wide lapels and narrow cuffs. Longer hair, a round-collared, patterned shirt, knotted silk neckerchief or cravat, with white tennis-socks and Derby shoes or brown leather sandals with no socks, completed the look. The above combination, give or take a shampoo or two, became accepted post-hippie daywear for creative London ‘heads’ from autumn ’68 through the next couple of summers.

  Everyone was smartening up, as physical appearance reflected mental attitude. Fashion-wise, perhaps in a reaction to the San Francisco ‘Hashbury’ look, too unkempt and filthy for the English, there began a definite move towards smartness; probable influences being the films of Fellini and Antonioni or Sunday supplement shoots in Tangiers and the Cote d’Azur. Magazine design and content was polarised between the chic, minimalist spreads of David Hillman’s Nova, the layout of which looked forward to the next decade, and the more traditional City Gent/Man About Town conservatism still with its base in Savile Row.

  By the time Jack Clayton’s adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic opened in cinemas across America (spring 1974), John Nightly was already in aspic but to latent mods and the well-to-do hippie set it must have seemed like this new, or ‘next look’ was already a revival. Three of the Beatles wore tailored suits on the cover of Abbey Road. The film of Bonnie and Clyde, re-runs of Casablanca, the craze for vintage fashion and the vogue for 1930s Noir had been an influence in dragging hippie kids out of their cheesecloth and into second-hand tat.

  This carefree, wind-in-your-hair, Rive Gauche extravagance would mutate into hard-lacquered glam as peddled by Roxy Music, Sparks, the New York Dolls and Jobriath, which faded badly in the light. Its spiritual home being the new Biba department store in Kensington High Street, the Sistine Chapel of re-made neo-thirties décor. Art Nouveau and particularly Art Deco were given some oxygen and quickly revived, immediately moving things on from Victorian and Edwardian influences. The trend for Astaire and Rogers-era Hollywood dragged on for one more year at least, becoming sleazier and obvious, until leopardskin prints, fake leather, Oxford bags, and ‘boudoir chic’ sent a ’50s rock’n’roll revival crashing head-on into the punk explosion of 1976.

  Through 1967 and ’68 John Nightly continued his rise and rise while he improved his credit status supported by royalty income from worldwide sales. Almost a million albums in 1967, a million and a half in ’68 and two million in ’69. Then, after this series of forward-looking recordings, applauded by critics and public, he too lapsed into another world. Had certain events not turned out well, and had he not been fortunate enough to have surrounded himself with those who had a concern for his welfare and respect for his talent, then John Nightly would not have survived either and his story would never have had an Act Two. Progress through life is nothing more or less that a haphazard mixture of fortune and judgement. In John Nightly’s case the scales were always balanced in favour of luck and that in itself was fortunate for him; for, as we shall soon see, his own judgement remained severely faulty.

  ‘I was going at a tremendous speed… at the time of my Blonde On Blonde album, I was going at a tremendous speed’

  Bob Dylan, New York City, October 1969

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  The Summer Centre’s recent UK Symposium on Addictive Disorders was widely recognised as the most innovative and wide-ranging therapy-led debate ever to be held in the UK. To enable absentees to experience this event, the Summer Foundation has teamed up with Recover to produce a double-LP recording of the symposium in both standard stereo and/or Quad audio format in order to celebrate the collaborative nature of the weekend along with synchronised slide-projections and transcriptions. The various components of the conference can therefore be recreated locally exactly as they were presented on the day.

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  Trewin Farm, Porthcreek, Carn Point, Cornwall. The very middle of midsummer 2006.

  ‘Sand! Bloody sand! Just damned bloody sand… all the way down!’

  Robert Kemp – nurseryman, smallholder, plant expert and CEO of Trewin Exotics – stood upright in the middle of the damp, peaty plot, digging in a large Magnolia stellata in the shadow of a full-flowering buddleja, taking extra care not to damage new roots.

  ‘Only thing you ever get here is bloody –’ the digger wiped his brow – ‘buggerin’ – before taking one more jab at the earth – ‘sand!’

  Mrs Peed threw a pail of washing-up water onto the roses, keeping one hand on her bonnet to prevent it from falling onto the thorns. She chuckled, clucking like a farm hen at her colleague’s obvious frustration.

  ‘Can’t you get a grip, lad?’

  ‘No, I can’t get a bloody grip… that’s the point!’

  Robert huffed and puffed as he dug deeper, switching to the large foot spade in the hope of finding clay or some other more helpful organic material underneath. But it was all sand, the whole plot; everything ‘bloody’ sand. The only other thing he came across, about a foot further down, being a blue and white Tesco bag.

  ‘Thing is…’ Robert sank his fork into the ground so he could lean on it. ‘I’m going to have to put down some clay or something… or somebody is. Nothing’ll ever take otherwise.’

  “Always been a problem round here, that… sand…”

  The housekeeper chuckled and clucked some more as she bent down to pick up the hat, which had been lifted off by the breeze and carried onto the small bonfire being prepared by RCN over by the washing line.

  ‘Ever since that sand invasion…’ Endy fell silent, seeking a response that wasn’t forthcoming. ‘Few year ago now…’

  ‘1607 was the big one, I believe…’ Robert looked around to see if there was another, sharper tool.

  ‘My father remembered that one. Oh, he knew a lot about a lot of things, my father did…’

  ‘Your father remembered quite a way back then!’

  Endy did not appreciate the attempt at humour. ‘My father remembered quite a few sand invasions, I can tell you.’

  But Kemp had more or less given up. ‘The bush is too big for this space, anyway… I did say that to John…’

  ‘If that’s what he wants… you’ll have to do it, won’t you? Won’t hurt anyone, I’m sure.’

  ‘He never thinks about how big these things are going to grow,’ the groundsman huffed.

  Mrs Peed turned her hat inside out and placed it back on her head, giving it a pat or two to make it sit snugly on top of her new perm. She pulled down the brim to shield her eyes from the sun, which even at 8.30am was dazzlingly bright.The nurseryman was bent double on the lawn frantically de-sanding his clothes.

  ‘Won’t hurt anyone…’

  Endy twisted the bonnet round and gave it another tap. Robert looked up at her protectively.

  ‘That’s the main thing, then, Endy.’

  It was already a warm, hazy midsummer morning. A normal day in West Cornwall for mid-August. The busiest time of the year for the local tourist industry and the busiest and best time of the year in the garden.

  Had any visitor made it up the overgrown path and suddenly come upon the flower meadows at Trewin they might well have gotten the impression that a supernova had exploded on the spot before suddenly freezing, petrified and stranded, mid-explosion. Its spores were light-blue agapanthus, their tall reclining stalks supporting bright star-headed lanterns. Its dust was huge clumps of dahlias, aquilegias and lamiums. Plants and vegetables appeared lush and hardy and no doubt very, very happy as they benefitted from hours of endless sunshine followed by regular watering and mild, airy nights.

  But so did the weeds! A carpet of horsetail and dandelion was attempting to conquer the entire back lawn. There they were, poking their horrible frizzy heads up between the flagstones as they checked for buttercup competitors before quietly slipping through. An invasion indeed. Mrs Peed had noticed them last week while picking wild strawberries growing along the back path. But RCN hadn’t bothered to do anything about it and now these tight bundles of nothing with their scrawny white necks, a weak attempt at some kind of flowering, were all over the place, literally all over. A plague of unwanted vegetation, sown by the sparrows and fed by the light, morning dew.

  As usual, it would be up to Robert to deal with the problem, although of course no weedkiller or commercial destruction kits were to be used. No DDT, paraquat or toxins of any kind had ever been employed at Trewin Farm, not in the twenty odd years the Johns had been resident. It’s now a well-known fact that it can take at least fifteen summers for man-made weedkiller to be erased from the topsoil; so it was likely that, at the present time, the wind and the elements permitting, Trewin was already nearing organic status. Certainly both Johns had done everything they could to make that intention a reality – so digging the damned things up, one by one, was the only allowable solution. Each steadfast root and tuber would have to be levered out with a fork, turned, allowed to dry and then gathered up and chucked in a bag. No weedkiller? It was the bane of Kemp’s life.

  ‘Think I’ll have to get on and do these weeds tomorrow instead of right now. Looks like it might rain. Be easier to get ’em out after a rain.’

  ‘You do that…’

  Mrs Peed, christened Endymion, but known to her friends as Endy, having no time for complaint of any kind and certainly not for idleness, a trait which, along with a person’s zodiac, told her all she needed to know about their inherent character, had a few jobs to attend to herself. RCN had asked her to go round and change the batteries in every appliance in the house ‘when she got a minute’. He said he was fed up with turning things on and them either not working or running at ‘half-tilt’.

  ‘When she got a minute?’ That was a good one! What minute did she ever get? she had to ask herself. Apart from anything else, the put-upon housekeeper had absolutely no idea how many handsets, remotes and other gadgets this related to, but she knew there were a fair few.

  Trewin Farm boasted at least thirty or forty radios, for a start, ranging from the post-war transistor to the bleeping space-age pod – the old wireless to the new wireless. Both Johns liked to have one in each room, the small pocket-type with round-dial tuning if possible. Tin or wood – not the new plastic rubbish. Unless, of course, it happened to be ’60s plastic, in which case it was okay. Particularly with a Rexine finish, to make everyone feel completely at home. That was acceptable. Otherwise, they preferred something chunkier and a bit more, well, ‘radio-looking’. Although recently, since the arrival of Mawgan, things had gone rather ‘apeshit crazy’, you might say. There were now at least another thirty more chargers, convertors, channel-changers, players and plug-ins strewn all over the property.

  The new additions were something of a bafflement to both Johns, who every now and again would happen upon one of the things – a slimline pod the size of a fag packet, say, absent-mindedly left by Mawgan on the back porch or on the chair where RCN read his newspaper in the mornings. They’d pick it up, fail to recognise anything resembling a knob or control of any kind, turn the thing over in their hands, run their thumb across it, press on anything that looked pressable, raise their eyebrows, frown, and put it down again.

  There was at least one transistor in each of the sunlounges and probably a couple in the garage… Mrs Peed thought she remembered seeing one outside on the old wooden shaft near the rubbish dump, another strung up to the front gate, a bulky old thing over near the compost heaps and one or two more little boxes up there in the side meadow as Robert liked to check the weather forecast late at night when the trucks were loading up.

  Changing the batteries wasn’t exactly something that could be done in your tea break. Not that Mrs Peed ever had one of those either! And although Mawgan had said
not to worry, that he would do it for her – when he ‘got a minute’ – she wasn’t banking on it, as laziness, the laziness of youth, or at least a talent for doing things when he got a minute, was one of the kid’s most noticeable character traits. Though there was no way Endy would ever say a word against Mawgan. They had quickly grown as close as grandmother and grandson. If Endy needed something lifting or fetching she’d immediately shout for Mawg, not RCN or Robert. Sometimes just as an excuse to see him, and ask if he’d like a Coke, juice drink or one of those packet cappuccinos he seemed addicted to. And if Endy called then Mawgan would abandon the job at hand, a complex remixing of four hundred musicians from thirty odd years ago, maybe a balance that he’d been perfecting and finessing for hours… days even, and come running.

  ‘Darling…’

  With this expanded family consisting of Mawg, Mrs Peed and Robert now being a more or less permanently settled group, summer days at Trewin were very happy. Neither John could remember a happier time. The early mornings, with the sun flooding onto the steppes and into the large TV lounge, giving the whole house a warm, yellow glow; the smell of Endy’s burning toast drifting through each room in turn; the constant chee-aaw, chee-aaw of the gulls; the dappled light falling from the cypress trees; the fragrance of expensive patio roses; and Alexandre running around like a peripatetic donkey as he chased after giant spiders all contributed to the happy scene.

  ‘Darling…’

  It was certainly a whole lot happier than the apeshit-crazy times of the past. Swinging London and the self-inflicted solitary confinement of recording-studios, tour buses, anonymous motel rooms and baseball stadia. The day-to-day affairs of Trewin Exotics were so much easier to deal with than the logistics of trying to record and tour ‘difficult to categorise’ long-form masterworks to 20,000 worshippers up and down the West Coast of America, while at the same time drugging yourself silly just to get through it all and somehow emerge in one piece at the other end. Well… the two Johns might not actually be in one piece – they weren’t exactly sure themselves – but they had gotten out alive… just. So, the current situation was a lot better than that, they thought to themselves. One hell of a lot better.