by Tot Taylor
‘We need to take advantage of that, John. The vibe, I mean. The reason I exist, in this place anyway, is to find hit acts. Maybe not just hit acts but classy hit acts, career-type acts – not just one-offs. Point being that one-offs do not make money. Your “one-hit-wonders” and all that’. He turned his nose up. ‘They might bring in a bit of cash… or cash flow, but in the long term…’
The Swinging entrepreneur had become anything but laid-back. He was persuasive now, super-concentrated; and undeniably impressive. The impressive John Pond brought his pill-shattered mind back into focus. He sat up straight and flexed his fingers, ready to impart his own very particular philosophy. The guru of Carnaby Street, revealing all manner of previously un-thought ways and means.
‘Let me put it this way… The owner of the company, John Carter; his background is not exactly in music. Not in music at all. It’s in tin. As in cans. The tin can business. Baked beans, sardines… orange segments – all come in tins, don’t they?’ Pond got up and pushed away his seat, making unintentionally comical hand gestures as he expanded on his theme.
‘He was in tin cans originally. Though that’s been taken over by the Americans now. So at the moment he’s into cars and ships… Ammunition as well, probably. Anything made of tin. Mining the stuff in Cornwall, which is where he spends most of his time, thank God; and not in here.’
Pond played with his fringe again, swishing it from side to side. He stared into space, posing self-consciously in front of a gold disc as he blew smoke rings out into the corridor, pausing to see whether Cornelia and Sandra were at all impressed by his son et lumière puffs. He leaned back on the office door, completely at ease with himself, his protégé, and the world at large.
‘Ever been down there?’
‘what?’
‘Cornwall? Ever been there?’
The boy had also calmed down.
‘no… no, I haven’t. I did go once, actually, on a… family holiday… when I was a child…’
‘The boss, John… John Carter I mean. Though he’s a good guy and all that, doesn’t really have much of a clue about the pop scene. Or music in general. Nobody does. It’s a new thing, so clues don’t really help. But I do… it’s my business, obviously. My… speciality is what it is. It’s what I know’. The manager walked back across the room, leaned over his desk and picked up the receiver again. ‘Tell you what… If you wouldn’t mind just going out and sitting with Cornelia for a minute. Well… who would, y’know!’ He began dialling. ‘Just give me a couple of minutes of “phone time” man…’
In Cornwall, tin is a dying business. A century ago there were mines all over the county districts of Penwith and Pendeen. One hundred years earlier, John Wesley preached to vast outdoor congregations all the way from Quarry Bank to Carn Point. Tinners in Redruth and Morvah hung on his every word. Today, one thousand derelict sites lay abandoned across the rough coastal plains where once there were fifty thousand working pits.
Well, the tin has to come from somewhere now that everything is tinned and canned, doesn’t it? Even laughter. And Tin Pan Alley itself, of course. It’s more hygienic. It’s more… what we come to expect from Now! But these days, all that tin is coming from America. So in Cornwall, and places like that, where the industrialisation of natural resources can no longer support the local community, people are looking for other ways to make a living. And this is where the new pop entrepreneurs come in, where they’re emerging from – the most unlikely trades and industries. In the case of twenty-one-year-old John Pond at JCE, it’s the TUC, the Trades Union Congress. The body that regulates fair wages and fair play for Britain’s long-suffering workforce was the manager’s previous paymaster, his ‘alma mater’, if you like.
When the position of Youth Employment Regulator turned out to be more of a desk job than anything else, the ambitious young graduate stayed for the statutory 12 months only before moving to the much groovier environs of Carnaby Street. Before the TUC, the precocious Pond had been the head of the Student Union at Bristol where he was studying for a degree in mining. And that… little connection… is how he came across John Aldebaran Carter. Mr Tin Mine himself. Mr JCE.
The universities and art schools of Britain are now breeding grounds for Pop, as people have quickly realised that it’s a thriving new business, and that there’s a penny or two in it. Again, it’s the place to be. It’s hard to see how a degree in quantum physics can lead to a dingy back room behind Oxford Circus but that’s how it is nowadays. Identify the zeitgeist and anyone can zoom.
Take Johnny Johnson, manager of the Witchdoctors. He came from Boxing, where he trained three Lonsdale Belt holders before using his contacts in the world of entertainment to secure the Canvey Island rockers slots on some of the biggest package tours of the day. Then there’s Johnny Storm, who looks after new sensation Polly Pops (they used to be the old rock’n’roll band the Vampires); he still runs a string of hair salons and men’s barber shops across the Midlands, which is where he started off. ‘Stormy’ Storm, so called because of his notorious black moods, was the first person anywhere to coin the phrase Unisex. And that is still his legend.
The fact is that today every opportunity is open. So if you have the will to make it and can get yourself down to London and get operating, well… It’s all there for the taking, isn’t it? The unlikeliest one of all being Johnny ‘Dave’ Davison, currently proprietor of the new underground gossip mag Grass. Dave was originally in politics with the National Teenage Party1, where he campaigned for a lower voting age and protecting the environment. One night on the campaign trail he came across Strawberry Quick in a pub in Mile End – they were called the Periwigs then – and took them to the top of the charts. The Periwigs needed money to record their debut single so Davison contacted old Johnny Carter, who he knew from the tinned-fruit world. And there you have it – Strawberry Quick became the first JCE success! In fact, their single ‘Lovely Louvre’ is about to be featured in the new John Schlesinger film and John Barry told someone he liked them a lot in an interview on the radio the other day.
Cornelia came back out of the manager’s office and looked on the boy with new enthusiasm.
‘John… do you think you could be at GIRL magazine at four this afternoon?’
‘oh, but I… I mean, I don’t… I… well… uh, no! Definitely not!’ The boy sounded resolute. ‘I’ll be on the train back to Cambridge by then.’
‘John wants you to see the picture editor there at four. They’re doing a feature on stars who went to college. Graduates…’
Cornelia, suddenly finding the new recruit a deal more attractive personally, struck up a rather awkward model pose herself – a typical knock-kneed Twiggy – as if rehearsing for a potential future scenario. She held her file of Young Possibles away from her blouse, in order to show off her figure while balancing her statuesque, perfectly proportioned frame on her lacquered slingbacks.
‘It’s just amazingly perfect for you, John…’ The girl put a small step forward to prevent herself from toppling over. ‘They’ve got Jonathan Miller and Jonathan King2… but they want someone new as well. Brand new…’, Cornelia raised her eyebrows provocatively at the awkward youth.
‘but I… I mean I… I’m not a “pop star”, am I? I’m not any kind of star at all…”
Cornelia leaned back and tapped suggestively on her clip-file, ‘I think you’d enjoy it, John.’
‘… I don’t think I…’
‘But what have you got to lose, darling?’
‘… well… I… I don’t know… I… I know I wouldn’t…’
What the boy was saying sounded conclusive and final, but maybe he was really only waiting for an excuse to change his mind. On the one hand, John Nightly was thinking about the green guitar and the scooter, but he was also curious to discover how these fresh, innocent and most importantly ‘foreign’ model girls might appear in the flesh. The boy continued to playact with the decorative secretary. ‘I don’t even know where…’ Bu
t Cornelia had to move on, get on with her arrangement-making. ‘Wardour Street, John. You can walk there in two minutes…’
‘… I’ve never done anything like that before…’
The boy sighed and played with his scarf. To turn down this out-of-the-blue assignment might discourage the vibey management from proceeding with the real business of the day, securing him that all-important gold-dusted recording contract.
‘… I… uh… it might be alright, I suppose…’ he mumbled to no one in particular as he turned to leave. ‘Long as I can get back on the train to Cambridge…’
* * *
1 The National Teenage Party, founded in 1963 by David ‘Screaming Lord’ Sutch, was the forerunner of the Monster Raving Looney Party.
2 Jonathan King, formerly Kenneth King
Trewin House, Porthcreek, Cornwall. Saturday, 27 August 2006.
‘I wonder if I could speak to Mr Nightly, please?’
‘… who is this?’
‘It’s Neil… Neil Winters…’
‘… this is Mr Nightly.’
‘Ah… hullo… John… I’m really sorry to disturb you… and I… I hope I’m not disturbing you at a bad time, but… but what it is… I saw the article about you in the Cornishman yesterday…’
‘… yes…’
‘About your canna plants…’
‘oh, yes…’
‘The thing is… I’m actually a… a bit of a fan of yours from way back…’
Click.
John Nightly replaced the receiver, as he had done so many times over the years. Slowly and blankly. Then he went back to repotting and draining his collection of Dorotheanthus bellidiflorus, illegally imported from the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in Cape Town, Southern Africa. Thousands of small green shoots were waiting to be done, and John couldn’t wait to do them; the contraband packed onto the heaving shelves of his ever-expanding greenhouse encampment and his just installed E-Plasmic sunlounge extensions where his most expensive and treasured Arborealis Expirus were housed. DO NOT TOUCH FOLIAGE WITHOUT GLOVES. CAUSES BURNING IRRITATION TO THE SKIN.
John Nightly wouldn’t normally have answered the phone anyway. He didn’t say a word to anyone for a whole nine years, except once during Year 3, when British Gas came to trace a leak after having to get a court order to advance just two feet inside the compound, and once in Year 9, when British Telecom needed access to the property to put in phone and fax lines, mainly for the use of Nightly’s live-in male nurse, John RCN.
The man who had once been the very figurehead of pop, pin-up of every pretty young thing in the country – not to mention quite a few of their mothers – named by the Sunday Times colour section as ‘the most beautiful man in England’, whose music and lyrics and ideas and clothes and genteel behaviour and straw-blond hair and blue, blue eyes epitomised all that was youthful and happening but also somehow meaningful and sincere about Swinging London, as it was once called, wasn’t in touch with the world at all anymore.
John Nightly wasn’t even in touch with himself. John Nightly was just… hanging on. John hadn’t put his hands on a musical instrument for thirty-four years. He hadn’t flicked a switch to turn on an amplifier or an electronic keyboard, or to start up a tape-machine to record another of his spindly, modal compositions in all that time. The eras of audio cassettes and personal stereos had passed him by. He would have associated the word iPod with autumnal seed gathering, or visual injury. And John Nightly only opened his mouth to sing once every twelve months, on Christmas Eve, when he attended Midnight Mass in Porthcreek, at the little church of St Eina, always standing with John RCN in exactly the same spot – the back corner of the Lady Chapel by the old bell tower – in case a quick getaway was needed, as it had been on that fateful midnight eve of Christmas 1991.
Every year, John donated his very best canna ‘Luxor’, his own hybrid, always the deepest pinks, to the grateful churchwardens. He had even found a way of delaying the autumn flowering cycle of these South African queens so that they would synchronise and bloom at Michaelmas. Just in time for them to present their most magnificent flowers, the ones right at the top of the stem, and remain in perfect condition over the Christmas period. This and the Porthcreek annual horticultural show were the two big events in John Nightly’s calendar. Well… they were the only events. And that’s the way he liked it. That’s the only way things were going to be. The only way it was ever really gonna ‘happen’.
John hadn’t put his hands anywhere near a woman either. Nothing in all that time. During the summer of 1971, the year of John and Iona’s first break-up, John dated Donna Vost, Kassandra Parker-Pope, Myra Knoll, the Contessina Rafaella de Weyden, Flora Wood and Teri-Ann Christie. In other words, six of the most beautiful women in Christendom. John’s problems were already coming on, but what set the torch alight was when Teri-Ann, not appreciating being jilted by the young blade, literally ‘exposed’ him in the News of the World with a photo essay detailing their exploits at the Savoy Hotel. It showed a depraved and decadent couple, a couple totally removed from reality. Naked, blurred, with John apparently mounting Teri-Ann in the marbled bathroom of the hotel’s royal suite. That was the last off-duty photograph printed of John Nightly, until this week’s feature in the Cornishman.
Although he never did officially release a single in England; in spring ’68 John had the Number 1 disc in France and Germany, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Greece, Hungaria, Poland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, South Africa, Madagascar, Australia and New Zealand. All at the same time. Touring was chaotic but lucrative. JCE hastily arranging extra live dates and TV appearances everywhere John Nightly performed. He’d been airlifted away from a snowbound Stockholm, suffered heat exhaustion in Canberra, been ‘held hostage’ by a group of hysterical fans in Munich, and in Johannesburg had refused to play to a segregated audience, creating a political uproar when he left the country without singing a note.
item: Monthly Cultural Notes: January.
At this time of year, much enjoyment can be derived from the greenhouse and from the cultivation of a number of different types of fruit and vegetables, but it’s a slow start in January. If you have electricity, and therefore heating, use it sparingly. Keep an eye on the weather, using straw or old newspaper to protect from frost. Euphorbia, zygocacti, sedums, astrophytums and other succulents may be watered once a week if it is sunny. Do not overwater. Cannas and begonia tubers should be lifted and stored in peat for the spring. Ventilate and clean the greenhouse to prepare for the sowing of seeds.
GIRL magazine, issue #5. Friday, 30 January 1966.
GIRL is the magazine of the times. The magazine of the moment. This week Brian Jones is on the cover. Inside, Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys talks about surfing the Californian waves and Mary Quant advises on how to wear the miniskirt in winter. Vidal Sassoon gives hairstyling tips on here and the centrespread features the fabulous new holiday destination of Torremolinos, Spain: take part in our competition to sip sangria with Sandie and picnic on paella with Petula on its sun-kissed beaches. Lynn Redgrave and Hayley Mills both feature in our regular film round-up and on the back page here’s Hardy Amies and ‘Teasy-Weasy’ Raymond with some hard-earned advice for the younger generation. Then of course our regular feature on the Beatles. Everyone is always talking about the Beatles. The Beatles are the reason we go on. The reason we’re all here in the first place. If John has toothache, it’s on the BBC teatime news!
Turn to here. Here’s a new face! It’s Cambridge graduate John Nightly in his purple John Smedley top and blue -and-white college scarf sitting in the offices of Southeran Books, Mayfair’s famous olde-worlde bookseller, with Iona Sandstrand. Yes, that Iona Sandstrand! Danish fashion model and of course actor John Paul’s most recent ex. Her long, tanned, over-insured legs are wrapped around Mr Nightly as they both recline in a large James St James gilt divan. In the background the art dealer John Kasmin has hung a painting of a solar eclipse and in the foreground the textile designer Celi
a Birtwell has arranged some cheesecloth-thin floral patterns to give this most traditional antiquarian bookstore an up-to-the-minute Moroccan look.
In the five-page centrespread these two beautiful people, seemingly unaware and therefore unaffected by their own extreme physical beauty, look each other up and down; they fool around and then feign disinterest in one another in John Christian’s beautifully luminous photographs. In one picture, Iona is caught staring at John as if he’s the most beautiful man she has ever set eyes on. The most beautiful man alive. And that’s because he is!
It’s this same picture I’m looking at right now, reproduced on the cover of Fashion USA, April ’66. Fashion USA is the American fashion industry bible. Reporting on and in some cases setting trends in youth and fashion across the United States. ‘Fashion USA comes to Swinging London’ is the title of the feature. This is the photograph that John Farjeon, picture editor at Fashion USA, New York, has chosen to best illustrate the hope, the will, the desire to make progress, the ambition and the absolute optimism that has seized the country: England, Britain… London, Europe. A kingdom not hampered by Vietnam protests or race riots or presidential assassinations. This England. Our England. Our pendulum. England Swings – or they say it does. For the moment anyway. And now, everyone wants to swing along with it. With no thought for Air Traffic Control, it seems that the whole world is on its way to our very own tick-tocking capital.
Weekend World, 15 April 1966: ‘London - The Swingers’
‘London swings and you’re hooked!’
Cover story by Sandro Timpani
