by Tot Taylor
The next event to have a big effect on the young John Nightly was the adventures of Yuri Gagarin. On 12 April 1961 the Russian cosmonaut became the first man in space, completing one full orbit of the earth in his 4.5-tonne nosecone just 108 minutes after taking off.
One of the main preoccupations of the general public in the early 1960s was what was then known as the Space Race – the competition between the US and the USSR to achieve the historic feat of taking the first human into space, then establish dominance of the territory, neither side having any idea at all what they might do with it or even find along this new frontier. Russia was the victor, sending the twenty-six-year-old Gagarin into the earth’s orbit, thus establishing the USSR as a superpower of the atomic era and capturing the imagination of school-children around the world.
Because of John Snr’s employment at Pye, the Nightly family were one of the few locally to own a television set capable of producing a viewable picture. As a beaming Gagarin appeared on the BBC teatime news, newsreader Robert Dougall announcing the historic conquest, the boy rushed to the piano and produced a sequence of blurry clusters. These he repeated several times using his left hand as his right picked out a noble, angular melody based on the tritone motif from West Side Story, with which John was currently infatuated. In the next few months John Nightly created a whole book of ideas for Yuri, referred to as his Yuri Tunes; and two years later, when Russia blasted the female cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova into space in Vostok 6, John reworked his tri-tonal Yuri theme producing a very poetic ballad in homage to Valentina.
This early composition, containing many of what would become known as Nightly musical signatures, was premiered at that year’s end-of-term Summer Concert at St John’s Secondary School with John performing on the piano and Jana Feather adding the simple yet undeniably moving theme on the cello.
Valentina won the school’s annual award for Most Promising Musical Debut and earned its performers a guinea record token to be spent at Miller’s music store. That same thematic idea, this time moving forwards and backwards simultaneously as part of an elaborate triple fugue, was to become the basis for the ‘Vega Fluxus’ movement of the Mink Bungalow Requiem some ten years later. But that is another story entirely.
After leaving St John’s, John Nightly devoted most of each day to his instruments: the piano, from which of course he could never be separated, the Twinwood nylon guitar on which he was equally proficient, a rusty concertina, for playing what he called his ‘stupid’ music – songs in two keys at once with bizarre and constantly changing time signatures – and a saxophone presented to him by Jana on behalf of her father, Jani Feather.
Jana Feather was the perfect foil for John. Musically gifted herself, though possessing nothing like the ability of the object of her affection, Jana immediately recognised on meeting the young man that he was someone very special indeed. She had only to call out a tune or a pop song of the day and John would serenade her with it on the piano, laughing aloud at the extent of his own ability and amazing all of her friends as well as Jana’s father, who saw even more evidence in private than at school that right before his eyes stood a bona fide ‘musical genius’. This boy at twelve understood, without the benefit of any musical or cultural background whatsoever, a great deal more about the actual condition of music than his teacher – an accomplished musician himself – ever would.
John and Jana spent hour upon hour playing tennis at the local courts, reading poetry – Jana introducing her new boyfriend to the works of John Donne, John Keats’ A Song About Myself and the war poems of Wilfred Owen – while at the same time systematically working their way through Jani’s record collection. A particular turntable favourite was the Grieg Piano Concerto in a recording by Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli (Phillips BH4510), the second movement of which, in Jana’s opinion, was one of the most utterly wonderful and perfect pieces that had ever been written. As her father had explained in his music-appreciation class the previous Friday: ‘Every note, every phrase, every nuance means something… There is no waste. There is economy, but also elegance and romance. Lyricism. A thread, a through line, development… and what seems like a series of almost… inevitable resolves and conclusions. A balance of ideas and presentation which gives a serenity, a security, a… completeness, restfulness, a… naturalness… a true “humanity” to the piece. It is a gift of inspiration which must have arrived in the mind of its genius creator more or less fully formed.’
The other big favourite of Jana’s was ‘Apache’ by the Shadows (Columbia 45-DB 4484), an exotic guitar-based track that they both loved. When the two young pop fans watched Hank Marvin perform with the group on ATV’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium both became very excited indeed and started twisting and jiving around the room, rattling the dinner trolley and playing havoc with the already precarious TV reception while Dr Feather and his wife, the concert cellist Valerie Bloom, remained glued to the fuzzy black-and-white picture in disbelief. What exactly were these kids hearing?
Years later, when the Shadows had become the most unfashionable of groups, completely out of kilter with the post-Swinging world, John spotted his hero at the British Music Awards luncheon. Hank sat at a table at the back of the room with the other members of his new band Marvin, Welch and Farrar. His mastery of the guitar and his easy, melodic approach seemed like an echo from a bygone age, but John, thrilled at last to be in the presence of an early idol, rushed over and surprised the guitarist by telling him how much he admired his playing. Peter Green was a guest at the same event to pick up his award for ‘Albatross’. Leaving the platform after receiving his statue, Green too went straight for Marvin’s table to pay tribute to his first guitar hero, ignoring the judges and the audience applauding his own dazzling achievement.
But this period for John and Jana was not the heightened world of the ’60s. The teenagers were at least a couple of gear shifts away from the fab, life-changing boom they were headed for. The seeds had been sown, and young people at least seemed to have been tipped off that a revolution was on its way, but March 1962 was still a pre-Beatle world. It was as if a huge convective tower of impenetrable black cloud needed to be dispersed before the new dawn could finally break.
It may be difficult now to imagine the lack of substance in the popular music promoted by record labels and endorsed by broadcasters in those early overcast days. The UK Hit Parade acted like a sedative on the hard-done-by British people. The adoption of the 45rpm format and the dependence on sponsored music broadcasting in the US may have been partly responsible for the never-ending diet of lightweight, moon-in-June confections, but even a casual glimpse at the new releases listed in Melody Maker any Friday revealed an appalling lack of much actual ‘musical’ music.
If there was a sound aimed more towards the youth of the day it would have been the machine-gun riffs and tribal rhythms of Dick Dale and other instrumental guitar groups like the Ventures and the Surfaris. Dale’s ‘Let’s Go Trippin’’ heralded a subgenre of releases by the Bel Airs, the Chantays and of course the Beach Boys, whose effervescent ‘Surfin’’ alerted the youngsters to the presence of a Californian chorister-voiced ‘family’ and their stripe-shirted harmonies. Although ‘Surfin’’ never hinted at the sophisticated grandeur of ‘Surf’s Up’ just half a decade later, it was a phenomenally energetic and very raw-sounding record given the lack of fire in the popular music of the period.
Californian surf songs, their billboard titles telling of rip curls, breakers and wipeouts, along with homegrown singles like the Shadows’ ‘Wonderful Land’, ‘FBI’ or ‘Apache’, and a handful of other instrumental TV-detective themes, were to be a big influence; John would later describe the main orchestral motif from the Mink Bungalow Requiem as being ‘like a symphonic surf tune’.
In the spring of 1962, record shops in Britain still categorised their stock in easy-to-file compartments. The part-word pop had acquired neither the meaning nor the significance it was to have later; nor had it enter
ed everyday vocabulary, except within a general association of the throwaway or temporary. In music, pop was used to describe a product which was lighthearted and therefore not particularly consequential – an inauspicious start for a term that would soon twist itself free from its beginnings in the broom cupboard of showbusiness to become shorthand for all things modern, a watchword for the times. Both the word and its sound were expressive, the very essence, or quintessence, of youthful purpose – the mode – the ultimate and much-required new state of being. The mode was a composite of various elements melted down into a single dimension; combining unity of purpose with purity of approach and popularity – often instant acceptance due to the era’s inherent impatience and therefore apparent easy success. In the early 1960s, for young, half-alive adolescents and their sympathisers this state of mind – applied much like a clothes tag to every other branch of creative endeavour – was as fresh and liberated as the leaves of spring. An inexpensive, off-the-peg item in white PVC, chalk-stripe weave or silky Afghan that the acolyte would slip into in order to begin his or her own quest of self-discovery, the much-anticipated ‘meta-journey’.
It seemed that those involved in music for the sake of profit had never considered that music for music’s sake might actually turn out to be more profitable. So record retailers’ stock consisted mainly of novelty. Jingly ditties performed by ponytailed bobbysoxers or boy-next-door dreamboats. Music of spirit and adventure did exist but proved almost impossible to obtain, which is why fans in Liverpool and Newcastle became the first in Britain to purchase and become inspired by rock’n’roll vinyl when limited-release imports were brought into British dock towns by merchant seamen.
Rifling through the alphabeticised JKL in Millers under Popular Light Vocal, the unsuspecting aficionado might encounter Teddy Johnson and Pearl Carr, Kathie Kay, Kathy Kirby, Cleo Laine or Frankie Laine or Evelyn Laye along with singing dogs, deceased music-hall comedians and seaside-cinema organists. Across the alphabet these extremely lightweight chart-bound sounds would be vying for space with curiosities like the Mousehole Male Voice Choir, the Red Army Choir, the Black and White Minstrels, the airmen of the Fleet Air Arm, the GUS footwear factory band or actors and personalities such as TV cowboy Ty ‘Bronco’ Hardin.
Along with other singing cowboys, Clint Eastwood or Roy Rogers, the racks were stuffed with yodelling shepherds, squawking chipmunks and even light operetta from the likes of Donald Peers and Mario Lanza. While next door in Popular Light Instrumental were to be found Kenny Ball, Chris Barber, Percy Faith, Geoff Love… and self-taught pianist Russ Conway – of whom the young Nightly took more notice, having watched him perform each week in his coy but appealing manner on BBC television’s big Saturday-night ‘light entertainment’ staple, The Billy Cotton Band Show, the boy’s favourite tune being the tinkly, self-composed ‘Side Saddle’.
Pianists were popular in the era before guitars. Ferrante & Teicher and Rawicz & Landauer played film themes of the day, trying to compete with the life-enhancing smile of Winifred Atwell, the more refined touch of Semprini and the larger-than-life Liberace with his overwrought Chopin nocturnes. If the kids survived all that then in the Rock’n’roll & Beat Vocal racks lurked the disparate jukebox talents of Cliff Richard, Jim Reeves, Johnnie Ray, Al Martino and Perry Como.
Spending every Saturday morning in the listening booths of Millers, the by now inseparable pair found at least some solace in the Folk & Children’s section, which housed the more natural-sounding voices of Pete Seeger and Burl Ives, or in Films & Shows, where they would thumb through numerous different recordings of The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, Carousel and Lionel Bart’s Oliver! before trying them out in the booths with a good deal of incompetent kissing and cuddling thrown in. Eventually John and Jana would get round to the Popular racks, which occupied one whole side of the store and were home to such as Frankie Vaughan, Sarah Vaughan, the Beverley Sisters, Doris Day, Alma Cogan, Helen Shapiro and Elvis, along with the all-powerful Larry Parnes management stable: Adam Faith, Marty Wilde, Billy Fury, Vince Eager, Joe Brown and Tommy Steele. Soon, all of the above would form an orderly queue behind the Beatles.
John had first noted the name Lionel Bart on Justin’s copy of Steele’s ‘Rock with the Cavemen’. Bart and his friend John Barry, familiar because of his credit on ‘Walk Don’t Run’ – the theme tune to the BBC’s Juke Box Jury – were two names John had already singled out as being on a level above the rest. The third was the cartoon-named Joe Meek, the producer of ‘Telstar’ by the Tornados, an otherworldly concoction that dropped on the Nightly household like a bomb in August ’62. Cashing in on the popularity of the space satellite, the song’s distinctive theme played on an unidentified instrument, the sound of which John tried his best to mimic as he made the daily two-mile trek back and forth between Grantchester and St John’s Secondary. He also liked the fact that the Tornados, like the Shads, had their own stage-school dance routine, which they performed every week on Thank Your Lucky Stars as well as boasting a moody, peroxided pin-up in the shape of Heinz Burt.
Other favourite 45s of the day were the actor John Leyton’s echo-laden ‘Johnny Remember Me’ (another Meek production), Bobby Darin’s jaunty ‘Things’, Aussie singer Frank Ifield’s hugely popular version of the standard ‘I Remember You’, which – probably because of its semi-yodelled vocal – seemed to be the record of the moment, and Acker Bilk’s romantic ‘Stranger on the Shore’, the theme to Jana’s favourite TV series.
Great Britain was indeed a tame land. And proud of it. Thankful for its very survival, while still being class-ridden and privileged, still a place of ‘have and have-nots’. There was no precedent or appetite for dissent; most of the population would not have understood what the word meant. In the old terraces and the new cul-de-sacs the prevailing mood was one of getting on with it – the phrase drummed into every voter by their civic leaders in order to retain morale in the still recent war. In 1962, the British people never doubted the patronising hand of their decision-makers, their ‘betters’. They welcomed it, for in those dull, drab days there remained an unhealthy respect for and polite toleration of those in authority. But while the population ‘got on with it’ it also thought itself lucky to be able to. This convenient equation became securely lodged within the psyche of the British workforce as it went about its business. You thought yourself lucky to have bread on the table and to have a job to go to. You thought yourself lucky to be alive. Hardly a notion likely to encourage ambition and enterprise or act as a basis for imagination and adventure in a recovering society.
It seemed like the nation was in a coma. In 1962, young people had no social voice. They were given no opportunity to disagree, which is why their voice was to find its true dimension within a format, the popular song, which their parents considered insignificant. Pre-Dylan and pre-Beatles, Britain was a tolerant society. It knew its place. But its recent history, its Victorian morals, its ambiguous and inconsistent laws, its corner-shop mentality, its excessive reserve and its undue respect for those in authority was turning it into a land of the past.
While the country’s more serious artistic practitioners – its poets, playwrights and filmmakers – questioned the system, the caretakers of Britain’s popular-music industry seemed content to churn out inoffensive tat. Pop music, by its label and much of its content, was transitory and cynical. Pop music was made to fit. Made easy to like and easy-going; a commodity like shoes or disinfectant. It didn’t set out to challenge or change anything. It set out to please and to sell. To be literally ‘popular’. With a cultural impact equal to that of cat food, this manufactured product was handed down to teenagers by their betters, the giant recording corporations. The product was not made by them but for them, and was thus viewed with suspicion, being mostly disregarded by the serious artist in every field. By the spring of 1962, pop had become its own dirty word.
A mere ten or so singles and a handful of LPs sustained John and Jana during the two-year period from early 19
60 to late ’62. But, in this safe and cosy pre-dawn, it mattered little what the records were, or even whether they liked them very much. The culture, or maybe just the ‘procedure’, the ‘mode’ – the act of discovery, trying and testing, approval or rejection – mattered, just as much as the content. Day after day, the teenagers piled up the A’s and the B’s on the autochanger of the Feathers’ Dansette and (to the bewilderment of their guardians) set the machine to infinite repeat.
item: ‘Pioneer Profile’, US Science Weekly #591, May 1962.
In 1954, the American satellite pioneer and psycho-acoustic researcher John Robinson Pierce suggested that satellite communication would be possible by bouncing signals off of a passive, geostationary orbiting object. He was proven correct in 1960 with the launch of Echo, a giant balloon that bounced telephone calls coast-to-coast that were broadcast to it from the Bell Labs facility at Crawford Hill, New Jersey. The Bell System took the next step – a giant one – when it built Telstar, the world’s first active communications satellite, and saw it successfully orbited and operational in 1962.
item: ‘His lordship has two ears for stereo…’
