by Tot Taylor
When mastering, in the midst of this tricky weighing-up, the creator listens in absolute silence; absolute detail and denial – a kind of communion. Because this is the final time. Your very last chance. The proofs of your novel, final cut of your movie. The genuine ‘end of the end’, as RCN still liked to remind everyone. ‘Let’s stop before it gets any better!’ as Pondy used to say. The creator must do his best to hear with new ears at an endpoint where what sounded rapturous now sounds rudimentary. Once-thrilling chord changes rise and fall in the distance; strings that aroused the hairs on the back of your neck pass without notice. A perfect word or phrase, one that once meant so much, seems inconsequential. Familiarity and repetition have dulled the experience, put out the spark.
Hearing anew is an impossible task. So the mastering technician is implored to be particularly diligent, to pay special attention. Everyone must listen now. Not just the artistes themselves, but the studio maintenance man, the lady from the canteen, the boy who comes to service the machines. Anyone who happens to pass by the isolation tank is press-ganged and put to good use. What is sought is objectivity. A box-fresh ear. Trying to imagine that you know nothing whatsoever about the masterpiece that is now so much a part of you that you must deny it. Your own cosmic string is about to be cast off. Time to finally let the infant go.
And so, RCN and Mawg were sat at what appeared to be a flight deck in Mastering Room 13 at EMI’s Abbey Road complex along with a cleaner, a tea lady and tape-op intern. On the sofas at the back of the studio, barely able to sit upright without flopping over, were a group of overweight, late-middle-aged men formerly known (sometimes) as the Sleepwalkers. The John Nightly Love-Rock band: Justin, Ash, Ron and Jon, even Jean-Claude, and the man with more opinions than most, Lee Hide. Life-crash survivors together in the same capsule for the first summer since ’72. The new recruit felt like a ’60s throwback himself.
‘Over the past thirty-four years the word regarding the Mink Bungalow Requiem has altered dramatically. When the Virgin Record Guide published a listing for John Nightly in 1984, the work was seen as the overblown excess of a drug-addled mind, but at the time of its reissue and reassessment in 2006, MOJO described it as ‘possibly the most ambitious, genuinely imaginative work ever produced under the vague mantle of Pop’. The Mink Bungalow Requiem is a true fusion of ’60s beat, acid pop, love rock, cut-ups, mash-ups, (cock-ups), contemporary-classical, mid-20th-century avant garde, romanticism, musique concrète, concrete poetry, electronica, folk rock, art rock, space rock, serialism and exotica. The only thing it doesn’t contain is any element of “jazz”. Truly a work of genius.’
‘Well, that’s what it says…’
RCN handed Mawgan the review but the kid wasn’t interested. Mawg got up from the Master’s chair without acknowledging the nurse, pulled down his cardigan sleeves and gazed out onto the rose garden. Expressionless and blank, he picked out a small, plastic watering can from a selection on an overcrowded shelf and wandered through to the sun room.
‘The crows are all over the dahlias again…’
Mawgan slid open the door and stepped out onto the dew-soaked lawn. Before him, not the rockeries and canna sheds, Robert’s bonfire and Endy’s washing-line, but a vast auditorium of life. The grass shimmered beneath his feet as Mawg lifted his head to look out above the trees to a place beyond the sanctuary where he felt something else might exist, a kind of ‘good’ place somewhere up there, maybe influencing bad places. A control zone that sort of ‘sat right’ and felt right, evened things out and felt good. In this good, green wood everything you tried to get to work actually worked; success waited around every corner, reward around every bend. Everything and everyone, every worm and every bluebell, had ‘flow’. Everything really was… well, shipshape. As Endy always said things ought to be.
Just a few feet ahead of Mawgan’s warm toes was the edge of the world and Mawgan stepped off it. In this new reachable zone things immediately felt better and more resolved. It looked nice for a start. There were lush flower meadows of seagrass and chamomile. The drill of pigeons and blackcaps made him feel at home. Japanese kamikaze pilots rained from the sky like floating chrysanthemums as Mawgan slid along on a battery pack powered by chicken shit and came upon an iron gate where a shingle path led visitors to a garden centre, a real one, wedged between the headland and the tape head. The reception area was not the customary car bay with storage tubs for fertiliser and swings for the kids, but rather a bay of blue-green pasture scattered with brush heads of valerian ready to explode and seed the meadows with deliriously happy seeds. Beyond that, a wide transept of stained glass – cockle white, storm red, eclipse yellow – set against a bank of orange crushed velvet, Terry’s Orange Gold. Always good to have a sponsor for life, he thought, as he kicked off his sandals and dipped his toe into a dense floral sea of mayweed and mesembryanthemums – or sand daisies, Robert Kemp’s favourite B&Q value filler.
Then a decision. Up ahead, a fork in the road, connecting this reachable ‘seen’ world to the unseen. To the right… Carnaby Street, to the left… Carn Point. Along that right-hand path, the most ‘happening’ path that ever existed, a number of shipwrecks, lives lost in submerged reefs, washed up in the narrow zawns and clefts between fast-wind and rewind. John Speedy Keen, 21 March 2002. Lisbett Ann Nightly, 9 December 1967. The boy pressed PLAY, took the left-hand track, as he always would, and came upon an ancient way-mark, engraved on granite, that once read 5 miles. Weathered over the years, and with part of the numeral 5 having been eroded, it now announced that he had come upon a place called Smiles. Which was true.
Another familiar sight, the old branch-line track, and a signpost pointing towards the parish of Morvah (‘sea grave’). Keep to the Paths, it said, Keep to the Paths. ‘Keep to the paths,’ he murmured as he carried on not keeping to the paths. Now the world became entirely more familiar. All around him a recharged ocean, no heaviness at all, no lives lost, only happy seed explosions and maypole smiles. If all was silent before, now there was sound. Pye full spectrum, f4 waveband. The kid could just about make out the yelps of surfers echoing around the Shepperton tank, basking in the gas, the groove, the pure fix of summer. Fistral Beach regulars expecting another wave, another burst, another cave-in. Fragrant musk from the Santa Rosa floribunda (‘Stanwell Perpetual’), blush-pink and fading to white, wafted like incense through the halting places and waiting rooms of these swinging, swaying worlds, these pendulum worlds. Up ahead there was a farmhouse, hanging like a bauble on John Wesley’s tree, suspended right in front of the kid’s nose; a picture postcard, with smoky edges, like those Victorian photo-cards in St John’s Hall, Penzance. In flickering black-and-white cinemascope a door opened and a little girl holding on to her sun bonnet for dear life ran into the yard to put out nightjars for wasps and slugs.
Further on, woodruff and field madder (lady’s bedstraw) smelling of new-mown hay, phased in and out, twin-tracked, twin-necked, diode-connected, guiding him, guarding him, encouraging him further, leading him on. Spores of dandelion and daystar danced before the dude along the lazy, hazy, crazy coastal path of summer, no longer sand and pebbledash but crazy-paved, the whole vista, the whole awning, now become visionary and transcendental, perpetual and evergreen in the powdery summer afternoon.
In this particular seaside postcard it would always be a sunny day, ‘delightfully situated’, like the holiday homes in Johnson’s estate agents in Saint Ives or the tinners’ cottages at Black Cliff in the classic John Hinde postcards of West Country coastal resorts. Many smiles came his way, beamed their beams towards Mawg, regarding him, rewarding him, thinking about him, until a shallow breeze lifted the seedheads of the dandelions into the air and into the wind, over the cliffs and into the ocean deep. The ’lantic sea. Into the sunshine.
The kid walked a little further and came to a final clearing and a glade. There was a cappuccino pond stuffed with tape grass and frog-bit (water soldier), the reeds suspended in the water, three-petalled, male and fe
male on separate plants, flowers white, a shy flowerer.
It became time to say goodbye… Goodbye… and then something brushed past him, something or someone, passed by from day into night, something warm and tender, well-meaning, innocent, kamikaze; with his honour intact. A vagrant comet indeed, spirit wind, someone definitely in the ascendant. A ‘knowledge’ man, like John Snr or Jani or Alexander Telstar – for it was he – cascading in and out. A life-giver, Jesus-lover, whose motion with the firmament most certainly agreed, a brush with… a kind of universal truth, via the dude’s diminishing understanding and acceptance of his own infatuated, geocentric world.
6 April 1945. That was the date, the date of the highest number of kamikaze pilots killed in action in one single sunny afternoon during WW2. The Battle of Okinawa, Operation Kikusai. The young men who went to their deaths were referred to as kikusai (floating chrysanthemums) by their life-takers and their undertakers. Stick to the rules. Stick to the rules, they said. Don’t look down… And they didn’t; they looked up, like John and Justin had done so many times at Cambridge Botanical Gardens. Beware the cliff edge. Do not wander up onto the coast path after dark. Follow the Acorn route. Keep children supervised.
BANG!
A gull flew straight into the BT line behind him, cut itself in half and brought down the cable as both bits of the bird, nicely singed at each end, tumbled out of the sky. Kamikaze. No other explanation for it. Except bird flu, LSD maybe, or general Blair-world. Unless it was the fault, like everything else round here, of Penwith District Council.
‘I put the black plastic bags out but it don’t scare ’em anymore…’ RCN put the kettle on and searched for teabags. Mawg turned back and acknowledged his old and good, his most-treasured friend.
‘I have to go and do the watering now.’
* In February 2012, BBC Radio 1 recorded 12.66 million listeners aged ten and over.
1 ‘Each song is a pastiche of the previous one. With glazed eyes fixed on the stage, seat holders rise up as one, they rock backwards and forwards like seaweed…’ Roy Carr reviews Black Sabbath, NME, March 1973.
John Nightly died peacefully in his room sometime during the late afternoon of 1 July 2007, just fourteen days before his fifty-ninth birthday. John was found by his old and good friend RCN after failing to come in to get his 5pm kick-start coffee, as he had done every teatime for the past 9,205 teatimes.
After the dramatic though in some ways quite fitting deaths of many of his fellow travellers, John Nightly’s was a most unviolent, unglamorous passing. An almost embarrassingly normal way to go.
John hadn’t bothered to lay on anything special, like Pondy, Myra, Donna and the others. The conjuror had abandoned his tricks, literally ‘passing over’ in the euphemistic condolence of coffee-morning volunteers and Methodist lay-preachers. No story value in that. No PR buzz, no ‘tragic passing’ local freesheet headlines.
The end of the end, as far as it went, was unremarkable in terms of column inches that might be used to maximise posthumous record sales. No use at all in terms of a fitting rock’n’roll end, double-clicked, copied and pasted before being alphabetically listed as a stop-press departure on death-watch weblogs.
These acute and admittedly hard-edged practicals were the first thoughts that passed through John Nightly’s keeper’s mind. RCN was shocked, very shocked, but not surprised. In a way, he’d been waiting for this day a long time; maybe not ‘waiting’ exactly, but sort of expecting it, wondering what would happen when it did finally arrive. Suddenly, the nurse needed to think clearly and focus on the scene before him. Time stopped temporarily in the small back bedroom, it’s climate more suited to force-fed triffids than to a prematurely aged, fifty-eight-year-old single male. RCN drew back a curtain and opened the steamed-up window in order to un-stick the air.
In terms of ‘mechanical’ practicals, the Master’s limbs seemed set within an awkward compass, his left arm locked at a hard 90-degree turn, his right, bent like supple willow, carefully folded around his summer-weight duvet. One of those classic, exhibit-like positions in which the subject could only be, well… dead, unfortunately.
On the flower-patterned quilt beside him lay the master’s cheap reading-glasses – four-quid Specsavers specials – a half-empty tumbler of whiskey, a marker-pen for marking, a highlighter for highlighting and a copy of the local gazette, John’s absolute favourite read, open at the weekly classifieds: Garden Furniture, Bric-a-Brac, Tools.
So there he lay, the real boss… only Master and Teacher. Slumped in this most uncomfortable of poses. It occurred to RCN that his old friend might have been trying to get off the bed, maybe grasping for something, mid-position or halfway through a quite-desperate motion, perhaps, when the moment of absolution came upon him.
Maybe John Nightly had suffered some kind of minor heart attack or stroke. Reaching out, possibly for the first (and last) time in his life, for something or someone… attempting to lift himself up in the midst of being struck down. RCN considered that John must have felt very ill indeed to even think about asking anyone else for help. Although the Master’s expression, such as it was – a placid, empty face – was utterly calm. And that’s what RCN was fixed on, John Nightly’s facial appearance. Wanting to be absolutely sure that his old friend had not suffered, as so many do, when death comes unexpectedly and there is simply no one there.
In these situations, it is tempting for those who are left behind to imagine the exact circumstances of their loved one’s passing. There may have been a few seconds, minutes even, of unease, struggle. An intense few moments that the remaining loved ones hope and wish had never existed, but can’t help wondering about. The bit of life they never saw. That part of the mystery, maybe the only part, of someone’s existence that could never be known to another.
Bizarre really, because the Master’s twisted mouth and permanent frown, the deep single furrow or ‘zawn’ above his brow, were gone; vanished without trace – like their host. The stress, all the weight of living, of being this bloody difficult, impossible-to-deal-with individual, this character, this intense, geocentric persona, had miraculously disappeared from his face, the boy’s face. Now, John Nightly was dead and calm. Now he was simply human again. Calmer in death, much calmer (apart from this crooked, bony old arm), as far as RCN could see, than he had ever been, or his friend had ever known him to be, in life.
The nurse stood a while. Lingered in a kind of timeless surveillance over his boss. Stood and stared. Wanting to take just a moment, a little time for himself, before going in to tell the others what had occurred. The remaining John most definitely needing a few moments to consider, and assess, exactly what the new situation might be. There would be some cobbling together certainly. A story… something.
But first RCN wanted to think a little about his old friend. Just for a moment or two. Not to ‘say goodbye’ or any low-grade cliché like that. How can you say goodbye to someone who isn’t bloody there? Someone who’s just bloody well gone and left you without bothering to say goodbye themselves? That was the nurse’s very first thought. What came into his head right there and then? Together with his initial overall emotion; anger.
Selfish as it may sound, unqualified anger is often one of the first reactions following a death. Particularly when someone very close has just disappeared into thin air, popped off for good, in the middle of the night. Like a schoolgirl elopement, teenage runaway, or a bullied child unable to face it any longer.
But also, RCN wanted to remember.
Daly, only half-awake himself after a troublesome night with his poor old back, bent down and touched his friend lightly on the shoulder in a most affectionate way. Something he would never have done had John Nightly still breathed. He lay his hand on, then suddenly, and completely unexpectedly, uneven breathing and sobbing began to overtake him, before – taken unawares by his own unguarded emotions, and worried that Mawg or Endy might wonder where the both of them were – the nurse stifled his tears, cleared his throa
t and swallowed. Holding back, like a good Englishman, in case emotion might get the better of him. Lest he might show his imperfection, his common humanity.
RCN perched on the corner of the bed and examined John’s position thinking he might do something to try to correct it. Better he do that, he thought, one who knew the deceased – and technically qualified, after all – than some young apprentice in Penzance; the ‘laying-out’ guy, undertaker’s mate, who didn’t know John Nightly, wouldn’t have had the faintest idea who he was, who he had been, and what he had managed to achieve in his reasonably short existence.
The laying-out guy might therefore not operate at the very top of his game. Might not move the boss with the required degree of respect, the correct amount of loving care and attention, bearing in mind the achievements of the dead person in his arms – the jargonised TLC, as everyone, even Endy, called it now.
RCN imagined the trainee wanting to get away of an evening, get off early, rushing to meet his girl, get to the pub, watch a match, then take her to his bed, to the pub car park or outside toilets, the usual place for a quickie, followed by a kebab on the way home.
These were the thoughts that might end up rushing through the mind of the young apprentice as he lay his black-gloved hands on the boss. The remaining John didn’t like those thoughts. Considered they might be… completely inappropriate and therefore decided to change things around a little so as to minimise the actual laying-out process for the presumably preoccupied apprentice.
RCN leaned over and lifted his friend’s arm. Gently, carefully, using both hands, stretching it out, correcting this most awkward of positions, making the boss a good deal more comfortable than before, he imagined. He picked up John’s specs and laid them to the side.