by Tot Taylor
John was not so much ‘educated’ – he spent little time at his studies – as ‘self-improved’; curious to learn about anything he didn’t already know. He carried a pile of books and pamphlets around in a leather bag, ready to shove un-constituted astronomy and ecology, along with the obligatory own-brand philosophy, down everyone’s throat. The boy relished the role of self-proclaimed instructor. An inspiration to all who came across him. And, as long as he was in a good mood, that is exactly what he was.
So Iona was completely zapped by John. But she wasn’t stupid; though sometimes, most uncharitably, her companion took her to be so. Her only real failing was to expect their life together to continue on indefinitely. The blessed union should have been a time-compressed experience, something for both to enjoy, get out of the way, then look back on with affection for the rest of their days. But the relationship became more of a ‘siege’. After that, the affair retained a casualness not associated with such a binding agreement because John Nightly found himself, at just twenty summers, unable to commit psychologically to anyone or anything except music itself, his creative and spiritual centre. Iona should have realised that. Instead, she chose to ignore it. And ended up trying to get him out of her consciousness for the remainder of her days.
Queen Square, Regent’s Park, London NW1. Saturday, 11 March 1968.
The newlyweds spread themselves out on the balcony. With their coffee and toast, sun-loungers and lotions, piles of magazines and of course grass – the best available in London – John and Iona seemed very much at home.
It was extremely early in the day for both of them, the reason being that neither had yet been to bed – Iona having arrived back from a photo-shoot at 4am with John walking in two hours later, zomboid after driving down from Manchester. London’s most beautiful, beautiful couple were taking it easy.
As she gazed lovingly at her husband the new Mrs Nightly was all too aware that she was a lucky girl. The fan mail flowing into JCE, some of it of a shockingly personal nature, gave a good indication of John Nightly’s pull. It was the same for Iona. Everywhere she went the girl was trailed by admirers, while appearing to be entirely innocent about the effect she had on men of all ages. At work or play, sharing an equal level of attraction, Iona and John were two ‘naifs’; Arcadian spirits fated somehow to meet and to exist as one.
If John Nightly had believed in fate, he would have had to agree. His wife, with her homespun horoscopes, consultant palmists, birth charts, star charts, tarot, I Ching and other paraphernalia of prediction and destiny, remained certain that this very real concept had been instrumental in bringing herself and her loved one together.
Belief was the reason Iona had pursued John in the first place. When she set eyes on him walking into Sotheran’s, ill at ease and lost to the real world in his Mr Byrite togs and bowl-cut hair, Iona knew right away that this was a talisman. A gift sent to her from… somewhere, God, maybe, via her friend and sidereal messenger John Pond. Somehow Pondy, in just as coincidental, fated way, had delivered to Iona the present – and the problem – of a lifetime.
As she sat swathed in a pink bath towel, perched precariously on a roof tile, her hands cupped around a macro-grain concoction made by her husband with his new Topcaff machine, the Danish teenager gazed out over her meadow. Before her a jigsaw vista of the city. Uneven rooftops, crumbling terraces, water-damaged chimneys and rusty balustrades reminded her of the illustrations in the Peter Pan pop-up edition presented by her mother on the occasion of her confirmation. The girl looked out across history – a perfect fairytale vista inside and out. The demands of commerce in the Queen’s backyard meant continual development and renovation at street level but up here, as far as Iona’s heavily lashed eyes could see, all around her remained more or less as it had been 100 years before.
Her husband wandered back into the box room, strummed a few chords and began to moan away. Iona picked up the book she’d begun a few nights before when, after a long session at the Bag O’Nails, she’d left John, Justin and Monika more or less comatose in the bedroom and had snuck up here to read. It seemed that everyone was into The Psychedelic Experience, a ‘manual’ based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. It was the only reading material Monika possessed, stolen during one of her many trips to the World Psychedelic Centre. Little did Iona know that the ‘ego-death’, ‘de-personalisation’ and ‘evil karma’, referred to within its pages – words and phrases that had had no reason to occupy her thoughts previously – would soon become part of her own story, shaking her apparently perfect world. As Iona settled down, Monika’s voice shouted from the kitchen.
‘John! Radio! Quick! Be quick!’
But the man of the house didn’t stir. He didn’t give a damn if someone’s terrible cover version of one of his songs – the Bellbottoms’ ‘Zigging & Zagging’ – polluted the nation’s collective brain or not. Right now it was the last thing on John Nightly’s mind.
The boy took a sip of Topcaff’s trademark mud and sang a long, arched melody into his Dictaphone. Having already decided that his next step compositionally would be to move away from the restrictions of song form, he offloaded one brilliant idea after another into the small plastic box.
One thing that constantly nagged was the feeling of being overlooked by the classical-music establishment. The serious press coverage awarded to so-called contemporary composers made him envious. He worried that his place in history – if he were to have one at all – would always be as a ‘pop’ musician. How unfair that seemed. Ridiculous that there should be any division at all in these free and easy days.
John and Iona attended the premiere of Harrison Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy at the 1968 Aldeburgh Festival. Here was the first fully staged, fully sung, ‘post-serialist’ work, as John painstakingly explained to his wife, certain he could have done something similar, better himself. He could have gotten there before Birtwistle. John Nightly could have been the name attached to this high watermark – Aldeburgh, BBC Proms – a project stamped with cultural authority and credibility. He possessed the talent and the imagination, and the connections, but he’d spent the past two years making ‘commercial’ recordings. He’d made them as un-commercial as possible, of course – as his manager never failed to remind him – but they still bore the hallmarks of ‘product’; blocks of music within a four-square beat wrapped in a deluxe, record-orientated sound. A confection of the people for the people, firmly based within the requirements and therefore the constraints of radio playlisting and the market.
Not subject to grants and commissions, John Nightly’s work, like all product within the pop machine, existed – from the point of view of its funders and its promoters – to generate income. It had been created, come into being, for that purpose, its very success derived from sales: the absolute bottom-line, which would, in terms of chart position and subsequent coverage, justify the outlay and prove the music’s worth. Otherwise, there was no game to be played. The operation of recording companies had little in common with that of the Arts Council. In the classical world, the orchestral musician, winding his way through the system, and through the ranks, would learn to play an instrument at school by reading music; he would take exams, attend music college, get his degree. If he were fortunate a career as a composer might follow, dependent upon the usual grants, commissions and bursaries. If not, there was the option of work as an orchestral player. Even with world-class orchestras this was a tough, uncompromising life. The stress and strain of touring and learning repertoire combined with film and television sessions scheduled on days off involved at least as much alcohol consumption among the professional classical world as there was to be found in rock’n’roll. If you didn’t make it there, it was down to teaching: the ‘fallback’ career in education. John remembered the tired faces of Jani and Valerie. Eking out a living in that way, life being nothing but one continual compromise, had never been what John Nightly had in mind.
On the other side lay the great escape: pop music, the a
rt medium of the times. Sooner or later, these two protected spheres would have to coexist within the same universe; musicians on either side seeming to have no problem whatsoever appreciating the stuff coming from the opposite direction. ‘Pop’ success had its compensations, though. It allowed John Nightly to indulge himself in a way he could never have imagined just a few years before.
Back in his Cambridge days, in the library at Trinity College, John had spent hours poring over the great scientific texts of the Classical era. Now he was able to fill Queen Square with expensively produced facsimiles. When he wasn’t in the box room sewing the quilt that would become Quiz Axe Queen John would immerse himself in reprinted editions of star almanacs and celestial atlases by Brahe, Kepler, Flamsteed, Galileo and Copernicus. The great works of science, translated from the academic Latin, were now available to him or indeed anyone with the money to purchase them. The boy was not only able to read and make notes from actual calculations and theses as originally published, but he was also able to have all of the major works of reference on permanent display, laid out side by side in the small studio-room, available to him to cross-reference one with another. John had even managed to procure one of the first-edition copies of Isaac Newton’s Principia1. Purchased from Sotheby’s at great cost, the Principia was John’s most treasured possession – apart from Iona. Its yellowed pages lay open on the couple’s kitchen table within easy reach of stray breadcrumbs and coffee spills.
On the wall above hung one of Tycho Brahe’s elaborate celestial maps created in his specially built Stjerneborg (‘Star Castle’) observatory. John compared Brahe’s findings with modern satellite pictures. He was impatient to discover how much of John Flamsteed – the first Astronomer Royal – existed in Newton’s writings. And why the great astronomer had been denied credit by his rival, who deleted Flamsteed’s name from the second version of the Principia.
Cross-referencing the actual texts, the young enthusiast was able to resolve many questions – particularly those concerning the perspective of time and date. He contrasted the designations of Brahe and Copernicus by studying the corresponding maps, laying across them a tracing of his own modern-day star map. It was immediately obvious how Kepler, then employed as Brahe’s assistant, improved on his master’s findings, taking Tycho’s work to the next elevated stage.
The thrill of being able to view the damp-stained title of The Rudolphine Tables or Delle stelle fisse in the exact same format as their authors would have written them was a revelation to the boy astronomer.
John had been able to obtain all four volumes of the Principia (Foote Society Reprint, 1965), along with a facsimile version of John Pond’s Catalogue of 1,000 Stars, botanical indices by John Gerard, John Tradescant and John Ray as well as very early editions by another influence, John Clare (the lunatic, peasant genius who’d spent the last forty years of his life in an asylum). A bound copy of John Donne’s early poetry, again an original printing, had also been acquired for him from Sotheran’s by Iona. The first and last birthday present her boyfriend would ever receive from her.
* * *
1 Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica by Isaac Newton, 1687. Published and edited by Edmund Halley.
John Nightly fantasised that this Principia was from the batch of 40 sent by coach from London to Cambridge by Newton’s patron Halley, with a letter asking Newton himself to arrange for them to be sold so that Halley, the eminent astronomer who had invested a considerable sum in publishing his friend’s work, would be able to recover his investment.
The next few months were taken up with gigs. The band pleaded with their manager to try to schedule dates a little more efficiently. Not to book them into Aberdeen one night and Plymouth the next if at all possible, but the canny management still had them headlining at Hull Student Union on the Thursday followed by Exeter Tech on the Friday. These two carefully scheduled appearances were followed by a trip the following day up to Lancaster Poly.
On 10 May a special one-off date was booked at the Lyceum Ballroom, in order to try out material from the new album in front of a mainly fan-based audience. In the event, the concert was so oversubscribed that two more nights had to be added before JCE came up with the idea of adding two ‘lunchtime’ slots. The second daytime show being recorded for BBC’s Sounds of the Seventies hosted by David Symonds. ‘The gear’s all set up, and there’s no extra cost. So let’s just do it!’ said Pondy. And do it they did. The Nightly band ended up ‘doing it’ eight times in four days, kept lively by a large and quite varied amphetamine intake courtesy of their sound engineer, washed down with bottles of White Horse whiskey and Iona’s exotic fudge.
The following week came the final mixing sessions for Pitfall. Fewer than were scheduled, as the project had long since run out of funds. The Knoll Film Company were not only experiencing distribution problems at home but were also dealing with the logistics of producing a US-financed feature in London with a Polish director and a mainly French cast. Though John Nightly, on his first-ever ‘sync-to-picture’ assignment, had turned in an inspired score. He was almost pleased with it himself, though there were some complaints from the producer that every now and then the soundtrack would occasionally slip into its own world – a John Nightly world – becoming a little too self-conscious or ‘sad’ for the film it served.
‘The scene is supposed to be “terrifying”, John,’ Myra would announce. ‘Why do we have all this tear-jerk stuff going on?’
The boy hadn’t got a clue, of course. John listened politely, but failed to identify a ‘tear-jerk’ aspect to anything he’d delivered. When Myra innocently enquired why the composer hadn’t used more ‘major’ chords, sarcasm would get the better of John, who would quote Tchaikovsky’s line – saying he always ‘saved the major chords for the sad bits’.
The composer was vindicated when Pitfall was released to surprisingly good reviews. All mentioned the soundtrack, a most unorthodox imagining for a mainstream feature, with John succeeding in recording the majority of it himself, at home mostly, to the chagrin of Justin, Jonathan and Ash, who complained of having to sit around doing nothing – and getting paid for it – while the boss finished his other projects.
One of the ‘other’ projects the boss was finishing was the young film producer herself, who was gracing John Nightly’s bed in his wife’s absence. With Iona now at the peak of her career, abroad for periods of a week or more at a time, John had opportunity enough to schedule a few home recording sessions followed by afterhours entertainment.
John was tripping out almost every night when he wasn’t working. Taking fifty milligram sheets of acid, alone or with Myra or in ‘sessions’ with the Sleepwalkers or his manager.
With long, tiring journeys between gigs, seldom arriving back home before dawn, and little sleep while he was recording, John’s already hollow cheeks became hollower as unsightly bags and creases began to appear beneath his sapphire eyes which now took on a staring, almost accusatory look beneath his beleaguered brow. Some mornings his eyelids appeared so heavy and hooded that he resembled a lizard – saura dinos – ‘terrible lizard’ or ‘dinosaur’ (a word that would have depressing associations later on). On the occasions when John wasn’t taking the sacramental chemical, there would be an immediate reversion and the shy young charmer would re-emerge to become everyone’s favourite pied piper once again.
Everyone was taking some form of ‘helper’, as creative artists always had; the laudanum with which Coleridge pummelled himself, the nitrous oxide – laughing gas – Humphry Davy sniffed from a silk bag, Freud’s long-term use of lime cocaine. Those past times when the safest source of liquid had often been alcohol due to the fact that water was so unfit, and therefore unsafe, to drink.
Fortunately, John Nightly had never been attracted to booze. His ‘drink’ was fresh orange juice with one white, occasionally customised, sugar cube. The family member who became affected by a different kind of spirit was Iona, who, because she could see that she was losi
ng her brightest starre, took to lacing everything from Typhoo Tea to beetroot juice with cornershop whiskey which lay concealed in small bottles in one of the three fridges in the Nightly household. Not only could Iona drinka pinta thata day she could also down several other varieties. The girl was getting through at least two quart bottles a week, more than enough liquor for someone to be concerned about. But no one was. The husband who should have been was hardly ever at home at the same time as his wife, and he was beginning not to care that much about other human beings anymore.
Like so many of their contemporaries, by June 1968, John and Iona were pretty much freaked out most of the time. If they did happen to find themselves alone in the flat, alone with each other, they tended not to stay that way, rounding up a group of friends to lend a little comfort and spread a little, if temporary, happiness.
Together the couple were a veritable pool of beauty and talent. However, great success can bring not only great fulfilment but also great destruction. John and Iona were two seeds in a seedpod of possibility powdered by the hand of fate. Life for them overflowed with potential. Fantasies, no matter how far-fetched or existential, had become fact. But still they desired more. More intensity, more cloud-cuckoos to be listened to and seduced by. As it dawned on them they’d squeezed one another and the immediate vicinity dry they looked elsewhere.
When Iona returned to Denmark for her parents’ silver wedding she considered not coming back. After just three years’ professional work Iona was already much too comfortable, and intelligent enough to realise that there was much more to life than waiting around.