by Tot Taylor
The girl, by now frozen cold, though covered from head to toe in scarves and shawls aping the bohemian style of her mother, suggested they walk into town, forgetting the absent bus. She felt as if she’d said her piece. The boy looked exasperated.
‘I’m sorry about that as well, but it… It was a nice day… that day… A great day. It’s just that so many things happened in those few days.’
‘So I gather…’
John continued. ‘All the people I met were nice to me and they liked me. They didn’t think I was… “weird” or anything. And they didn’t look at me… suspiciously. Like they do in Cambridge.’
‘You mean they liked you because you were weird? Or… because they just liked you?’
‘I think they just really… It’s not weird in London to be weird anyway. Even if I was weird, which I’m not saying I am, of course.’ John raised his eyebrows and gave a little false laugh in an attempt to bring some lightness into the situation. ‘There’s nothing “weird” about me.’
‘No, John.’
‘What I mean is… I wouldn’t be weird in London.’ Again, he overdid it. ‘That’s what I like about it. Up there, they think I can do something… and leave it at that… Rather than thinking I’m a bit… odd because of it.’
Jana sighed. ‘Well, they’re right there, John. You are surely the cleverest person I have ever met – who I will ever meet.’ She wrapped her headscarf tightly around her ears and, resigned to being unable to do anything more about it, took the arm of her beau as they hurried along. ‘I know you are…’
‘Fame and money are the temptations that gnaw my vitals without my being wholly aware of it’
Igor Stravinsky in a letter written from Ustilug, Ukraine, to his friend Maurice Delage, 14 October 1912
* * *
* Though the complete set of (six ?) songs remains unreleased, one piece, ‘Steeple Gate’, the original demo recorded in Cambridge, late ’65, turned up unlicensed on the bootleg ‘All the Madmen, Vol. 4 (Tout EM341), which began to circulate among collectors and fans in the late ‘80s.
Monday morning John was booked into KCEMS (King’s College Electronic Music Studios), a small, local facility housed in former artists’ studios at number 34 Free School Lane. The control room of KCEMS boasted a Studer 4-track, Neve console, a GPO patchbay plugged up with red and green mini-jacks, an Ampex half-inch, a Revox and a pair of door-size Tannoy monitors. Next door, a handful of abandoned instruments lay scattered about the damp, soundproofed basement. A set of vibes, glockenspiels and chime bars, a single timpani drum and two over-strung pianos decorated the dead-as-a-doornail ex-storage unit. School-room instruments, probably left there by local rehearsal orchestras. An old Steck, newly converted to the status of tack piano by the addition of drawing pins in its hammers, lived in the hallway outside, while on the other side of a cracked glass partition stood a good Steinway upright, kindly donated by the Britten school – Benjamin Britten lived close by at Aldeburgh in Suffolk.
At the back of the premises was a further division, along a narrow, dusty corridor, where strips of sheet-metal, old wound piano strings, glass rods, wind chimes and lengths of clattery cheese wire hung suspended from the ceiling. This 5’ x 2’ cubby-hole, resembling a cartoon torture chamber more than anything else, was referred to as the sound-effects suite in the KCEMS brochure. The photographs showed the studio as it had been in the 1950s, complete with the old lever console, tongue-and-groove wall panelling and Festival of Britain carpet. In the far corner stood a Victorian school desk with an editing block, a wooden metronome, a set of Pyetone reference speakers, a Grundig 2-track and, best of all, a double-manual Hammond organ.
One of the signature sounds of jazz, as popularised by the likes of Jimmy Smith and Milt Buckner, the Hammond C3 and B3 models, used in an entirely different way than by their jazz exponents, often supply the magical ‘coming and going’ sound – phasing – on many classic pop recordings. A great asset in any studio set-up, the Hammond, along with timpani, vibraphone, glockenspiel and celeste, is often subliminally mixed in among the usual two guitars, bass and drums; adding scale and depth to even the most basic-sounding recordings. This nursery clutter provides the starlight, the flickering night sky of the soundworlds created by both Brian Wilson and his mentor Phil Spector.
KCEMS had been home to John Nightly on and off for the past six months or so, affording him a cheap, well-equipped facility in which to try out ideas and also discover how to use many of the techniques that would become commonplace in professional recording studios from the mid ’60s onwards. At exam time particularly, the studio was often empty for long periods, being mainly used by the Cambridge Experimental Film Co-Op (CEFCO) – undergraduates from King’s, John’s and Trinity – to dub sound and record Foley work and sound effects on the many student films that were being made in the town at the time.
Today John was to be found in his usual position, hunched over the desk in the small back room with his best friend, guitarist and fellow stargazer Justin ‘Just’ Makepeace at his side – and at his beckoning. Having finished his course in electronic music at the end of December, John had made an arrangement with the bursar to carry on using the studio in any downtime. He’d also recently completed his correspondence course with Professor John Diamond at the Cornish School in Seattle, Washington, where he’d taken part in a ‘mail art’ musical chain letter initiated by John Cage. Because of his association with Cambridge University Music Society (CUMS), the enthusiastic teenager had corresponded with Cage a number of times and had even met up with the great man himself when the composer had stopped over in Cambridge on his way to the Aldeburgh Festival the previous summer, August 1965. Cage had encouraged the student in his experiments with random and ‘chance’ music and other non-formal structures. Ideas almost forced on John Nightly by the limitations of working in his father’s garage on their own Grundig 2-track.
The problem being that on John Snr’s simple domestic set-up there was no way to overdub – create ‘sound-on-sound’ – using the primitive stereo machine. John’s solution had been to suspend a wafer-thin sheet of foil from his father’s pack of Woodbines over the erasehead as the tape passed through. Thus blocking the previously recorded tracks from automatically being wiped as the new take was recorded, thereby converting the machine into a multitrack of sorts simply by never actually erasing anything.
The downside of this simple ‘update’ was that it was impossible to monitor and therefore play along with what had just been recorded. John would have to add each new part completely in the dark, humming to himself what he imagined was playing in the background while he performed or overdubbed the next layer. Hence the necessarily loose or ‘chance’ timing and the lack of any verse/chorus-based songwriting. By the time he reached even the first refrain or hook he’d almost definitely be out of sync with the other tracks. The only music it was possible to record in this situation was something that might charitably be called a ‘sound collage’; in reality, a frustrating mess of ideas and parts.
John had managed to achieve some semblance of regular tempo by setting his metronome off at exactly the same point each time; the point at which he saw a chinagraph pencil mark pass through the record head just before the music began. But then the metronome itself was unstable, the metal rod having been bent through being thrown across the living room by Frieda during a particularly violent outburst at no one in particular.
At home, a constant beat would hold together for roughly fifteen seconds or so if you were lucky, so finding a base like KCEMS was like finding Lake Windermere in a desert. As John hummed along with himself and adjusted the EQ on the board it occurred to Justin that, although his friend was barely eighteen years old, John had been recording ever since they had known each other, a total of thirteen years. For John Nightly, composing music on tape was as natural as writing a postcard.
Sitting at the 4-track in the main room, chinagraph in hand, Justin began to build up a basic tempo by setting t
he pendulum to a regular 72 beats per minute. John tapped it out with his foot and played a kind of slow, irregular rhythm on the back of his acoustic guitar. After they’d recorded almost 60 seconds worth of the idea, the two of them listened back carefully, agreeing that the best section was from 41 to 49 seconds in. Justin marked the beginning and end of this 8-second space with the white crayon before John took the quarter-inch tape off the head, laid it on the edit block, making sure there was enough slack at both ends so it wouldn’t crease, and made two diagonal cuts, one at each end, separating this ‘good bit’ from the rest. He then went next door, laid the extracted piece of tape on a second block and edited the section into a length of white ‘leader’, putting the gash onto the Revox so that he could transfer the chosen good bit via a tie line, before copying it back onto the Grundig ad infinitum. The boy would then painstakingly edit all of these identical extracts together.
Two hours later John had spliced enough of the repeated sections to cover three minutes’ worth of music; a continuous looped beat. He then walked into the corridor, placed the newly compiled tape back on the Studer and checked it through, concentrating hard to make sure that all of the cross points were smooth and seamless. This little repeated collage was to be the backing track of a new song he’d been working on, ‘Peachfruit Love Parchment #1.’
As the hypnotic, shifting rhythm played back through the tapeheads and Justin checked levels on the meters, John Nightly relaxed into his chair and began a winding arpeggiated figure on his Eko acoustic. The music immediately changed character and sounded exotic and mysterious; the new part being recorded by his friend on the second track of the four.
It was a time-consuming process that involved the making of ‘reduction’ tracks – sub-mixes – as you went along, before bouncing all of the separate elements into a single composite on the second machine. The process involving four interlocking parts being mixed down to one. The balance of the newly bounced track would then be checked, before erasing the original four on the other machine, giving four clean ‘grids’ on which to overdub and start all over again.
Simple really. But because there was only John involved creatively – the only way he would have it – the boy was having to do everything himself, both the compositional and practical work, with Justin lending an objective ear and helping out when more than two hands were needed. For John, this made the recording of music an all-encompassing and life-enhancing though sometimes repetitive process. It removed him to another world, a world away from the domestic dramas of Meadow Road and the drudgery of school. The recording studio transported John Nightly to a place where he was aware of neither time nor tide. A world of mechanical invention, ‘make-do’ technology. Experimenting and having fun with sped-up guitars and backwards pianos, overloading the audio signal with oceanic reverb or an infinity of repeated echoes. Making use of the strange-looking processing boxes designed for him by his father, filling wine glasses with different amounts of water to make a ‘glass xylophone’, singing through megaphones made out of toilet-roll tubes and tin cans. Investigating the particular dynamic of each instrument within its natural range or, even better, just outside of it. The pair of them viewed all of it as experimentation, as well as great fun. With little recording activity going on in the town John and Justin remained completely isolated, having no one with whom to compare notes or take their lead from. They must have sensed that what they were doing might be somehow new – ‘groundbreaking’, even, had that term been in common use at the time. They understood that it was at least ‘different’, but that it was still a process – a procedure. As it turned out, the very same procedure, albeit with slightly more facility, that the Beatles themselves were currently using in St John’s Wood, sixty miles down the A10, at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios, to record their as-yet-untitled new LP*. But John Nightly didn’t yet know that.
Back in the main room, John recorded some low-pitched guitar followed by a sequence of glockenspiel chords onto tracks one and two of the Studer. After that, he added two or three higher-voiced notes, modal and open-sounding, on the vibes. John loved the college’s Musser vibraphone. It was an incredibly warm, dreamy sound that always inspired him. The instrument can often sound dark and gloomy; its expressive tremolando is used in films to denote moments of tension or impending doom. But John registered its vibrato as soft and soothing. A rich timbre that could be light and romantic but also ethereal and hypnotic. He’d been fascinated by the vibraphone since hearing the Modern Jazz Quartet’s recording of Ornette Coleman’s ‘Lonely Woman’ (Atlantic 8122-75361-2) again at Jana’s. A synthesis of classical form and jazz attitude, the piece could almost have been composed by Poulenc or Hindemith.
As Justin added the spring reverb from the Hammond, ‘Peachfruit’ hit its fade section; a slowly reducing pattern with three beautiful though apparently unrelated chords building through each compositional block to an unresolved cadence. It wasn’t really a song – not yet anyway. It was more of a… mood or ‘feel’, as John declared, sitting in front of the Neve making a mess with his jam doughnut while his friend attempted to achieve a rough balance with the faders.
The boy pressed STOP abruptly, leaning over to re-align the tape on the playback head in order to eliminate the ‘cross talk’ he could hear bleeding through from the other tracks. He hit PLAY, keeping his finger on the top edge of the reel to steady it as it picked up speed. Because the new composition was made up of twenty-four 8-second edits, a recurring ‘pitch hit’ happened at each edit point, acting like a percussive wood block note every time it came round. The pitch suggested two chords. Unluckily, these were E major and B-flat major, harmonically just about as bad as it gets and therefore for John all the more exciting. As Justin added compression to the guitar the music suddenly seemed to just ‘sit’ and come to life right in front of them.
John, excited about his new creation, began to improvise word ideas on top, asking his friend to stop the tape for a moment while he quickly made some notes on the back of the track sheet. Flo-wer bond, flo-wer bond, Ba-sil-don Bond, flori-bund. He repeated syllable by syllable, over and over, like a mantra.
The boy picked up his leather bag and pulled out a loose-leaf file. A few ruled pages fell to the floor. Typed words, evenly spaced, hopefully evocative of something, he wasn’t sure quite what exactly, were arranged in columns down the page. John took a pair of scissors and cut them into small, single-word squares. He then asked Just to clear a space while he climbed onto a chair, held the word snow above his head and let it fall to the ground. As his friend rescued one piece of paper from his hair John stared down at the first word to catch his attention, it being closest to him and also face-up.
‘Smile’ he announced, attaching an almost mystical importance to the completely random syllable. Justin remained silent, giving John space to think, well aware that John Nightly himself was the only one able to make selections or decisions about anything regarding his own music. John moved towards the door and turned his head to a single scrap resting on a potted plant.
‘Prayer’ he whispered. Again, bestowing upon the word a meaning beyond the present, as if discovering the next important find in an archaeological dig. The third piece of paper had floated away from the others and landed on a painted wooden chair, as if it insisted on being treated differently from the rest.
‘Wish…’ John looked up at Justin. ‘Smile, Prayer, Wish!’ He raised his eyebrows to the skies and his face lit up as if to say ‘You see!’ while his friend looked on reassuringly. John repeated the three single-syllable words several times over. Smile… Prayer… Wish. Smile… Prayer… Wish… Wave… Orange… Love. He mumbled to himself as he hummed a vague rhythm while his partner looked on, awaiting instructions from the boss.
In a situation such as this the boy was really concentrated. A different proposition altogether while he was actually ‘doing’ his thing. John always spoke about music as taking place in suspended time, as if there were no actual time moving along through
out the day. In an interview published much later he summed it up by saying that this was when he felt ‘suspended on the vertical while the rest of the world was on the horizontal’. He described the making of music as a time when he needed neither food nor water, nor any kind of ‘outside energy’ to nourish and sustain him. No conversation, and no normal human contact. At KCEMS John could be lost in this state for days, or weeks… if the college authorities would allow it.
When Justin suggested a break, the two of them would repair to the Civic or the Whim for egg on toast and stewed tea, but on other occasions they’d remain in their dingy cell for twelve or fourteen hours on end, lost in their own little world, working up their sonic collages – or, as John would refer to them, ‘curtains of sound’ – using a layering process that George Martin would later call ‘painting in sound.’
And so it was that in this tiny, padded room the basic ideas for the boy’s debut, Principal Fixed Stars, would first take shape. Much later on it was widely acknowledged that PFS heralded the beginning of the whole ‘symphonic rock’ (for want of a much better term) phenomenon. The LP would go on to shift a total of nine million units in America alone, keeping John Nightly in ludicrously expensive hothouse installations for the rest of his life. Right now, the landmark recording amounted to little more than a sketch, a cardboard box full of tape reels, chord charts and paper cutouts based on the writings and the tidal correspondence – tidal-letters – of a Boy’s Own hero of John Nightly’s, the 18th-century Astronomer Royal, John Pond.
Despite being proficient on a number of instruments as well as being able to compose quite complex pieces at will with the benefit of a note-perfect ‘sound memory’, much the same as people have a photographic memory, John Nightly would never be able to actually read or write music – though from the work he created, ‘proper’, formal-sounding compositions, it would always be assumed that he could.
