by Tot Taylor
Miss Knoll was the very picture of health. Her cow-fed, Daddy-fattened childhood had produced a formidable Texan princess. Donna was the opposite. Her seldom-fed slender frame, the product of a family of Iron Curtain hoofers, was starved by choice. She followed the diet of a ballerina or champion jockey. In her case nourished not by protein or vitamin, but by book reading and play-going. Keeping to a strict macrobiotic regime, Donna’s physical and mental discipline had produced a sylph-like presence. The young dancer was acutely intelligent, acutely sensitive and acutely neurotic.
But Miss Vost was no less physically attractive than her rival, and rather more conventionally feminine in appearance. It was the way she moved, on tiptoe almost, padding around the studio as if she were part-sighted, feeling her way through a semi-resistant web. For a trained soloist, able to memorise the ticker-tape choreography of both Frederick Ashton and Frederich Astaire, Donna Vost rarely gave the impression that she knew where she was headed. Either in the next few steps or in life itself.
But you’d notice her. You’d notice her alright. She was the leaf-light figure in Isadora silks smiling and swaying backstage at the Roundhouse or soul-dancing at Sybilla’s. Donna would appear unannounced at whichever studio the band were booked into, kick off her flip-flops and let herself be liberated by what she heard, gently bending her supple limbs as she floated through the control room, alternating between swigs of peppermint tea and Southern Comfort. Able to illustrate and act out the music, interpreting it exactly as the composer imagined. John said that Donna moved to his music as if she’d written it herself. ‘The Gazelle’, Justin called her, for she did have something of the appearance of a fallow deer. The band members could only imagine what sublime pleasures might be experienced if Donna’s anatomically perfect, classically trained, supplement-enriched limbs ever came anywhere near their creaky, calcium-deprived rock’n’roll sheckles.
But the combination was never likely to be, for the girl had eyes only for one: the boss, the enchanter. Donna declared that, should John ever be free to love and be loved, she would lay out all of her charms and pentacles, her love beads, her prayer beads, even her Ukrainian grandmother’s beads (the most treasured beads in her possession), and plot some kind of beady, astrologically-sound seduction or enchantment.
The Gazelle had already obtained detailed charts for both herself and her intended. He was a Cancer with Saturn in Gemini, she a Pisces with Jupiter in Virgo – conclusive proof that creator and interpreter were as perfect a match, astrally-speaking, as could ever be. This taken-as-fact pronouncement she repeated to Ron, Justin, Ashley, Jonathan, Lee and even Pondy, plus anyone else who would listen, politely or otherwise, including the enchanter himself.
It was Donna who kept the boss up to date, kept him avant-garde. John Nightly used to be avant-garde, back in his Grantchester days, but the effect seemed to have gradually worn off. In Cambridge, John’s enthusiasm for unmusical music, un-poetic poetry and illogical, cosmological equations raised him above the pub-and-cellar chit-chat of both Town and Gown. There remained a kind of academic tradition along the Backs; but, given that this was the seat of learning of Darwin, Donne and Newton, topics of conversation at the Cavendish laboratory were much the same as anywhere else. When they weren’t making groundbreaking discoveries, research students’ minds were focused on university goings-on and -off; football, cricket and rugger, James Bond actresses and institutional scandal. Most likely it never dawned on the boy that it was his very solitude that kept him ‘thinking differently’, naturally off-centre. It was almost more difficult to keep up to date in London. Particularly when you were being creative yourself, and away from the action a lot of the time promoting those creations.
Therefore Donna Vost appointed herself John Nightly’s personal tastemaker. Taking him to evenings at the Open Space Theatre in Tottenham Court Road, jazz and poetry – Jazzetry – concerts at the ICA, or dance events at the Roundhouse. They’d go out to Eel Pie Island* to see John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers or Long John Baldry’s Hoochie Coochie Men. Close by was the location of Pete Townshend’s Oceanic, the UK’s first Meher Baba retreat. Prayer circles, ‘encounter groups’ and other gatherings were springing up all over the capital. Donna kept John in threads. At least for casual clothes, something Iona could never be bothered to do, as he dutifully accompanied Ms Vost to her favourite boutiques.
What John saw in the teenager was someone, the only person other than Jana, who was able to really get to grips with what he was trying to do. Donna heard the music, spoke that same language; and this of course meant everything to him.
John hammered out his inspirations and Donna, inspired, danced to them. Though she found the music itself very moving, what no doubt motivated her as much as anything else was the actual proximity to – and the possibility of closer contact with – its perpetrator. The girl would not have to wait long. John tried to concentrate on his crushed tritones and spread-fingered arpeggios but soon became distracted by her fluid, attention-seeking movement and ended up playing many more clusters than usual.
Whenever they did meet, to have sex – at Queen Square, as Donna shared a bedsit in Earl’s Court with Marnie, her regular stand-in, or in a room at the Savoy Hotel pre-booked with a piano and a dance-friendly floor – the late-afternoon sessions comprised 50 per cent work and 50 per cent recreation, though the affair still retained something of the feeling of an old-fashioned romance – unlike John’s adventures with Myra, who would have more or less disrobed on the stairs leading up to his front door. Myra wanted to get on with it, get it over with, in a way, so she could get back to her production schedules and call sheets. Love-making sessions with his producer would be interrupted by telephone calls at awkward times, most being transatlantic, leaving the composer in abeyance. John would hold his boss in his arms while she wooed some highly touted actor or director; the wooer-in-waiting ironically much more fabulous, and famous, than that being wooed.
For a short while – autumn 1968 through to spring the following year – John Nightly appeared to have it both ways. These two opposing forces were available to him at any time of the day or night at very short notice. Short notice was good, and suited everyone. Convenient to both Myra’s filming commitments and Donna’s independent dance projects. Notwithstanding the odd groupie or fan he might occasionally favour, John Nightly seemed to have solved the age-old problem of how to truly combine business with pleasure – or in his case pleasure with pleasure.
But keeping several lovers at once is not at all straightforward. Being involved in two serious relationships simultaneously necessitated an adjustment psychologically. In those moments when the reality of the situation might suddenly be brought into focus, the boy would be forced to conclude that he had no real feelings for either companion. No commitment or preference romantically or morally. How did Donna and Myra deal with their own compromising situations?
Six months in there remained a kind of collusion between the three partners as to the true nature of each one’s relationship with the other. Every liaison became a mini-drama in itself. Both women asked impossible-to-answer questions. An inquisition would often take place, prompting the defendant to view that particular evening’s get-together as the final bout of an overlong series. Though a brilliant instigator of projects and a natural ideas man, John Nightly was a very poor closer.
Dropping a tab of lightning several nights a week, whether in the company of mistress or band, groupie or hanger-on, the boss found he was beginning to get very overtired indeed – sometimes inhumanly so. But then, everyone was. Revolution had proved to be hard work. Due to the almost round-the-clock socialising, band rehearsals and meetings were fitted in around more important events – friends’ gigs, album playbacks, press receptions and art openings – resulting in everyone performing badly and becoming irritable and aggressive. A roomful of distracted, paranoid persons, out of their heads with worry about their own half-imagined, self-obsessed non-anxieties.
When the freak
s should have been viewing their output objectively, from outside of their overcooked heads, the substances they were taking placed them firmly at the centre of things. The layout of the day became distorted. Wake-up calls could never be earlier than one or two in the afternoon. Bedtime occurred anytime at all within the Greenwich Mean Time spectrum.
The scene was half asleep, in a daze, mostly; running out of steam and therefore easy prey for the flanks of commercial operators looking to exploit neo-hippie culture. A decade of optimism and expectation was edging into decline. It seemed to many that the Revolution was running very late, if indeed it was coming at all.
When John and Iona attended the Dialectics of Liberation conference (Chalk Farm Roundhouse, July ’67), the most significant counter-cultural assembly of the era, he did finally, – for the first time in his life – begin to consider his own physical and psychological limits; the otherwise-unexplored space between his own inner and outer self.
The conference, set up by R. D. Laing and the Institute of Phenomenological Studies, considered the effect of mental and physical ‘violence’ in society. Including the home-spun violence of love itself, by way of making inroads into understanding the ‘oppression’ of love while at the same time demystifying it. ‘Education enslaves us, technology kills us!’ proclaimed the handout for the fortnight-long bash. After hearing lectures by Laing and Black Power leader Stokely Carmichael, John resolved to make changes, including a real attempt to clean up and get himself together so as to be able to exploit the ‘heavy creative phase’ he felt was currently being ‘laid on him’.
This meant that over the next few months the young millionaire took far less pick-me-ups and spent far more time at home, improvising freely on the piano, recording every thought and spark, while sampling paperbacks of Laing, Winnicott and Freud in easy-to-swallow doses. Health-wise, there was a noticeable, immediate improvement. But also, for the first time since he left Grantchester, John began to think – really think. And when that happened his reflections inevitably centred around his childhood.
John Nightly considered daily life firstly from the point of view of his mother Frieda. He imagined her standing on the edge of a wide bay, like a sentinel or watchman, looking out to sea at her two ‘best men’. Floating impressions in the form of the lifeless bodies of John himself and his father came in and out of focus like skiffs or sailboats brought into land to be taken away again by the waves and tides. Was Frieda really better off than she would have been if she’d remained at home in Norway? A society with a good supply of strong, independent-minded, ‘normal’ Norwegian men instead of weak, repressed Englishmen. He imagined Nightly family life as if he were John Snr, the invigilator and guardian who had encouraged John more than anyone, giving up even the family home, converting it into a sonic adventure playground for his only child. A playground that no doubt reflected John Snr’s own interests, perhaps enabling him to realise some of his own unfulfilled dreams and desires. John the son hoped that had indeed been the case.
For the first time ever, John Nightly was able to view his compliant, put-upon but thoroughly good-natured father as a stand-alone man. A whole person (temporarily) disconnected from his wife and child, rather than a service character or supporting player, a mere attachment to his family. Was this man, this individual, really fulfilled and content? Or just making the best of it? ‘Doing his duty’, like everyone else of a proper moral bent in these hard-up times.
In this respect, the boy’s family were with him throughout the birth of what was to become his magnum opus. John sat in the stillness and darkness of the box room, his hands resting on the keys, and let his mind go as he waited for something to come. When it did, he hit the red button on his new mini cassette-machine faster than Rod Laver could return a serve. Everything John Nightly channelled during this most productive period would be collated, edited and assembled to be reordered and reorganised at a later date by Justin. Ready to be restructured, reformatted, re-recorded, prior to being orchestrated and carefully polished, finessed for human consumption. Donkeywork a lot of it, particularly the part that would have to be completed after the composer had exhausted his ideas, long after his current heavy creative phase had deserted him.
A lot of what had been discussed at the Laing conference applied to John’s own beginnings. The Nightly family, as it existed in Cambridge, would have been the perfect control group. It lived in a kind of cell, sealed tightly away from its neighbours. Even the streets bordering Meadow Road were light years away from it. Few relatives visited. No friends stayed over. No birthday or tea parties had ever been celebrated. There was never more than 25 per cent school attendance for John, with hardly any interaction with children of his own age. Days were long and generally given over to work. For John Snr that meant numbingly extended hours and extra shifts. But, as he would regularly tell his workmates, ‘if it means a better going-on for my wife and son…’ – the unspoken reason for maximum overtime being the need for John’s father to get away from Frieda’s and John’s specific two-hander while remaining able to bring sufficient income into the production for the group to be able to maintain its own vital seclusion from the outside world.
But there was also a great deal of love. Of a type. Residual love is what it was. The love that could apparently be produced from concerted labour. It seemed that, as far as the Nightly household was concerned, love itself was one of the by-products of labour. And apparently, like karma, it would eventually seep out, suffuse and envelope both the lovers and the loved. It was a love squeezed from tired eyes. Snuggled up between dry lips. Producing, the perpetrators imagined, in distilled form, contentment; a sort of tired, dry happiness. Another by-product. Of a kind.
As John Nightly studied his precious facsimiles, highlighting sections by placing slips of different coloured paper between the pages, he began to think about what might remain if the music were to be removed from his own psychological make-up. John no doubt realised that he would one day have to come to terms with his own behavioural imbalance, but what he concluded wasn’t healthy reading. Without the music of John Nightly – removing the song from the singer – there was little more than a stain of the boy left. John remembered a comment by one of his teachers from his final school report. Rebecca Thorne, BA (Hons), MA (Cantab), John’s history monitor and form mistress, had written that ‘apart from being continually distracted, in a world of his own, and finding it hard to concentrate’, the boy seemed ‘emotionally detached, cold sometimes, hard to get through to’.
Neither Frieda nor her husband had ever mentioned this rather too frank comment. Or if they had it was glossed over and forgotten like everything else in the Nightly household relating to emotions or opinions that might affect or upset its own precarious balance. That was it! No one wanted to be affected! The dynamic between the partners having been wound up so damn tight that the group may not have been able to survive a slight momentum shift. John considered how things might be at the present moment between John Snr and Frieda. Day to day. Without John himself – the pivot, the referee, the buffer separating two headstrong contenders who were victims also. He assumed there were few words spoken between the sparrers now. They barely existed as a couple. His mother and father had somehow stayed together… but why? Too afraid to leave or even to move? Move on? Go forward, or maybe go back?
John imagined there being little human contact in Meadow Road beyond the postman and the milkman. As far as he knew, his father continued to work as many hours as possible while his mother drifted farther away. Comforted by her son’s unexpected success of course. Proud of him no doubt, without actually wanting to have anything to do with it. Fearful of the whole development of fame itself and what might come after.
Frieda hadn’t even gone to see the Nightly band at Cambridge Guildhall the previous July. A big gig, just two miles from home. Though John’s father had, of course, making an excuse for his wife’s absence when he himself appeared from behind the backstage monitors minutes before his
son boarded a tour bus bound for Carlisle.
John Nightly spent the winter of that year in this considering, configuring mode. Then, as the flow dried up and more practical concerns took over, he went back into the studio and back into denial. The boy requested that JCE book a six-month lockout in the two most expensive recording facilities in London and at the same time book him an appointment with Dr Laing at his practice in Wimpole Street. John Nightly then beat a hasty retreat back into a limbo world of half-waking, half-sleeping escape.
* * *
* By 1970 Eel Pie Island had become Britain’s largest hippie commune.
Gorse bushes at Porthcreek © John Daly 2002
Cornwall is yellow in spring. From daffodil acres on sloping coastal plains to the lemon tapers of the Aeonium Heliconia that decorate Endymion Peed’s kitchen window. Fiery-orange gorse, nature’s barbed wire, protects the outland pasture from walkers and hikers. The enemy. Unwashed and unwanted. TRESPASSERS. Heavy-booted destroyers of coastal fields and plots. Despised by the indigenous population, walkers are both a serious environmental nuisance and a joke, as far as the locals are concerned.
These legalised invaders – with their bulging rucksacks, ever-present athletes’ water bottles (later found abandoned in every ditch and spill), their collections of rods and staffs to help them up the soft 3:1 gradient – could be seen, and sometimes heard, braving the track that led firstly towards and then away from the white farm. A rainforest-grade kitbag full of compasses and charts is necessary to guide these hapless meanderers along perfectly well-marked acorn paths.
‘What are they on?’ Mawg would ask.
‘Private land,’ RCN would reply.