by Tot Taylor
‘I came home very tired. Dinner being over […] I sat down at the piano. In a little while, soothed and feeling rested, I began to play, suddenly my wife interrupted me saying, “Edward, that’s a good tune.” I awoke from the dream: “Eh! Tune, what tune?” and she said, “Play it again, I like that tune.” I played and strummed, and played, and then she exclaimed, “That’s the tune.” And that is the theme of the Variations.’
Edward Elgar recalling how the Enigma Variations came to be conceived, 21 October 1898
‘How for some wise purpose is every bit of sunshine clouded over in me?’
John Constable’s Everyday Book, 1829
From Pendeen Watch you can see all along the vast expanse of the bay; the ocean corridor from St Just and Zennor right up to Carn Point and beyond. Its sun-damaged picture-book views of creeks, inlets and zawns, platefuls of translucent blue, lead back to ancient Spanish routes. Lead way back. Back through history. The history of invasion. A time when armadas advanced up the estuaries before setting down to come ashore under cover of the many bluffs, coves and dunes in order to plunder our lands, our food and livestock, our copper and tin, and our women; the items we produced and those that produced us.
Since childhood, John Nightly had viewed himself as a character living within, and throughout, history. A figure plotted on a timeline. John would most certainly be assured of his place in the annals of popular or ‘pop’ music; the classical music of Now. Even as a kid he knew. Fantasising about past and future times. What the exact nature of his achievement within that system of events and revolutions might end up being was more tricky. But John knew he’d be there. Maybe he’d have to wait until after his time to be appreciated. The genius astronomers, composers, architects, poets… and plantsmen; John Pond and John Pierce, John Nash and John Dee, John Harrison, John Donne and John Clare. John Nightly didn’t consider them as belonging to the past. Or to any time. As far as John Nightly was concerned these Johns were very much alive and in the room with him, as alive and well as his present company. Their atmospheres and ideas as vital and real as the music of the composer-inventors who seemed to him to be sharing this day and age, this dislodged atomic age and time, with himself and his wife, their fellow seekers and travellers.
Some evenings at Queen Square, John would put on Ravel’s left-handed concerto or Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and try as best he could to bore Iona to death about how he felt he knew these works’ composers not just as creators but as beings. Knew them and felt them so well he believed he could reach out and touch them, trying to explain to his wife in such a way that he hoped she might understand. John felt Gershwin’s presence right there in the room. George was sitting in John’s rattan chair, trying his best to get comfortable as he glittered and gleamed, beamed like a veritable lighthouse of invention. The man possessed with so much crude ability, such confidence, ‘comet-hit’. George’s great big personality, his immodest but thoroughly generous reality, was right here in sixties London just as sure as it was in those swellegent, self-assured melodies.
George and his cigar smoke often lingered in John and Iona’s front room. George was the centre of attention – as always. George was enjoying his drink; George was tapping his foot on John and Iona’s floor. George was pounding away on John’s upright, explaining how easy it had been for him to write the Rhapsody and his other masterpieces – using the term very matter-of-factly. George said that… well, coming up with the stuff… it just wasn’t that difficult a thing. The music came to him and out of him like a torrent. Rushed in and tumbled out faster than he was able to realise it, remember it, catch it. Certainly much faster than he could write it down.
John spoke about John Donne, sensing the poet’s frustrations in the verses he insisted on reading to Iona late into the night. Donne’s rough quality, his explicit tone, the inner conflict of his carnal and spiritual longings. John imagined Donne very much a modern man. Young guy of today. Pusher. Go-getter. A Now-man – hippie, like John Nightly himself.
John regaled Iona with endless, cobbled philosophy involving Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. The big ones. Even Iona knew about them. He ran her into the ground with it. They were all hippies too. As ‘Now’ as Stravinsky or Prokofiev – or Stockhausen, Terry Riley, Harrison Birtwistle, the ‘progressive’ composers of today.
Then there was Rachmaninov. Well, Rachmaninov was different. Rachmaninov was a spirit. The composer having travelled as far as it was possible to go within the confines of ‘formal’ harmony without entering the realms of dissonance. John described the composer’s Piano Concerto No. 3 as ‘hysterical’, using the word in its real sense; i.e. like hysteria – ‘unmanageable, emotional excess’.
Hysteria. Heaven-like. Yes, Rachmaninov’s music was exactly that. A stream-of-consciousness whirling hysterically from beginning to end. One long unravelling mess of human-ness. Of life. And morality. No immorality to be heard in Rachmaninov. Although to many this composer was another thing entirely: old-fashioned, conventional, very obviously formal and overly romantic. ‘Exaggerated’ was a word often used. Rachmaninov was a square. But to John Nightly, excessively romantic and reasonably exaggerated himself, Rachmaninov was It. Rachmaninov was God – or a God. A God or Spirit* to stand alongside the composer-Gods of the Baroque and Classical eras. Just a bit more recent. John often reflected that he had missed him, Sergei, and also the glittering George, by some twenty or so years. That’s all. Just a little slip in time and they could have actually met. Anyway, the ‘Intermezzo: adagio’ from the third Concerto – a careering, swivelling, swirling mass of breakers and swells, crescendi and diminuendi, human and humane, a pool of humanity, seraphic, ‘hippie-ish’ in both conception and execution – was the piece of music that he and Iona chose to get married to.
* ‘He was not a conductor, he was not even a composer – he was a spirit’ – Mikhael Pletnev on Sergei Rachmaninov. In 1999 the pianist made a recital disc at Rachmaninov’s villa in Switzerland of the composer’s first piano concerto on Rachmaninov’s own 1933 Steinway.
Pathé London News. Saturday, 14 February 1968.
The world of entertainment was out in force today for the wedding of pop singer John Nightly and Danish fashion model Iona Sandstrand, TV’s Kit Kat girl. Traffic quickly came to a standstill outside Marylebone register office, bringing calls from local residents for a ban on showbiz weddings. The bride wore an Ossie Clark teal-blue kaftan from Quorum and a pair of Moya Bowler’s new Zodiac sandals in yellow suede (exclusively available at Ronald Keith in Oxford Street, W1), while the bridegroom wore a rather traditional cotton suit… in pink, mind you! (Pathé Newsreel)
Queen Square, Regents Park, London, NW1. Monday 16 February 1968.
John and Iona were married at Marylebone register office on Valentine’s Day 1968. In attendance were John Snr, Frieda, Signhild, Sindre, Steinar, Iona’s parents – Thorkild and Lisabet – and her brother, Kim, along with John’s dog Tyko and Jonathan and Justin from the group. Monika and Patti duly fulfilled their bridesmaid duties. It was one of those sunny London mornings; soft air, low light, a sharp, edgy frost and non-stop traffic – so loud that the tiny congregation could barely hear the service.
‘Like when James Stewart keeps saying he’s got a sound in his head…’
‘What, darling?’
‘James Stewart.’
‘Stuart?’
‘James Stewart… the actor, Glenn Miller Story.’ It didn’t seem to be ringing a bell.
‘What it’s like. I mean – that’s what I’ve got.’ John scratched his head. ‘Maybe what everyone’s got. I can hear it, but I can’t seem to achieve it – same problem as him.’
‘Who?’
‘Jimmy Stewart!’ he repeated again, ‘Godsake…’ John extricated a cotton bud from his left ear and examined it for wax.
‘You don’t mean you going deaf, darling? Not already? Like Beethoven?’
‘Let’s hope not…’ The boy looked at his bride in exasperation. ‘Godsake…’
John put down the swab and picked up his headphones. He put on both earpieces, having removed the left side so that he could clean out his head, listen to the track and speak to his wife simultaneously.
‘I can’t translate it,’ he continued. ‘That’s what I mean. If only I could make what I hear in my head a reality, I’d be…’
‘John…’ Iona adjusted the towel holding her head together. ‘Can you shout a bit quieter, darling…’
‘Being able to create the sound you’d imagined. More or less an impossibility, obviously, but that would really be…’ he pulled the headphones tight over his head. ‘The physical reality of sound is so different to our imagining of it.’
Iona put down her spliff and picked up a pair of large pattern-cutting scissors.
‘But isn’t it always like this?’ she murmured as she looked around for her smoke box, ‘the same it is with everything?’
John removed one side yet again. ‘I can’t hear you if you talk to me when I’ve got these on, can I?’ Iona looked across and repeated her philosophy.
‘It’s not “like everything else”, anyway – only music,’ he answered, as he flicked switches on the console in order to set up a new track. John prepared the bounce, heartened by the pleasing blend of Mellotron, Moog synthesiser and harpsichord. Seemingly more relaxed, the boy lightened up.
‘That’s better…’ he hummed. ‘Like when I think of you, darling… well… the “thinking” is a bit different to the reality!’
His wife sat bolt upright. ‘What do you mean, John?’ Iona shut her book. ‘I know there was gonna be some “philosophy” coming.’ She got up from her chair. ‘So we coming down to it, don’t we? Your meaning, the “thinking” is better than the “reality”,’ she puffed. ‘I certainly… I definitely understand you now!’
The boy made an act of slowly and systematically removing both headphones as he tossed his brand-new wife a thin, exasperated sigh.
‘Godsake,’ he said again. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, my love. Of course the thinking isn’t better than the reality with you!’
‘I don’t be ridiculous, John. It’s one of these… “psycho-logical” things…’ Iona wrapped her towel even tighter around her head. ‘You speak about it. It must be true.’
John completed the balance to his satisfaction. He sat and listened carefully to playback, checking that everything was exactly as he intended before he erased the two original tracks that made up the new combination. Unfortunately, a more comprehensive explanation was going to be necessary if he were to avoid one of the many mood swings and tempo changes that were becoming increasingly frequent from behind the oversize sunglasses of the ‘ultimate face of today’s young fashion’.
‘The only thing I’m saying – and this is all I’m saying…’ he broke off, ‘is, well, if we, I… could only translate this sound – and other elements as well – and I’m sure that’s what the classical composers had to do, because they couldn’t exactly make “demos”, before recording came along. Composers obviously had to orchestrate without hearing anything at all… without any idea what it was going to sound like.’ The boy picked up his guitar, ready to add the next part. ‘Keep literally everything in their heads…’ He plucked a couple of strings and grimaced at the tuning. ‘At least we can mock it up. Mock the real thing up, I mean.’ He began to tune as he spoke. ‘At least we can do that. Because they couldn’t, you see…’
‘Do you want tea, my darling?’ Iona seemed somewhat placated.
‘Don’t know why I’m always so… so dissatisfied with everything,’ John sighed wearily as he tried to remember the lyric to an old song from Grantchester days – ‘Easier said than done… Found your number on my doorstep, to take one more step… It’s easier said than done. Now that we’ve begun… Don’t believe you’ll make me say that I won’t see you. Easier said than…’ He turned to his wife and sang directly to her as he strummed: ‘Easy…’
‘John…’ Iona was visibly moved by the sweet melody. ‘You’ve got me… for starters.’
‘For starters?’
The boy laughed at the colloquialism his wife had picked up from God-knows-where. ‘I shouldn’t be dissatisfied, should I? I really shouldn’t,’ he said affectionately.
The fact was that John Nightly would never be satisfied with anything. The disability being part of his make-up, part of the fun – if it could be put that way – of who he was. Dissatisfaction somehow defined him. As Pondy said and Lee Hide always agreed: ‘Never satisfied!’ It seemed to sum the geezer up.
Out shopping with Iona one day John had become mesmerised by a couple and their kids; an ordinary couple, walking idly along; doing very little at all – apart from just ‘being’… living. But they were happy, John thought. They appeared happy. Without ambition or plan, apart from the intention to get from start to finish as comfortably, and as quietly, as possible. Living for that. Not thinking too much about their lives, the speed of things, their place in the world, who they were and where life was taking them.
If only he, John Nightly, could be satisfied in the same way as those ‘innocents’. As he would often complain to Iona, if only he didn’t have to do things. All this work. Creating this and that. Ideas going round and round in his head like a cylindrical saw. How difficult, and unrelenting, it was – particularly at the moment. If only the mercury flow would stop. Run out of juice. Give the boy a break.
Even when he’d finished recording a new song, the most exciting moment of all for any songwriter, John would forever be seeking that extra ‘edge’, something to lift it above the competition. Not always strictly a musical something; that edge could be sonic or mechanical. Adding more compression or distortion, overloading things a little – or a lot. Opening up the reverb across the whole track, or speeding things up by a very small increment. Though that ingredient might not exist – his collaborators pulling their hair out trying to prove to him that the track really didn’t need it – John Nightly would demand it of himself.
Sometimes the boy would become desperate. At which point his colleagues were alerted that they must tread carefully, lest that first speck of doubt be followed by a rapid descent. John’s mood could change faster than the wind, in which case a recording he’d just spent a week lovingly creating would be heard with dead ears. Cynical ears. Declaring to one and all that the thing was… ‘worthless’ and instructing Lee that he may as well wipe it all off, get rid of it – that really would be the best thing. Erase everything, and start afresh on something new tomorrow, thereby creating a cache of supposedly ‘wiped’ tracks, in various states of undress, that the boss would promptly forget all about. Recordings that years later the wily sound engineer would continue to make a comfortable living out of by ‘licensing’ encoded masters to bootleggers, downloaders and streamers. Issues about rights and ownership to both the songs and recordings tied up in one never-ending legal dispute.
It turned out that there were enough ‘erased’ tracks from 1967–1971 for at least three complete albums. After the eventual appearance of the Requiem, these ‘lost’ recordings began to filter through. Several of them re-mastered and remixed (the source having been a multitrack reel), appearing in expensive Digipak sleeves featuring unseen shots of John and the band taken in dressing-rooms in Bremen or Winnipeg or even shopping in their local supermarket. Sometimes personal band photographs, taken inside the studio during working sessions, cropped up inside CD booklets. It was obvious from the quality of both sound and picture and the very ‘completeness’ of the package that the source of these illegal recordings sadly had to be the group itself.
By September ’67, John Nightly had recorded an enormous body of work for his nineteen years. It ranged from piano interludes written in his early teens to the ballet piece he was currently at work on. But the creator of this massive outpouring probably wasn’t satisfied or entirely convinced by any of it and never would be. To her credit, Iona understood that that part of his character in the context of the
ir relationship was never going to change.
When Iona first watched John working, with Lee at Regal, she encountered a different personality altogether from the guy she’d spoken with properly only a few days before. In the studio, John Nightly was the absolute opposite of the shy young boy she’d assumed him to be. At Regal, John was confident; arrogant even. Desultory about his own music and critical of the studio – although it was by far the best facility he’d set foot in. ‘It’ll be good when we get it done properly!’ or whatever it was he said, was an unintentional slur on his engineer and the results Lee was able to achieve. John was dismissive of most music he encountered in any situation and would promptly turn the radio off if something came on that he felt was beneath him. ‘We don’t want to listen to that!’ he’d say, leaning over the transistor. ‘Not gonna pollute my brain with that, I don’t think!’
But John Nightly could afford to be high and mighty simply because he was so very talented. Iona noted the respect he received from Lee and the others being an accomplished performer on any number of instruments with a perfectly formed ‘head’ blueprint of the way his inventions should be recorded in the studio. With no dots, nothing written down, the music was literally in the boy’s head, possessing him as usual.
His consummate understanding of all things musical was confirmed by further studio visits. John would finish what he was working on then sit down at the piano and serenade his loved one with an Irving Berlin ballad. He’d perform a Spanish lament on the guitar, mocking his own dexterity with impossibly fast runs, cascades of complex chords that he’d dash off while responding to a question about food or which club to go to later that evening. Then he’d jump on the drum kit to knock out a Stax backbeat, get up on the vibraphone and imitate Lionel Hampton, run off Russ Conway’s ‘Sleigh Ride’ at triple speed or play a Mozartian version of that week’s Number 1 – not to impress; more to prove to himself that he could do it.