by Tot Taylor
The likely reason was that in real life the Tiddlywinks were actually a bunch of botanists. Spending their days propagating, feeding, clipping and planting out exotics at the Cambridge Botanic Gardens on Bateman Street. Only if you happened to come upon them when they were decked out in their peculiar tiddly-dotted stage outfits with their cheap second-hand instruments would you have any inkling at all that this was in fact a semi-pro beat combo. As it turned out, a pretty good one. A group that would give John Nightly his first helping hand on the ladder to fame and despair.
* * *
* Nearly all undergraduates take the Tripos (honours examinations) in their particular subject. The Tripos is divided into two parts, with Part II being (confusingly) known as the ‘Finals’ and taking place at the end of the third year. Results are classed into a First, a Second, or a Third.
* ’Deck of Cards’ by T. Texas Tyler (Dot 45-15968), with its catechism-like list, was the scourge of every ’60s ‘function’ band.
item: Monthly Cultural Notes: February
The month of February is taken up with preparation. Clean the greenhouse, especially the window panes, and label all seed trays carefully. Lithops, crassulas, saintpaulias and pelargoniums can be sown. Deadhead carnations and azaleas. Water plants in the mornings and from below where possible. Choose colours for mesembryanthemum and hand-pollinate flowers, transferring the pollen from head to head with a soft brush or a ball of cotton wool. Beware of frost.
‘But they liked your songs?’
‘yeh, but they looked terrible. Really, really awful. Can’t describe it. Two fat ones – they weren’t exactly “tiddly” – and the other one, Clem or Clam, whatever it was… a sort of… rugby type.’
‘God…’
John and Jana adopted a superior posture and stirred their sixpenny teas.
‘You should still do it, though.’
‘dunno… they’re… well, they’re…’ The boy puffed out his cheeks in an expression of disbelief. ‘Completely clueless… is the only way to…’
Jana continued to leaf through her textbooks. ‘When’s the next rehearsal?’
‘Thursday. We’re going to run through “Zigging & Zagging”.’
‘That’s the one they liked?’
‘they liked it. Kept saying it was a “hit” – whatever that means. But… same as always… people always like the ones that I don’t like. The normal songs. They never like the unusual ones, the ones that are actually good, or “different” or weird or…’ The boy picked up his cup, resigned to his art being misunderstood in the wider world. ‘Whatever I do, they just like the normal stuff…’
Ludo’s Cellar Club, Girton Road, Cambridge. Thursday, 17 May 1963.
Zigging and zagging and zigging and zagging and zigging
Zigging and zagging and zigging and zagging and zigging
Zigging and zagging and zigging and zagging and zigging
Zigging and zagging and zigging and zagging and…
‘Sorry, but… if we’re going to play this song next week to anyone at all, we’ve got to get these harmonies right.’
An exasperated John Nightly backed away from the microphone, placed his hand over the neck of his guitar to dampen the sound and stared doomily at the floor.
‘We will, John. It’s a great song… really it is. We’ve just got to work on these parts. But it’s so incredibly catchy… C’mon, us lot!’ We’ll get it!’ Vernon continued to rehearse the ‘difficult’ chord changes.
‘I want to make absolutely sure that we all know what each of these individual parts are actually supposed to be, before we start trying to sing them… Otherwise it’s gonna sound… not right.’ John walked over to his amp and adjusted the volume. ‘Not right at all.’ The boy drew a deep sigh and continued to tune his instrument as he spoke. ‘Let’s just do it again.’
Zigging and zagging and zigging and zagging and zigging……
Zigging and zagging and zigging and zagging and zigging……
Zigging and zagging and zigging and zagging and zigging……
Zigging and zagging and zigging and zagging and zigging……
The next day, John Nightly had a very different kind of musical engagement. The Cambridge Youth Music Society had commissioned his extended string piece Six Second Echo – named after the famously long sepulchral echo of King’s College Chapel – as part of that year’s King’s Summer Concerts programme.
Six Second Echo, made up of repeated heavy strikes on the low end of the piano, played at random intervals against a long-bowed D minor9 chord, was premiered by a ninety-piece double string orchestra accompanied by two transistor radios. The short concert, given by the Cambridge Youth Symphonia, took place in King’s Chapel itself before Madrigals on the Backs on the last Friday of term. In the audience were Frieda and John Snr, along with Jani, Valerie and Jana Feather and the Norwegian relatives, Signhild, Sindre and Steinar, who’d flown over specially for the big event. The highlight for John though was when the great David Willcocks,* the director of King’s College Choir and the über-führer of choral music in Cambridge, wandered in without realising that there was a concert on. Willcocks stayed for fifteen minutes or so, listening intently to what he heard, asked something of one of the choirmasters then nodded appreciatively and walked out again, closely monitored by the schoolboy composer.
The piece itself was influenced by Michael Tippett’s lush-sounding Concerto For Double String Orchestra (1939) a favourite of Jana’s mother, and also by one of La Monte Young’s Compositions 1960 which required a single chord to be held ‘for a very long time’. John had stolen the idea of including a tuned radio from Cage’s Imaginary Landscape #4 (1951), whose performers manipulated the dials and wavelengths of radio transmissions. At the King’s concert, the transistors were ‘played’ by the Feathers’ former lodger Daphne Mpanza, a Trinity music scholar from Johannesburg who would sometimes assist her landlord’s most promising student by writing down the chords of his piano pieces so he could firstly remember and then (more often than not) forget them. Six Second Echo built not to a climax but to a gradual echoing infinity as the sound of the piano strikes ricocheted off the walls of the cavernous chapel. The piece really was a mish-mash of ideas John had picked up from his contemporary-music studies and was a good indication of where he was musically at that moment. There were probably snatches of The Planets in there too, a sprinkling of Delius and a helping of Stravinsky but, well… It was all a very long way from ‘Zigging & Zagging’.
Town & Gown quarterly (May week offshoot of Varsity) reported in its issue 30 June 1963.
At the Cambridge Music Society’s Summer Concert performance in King's College Chapel on June 18th there was a great deal of interest in a very modern avant-garde composition – ‘Six Second Echo.’ A “random serialist” piece by Mr John Nightly, a student at St. John’s Secondary. Performed by the Cambridge Symphonia, the composition required the ninety-piece double orchestra to hold a single chord for almost forty minutes while members of the violin and viola sections struck harsh pizzicato chords every now and then, or whenever the mood took them, or so it seemed to quite a few of those present. Although quite a bit of murmuring was heard from some of the older members of the audience at the beginning, things soon settled down and Mr Nightly's seemingly random but most likely quite organised music created a rather hypnotic atmosphere as the long re-echoing waves of plucked strings reverberated around the chapel. What could have almost been an undergraduate’s May Week jape turned out to be a rather relaxing, even quite spiritual “enlightenment”. We'll look out for more experimentation from Mr Nightly in the future.
Cora Johnson: 'Music Notes', Town & Gown Quarterly.
I have a lot of ideas for so many different types of music. Sometimes I have to stop myself sitting down at the piano because I think I'm actually writing too much of it! Every time I sit down, I'll write something. There are boxes and boxes of tapes of all kinds. Short piano pieces, ideas and themes. Tunes I thought mi
ght be good for children’s things or for end of term plays, even music for television programmes that I like, documentaries and animal programmes. Honestly, sometimes it can get quite ridiculous. Keeping track of all the tunes I've written in my tunebooks. Because I don't read music, you see, although I do have my own sort of… remembering system. Getting the ideas is never a problem, but carrying them out and 'realising' them is more difficult. Sometimes it's a kind of a… nightmare
Imaginary interview with the Melody Maker, notated in John's Modern Science exercise book, November 27th, 1962, St. John's school, Cambridge. Containing detailed notes of what he would say in case he ever was interviewed by the venerable music weekly. The book, along with other John Nightly schoolboy memorabilia, was sold at Sotheby’s Film & Entertainment Auction, New Bond Street, London, Tuesday 17 September, 1993. Lot 143.
Benjamin Britten: 27 November 1963. BBC, The Light Programme: Talking to Douglas Brown.
I think one can say that the actual process of planning works comes to me fairly easily… the… That is before I get to the paper and start thinking about the notes. That is where the agony which Michael Tippett referred to in the Observer last Sunday begins…
* Willcocks conducted the Bach Choir for the Decca recording of Britten’s War Requiem (Decca 4785433) 1963, as well as for the recording of The Rolling Stones ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ from ‘Let It Bleed’ (Decca Red Mono LK5025) 1969.
* This piece contained detailed notes of what John imagined he would say in the event of being interviewed by the venerable music weekly. The book, along with other John Nightly schoolboy memorabilia, was sold at Sotheby’s Film & Entertainment Auction, New Bond Street, London, on Tuesday, 17 September 1993 (Lot 143).
It’s a Caroline Sureshot! C-A-R-O-L-I-N-E and this is Simon Dee saying Don’t Touch That Dial !!!
You’re listening to All Day Music Radio on Radio Caroline on this very special, very sunny Bank Holiday Weekend and today, as if you didn’t already know, it’s official Caroline Merseybeat Day [sounds of hysterical screaming] So here we go… And we’re starting with one of the Liverpool originals themselves… It’s the Fourmost! [the group’s ‘Hello Little Girl’ fades up in the background]
On Easter Saturday 1964, the pirate station Radio Caroline began transmitting on 199 metres with a power of 10 kilowatts off the coast of Felixstowe in Suffolk. In Cambridge and the surrounding area, due to the ship being so close, the reception was crystal clear. Teenagers in Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely, Suffolk, Norfolk and Essex tuned in and never touched their dials again. DJ Simon Dee launched the station and for the first time, ‘all-day music radio’ was brought to the UK, breaking the BBC monopoly. DJs included Tony Blackburn, Mike Ahern, Keith Skues, Emperor Rosko (Jana’s favourite), Graham Webb and Norman St John. Many similar offshore radio stations were set up that same year, including Radio Atlanta, Radio City, Radio England, Radio London, Radio Britain, Britain Radio, Radio 390, Radio 270 and Radio Sutch.
John Nightly was tuning in. Having taken on weekend work at Addenbrooke’s, he was beginning to develop an interest in music as a source of healing – spiritual health being a quality the young John Nightly had found severely lacking at home. That winter, while John had been concentrating on his music, Jana had been working her way through the bookshelves in her father’s study, becoming interested in and drawing John’s attention to the ideas of Eastern-styled philosophy concerned with spiritual health and healing via methods other than pharmaceutical prescription. Meher Hebera’s The Complete Principle of the Spirit and Music is a Healer, a pamphlet by Vishnu Rabala (a.k.a. Cambridge don Professor John Toal), were tucked into the brown leather satchel John carried around with him wherever he went that summer. Psychological health in Cambridge wasn’t good. By spring 1964, the Department of Psychiatry at Addenbrooke’s was seeing almost two hundred students per year, with another thousand booked in for treatment at the Cambridge Student Mental Health Unit at Bene’t Place. There were six suicides in the twelve months from January 1961 to January 1962 and seventeen up to January ’64, with gas rings and fires in the college rooms providing a quick way out. John and Jana’s solution was to arrange a series of lunchtime ‘coffee’ concerts in both facilities in order to try out ideas and also draw attention to the institutions themselves, which were invariably short of both funds and trained staff.
The other beneficiary of the performances was to be Christian Action. In April 1956, through the efforts of the international body, Jani Feather had been instrumental in organising the visit to Cambridge of Bishop Trevor Huddlestone from the Sophiatown slums in Johannesburg. Bishop Huddlestone addressed a crowd of thousands outside the Liberal Club in what turned out to be the largest ever public meeting to be held in the city. In an initiative set up by local action group Joint Action Group for Understanding (JAGUAR), a campaign was begun to enable South African students from British High Commission territories to attend the university on scholarships. One such student was Daphne Mpanza, who lodged with the Feathers from Lent ’57 to Michaelmas ’63, during which time she completed a PhD in music and became well known locally for her multipatterned garments and exotic headgear. By early 1962 anti-apartheid feeling in the university was so strong that students working at the railway-station buffet were reprimanded for discouraging customers from buying oranges and bananas that came from Swaziland and Rhodesia. Despite this continuing effort, visits to South Africa by the Cambridge Shakespeare Group and the Dryden Society (Trinity’s Dramatic Society) went ahead.
Saturday, 18 June 1964: Jana’s sixteenth birthday. Dutch fans trying to get closer to the Beatles threw themselves into a canal during the group’s arrival in Amsterdam. In Cambridge, after taking Jana for her birthday treat – a punt along the Cam from the mooring at Grantchester to the pier at Jesus Lane – John Nightly and the Trinity New Music Group performed the premiere of his tone-poem Silhouette at the Student Mental Health Unit (ticket price: a two shilling optional donation) and then again that evening at the Student and University Mental Health Association, SUMHA (later renamed the SUMHA Centre then the Summer Centre). There was a further free performance the following night at St Andrews Church on the Market Place.
Silhouette would have been an ambitious piece even for a professional composer, let alone a (nearly) sixteen-year-old who could barely read his own score. It was an ‘imagist’ (John’s word) interpretation of the eclipse-like after-effects John had registered from certain fixed stars he’d been tracking with his telescope when he should have been asleep. The work had been composed in an apparently ‘revolutionary’ way. Silhouette had come into existence by chance.
Taking his cue again from his long-distance tutor, Cage, John had tried to ‘discover’ the music as the result of dice throws, card shuffles and local telephone codes rather than create it through his own experience. The words, the rhythms and even the choreography, which John had worked out himself after consulting a book by Hermes Pan, had been put together so that there could exist random differences between each performance. The music being allowed to ‘live’ for itself without being directed and controlled by the composer. There was some composed music in the final section though, and this recalled the wide harmonic intervals of Tippett and Copland – John had seen the Cambridge University Opera Group’s European premiere of the American composer’s The Tender Land two years previously, and only last week he’d sat and listened intently to Tippett’s A Child of Our Time on a BBC radio broadcast while John Snr installed a new 4-track board in the garage studio.
The two performances of Silhouette went down well, particularly with friends and family, confirming to Jani, Valerie, Jana and Daphne that John’s future as a composer and musician was every bit as promising as they had imagined. While not quite understanding what they had heard, Frieda and John Snr were of course immensely proud of their industrious and talented son. On top of all this activity John had his new lunchtime piano spot in the Heffer Gallery in Sidney Street, where he would happil
y knock out anything from Chopin nocturnes to ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ as long as they paid and fed him; and of course he continued to play and also play hell with the Tiddlywinks, now rechristened the Everyman, having been quickly transformed from happy-go-lucky amateurs into John Nightly’s long-suffering backing group.
item: John Pond (1767–1836), Astronomer Royal, born London.
Aged 15, Pond detected errors in the Greenwich observations. At 16 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, but was obliged to leave due to ill health. He went abroad, visiting Portugal, Malta, Constantinople and Egypt, making astronomical observations at his halting-places. Settling at Westbury in Somerset in 1798, he erected there an altazimuth instrument of 2 ½ feet in diameter which became known as the Westbury Circle (see Phil. Trans. xcvi. 424). In 1800–1801 his observations with it, On the Declinations of Some of the Principal Fixed Stars, communicated to the Royal Society on 26 June 1806 (ib. p420) gave decisive proof of deformation through age in the Greenwich quadrant and rendered inevitable a complete re-equipment of the Royal Observatory. Pond was elected a fellow of the Royal Society on 26 February 1807. He married in the same year and lived in London, occupying himself with practical astronomy. Dr Nevil Maskelyne, the fifth Astronomer Royal, recommended him as his successor to the council of the Royal Society and Sir Humphry Davy, from Penzance, who had visited him at Westbury in 1800, brought his merits to the notice of the Prince Regent. As a result, John Pond was appointed Astronomer Royal in February 1811 with an augmented salary of 600 guineas. In 1821 he substituted a mercury horizon for the plumbline and spirit level (ib. cxiii. 35) and in 1825 introduced the system of observing the same objects alternately by direct and reflected vision, which, improved by Airy, is still employed (Memoirs Roy. Astr. Society, ii. 499). He was a member of the board of longitude and attended diligently the sittings in 1829–30 of the Astronomical Society’s committee on the Nautical Almanac of which publication he superintended the issues for 1832 and 1833. A translation by Pond of Laplace’s Système du monde was published in 1809. He wrote one tidal letter.
