The Story of John Nightly

by Tot Taylor

  But, because the singer fails to respond to or even acknowledge this encouragement, neither hearing nor seeing them, failing to engage with the audience at all for the duration of the concert, a wave of puzzlement soon comes over them. The packed stadium of long-term devotees, knowing and possibly understanding a good deal more about John Nightly than he ever will himself, realise that something is deeply, desperately wrong.

  Back in the auditorium, the band had stopped performing. They were still playing, but had stopped giving out. There was the sight of Justin, cast as sentinel stage left, a position he had never previously occupied (it being reserved exclusively for the main attraction, as Pondy dictated). Right-hand man, suddenly up there on equal terms with the Master. Justin’s eyes fixed on John. Ron, resplendent in cape and bicorn hat, abandoned his Mellotron and crept across the stage towards Jonathan and Ash. ‘Keep playing!!’ he shouted, as the drummer struggled to keep things in order by reverting to a completely uncharacteristic backbeat. Tying down the groove, grounding it. Bringing John Nightly’s agitated, un-rhythmic rhythms right back to rock’n’roll basics. A flashback drum-wise through the group’s progressively experimental journey as seamlessly as he could manage.

  A few more minutes, and the delicate, ornate metre of ‘Lavender Girl’ had been reduced to a slow-burning mechanical tick. The group’s leader left clutching the mike, as if, God forbid, electrocution had welded him to it, his faithful Stratocaster hanging limply across his shoulder blades.

  The boss stared out to face his audience, while at the same time staring into the sub-natural abyss. John mouthed something. Numbers… a count-in, or count-out maybe. Random numbers, as Ashley yelled to everyone from the other end of the wide platform, held his sticks high in the air, indicating that the band and orchestra take note, before executing a very long, very clichéd drum roll twice around the kit, the staple rejoinder for an assembly of musicians to call it a day, song-wise. This swift, extremely unsignature riff brought the song, and also the careers of all those on stage, to a most unscheduled and uncharacteristically, somewhat-corny end.

  But Lee was way ahead of them; and so, during Ashley’s solo, and the extended drum wind-up, the Revox had been faded up through the house speakers into the stadium itself. A muffled orchestral segment from MBR; the funereal ‘Adagio Mortada’, seeped out into the ether, washing over the open-mouthed gathering like a chemical purifier or detergent. What had just occurred had been unsettling to watch, if you were in your right mind.

  That final night at the Estadio Quinta, John Nightly must have known that these evil Manga weeds were not real. He must have. There was so much opposition in that very worshipful assembly against evil itself. Forty-seven thousand well-wishing, ticket-bearing freaks in communion with their main man. Sending him their best, willing to be seduced by his fakery, wanting him to take them home, duped by his phoney courtship and tin-pot philosophy. Like the tinners in John Wesley’s pit congregations, John Nightly’s assembly had come to worship.

  Justin, unable to deal with emotion any easier than the average band member, tried to comfort: ‘Not to worry, man… just a… a flip-out; weird one. Really… y’know…’

  And that was it. The extent of the wisdom that John Nightly’s closest associate, oldest and no doubt most-treasured countenance had to offer his lifelong buddy and patron. ‘Don’t cut yourself up, man,’ comforted Ash. ‘We’re here right beside you… standing on the same stage, John. Your mates… your old mates, band mates. Listening to me, John? We can’t see any weeds… because there ain’t no fuckin’ weeds. No… horses and no carts neither.’ Justin took another swig. ‘Nothing like that out there. All there is, is a bunch of fans. Record-buyers… supporters of the band.

  John…’

  Justin took his friend’s guitar, liberated it from John’s neck, making sure the volume was off before he leaned it carefully against the speaker cabinet. The machine rocked from side to side, refusing to be silenced. Like the boys themselves, unwilling to finish its days quite yet. The machine protested by emitting a low, morose hum. Regenerating feedback that pumped through the circuitry of the amp and the guitar’s expensively customised pick-ups. The instrument continued to complain and moan for several minutes, but its cry for mercy was lost in the creak of broken topsoil and turned earth beginning to both envelop and encase a panicked frontman.

  ‘We can’t see anything, man,’ repeated Justin, waving one arm out into the universe as he wrapped the other around his companion for the night, the unnatural blonde otherwise to be found behind the stadium’s hot-dog counter… ‘Can we, babe?’ But the young woman was visibly shocked, and silenced, by the state of the backstage persona of the most famous individual she’d yet been in the presence of.

  This frighteningly recent episode was one of a million other flashbacks that sped through John Nightly’s mind-files as he lay face-down on the carpet. Weeds in the audience, weeds on stage. Meetings with the taxman, deaths in the family, specks on the ceiling. It had come to this. Whacked-out on the floor where Kennedy, Johnston, Nixon and God knows how many candidates, dealers, pushers and hookers had slept or slumped. John Nightly was making a very close inspection of the carpet. Soon, very soon now, he would indeed be returning ‘home’.

  Although no one realised it at the time, that night at the Hyatt, the leading man in no fit condition to continue, it really was all finally over. Laid to rest. The auditory hallucinations had sealed it. Paramedics arrived and stopped the fight. John Nightly was cut off. Never to be switched on again. John would never sing for money again. He would never have any kind of a relationship with an outsider again. The boss would rather let go the ropes, give up and perish, than have to make any kind of effort towards engagement. Given the option, it was an alternative he would happily consider right now. If he, or any of the others, were able to break into the de-oxygenated soul that lay frozen before them.

  But what of the ‘practicals’? As the manager, were he still any kind of manager at all, would doubtless ask. What exactly were the practicals? They had to be considered, of course. And as a five-man Los Angeles district PM unit carried the now unconscious boss out of Room 313, the assembled crew considered the practicals extremely… practically.

  The most pressing practical being that Ash, Justin, Ron, Jonathan, Lee and Jean-Claude would have no option but to seek alternative employment, wherever it could be found. All were professionals, and as such, week to week, needed to make a living from their profession.

  Mosaic/EMI, its shareholders and directors, would have no alternative but to take the hit. Loss of income from this extremely profitable, easy-to-deal-with multi-stream sales generator would be difficult to bear. Company share price was guaranteed to suffer. The John Nightly infrastructure – agents, bookers, promoters, publishers, label bosses, marketing men, PR executives, legal teams, income-distribution processors and royalty-calculation societies, all of whom depended on his earnings as a significant part of their annual turnover – would readjust; maybe, in some cases, collapse.

  The fans would disperse, find another ten-a-penny, hyped-to-death rock’n’roll fabrication. General interest would evaporate, and sooner or later, three, four… five years down the line, income would dry up, at which point he… he himself, god of all things – boss, shaman, magicien, revered seer and peer, devoted school chum and… all the rest of it – he… would dry up.

  Thirty-two years old. Stopped… like a .42-calibre slug fired into arc-iron, beached like a sperm whale, dried out like a California raisin. No use to anyone anymore. The world too small a place. The most deserted oceanic hideaway, the farthest arctic cabin too close a place. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to run, to ‘get back’. Nowhere to go to try to right things. Except inward maybe.

  That’s exactly where he went.

  During the next weeks there was some, albeit temporary, recovery. John remained in Los Angeles. In bed mostly. No doubt he whittled and worried. He did not fiddle, fornicate or philander. The boy kept himself
to himself, fixed on many ceilings and floors. Considering his position and his options. Mentally, spiritually and physically, John Nightly was becoming quite unrecognisable.

  John’s straw hair, now more scarecrow than swan, poked out of his head like the dandelion stalks he had been trying to avoid. His Dutch-boy cut had collapsed into a kind of crow’s nest. The whites of his eyes, and the craters beneath them, were riddled with thin, red veins. Like many so-called music fans who stop listening, stop tuning in at a certain point in their life, it was as if John had also become cobwebbed. The boss never seemed quite clean or very hygienic anymore; his scaly, glazed skin no longer protected and covered his innards but seemed to leak from them, like skin on custard. This odd, unhealthy look, coupled with his dead-eyed countenance and worsening manners, lent him a kind of instant ‘feel-bad factor’ whenever he entered a room.

  After six weeks of it John Nightly got up from his bed one endless day, took one step forward, and 32,000 steps back. He looked himself up and down. He dusted himself off, straightened himself out and cut off his ragged corners, checking that whatever remained of him was operational before he folded himself in, sealed himself up and disconnected his tired, spongy brain. John Nightly flicked the switch, pulled the plug on his own internal power supply, let the battery go flat, went completely off air and stopped broadcasting. Closed down altogether, taking the only route open to him. He then, from the general public’s point of view, vanished for almost forty years.

  The Twilight Grotto of Tito and Hanna Robst

  Local Zarathustrians Tito and Hanna Robst opened their beautiful, recently refurbished modular residence to the local community of Elmo for the first time last weekend as part of the Elmo Open, the popular twice-yearly event where residents of the small Wisconsin town are invited to open their gardens to the public on two weekends per year. The Robsts proudly unveiled a new ‘Disney-inspired’ candlelit grotto dedicated to the preachings of Zarathustra and the Avestan way of life and also as a celebration of the music of seventies rock singer John Nightly from England, Great Britain. The Robsts have spent two months preparing this ‘contemplative’ and ‘calming’ corner of their garden adjoining their rose-covered English bungalow. For further information go to Wisconsin.gov (e-government portal) or by post 1113, 6th Ave, Elmo, Wisconsin, W1 54481, USA.

  Hyperlink: The American Folklore Society, afsnet.org

  item: Brian O'Hara, the Fourmost (12 March 1942– 27 June 27 1999).

  Brian O'Hara, former singer and guitarist with the Fourmost, a 1960s Liverpool group managed by Brian Epstein that had hits with songs written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, has been found hanged at his home. He was 58. Liverpool police found O’Hara in the Wavertree area of the city. The group, originally known as the Blue Jays, had half a dozen hit singles from 1963 to 1965, including ‘Hello Little Girl’ and ‘I’m In Love’ by Lennon and McCartney. The Fourmost appeared in the Gerry and the Pacemakers film Ferry Cross the Mersey.

  THE STORY OF JOHN NIGHTLY

  SCREENPLAY/LOCATIONS

  Cambridge – University & Town

  1958-1965

  London – Soho, Regent’s Park, Mayfair

  1966-1970

  Los Angeles – the Summer Center

  1972-1982

  Cornwall – area surrounding Porthcreek

  1982-2006

  OPENING TITLE

  Cornwall – a vast expanse of ocean is seen from the air. Bright sparkling colours. A sunny midsummer’s day with high, rolling waves. The camera swoops and glides like a bird high above the water. Close-ups of the inside – the ‘tubes’ – of the waves, as they roll in. The volume of the waves is deafening. Orchestral music rolls with the film, rushing along in tempo with the wind and the ocean.

  The camera circles the cliff edge to locate a lone character perched on top of a precipice facing out to sea. A thin, slight figure, 60 years old, huddled together as if freezing cold on this blisteringly hot summer’s day, knees drawn up to his chin, windcheater zipped right up to his neck.

  Close-up we see he is shivering in the sun, his teeth chattering. He gazes out to sea immobile and lost; the camera floats over him and glides down to the road running behind him, parallel to the coast. A delivery truck, a white fish van, makes its way slowly along the narrow B-road, supplying fresh fish to the houses and farms dotted about the coastal plain.

  VOICEOVER

  A close-miked, world-weary, but still youthful voice…

  ‘You know in a dream? When something really bad, or something really good is about to happen? And you try to move, to run? To get out of there as fast as your legs can carry you? But somehow, no matter how hard you try, you just can’t seem to move fast enough? As fast as you need to. You’re running and running, but you’re just not getting anywhere. Well… my life was a bit like that…’

  Suddenly the wind turns and the bird is dragged away, carried backwards high up into the sky. The music also unwinds and plays the symphonic extract backwards, Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols, as we spin back through the film at tremendous speed – a typical film flashback – in black and white. Looking down the tube, out of this spiralling tunnel we can just about make out a figure coming towards us. A young boy, five, maybe six years old, with a school cap and a satchel, running, running, along a pavement, as fast as his legs can carry him. It is an idyllic, sunny late afternoon in a suburban tree-lined Cambridge street sometime in the mid-1950s.

  The boy cannot wait to get home as he turns through a wooden gate into a gravel drive leading up to a house where an attractive woman, his mother, waits at an open doorway. They greet and hug as though they haven’t set eyes on each other for years, though the child left home for school only that morning. As she releases him from her arms, he rushes past her down a corridor into another room, a modern open-plan lounge that looks out onto a tended garden. There is an upright piano which the boy jumps on and plays although we don’t hear what he plays as the orchestral music still carries over. The camera closes in on his hands and now we do hear John Nightly’s music – simple piano chords that fade in as the orchestra gradually recedes.

  When the camera pulls back from the same hands we see the same character but 20 years later a young man sitting at a grander piano in a large recording-studio where there is a band rehearsing, recording. John Nightly is dressed in a white YSL suit and silk scarf, very much in 1970s mode. He gets up from his white piano, stares into the control-room and mouths something to the engineer. He walks towards the control-room and pushes the heavy, soundproofed door. As it opens, the camera peers inside the room, John Nightly looks in and sees himself, a young teenage ex-schoolboy sitting nervously, foot tapping like a jackhammer, as he waits in a typically dismal showbiz office.

  SCENE 1

  Interior: London, Carnaby Street; Monday, 12 January 1966

  Seen from the boy’s POV, a small office with two pretty secretaries. John is daydreaming about a recent live appearance in Cambridge, his group having won the annual music competition at a local public house. We see and hear the performance going on in his head.

  Girl

  ‘Had a cup of tea?’ – a secretary interrupts the boy’s concentration

  SCENE 2

  Exterior: London, Carnaby Street

  A TV reporter on the streets of London’s Carnaby Street. She is 16-17 years old, a little over-enthusiastic in her ‘swinging’ commentary…

  ‘This is London…’

  SCENE 3

  Trewin House, Porthcreek, 1982

  A hand picks up the telephone.…

  ‘I’d like to speak with Mr Nightly, please…’ a voice announces at the other end.

  ‘Carn Point Lighthouse is situated on one of the most dangerous and dramatic stretches of coastline in Britain. For years CPL has been warning mariners of the treacherous sunken and exposed rocks near Pendeen Watch. Its lamp has the intensity of 300,000 candela, and a range of nineteen miles.’

  www.lighthouse.org

 
item: The Times, London. 7 March 2004.

  West Penwith in Cornwall is set to become the international centre for wave-power generation if a bid to install one of the world’s most advanced wave-energy technologies is successful this Friday. A sea-based power plant will gather the energy generated by the massive swells that regularly batter Cornwall’s west coast, and is intended to be the first of five plants designed to transform the energy of the seas around Britain into electricity for the national grid. Speaking at a public meeting in Truro yesterday, Lars Vardom, chairman of WavCon, the company behind the wave-power generator, said: ‘Wave plants are the mains power of the future. We believe that the plant will be 100 per cent effective, so that if people want to look at successful sea-power systems – which is going to be a major factor in energy generation in the future – they will come here.’ A prototype wave generator built by Wave Boom is now successfully completing trials at Limfjorden in east Denmark. Other companies, including Wavedom and Seagrove Systems, are also developing plans for construction of other wave-power plants in the UK.

  ‘He paints the wayside flower, he lights the evening star…’

  Endy is in full flow. Sunday teatime means Songs of Praise to some 13 million Britons. Endymion Peed is one of them. The housekeeper sits, as she always does, deep within the springless depths of Trewin’s tulip-patterned couch. Alexandre beside her, both of them at one with the TV congregation, oblivious to the real, unholy chaos beyond their own little hidey-hole. The singing housekeeper, swept away by the sight of BBC believers joining together on her favourite Methodist anthem. The exact same sound that makes the two Johns feel ‘physically sick’ should they happen to pass by the living room at 6pm on a Sunday.