by Tot Taylor
Lighting set-ups, lens changes, backdrops, Polaroid tests; the general drill on every assignment. The company and the locations were often unbearably dull. Then, when she arrived home, Iona would be waiting again, now for her husband to show up or at least call and tell his wife the name of the town he was no longer coming back from. Leaving Iona to spend another troubled night with her spiked juices and delusions.
Eventually the girl decided that she’d waited long enough. And that realisation about her own damaged prospects was the prelude to John Nightly’s own slow fade.
‘I believe Elvis Presley and the Beatles and the Rolling Stones are going to answer to God. God is going to rain judgement upon earth – and this could happen at any moment with all the rock music and illicit sex and wine, women and the glasses they wear – and there will be a time of terrible tribulation when all hell will be let loose on earth…’
Reverend Jack Wyrtzen, World of Life community, in All You Need Is Love, (Futura Productions Ltd), 1977.
‘Cut the page down the centre, then take the other and do the same.’
Justin demonstrated with the scissors as he handed the four new vertical sections to Ash. ‘Now try putting page one to the left-hand side of page four and see whatcha get…’
Ashley slid the two halves together.
‘The butter | in the native | Zanzibar “You get outta here!” 2,000 years old |Anglo-Saxon heritage. No budgerigar. She lies about her |chimney – “Hello Mister!”‘, Justin eyed up the final line: ‘Put her |the oven at one hundred degrees!’
‘What a loada shit, Just. We did it the other way round last time.’ But before Ash could finish, the guitarist had snatched back the scissors and was cutting the page into single lines. Justin snipped off each word separately, held the pieces of paper high in the air then let them fall on the lino. ‘This’ll be interesting…’ he whispered, while the others gathered round.
‘You should only do it in “threes”, though – let’s see…’ Ash peered down at the random arrangement.
mystery chimney
develops hat butter medley,
crop harmless budgerigars
Crazy, man! Native!
‘See what I mean! It’s brilliant, brilliant!’ declared Justin. ‘Crazy, man… Crazy…’ Ash looked up to see if anyone was still listening.
‘Always works!’ the guitarist whispered hopefully.
item: ‘Look Away’ by Brion Gysin, from Minutes to Go, with Sinclair Beiles, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin (Beach Books). 1968.
“My Principal is no Monkey”…You figure it out. Try it yourself. Here is how you do it: Let’s see, now. No, I’m not stalling. Common sense tells you that words are meant to mislead. It’s about like this: Just talk to yourself for a minute. You hear that little voice? Well, now argue with yourself: take two sides of a question. Dig? That’s already a line. Do it like a phone call. Broadcast something. I hesitate to advise, because I know only for me, that something pretty saucy will often get you a sharp answer. Realize that it is an answer when you hear it and not just you. Your first party or any party may be hard to identify but just go on listening. Soon plenty of voices will come in and soon you will be able to call out. Don’t put this down. Lots of people want this, need it and are damned well getting it by themselves. This ain’t no monopoly, lady. Shove off, you!
Stop and listen. The state called reverie just before sleep is a good place to start. Artists and intellectuals BEST learn a method best called LOOK AWAY. You will find that you are broadcasting at all hours without knowing it. How else do you think ideas ‘get around’, man. Well, call me any time you want and just identify yourself when you call. Name and address, please. I’ll be glad to talk to you about this or anything else you have in mind. Crazy, man, crazy.
CUT ME UP * BRION GYSIN * CUT ME UP * BRION GYSIN * CUT ME UP * BRION GYSIN * CUT ME IN *
Sir Edward Elgar opens EMI's new Abbey Road Studios, 12 November 1931
‘The enigma I will not explain – its “dark saying” must be left unguessed’
Edward Elgar, programme notes for the Hans Richter premiere of the Enigma Variations, 19 June 1899
There’s a new world coming, and it’s just around the bend
‘New World Coming’, Mama Cass, 1970
(Dunhill/ABC4225)
People who live by the ocean get heavy when the weather does and lighten when it breaks. The rain which had been forecast for weeks arrived in a downpour as RCN made his way back over to Porthcreek.
The atmosphere was black all round. A gothic mist rolling all the way up the north coast as John drove along, keeping a careful eye on the road. Potato trucks, school buses and local fish vans were stopped in their tracks along the waterlogged coastal canal. A queue of vehicles stretched back as far as Black Zawn, where an articulated container had run aground just off the barely sufficient 1950s-built B-carriageway.
Daly planned on stopping somewhere before he got too close to home, so he pulled off the B3306 and parked up on a mound of ocean-heather. He grabbed the plastic bag and eased himself out of the car, gazing back at the traffic built up behind him and at the torrent of water which had fallen in barely ten minutes. RCN lifted his boots out of the slub and shook his head in disbelief as he stroked the bristles on the back of his neck.
Too short. Much too short. Ever since John was a small boy the new haircut had been too short. As a teenager this had made him look younger, like a fresh-faced bobby-soxer, the kid in Champion the Wonder Horse, or Kookie, his schoolboy crush from 77 Sunset Strip, a USAF crewcut being the required style of summer ’61. But nowadays, hair cut too short made him look considerably older, and greyer, than before. It showed up the unsightly bump at the back of his neck and his enlarged ‘pensioner’s ears’, which alarmed him every time he caught sight of himself in the wing mirror but was met by a ghostly vision of his father instead.
There seemed to be literally no trace left of the old John. Where was he? The hippie fixer. The quiet reliable guy who turned in early while the children stayed up all night. The idiot who stuck to Lucozade and pasties when everyone else laid in to tequila and pills and anything else that might be on offer.
Here lay the result of that unnecessary devotion. This mooching, rain-soaked figure, soft-edged silhouette alone on the rock. Fat old ‘anorak man’ with too-short hair. Still good for looking after people, though. That hadn’t changed, though his gut certainly had. RCN was hardly able to walk some days, he was so full of beer, fags and Typhoo – buckets of it. Even worse on a Sunday after Mrs Peed’s magnificent roast plate and lemon-curd slice.
Feeling a chill, John wound his scarf tight around his neck. He wiped the spray from his eyes, pulled his collar up and his cap down. The thoughts rushing through his head weren’t kind ones.
Suddenly the scene lightened. The smoky skies cleared. The rain moved southwards and became finer. Magpies and jays began to squawk. There was visibility ahead. Though it was just mid-afternoon, the farmhouses along the headland already had their lights on. From the highest point of the Zawn, RCN had a clear view across Black Cliff; and beyond that Carn Point and Porthcreek. He stabbed at the gorse with his boot to see if there wasn’t a covered ditch in front, then walked the couple of yards further up to the edge of the rock, stopping abruptly just inches from the overhang. Still dazzled after all these years by the Vista-Vision sweep of the pendulous landscape, he stared blearily out over the precipice.
Viewed from this height and at this angle the oceanic bowl appeared weightless. As if the tank of a huge crane lifted you up and tilted you back, face-on to the sky. Removing you. Most people who came out here hoped to experience something like that. To taste rough elements. Wished to be removed; from something.
If the hapless tourist wandered up onto the headland on a bad-weather day, then the wind chopped and howled and the rain lashed at his face. Horizontal, hard pellets of water. Visitors commented on the harsh weather but they also relished it. Smiling and noddi
ng knowingly, like insiders, when they told the folks back home, as if they could hardly believe the conditions they’d been subjected to. With the elements swirling around them, encircling them, confusing their sense of perspective and balance, these weekenders no doubt assumed they were at the very core of nature’s chaos. The bay was the cosmos itself, whipping and whirling, spinning around its life-giving hub. But the holidaymakers, up here to experience an alternative condition or ‘state’, away from their tidy, temperate, kind-weather lives, were interested only in egofied, geocentric cosmology. A habitual, self-obsessed way of viewing the world – and one’s place in it. Life as a self-portrait, accompanied by a hastily sketched matte of supporting players. Human beings invariably see themselves as the centre of every unit, every group, every assembly, every cosmos.
Standing bolt upright, keeping still, looking out at the ocean haze while letting the elements swirl and lash all they wanted, it was easy to imagine that it was the world revolving around you rather than vice versa. Where was the centre anyway? The midheaven point? We’d all like to know that. Though of course there couldn’t be just one. There were many centres and swirls, ripple-pools, panels, pulsars, energy triangles, hubs and converters. Existence as time-dependent landscape. Human beings no more significant than hairdresser’s clippings and other detritus whirling through the universe from one corner of eternity to another.
RCN surveyed the view before him as he had done so many times over the years. Until, in the mist and confusion between rainwater, seawater and cyclonic curtains of smoke and storm, the exact point of the horizon disappeared as his retinas gave up and became gel against the moisture in the air. John’s tired old, rheumy old eyes lost their will to focus as he shut down normal transmission and lapsed into free flow while his altered state delivered him back to some idyllic beachside with his Kiwi wife – his sun-damaged face and her continual hen-pecking his only daytime distraction – until the screams of gulls sheltering below, and the cut of an RNLI helicopter, dragged him back to his own wretched mind.
RCN wasn’t an unsentimental man, but he had to be absolutely certain that all of his hard work over the years wasn’t going to be wasted. He dwelled on these thoughts for a moment. The dark legacy of the day, its past and present. Characters, events, circumstances and possible outcomes. Moving forward. The conclusion of what he and Iona had discussed that morning.
Up until now, the whole unfinished tale of John Nightly had rarely involved fate. Events had taken place due to the protagonists’ actions, and their choices. Decisions. Their stupid, bad decisions. RCN thought about the roads the four or five star players had taken. Stupid, wrong roads. Roads that always led to the coast. The edge of things. The limits. He thought about Iona, back in her luxurious surroundings long before now, of course. Tucked up well inland, on her inherited acres. Probably five or six miles between Iona and the sea. Compare that to Trewin. No amount of miles there. Nightly and Daly were right on the thing. Right bloody on it. Always had been. Straightway dangerous was their marker. The Nightly fable was about innocence, ambition, industry – pretty much in that order – and a kind of measured risk, as if they welcomed it; thrived on ‘fancy over reason’.
RCN thought about the boss, waiting at home, ignorant of anything outside of the perimeter fence. Pottering, planting, plotting. The stuff he’d built around him, bubble-wrapped himself in; layers of protection from his various ‘anxieties’. The boss had managed to stave off his melancholy without being able to actually rid himself of it. Dull tasks put in place to lift his untidy moods, whatever it was that actually got him through the night – and the following day. But John Nightly knew he could still count on his old friend from Huntingdon.
Daly would have loved to have erased all of these burdensome thoughts and characters from his inner cosmos. But, realising that he was actually getting very damp indeed, the anorak man lifted the large round tin out of its bag and hurled it over the edge.
John Nightly’s new world view began to cause trouble with his associates during the long summer of ’68, the last good summer of the decade. As usual, John was busy; a little busier than he liked. There was really no need for this wildly successful auteur to be rushing around like a gopher. He’d even begun to assume some of the practicals himself, thereby removing a good deal of his manager’s workload, John Pond’s part of the deal – and Pond’s hold, or, as the manager himself would’ve put it, ‘control’ over his protégé’s career.
Suddenly the client wanted to know where every penny was going. For no particular reason. John Nightly wasn’t at all money-oriented, or money-minded. He never had been. He simply wanted to know. Having read that the Beatles knew where ‘every penny was going’, John Nightly thought that he should too.
John’s accountants demanded royalty statements and recoupables from records that had barely left the shops. Wage slips and MU session forms were located and dispatched. Hotel bills and petrol receipts from last summer’s college gigs, cheque stubs and wage packets, petty-cash and other miscellaneous (drugs and booze) expenses were ordered up and sent over.
One drizzly Saturday morning a mountain of filed invoices impaled on coat-hanger wire was delivered to Queen Square along with bought ledgers, sales ledgers and heavy cardboard box-files containing bound three-monthly accounts, all stamped with Her Majesty’s dull red seal. John would never look at them.
As it was, the Beatles knew so little about where the pennies went that they were heading for bankruptcy themselves. Unbelievable as it may sound now, following the death of their manager and the creation of the free-for-all that was Apple Corps, money really was flowing out like rain, leading to John Lennon’s statement that ‘I’m down to my last 10,000 [pounds] and will probably be broke by Christmas.’
The magiciens, at the height of their creative powers, and with millions of dollars’ worth of record and film sales, merchandising, product endorsements and box-office touring receipts behind them, they should have been spending each waking hour offloading as many of their transmissions onto tape as was humanly possible. Instead, their heads were full of financial plans and forecasts, for Beatles Ltd and Apple, budgets for launching other artists careers and for planning and producing Apple product. They’d become businessmen, but not businesslike. In physical man-hours, the group could expect to be working harder than ever – partly in an attempt to stave off their own collective despair, their own dark hours.
John Nightly began to encounter similar difficulties. Each musical exploration seemed to take longer than the previous one and could quickly turn into a logistical nightmare as the boy’s nervy, wide-eyed innocence slowly transformed itself into world-weary paranoia.
John insisted on personally autographing every cheque JCE wrote out on behalf of John Nightly Ltd. Impossible if you consider an orchestral session from which each player would receive their individual MU fee – some 150 payments in all. Or the costings and budgets for a tour, involving 100 or so employees paid weekly over a four-to five-month period. Not only that, but John also insisted that the band’s weekly wages be paid in absolute cash (brown envelope every Friday) that he would personally present to Justin, Jonathan, Ashley, Ron and Lee. This hands-on payday would necessarily be accompanied by a discussion about the band’s clothes – the suitability of olive-green capes and magic beards for Ash and Ron (‘Definitely not!’ said Lee) – along with ongoing discussions about their personal lives – girlfriends’ travelling arrangements and accommodation, individual members’ drug and alcohol intake while performing, comfort elements of the workplace, onstage security (particularly with regard to ‘electricals’) – and of course their gear – instruments and amplification being the absolute preferred topic of conversation of every touring musician.
This personal weekly bestowment lasted all of six Fridays, ending only when John, carrying £14,000 in cash to be handed out on a particularly profitable payday, boarded a double-decker from Queen Square to Bond Street to be topped and tailed for a new suit.
Immersed in a much too favourable Melody Maker review of Quiz Axe Queen, the paymaster managed to leave the cash – all of it – in a brown paper bag on the downstairs side-seat of the bus. He hung on to the magazine.
Realising his mistake in H. & C. Johnson & Co., Suit & Boot, John took a taxi straight to JCE and resigned from the position. With a bill of £14,000 and nothing but his own organisational shortcomings and embarrassment to show for it, this was the very last time John Nightly would ever have any involvement whatsoever in his own finances.
The end of the year approached, and the Sleepwalkers embarked upon yet another round of British dates. Universities and technical colleges, mainly – preferred by their manager because they were ‘good payers’ while keeping the band’s profile high within the all-important student demographic. This handful of gigs being followed by a further five sold-out nights at the Lyceum Ballroom.
As expected, all went well, both with audiences and reviewers, but the Nightly band was tired, and the artist/manager relationship was becoming strained between each of the controlling arms of the operation, from John Nightly himself and JCE and John Nightly Ltd to Mosaic/EMI.
General over-indulgence was the obvious reason. John Pond still relied on two personal assistants – Sandra and, following Cornelia’s departure, Daisy; ‘Sand’ and ‘Daze’ – to run his day-to-day affairs, and had settled into a daily routine of not so much ‘nine to five’ but more like ‘four to five’. He’d arrive at the office late in the afternoon, to check on things rather than to instigate or direct them, only to leave the premises just one hour later. There were no more midnight calls to his client with inspired ideas for doing this or that and no more turning up at gigs in Harrogate or Swansea, unglamorous turning up, in order to demonstrate his continuing support.