by Tot Taylor
‘We plough the fields and scatter, the good seed on the land…’
‘I love this one’, whispers Endy. ‘Oh, I love the harvest hymns, Sandy… good old John Wesley hymn, this is.’ She ruffles the grey-flecked coat of her dopey friend.
Next door, the men of the house do their best not to listen. RCN is on the telephone trying to track down grass seed, while Robert deals with a pile of export documents to meet new European Community guidelines. As for Mawg, he lays half-comatose on the carpet, lost in his own Xbox reality, shielded from normal life by the religion of Nintendo while being protected still further by his ever-present ‘full-spectrum’ headset.
But what of John? The boss is… well, no one knows exactly where he is – in any sense – but he is around. Occasionally the old rocker will wander off on his own, but not very far. He liked to sit, on a humid, late-October eve, among the flowering cacti and pelargoniums set along the back corridor of the farmhouse. If he isn’t there, seemingly content and self-contained, he might be in the kitchen, reading the local paper, scouring the classifieds for bargains he doesn’t need, checking auction lists of sales that have already taken place, or maybe just burning some toast. Perhaps he’ll be in the study, taking a casual look at one of his ‘favourites’, as he thumbs through the scientific, astronomical and cosmological treatises lining the shelves of RCN’s makeshift office.
Stephen Hawking is a favourite. Stephen Hawking is well-thumbed-through, Hawking’s ideas following on from those of the other Cambridge geniuses John has studied all those years before. The way things are simply put, with the book using everyday language. The way it all seems so obvious and somehow natural. Stephen never tries to put it on.
The last time John Nightly had visited Cambridge, at the very height of his megalomania, he’d heard the man himself speak at a hastily arranged lecture in Caius cellars. As usual, the place was packed. John Nightly recalled the feeling of expectation, the familiar click-clack of stick on slate as Hawking made his way along the dank passage. Even at 21 years old, the future guru already had a reputation as an enlightening speaker, creating a buzz about himself and his ideas long before A Brief History of Time. Neither was there anything at all ‘difficult’ about the legendary but little-read tome. A kid could understand it. All you had to do was tune in and hang on. Be receptive – as receptive as a child. John could certainly do that. Both Mawg and RCN had taken on ABHOT and managed to survive it, no doubt emerging cosmically enriched at the other end.
Some days, if Mawg was in domestic mode, off-duty during an enforced break from technology, taking Alexandre for a stroll or catching up with a pile of sci-fi downloads, John might wander into the music room and hit PLAY. Not meaning at all to interfere, but simply to check exactly where his collaborator was at. Whether the kid had completed all of his ‘tasks’; these being instructions from the boss, a list of which was drawn up at the end of each session.
John Nightly couldn’t re-jig or update anything himself of course. Not even to turn up the volume or delete an instrument. John had no idea about how anything actually worked. But he could listen, absorb, memorise and obsess, with that photographic sound memory of his unbelievably still intact. Now, more than ever, the boss was coming back to the kid with suggestions, managing to keep whole swathes of music logged in his right-hand brain, just as he was able to in the old days. ‘Harpsichord needs to be louder there’, ‘Let’s add another bar at the start of that’, ‘Turn up the brightness – on everything – no, just turn up everything!’ he instructed. Sometimes struck by inspiration while stargazing out on the lawn or downing one of Endy’s homemade pasties.
The kid had certainly done a job on the music. And on John Nightly. Every move of the cursor was there to serve the Master. Mawgan was talented enough to be making music in his own right, of course. He had more than the necessary skill and imagination, if he’d wanted to do it. It must have been what he was aiming for eventually. After all, he was still only twenty-one, three years into the project, as it neared its eventual end – the ‘end of the end’ – as RCN cheerfully referred to it. Both Johns were no doubt looking forward to hearing what their young friend and colleague would be getting up to on his release.
But the first thing the kid needed was a good, long break. Mawg’s girlfriend, local hippie-chick Karen, model daughter of model-mother escapee from the Swinging age, had made an excellent job of charming the misfits of Trewin. A florist and flower-arranger by trade, Karen had quickly engaged with the ‘family’ by quizzing Robert about flowering cycles and Endy on Peed-patented Fairy Liquid mixtures. The teenager planned to get Mawg down to the small cottage they’d recently taken near Sennen Cove, financed by an inheritance from her grandfather and the £60,000 advance on royalties that RCN had given the young man in return for three years of his life. A suitable reward for overseeing a project that the nurse believed had the potential to generate at least ten times that amount, maybe 100 times, with the release of the MBR monster mash now set for the following July.
They were almost there. Really very little to be done now. The thing lay in wait back there in the guest bedroom. Having been rescued, watered and fed, it sat patiently on three Apple displays; a picture of health, lush as Eucalyptus. Reassembled, remodelled, remixed, reheated, redeemed. The Mink Bungalow Requiem had been spoiled rotten by long-term TLC. Sonically brought up to spec, polished and digitised, bits duplicated or copied – though never chopped off. Every second of John Nightly’s original vision had managed to survive the thirty-year-long journey. It really was a fully fledged triple-album monstrosity, the sort of thing that really shouldn’t be kept in the back bedroom, once again recognisable and identifiable as the same monster its creator remembered it as from three decades back in time.
Foyle’s bookshop, Charing Cross Road, London WC2. Monday, 8 May 1988. Jean-Claude Marx, author of Exclamation Marx! 60 Stories from the 60s (Random House, 1988) featured author.
‘His problems got far worse after the failure of the… Requiem.’ Jean-Claude stares at the untouched stack of signed copies on the table in front of him, ‘Ape Box had sold this crazy… ten million albums or something, but they still couldn’t get a single play on the new one.’ J-C leans over and straightens the pile, ‘And how could you? You’re trying to get them to play a record that doesn’t have anything on it which is actually ‘play-a-ble’. Long passages of… sound effects and… God-knows-what!’ The author seems put out, for no particular reason. ‘Bits and pieces of this and that. “Random-chanced”, he called them.’ He looks disgusted, ‘and then expect it to be played on US radio? Or anywhere else for that matter!’ J-C takes a sip of water as he notices an unusually well-dressed woman who has just entered the shop.
‘No “real songs” on the record at all. No “concessions”, you see. To people. People who buy records! The shortest piece lasted twenty minutes! J-C pauses and takes a deep breath, ‘there were… beautiful things, of course – I don’t say there weren’t – things they recorded in London… in the church – those orchestral pieces – the links, they were genuinely beautiful. [nods his head in agreement with himself] I used to… almost to have tears when they played them over the system, even at soundchecks and things. In those huge auditoriums with all that power. Like God coming out of the speakers. The “Lux Eterna”… That was… was a real – very much the ‘real thing’, as people say. But the rest of it… [gesticulates wildly as he travels back in time] Then… the real terror, when “reality struck”! J-C’s eyes become wild now too, ‘bankrupted by the whole fusion-power… farce. Stupid fool. Fool! Who the hell is travelling across the United States with a 200-piece rock group, 4,000-piece orchestra and 5,000 groupies? [lots of shuffling in the room] Then tries to power the whole thing up using water and candles!’
J-C picks up a wine bottle, checks the label, turns his nose up, and pours himself a glass.
‘No lighting at all apart from that, you see. Just candles. Millions of candles! Couldn’t damned well see wha
t you were doing! My engineers and electricians were going absolutely crazy. You can’t fix a plug or wire, or sort out a fault in candlelight for God’s sake!’
The store’s event manager shuffles in his chair, preparing to curtail the ‘interview’; tonight’s featured author puts down his empty glass, takes another disgusted look at the empty bottle and continues.
‘Wave Power was something that I put together for him, something that no one else was doing… using. And that, I’m sure, was part of the attraction and the attention for us. To be the first… which he, John, always wanted to be. Literally nobody else in the world had it and even we didn’t know if it was efficient – in terms of being ‘stable’ or even ‘safe’ power. We didn’t know! We’re transporting these huge girders around on trucks. They have to be set up along the coast.’ Jean-Claude gets up from his chair. ‘Madness! In an extremely mad, bad way I’m afraid,’ he laughs, laughing ‘at’ as well as ‘with’ the memory of the whole (in retrospect) ludicrously doomed enterprise; a fresh bottle appears on the table and is waved away by the event manager.
‘Even with the music you get pitching problems all the time because the level of power is not stable. Everything is flat! That’s one of the reasons we all use electricity in the first place. Sta-bi-li-ty! He knew that, of course. Knew that very well. If anyone understood that, John did.’
The speaker sits down again, rather exhausted already, even before his unscheduled outburst. ‘I can't think about it anymore. The man went through hell. But self-inflicted hell in a way also, I believe. To some extent, maybe we all did.’
‘We had this guy, mu-si-co-logist, come in and give a sort of lecture on the Requiem Mass. Not the Bungalow one, but the normal one, Mozart, Fauré, er… as a musical format. So that we mortals could ‘understand’ it. Hah! [pours himself a full glass of water and grimaces]
‘He – John – thought it was important that we all know about it. Because as usual, of course, the man was suddenly an expert! Anyway… we all soon became quite ‘au fait’ – expert too, about the old Requiem Mass. And the choreographer, Donna… sweet girl. As usual there was something going on… some “stuff” there.’ J-C raises his eyebrows. ‘Poor girl, you know… couldn’t see what she was doing. None of the dancers could see what they were bloody well dancing towards! Where exactly was the end of the bloody stage? [Settles down a little, possibly feeling that by now he may have made his point]
‘I was always told it looked good from the arena. Incroyable! was what everyone said. But it was dangerous as hell. Then of course the “bad thing” happened, and we lost a guy… Sacha… beautiful young guy… who fell from the rig… and that was because he could not see what he was doing, or even exactly where he was. And that really affected him – John. Destroyed him, certainly. You don’t usually have people die when you do entertainment.’ J-C smiles sourly and motions to the woman, now fixed on her own reflection in the bookshop window.
‘Our friend really was a poor thing after that. For a long, long time. But again, he was, or “is”, wherever he is, whatever he is doing, still an artist. He’s an artist and so he can recover from these things… rescue himself… as long as he has his Art. But I think what did it for John more than anything else was when we got back. When the… career side of things began to… dis… deteriorate. And the horror-movie people1 approached him for the music, the Requiem music, for some… horrible horror. That affected John because there was nothing he could do to stop it. So they used it… this extremely beautiful thing. They sped it up and hacked it about… this amazing piece of music, composed for entirely another purpose, became the bloody tune to bloody Blood of Dracula! Or whatever it was.
Then after that, when they got back to England, they asked him to write a song for that… Europe song thing. You know… Eurovision! is what I mean2. Then the bloody record company went down. He did something with a circus in London… TV gig. I think was the last thing he ever did do, wasn’t it?”. J-C acknowledges the woman again and smiles a little too sweetly, ‘After that it was totally over. Totally! And he went into a… a kind of – I don’t know what exactly – terrible desperation, I presume.’
2 Drac’s Blood, a Cameo Films Production. d. John Luseinger, UK/Italy 1974.
2 John Nightly himself did actually suggest his publishers submit a track – ‘Jesus Lover’, an anti-religion, anti-fan song based on the Wesleyan hymn ‘Jesus Lover Of My Soul’. The song was rejected by the UK Eurovision selection committee.
The winds and waves obey him,
By him the birds are fed…
Oh God… Endy was still singing along. Robert sat thumbing through the paper. ‘That one could have been written for the boss…’
‘I hope you’re saying that in a respectful way, Robert. This is a John Wesley hymn.’
RCN looked up from his bowl of crumble, a little surprised by Endy’s uncharacteristically bumptious remark.
Much more to us, his children,
He gives our daily bread…
‘Next week’s Songs of Praise will come from Royston in Huntingdonshire and will be presented by Alex Sanders. Next on BBC 1, the Antiques Roadshow, followed by our Digital Premiere for D-Day, the wartime romance The Way to the Stars, starring Michael Redgrave and Rosamund John. That’s in three quarters of an hour here on BBC 1…’
The housekeeper immediately brightened and got up to make tea. ‘Rosamund John… that’s a name you don’t hear very often nowadays. That's the film with the poem in it.’
Everyone looked blank. Mawg decided to drag himself away from the excitement and wandered off next door to do a bit more work.
‘You know…’ insisted Endy. ‘Head in air’, See his children fed…’ That one. Surely you know that? That’s a lovely film, that is… always reminds me of my mother…’
‘Does sound familiar…’ Robert picked up his teacup.
‘Oh, it was famous in its day, Robert… meant a lot, that film. To a lot of different people. Like a lot of things…’
The housekeeper took a pin from inside her bonnet and clipped it onto her pinafore.
Anders Jonsson, long-term John Nightly super-fan, interviewed on Radio Free Denmark. March 1979.
What it was in real? As a form, you mean? It was grand, wasn’t it? Grandiose. It was a mad one of those things. In a fantastic way, though. Very glorious. The Bungalow was three records, LPs, together in one art work where one played all three simultaneously, for which one needed three record-players or… hi-fis… Quad in those days. Line each one up, then set all three off at the same time, at which point all types of… noisiness and bizarre sounds would come loose. Of course, he had been doing this kind of thing for a very long time. I went to his flat in London to see Iona… when he was recording Quiz Axe Queen – ’68 that should be. He had the theme to the Bungalow then and he played it to me on the piano. Put the tape on, one chord repeating, over and over, and played along with it. Even like that, it sounded good, really good. I thought, this is something new! Something really new!
Later, when he had a more… permanent set-up with three proper decks up there along with his three TVs, all on at the same time as well, with – of course – all three channels… and the new one, BBC2. He would get all his girlfriends to come in and put the records on ‘as directed’ and basically subject all of his friends, anyone who visited the flat, to this… terrible chaos noise – as far as they were concerned it must be.
Then they came to record it properly – the Quadrophonic as well – I remember going to the big studio and a lot of it was piano versions and love-making sounds and all this… sex noises and everything, all mixed up. That day he had nine decks, arranged all in different parts of the flat, like 3+3… and these big, huge… tree-plants, with beautiful colours. It was a big old-time flat, and we were all going around, listening to all the different bits in the different rooms. Really… tripping out with our minds and with sounds. But… but this was long after people had stopped tripping out! And that in itself
was a big… huge problem. Honestly, the whole music was physically very out of sync… because there was no way of synchronising it with all these record decks running alone from each other.
In a way, of course, that might have been what he wanted. Maybe it had been constructed like that, to be truly ‘freeform’… FREE MUSIC! [gets very excited] But sometimes it just didn’t work at all. it just would sound like a mess a lot of the time. Of course it was influential, because soon after you had… ‘Revolution 9’ and all the love-making records and noise things on records – Tangerine Dream and things like this. Can and progressive things and all these things as well. But I don't think any of them – and the Pink Floyd things, because they came from Cambridge at the same time – would have happened without John Nightly.
He made arrangements with the HMV London studios in Abbey Road, with the conductor Lawrence Collingwood and the London Symphony orchestra, with gramophone personnel to transport a speaker-relay system to Marl Bank and set it up in an adjoining bedroom, with the Post Office for connecting lines.
Edward Elgar, aided by a supply of morphine, tunes into his own recording session at Abbey Road from his deathbed. 22 January 1934.
Trewin Farm, Porthcreek, Carn Point, Cornwall. Thursday, 1 July 2006.
‘There’ll be plenty of food at the studio for him. A whole canteen of organic this and that. Lots of healthy vegetarian musicians, no doubt.’ RCN raised his eyebrows and finished drying his hands.
‘Oh… oh, dear me…’ Endy stopped what she was doing. Fixed as she was on the new white loaf she’d just cut into. ‘There’s a… well, there’s a hole in this bread…’ She picked up the loaf. ‘Goes right through, that does.’