by Tot Taylor
It didn’t have to wait long. In November ’69, John Nightly’s stock was high. His manager, with a shortlist of partners lining up to get involved with anything the star put his name to, was able to announce that every item of equipment used on the tour would be adorned by an ocean-blue E-Lec logo – a cartoon-like lightning-strike proclaiming the unhindered progress of nature’s most powerful force.
By the time of the release of Ape Box Metal and its subsequent world tour, it was possible for the Nightly band to try out selections from the new work on an unsuspecting audience. Most of Ape Box was on tape anyway, it being the third in the trilogy of albums to combine already-recorded and live sounds. The group, having long since realised that their job would be made far simpler if they played along with pre-recorded tracks, rather than attempting to create the music from scratch, found it easy to switch gear between the reality of live performance and what had been recorded in the studio.
This taster-plate, particularly the interludes, seemed to concentrate the faithful more easily than had been anticipated and by the end of the fifth and final concert the crowd was brought to its feet. Bootlegged tracks began to be played in student common-rooms while a BBC teatime Dombey and Son licensed one of the incidental links as its theme tune. John happily gave permission, the passage being something he hadn’t considered as particularly significant to the work as a whole. It gave the boy a kick to see his composer credit – music by Alexander Telstar – come up at the end of each episode.
But the project faced competition from elsewhere during those heady weeks of 1970. The musical Hair continued to attract the crowds, the songs as familiar as anything on a Simon & Garfunkel album, while Kenneth Tynan’s Oh! Calcutta! recently opened at the Roundhouse, had the benefit of full onstage nudity. Oh! Calcutta! drew a sell-out house every night.
Pitted against this, in normal circumstances, the Mink Bungalow Requiem might have struggled to find an audience and sustain sufficient attendance over that first month to allow PR worker bees to exploit reviews and bring in the second and third waves of audiences, including the much-wanted coach parties – permed and tinted grandmothers from Redcar and Grimsby booked into a West End matinee as part of their London Weekend; every theatre manager longed to see coaches from Lancashire pull up at their doors.
There was no doubt that MBR was very much an untried phenomenon in Theatreland. On the other hand, JCE could count on a solid fan base in Britain of at least 150,000 real-live believers. Happily, advance sales for the UK dress rehearsals – three nights at Friars Aylesbury followed by a further three at Hatfield Poly – sold out ‘before they went on sale’, according to a temporarily reinvigorated Pond.
As well as rehearsing for these engagements, John spent time in the studio piecing together the music to be performed. This was a mammoth task in itself as sessions at Sound Techniques, Olympic Studios and Regent Sound, orchestra under the supervision of Jonathan Foxley, took place amongst a feverish round of promotion, awards ceremonies, interviews and guest appearances.
There were other appearances. Closeted meetings with HM Customs and Excise, which John Nightly learned of by accident after finding a claim for unpaid tax on his manager’s desk laid open for all to see. Unknown to the star and major shareholder of his own empire, the Inland Revenue had been investigating irregularities at JCE for the past 12 months. It seemed that cash pouring in and out of the company’s bank account was being listed in a separately named profits-holding into seemingly unrelated businesses at various addresses in the South West of England. Mining operations that had gone to the wall ten years previously continued to receive heavy investment from a London account.
Taxable profits on John Nightly royalties had been set off against failure in second-investment businesses that no longer existed. Of course John knew nothing about it. But the discovery was the stray spark that would eventually lead to the downfall and collapse of the by now pre-eminent management. One year on, John Carter would be facing imprisonment for fraud; but right now John Nightly was blissfully unaware of both the economic storm that was about to burst and also the damage being done to his relationship with Iona. There was also his own mental state.
Many of John’s associates were already gone to the woods, but perhaps not quite so far gone as John himself as he paced around Queen Square, watching a feature about his new pop/rock opera on the TV news while stuffing packet after packet of cheese thins into his gob, chain-smoking and listening to Erik Satie over and over – no doubt mindful of trying to keep oncoming storms at bay.
You should never go back – that’s the thing. Seems like a long time ago now since we went out with our little torches. To look at the sky. We woulda been seven or eight… not much more than that. We really knew our stars then, had our little maps… star maps – used to get ’em free in comics – and we looked for patterns we recognised… constellations. Little bit of red plastic over the lens to stop the glare. John’s dad showed us that. We were real serious about it.
You have to wait at least fifteen minutes for your iris to adapt to the dark anyway. It’ll open to let more light in, but it takes that amount of time. After another hour, the retina adapts as well and you can see everything you’re looking for, with the naked eye. Like the old naked-eye astronomers, before they had telescopes. After that amount of time… you can also get bloody cold!
We had our sandwiches and we’d just walk for a bit, find a spot, sit down and gaze up at the sky. Wasn’t exactly Jodrell Bank! But it was pretty amazing – was in those days anyway. No light pollution, y’see. Thing was… ’cause we heard Jodrell Bank was sited in a botanical garden* we used to head up in the direction of Bateman Street, where the Cambridge Botanic Garden was… [Justin guffaws loudly to himself] Really! for no reason… just our little kiddie brains…
If, like we did, you spend a lot of time looking at the sky and seeing amazing stuff, you do start to wonder… all this, y’know? Movement and… Does make you think… what the hell is it all about. [raises his eyebrows, in a mock-serious moment] And that makes you think about everything.
We’d read the… schoolboy versions of what Einstein and Newton had discovered. When the Hawking book came out it blasted us, man. In a way because he came from Cambridge. [smiles] John had even done a bit of work for him when John was at school… He was from… the same direction we were. [laughs] Or so we thought! I did anyway… in my… schoolboy brain.
All I know is… I’d love to go back and walk down that road and look up at those stars again… with John, I mean. Any night of the year. Don’t matter what the weather’s like.
Justin Makepeace, Guitar Hero Magazine. Zed Publishing, May 1995
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi talking to Leslie Smith, BBC Radio 4. Transcript: 14 October 1969.
Well, now. Suppose I came to you and I said, please tell me how to meditate ‘transcendentally’? What advice would you give me?
I’ll suggest to you one syllable…
A syllable?
By syllable, I mean some sound…
Like ‘rose’, for example?
No, no, not like ‘rose’. Some sound which will not have any meaning. Its value will be just the sound. Because… because…
Give me an example of such a sound…
No, because… because… the thing is that when we say ‘rose’ the mind goes on the rose and the mind floats on the horizontal… what we call ‘thinking’… Contemplating on something is the horizontal activity of the mind…”
Well, now, can you give me an example?
Examples we don’t give because… because each personality has his own suitable syllable…
* The Jodrell Bank observatory, built in 1945 by the astronomer Bernard Lovell, is situated at the Manchester University Botanical Gardens in Macclesfield.
‘And Jesus said to them
When you make the two one
And when you make the inner as the outer
And the outer as the inner
And the above as
the below
And when you make the male and female into a single one
So that the male will not be male
And the female will not be female
When you make eyes in the place of an eye
And a hand in the place of a hand
And a foot in the place of a foot
And an image in the place of an image
Then you shall enter the Kingdom’
‘The Gospel According to Thomas’
(Nag Hammadi Library)
Meher Baba and Meredith Starr (Herbert Close) at the Coombe Martin retreat, East Challacombe, Devon, 15 September 1931
Vanna Aquila Suri, by day Centrepoint volunteer, by night Wardour Street groupie, sat cross-legged on the pine floorboards of her Cricklewood bedsit.
Placing a pick-up arm on the grooves of ‘Lavender Girl’, Vanna wound the disc slowly backwards, trying to maintain a smooth, steady motion as the peripatetic needle grated its way through each crescendoing high and diminishing low.
She took a pencil from her mouth to scribble half-words on a scrap of Basildon Bond as she nodded her head in acquiescence to the wisdom being dispatched, and squinted, seemingly in some pain, while listening attentively for ‘messages’ – the odd word or sound, a combination of syllables buried within, as her friend Jasmine had indicated.
The polytechnic dropout was fifty-four seconds into the track; the point, just before – or after – chorus three, where Jas had heard John Nightly croon the words ‘Vanna come Nightly’, a distorted, drunken-sounding love-instruction from idol to fan. One of several karmic threads concealed by its author along with other clues deep in the jagged crevices of the vinyl.
The former Davina Woods, 21, recently decamped from Sheffield, was certainly a John Nightly obsessive – a true follower, the perfect chela. But in her own mind Davina was much more. Davina was John Nightly. The actual item. Not merely fan or even fanatic, but a kind of sacred conduit. The word ‘clone’ had not yet come into general use, but it would have been the word to describe her. For Davina saw herself as absolute; a completely integral part of His being. Inner woman to outer man. Shaman and ‘she-man’. He, Him, It – the thing itself. Guest+Host=Ghost. In this case Ghost to the Maker – female half.
Her friends agreed. For, as effectively as she had transformed herself from social worker to socialite, Davina had become, within her natural habitat – the university common-room or pub corner seat – the entire Student Union’s first port of call on all things astrological, and illogical.
Davina would peddle her Vedic horoscopes and natal charts involving ‘solar arcs in transit’, ‘lunar returns’, ‘Nakshatras’, ‘ascendants’, ‘cardinals’, ‘conjunctions’; a sort of cosmic kebab – yours for only 19 shillings and 11 pence, including fully personalised reading – to the highly impressionable only. Naturally divine, with O Level passes in PE and needlework, Woods was suddenly an authority on Zen spirit, pre-life and post-life possibility, spiritual praxis, universality and the Way – all heavily related, when given half the chance, to the creative works of John Nightly.
No one could deny that Vanna was in touch with the vibrations of the age, imagining herself as her Master’s companion along the undulating carriageways of life. But in the past months she had come to believe something more. Some nights, in the depths of her euphoria, the girl from Eccleshall imagined her whole being to have been somehow absorbed inside the Master, the physical person, the man, becoming a part of her Master’s very essence; the soul of him, what there was left of it – the male half – and no doubt wished, wish upon wish upon wish, that he could somehow be inside her.
Like the record she manipulated, Vanna was herself slowly unwinding. She loped along Cricklewood Broadway having ‘head conversations’ with her idol, ignoring the internal cross-talk that had troubled her since childhood, waiting for a word from Him, wherever he might be. Rehearsing potential episodes, learning her lines. How she and her unwitting Master would exist in the regular, everyday world, do their thing at the butcher’s or the laundrette. How serendipitous and significant for them to bump into each other at the zebra crossing or bus-stop? She fantasised how, when in her Master’s company, she would deal with the little things, introduce herself to others and how her Master/Lover might refer to his new ‘other half’.
She might even be accepted as John Nightly’s ‘lady’. Not conjuror’s assistant but more Zen Mistress to Zen Master. Though even Vanna had to admit this was unlikely. That being the case she fancied herself as a kind of ‘head’ academic, an authority on her loved one’s creative achievements and his… spiritual outlook; John Nightly’s ‘life view’ – what he did, what he got up to. Hopefully an ‘authorised authority’ – the first port of call on all things Nightly. Popping up on radio and television whenever any discussion of the Master’s work or his personal ups and downs came up. Or down.
Davina was certain that every word, every note of Nightly’s torrential output, had been the result of some cosmic birth – literally ‘divine’ and aimed directly at her. The entire Nightly oeuvre had been conceived and created for Woods. Her friends thought so too. Told her so. Nightly’s life’s work, its tapestry of ciphers and signifiers, numerators and predictors added up to the ultimate astral chart; full of hope and optimism for the poor deluded young… nutcase – as Pondy would’ve no doubt suggested.
Tonight, the low-roller would be in the presence of the Master once again. ‘Live’ this time, the seventh so far. A fan-club-only concert at Chalk Farm Roundhouse, using one of the tickets given to Centrepoint volunteers. John would perform his famous song about her, his lavender girl. Tonight she would, for the first time, be properly close to her idol and other-world paramour. Close enough to touch. Tonight Davina planned to do something new with John Nightly. Go that little bit further, cross the line. Step through the mirror into a veritable pothole of jiggery-pokery; from open-eyed reality to wettest dream.
Man-Force, God-Force, John-Force. Vanna and Johnna were both Seekers. Two parts of the same One; Single Universal Parent. Mother of God. Atom Heart… Two halves of the same lemon. Whipped up, whirled up, maybe washed up, on a five-mile stretch of golden sand. Both completely… rama-lama-ding-donged, she hoped. Krishna’d out. Like a burned-out Sibelius, a retreating Dylan.
Life’s like that. Sometimes it feels as though it’s all coming at once. Flashes of the past, or ‘before’, long before; ignitions, premonitions of things that may come along next. Life is hardly ever still – or moving in one horizontal, equatorial dimension.
A different situation altogether to her previous relationships with gurus1; for she’d had a few. David Philip Johansson being the first. The primary-school teacher who had recognised her particular talents and encouraged Davina to ‘use her imagination’. Marking her thirty-page essays 9/10. Taking time with her, worrying about her, making sure to place her in workgroups with other kids, leaving her to her own devices as little as possible.
Davina’s child psychiatrist, Dr John Woodley, was another. Someone she enjoyed telling her troubles to, guiding her – ‘saving her’ – through her early teenage years. Woodley in turn being a devotee of J. G. (John Godolphin) Bennett. Vanna had spent time at Bennett’s Coombe Springs community at Kingston upon Thames, two months of a ten-month course, just after arriving in London.
Then finally, a proper guru: foreign, Eastern, one that her friends had actually heard of. Meher Baba (compassionate father), later to become spiritual muse to Pete Townshend, had temporarily showed Vanna the light… Illuminating the way so that John Nightly, her final and absolute saviour, could make his entrance.
But let’s not judge too harshly. Maybe Vanna and Davina came from a background much harsher than yours. When you come from abuse, rejection and deprivation, as do thirty-seven per cent of all children born to families in the north of England2, you go to extremes. You discover your own Enlightenment. In the late months of 1970, full of disappointment and alienated from reality and also them
selves, many people offered just that. Maybe the gurus from India and Tibet, like the evangelists from California, were more of an everyday occurrence on their home territory than they were in Eccleshall. Like princesses in Persia or Malaysia – or Golders Green.
Maybe those gurus seemed more removed. Aloof and special, as an alternative to the violence of our own domestic environment: to our extremely loving parents – our ‘owners’, as the law would have it – and to conventional, left-brained schoolteachers – our ‘trainers’. Or set against the brand of enlightenment as touted by the government and the state – our actual ‘keepers’; the only ones able to exert any real authority over the people, more often than not against the will of the people.
Perhaps in India these becalmed, half-sedated holy men were really more akin to the parish priest, pub landlord or local GP. It might be possible to have some kind of exchange, swap them over, transplanting the pub landlord to the rivers of Rishikesh. Maybe the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi would have exactly the same effect as Derek the landlord down at the Dog and Duck? How might Derek fare in the Himalayas?
Mawgan didn’t think so. He and his friend Julian had gurus too. Surf guys. Kelly Slater or Greg Noll; grade-school athletes riding those big swells out in Waimea Bay whose physical strength had endowed them with true wisdom. Mawg knew they were special. Just last week he and Jules had watched the DVD of Riding Giants3, incredulous at both the power and grace of the boardmasters. Staying on top of the wave was hard enough. How on earth did they get inside and then underneath it?
Endy couldn’t fathom it at all. She could figure surfing on top, of course. Had seen it with her own eyes, during the war when she and her sister travelled to Newquay to watch the American servicemen. If they stayed on for more than ten seconds people would clap and cheer. But these new boys. Walking not on but inside water. How on earth? Though as Mawg pointed out, it wasn’t actually ‘on earth’.