The Story of John Nightly

by Tot Taylor

  10.46am. With exactly one hour to go, thick cloud appeared on the horizon, descending like a stage curtain ready to clothe a command performance. The wind picked up. Darkness crept along the headland from the direction of Redruth. The flanks of visitors and their car radios fell silent as they huddled in groups, cowering in heavy coats and anoraks in the very middle of summer, their tents and shelters like inflated mushrooms strewn across the rocks. The wind dropped and suddenly all was black. Torches and Jiffi lighters illuminated the granite. The encircling bay and the sea chamber were suddenly transformed into a vast auditorium, stadium rock, or John Wesley’s crater, as the congregation waited for something – anything – to happen. Hopefully some kind of whirling black mass; celestial music, the creak of the mill-wheel, maybe even the long, measured, West Country vowels of the Miller himself.

  As in any situation where one or two are gathered together, assembled worshippers waited not for what was about to be delivered but for what they hoped to see in it and what they expected to get out of it. The impressionable among them would experience not the reality – the sun and moon in odd conjunction, very temporary unseasonal weather, fellow travellers like themselves coming together to worship – but some kind of Messiah or Magus event. A mindbender, holy-star power – message ­– if there was one. Some sense to be knocked into them out of all this chaos.

  A couple of quick flashes from an automatic camera then suddenly thousands. Like ground fire from ack-ack positions. The Johns pressed their binoculars hard into their foreheads. Having no more dreams left in them, they concentrated not on what might develop but on what was now taking place behind the façade; the curtain of dense cloud that obscured almost all of the view out to sea. More flashes, and more massed cheering from the bedraggled assembly framed as silhouettes against the disappearing black-water.

  Then ‘it’ happened. The sun and the moon seemed to appear from nowhere, converge directly upon the mass, become one, reach a point of absolute conjunction, two pendulum worlds, as perfect a fit as hand and glove, ring and finger. A magnetic pull away from everyday worry and oppression. Gulls called to each other and flew from the cliffs. Kittiwakes scattered, scared out of their birdbrains by instant and total darkness. The two gods of sun and moon, most ancient super-powers, passed over, did their thing and separated. Visitation and divine alignment. A Cornish rhapsody. Two become one, and a message no doubt for all present.

  Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the thing was over. The freaks hit their car horns and cheered, applauding the two great gods as the Johns removed their binoculars and rubbed their indented skulls. They yawned as if it were a habit, looked out across the bay, the leaden sky, the starless, mid-morning twilight. They glanced at one another and chuckled.

  ‘Lot of fuss over nothing,’ said RCN. Further along the headland, backpackers were lined up along the old tinners’ path, consulting maps and seeking wastepaper bins for illegal cans and bottles. Up ahead, farmhouses already had their lights on while behind them, along the dual carriageway, flickering torches and beams from mobile phones pointed the way home. Above the ocean’s roar and the sea-polished rocks the cloud curtains opened, the sky becoming tinged with yellow, a slab of double-black as black as the Dandelion’s homemade carob cake streaked with precious philosophical student gold. ‘Said on the radio Hawkwind were supposed to play…’*

  Suddenly daylight. Things moved quickly on. There was music. A rave beat leaked from somewhere over near the Zawn. Booming out from a proper rig. The Johns gathered themselves together and began walking back to the car.

  ‘… well… we made the effort…’

  ‘Not a lot to see though… and bloody cold… for the time o’ year.’

  ‘… let’s get back.’

  item: John Nightly: Melody Maker interview, 13 March 1971 by Chris Bell.

  I like the whole idea of randomness. Tristan Tzara used to pull words out of a hat and make up a poem. It’s no big deal in terms of how I think about words or anything, but it leaves me free with the words. Otherwise, writing songs is just one big… crossword. [takes a match and lights another cigarette, takes a first drag and continues]

  I’d be trying to fit words that don’t go into musical spaces because they don’t want to. [snaps the match in half] Trying to balance the weight – the beat… of the syllables – the weight of the music, and the beat and the meaning of each note of the tune.

  [journalist nods sympathetically and continues doodling]

  Even if I could achieve… the technical feat… I still need things to… make sense as well… [flicks ash into his saucer] Whatever that means, so… by writing down some kind of 'sense' to start with… cutting up and… that will free me up… make the writing freer… and that's how you get… words. Ape Box Metal or Mink Bungalow… [Thinks for a second] I don’t just make them up because they sound nice. [sniffs and clears his throat]. It’s kind of… there has to be…

  Did the title Principal Fixed Stars come about in that way?

  That’s from a paper… research paper… by an old astronomer – John Pond. It’s the first ever star atlas… from around the… mid-1500s… Delle stelle fisse. Written by Alessandro Piccolomini.

  [journalist looks suitably impressed]

  And Mink Bungalow?

  It came from the house I stayed in with my… then girlfriend… when we first went to Los Angeles. The realtor – estate agent – billed it as a Spanish villa… but my girlfriend said it’s like a bungalow – old people’s bungalow. And the lady we rented it from was a Mrs Mink, originally Minski… she was related to the Protopopovs – the ice dancers. [stubs out his cigarette. Yawns and apologises for his tiredness]

  Every time I think about the place… the record we played – listened to all the time we were there – was ‘Jesus Was a Cross Maker’. [whistles the tune; interviewer nods again]

  Phoebe loved that song. I can’t think about the house without hearing it. And Billy Fury, hah! Thats what I was playing, ‘Halfway to Paradise’ – like me! and Parsifal, unbelievable bit, the ‘transformation’ bit. The chords. Amazing chords – and tune. Shouldn’t tell you that… [the boy smiles sweetly as he fiddles with the piece of string wound around his wrist] Ape Box Metal came from the chimpanzee they sent into space. That was an easy one.

  And Quiz Axe Queen?

  From the experiments with telegraphs Charles Wheatstone did. But it doesn’t matter about the source. I like all these titles anyway – as titles. Because it all connects… doesn’t sound like a cut-up. You’ve got this nice balance of ‘three’… naturally… in a natural way. Inherent in it, which I… I love the sound of and… that’s why I always use it.

  * * *

  * Hawkwind played at St Michael’s Mount in 1971.

  From around the time of the third US tour, mid-July 1971 onwards, the Nightly live set tended to be configured in two halves, the first being a slow burner. Ashley would begin with a short prologue, one chord held down on the Mellotron with his left hand while he played the ‘Lux Eterna’ theme on an electric harpsichord with his right. Then a waltz treatment of ‘Lavender Girl’, a specialty that went down particularly well with stoned audiences.

  The atmosphere was somewhere between evangelist convention, mime theatre with a budget and rock’n’roll funfair. Everyone – performers and audience – would be settling down, sunset would come and night would begin to fall. Without any announcement, dressed head to toe in white, and in complete darkness save for a solitary guiding torch, a silent, slight figure, a magicien – the Magicien – would emerge from the shadows.

  With his guitar set unfashionably high – the way Merseybeat groups held their instruments – the only Mahavishnu it could’ve been was John Nightly, if not John McLaughlin, who also cut a dash onstage and off in white cotton slacks and polo-neck, Royal Navy haircut and twin-necked cherry-red SG.

  In his soft white suit, loosely tied cravat and felt bolero – one of three or four per night to be sacrificed to the crowd –
John would’ve been watching the build-up from behind the PA. Getting in the mood, swaying in time to the music before stepping out. As candle-lighters tiptoed around the stage, making sure to avoid the perilous tangle of cables and wires, and dancers put their arms around each other to give good-luck hugs, there would be a gradual realisation among those gathered that the ‘presence’ they’d come to pay homage to was now… among them.

  As Ashley continued to improvise, forcing Stravinsky on Irving Berlin, zigging and zagging in and out of The Planets, weaving in and out of Debussy, a dash of Pretty Things here and Russ Conway there, the twinkling, skywide star-curtain would appear from smoke-filled scaffold. As it descended, the lighting of candles would gradually replace the late-evening sun as the auditorium was transformed into a revolving celestial sphere, backlit to reveal the performers, each bathed in their own radiant glow, while the band took up their positions and dancers trespassed upon the edges of the stage. As if Tycho Brahe had been the set designer for Jailhouse Rock.

  After a few minutes or so the preamble would grind to a halt, the circular section of the platform would stop revolving and – BANG! – the assembled community would launch into ‘The Miller’…

  Meet me at the Corn Exchange…

  And bring me eggs that are free-range

  Please don't think me very strange

  If I prefer a toasted cake or sop… o… nge…

  … followed by tracks from the first two albums, those the star himself could still bear to perform. Although, truth be told, as soon as John Nightly had a song recorded he instantly lost all interest in performing it or even hearing it again. Listening to his own recordings made their creator feel physically sick. The only enjoyment John Nightly had ever gotten from his own music was in the actual creation of it. The spark that begat it; and the reaction to that spark. There might be some kind of secondary pleasure in the sales accounting of each record and the accumulation of income, an absolute indication of the level of acceptance from the audience in response to what its originator had given, but the real buzz occurred in solitude. Nowadays, the creation of music was the only activity that could lift the Magicien from his despairing aloneness – or, as he now often referred to it, again after Laing, his ‘perpetual solitude’.

  ‘Free School Lane’, because of its easy, repetitive groove, closed the first set, bringing the audience to climax even though the festivities were barely halfway through. At the end of that 40 minutes, the heavenly backdrop depicting the fixed stars of the sidereal zodiac opened from the centre to reveal, like a megalomaniac conjuror’s act, more than 100 string players, their violins, violas, cellos and double-basses bowing as one for the intro to ‘Lavender Girl’. This effect having been conceived as being ‘too much’ for the audience, who would lift up their arms, cheer and chant, reach out and generally go apeshit crazy at the sight of such a spectacle, making the anticipation for the remainder of the evening almost unbearable.

  Thirty minutes or so later, intoxicated by the balm of various fragrances, the incense wafting in from the wings, the lavender and sandalwood phials smashed on the stage, cheap joss sticks in the crowd, the musky aroma of scented candles planted in the undergrowth, and at least one complete bottle of Southern Comfort, John Nightly would step up to the microphone.

  ‘I…’ he would say, ‘am a traveller…’

  ‘I… am a lost child…’ The audience would respond – as one – before the band attempted to reproduce whatever they could manage from the nascent work in progress, the still-untitled (Black) Requiem.

  Another 40 or so dancers, choreographed by Donna, climbed to the edge of the upper deck as the lighting designers used stage beams to silhouette the chorus against the starry backcloth.

  This overblown conceit was the reality of live performance of the era. The greatest show on earth. Something of a circus, but a state circus at least. Had they believed it possible to include dancing horses, elephants and hot-air balloons, the Nightly production would’ve. Whether in a small club, a ballroom, Student Union hall or polytechnic canteen, a makeshift festival stage or a huge arena like this one, Ashley, Justin, Jonathan, Ron and the others delivered a genuine one-off excitement, a level of live performance the audience did not expect to be bettered by any other act of the time. No other band or group being able to afford or be stupid enough to try to stage it. The stops were well and truly pulled out. It was a performance more akin to Diaghilev or Billy Smart than rock’n’roll. That was what was good about it.

  At the end of the night there would be ‘encores’, as many as the audience could get out of the assembled crew – John Nightly having taken to not performing any of his own songs at all as ‘requests’, but instead an alternative ‘bouquet of love songs’. Usually in the form of a cabaret-club medley consisting of ‘I Know Where I’m Going’ by Roger Quilter, snippets of the Yardbirds’ ‘For Your Love’ or the Fourmost’s ‘Hello Little Girl’, with a nod to Mahavishnu’s ‘Meeting of the Spirits’ topped off with a crowd-pleasing singalong of Sutch’s ‘My Big Black Coffin’.*

  Security Notice: Because of the use of lighted candles in the performance, the stadium manager requests that the audience refrain from smoking, lighting fires or using paraffin cigarette-lighters, incense or joss sticks in the main auditorium and the surrounding area.

  * From time to time John Nightly encores of the period also included Phil Och’s ‘There But for Fortune’, Astaire’s ‘Top Hat’, with the full complement of cane-tap gunshots courtesy of Miss Vost and the RKO film projected onto the group’s backdrop, along with a rather too heavy-handed reading of Badfinger’s ‘No Matter What’.

  Being back in LA was like being in space – though if anything more isolated. In the outer cosmos there are (as far as we know) no people, while in Los Angeles there are too many faces to first get into, then out of, your mind.

  The news was that the Magicien was ‘catatonic’ – the term used to describe a medical condition which through no fault of its own had acquired a tinge of glamour; if there could be anything at all glamorous about a schizophrenia so debilitating that it can lead to unconsciousness.

  In John Nightly’s case it was natural to assume burn-out to be a delayed reaction to the industrial amounts of weed, alcohol and various pastel-coloured toxins the boss had seen fit to inflict on his system these past few summers.

  Onstage that evening, as the Nightly band faced their audience, John Nightly gazed out and saw not row upon row of adoring good-vibing heads, but flank upon flank of bad-vibing pirate skulls shooting plumes of smoke. Warrior dandelions and thistles the size of telegraph poles like the ones from his father’s garden colonised the terrain. He saw ploughed acres in rainbow strips. He felt the heat of the guano, the composited remains of the nightdreams of a deluded generation.

  As he zoomed in and out he encountered distorted faces, the fat-bellied jowls of the maddest, most obsessed super-fans. Distended, tip-burned heads, seeming to devour themselves; heads that would never flower. Then out of nowhere, heavy horses came thundering towards the stage, and therefore towards the band, charging from a flickering, fiery mount – a crazed DeMille rhapsody, targeting players and dancers. The chariots eating up the entire stage, devouring the poor innocent English boys and washing over them, drenching them. Obliterating Justin, Ashley, Jon and Ron, boys from small towns promoted well above their social expectation. Clueless about life in general and no doubt thankful to be in the privileged position the gift of music had bestowed upon them. The TV news would report the unfortunates literally wiped off the planet by killer gulfweed, hair-weed, grizzle-weed.

  Last week in Madrid was the worst yet. Killer stalks, the same ones that haunted John’s father, creatures that would sneak up overnight between cracks in the suburban brick, needing to be weeded out almost daily – need to weed, as they say in gardening mags. Here were those same beady eyes, not bashful, not subservient, but utterly confident, driven, right up there in front, leering like anorak uncles, on the scaffold
with the tweeters and woofers and bins, their rusted, corrugated leaves and jaundiced ovaries dangling most unhealthily high above the performers.

  In Grantchester, John had been well trained. Pinching the bastards out as soon as he saw one taking root. The child hated touching the furry, flesh-crawly things. Unpleasant to the touch, somehow malevolent, taunting him from inside their padded, upholstered gullets. Consumptive presences. Their faces hidden among a tangle of hard yellow knots. Or were they just fans? Justin asked, as he uncorked another bottle of ’69.

  The boss stared out front, then looked back to the band. ‘Stop watering them, Ash! Stop watering!’ he cried, in this suddenly frail and sexless voice – as documented on bootlegs of the concert. In the posted clip – www.freefall.com/nightlyend/smonica/ snatcher71 – as they launch into ‘Free School Lane’, John doesn’t so much sing his heart out as scream it, his voice becoming unrecognisably hoarse, before, thank God, he is coerced away from the mike in a most graceful display by Justin as the band rolls into the newly extended overture to MBR.

  At first the audience seems excited by the committed performance; whatever is going on is exciting. Is passionate, undressed, direct. Uncontrolled. Human. Very un-John Nightly-ish.

  But, that night, John Nightly was seeing something neither his colleagues nor the audience could see – an apparition indeed. At the end of the mercifully short clip the crowd emerge from their communal stupor and begin shouting, cheering… jeering. ‘C’mon… c’mon… then!’ they cry, encouraging the Master to shout harder, scream louder, go further, be more passionate still, make more of a fool, more of a human, of himself.