In Bookshops today is the book you PLEDGED for and therefore made happen. Thank you!  
THE STORY OF JOHN NIGHTLY should now be in your hands.  
 
Feedback has been phenomenal over the first weeks so I know that some of you are already inside its pages  
and underneath its cover painting by BOB &amp; ROBERTA SMITH.  
 
There’s one FINAL THING for me to ask for your help with. AMAZON has become the worldwide ‘default’ reference for BOOKS.  
Each published work needs reviews there. JOHN NIGHTLY DOES too. Why?  
Because  when a book receives 50 reviews AMAZON will offer it to anyone browsing the site.  So far, we have 15 (very good) ones. 
 
At that point the shops take their re-orders, i. e. the novel becomes much more visible and therefore much more ‘available'.  
 
Here’s the ‘Review' link:  
 
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Story-John-Nightly-Tot-Taylor/dp/1783523204/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1501534371&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=John+Nightly 
 
Please find time to write a short - or long! - review. If you post a review on the Amazon site you will receive an invitation  
from me to our JOHN NIGHTLY Recording-Studio ALBUM PLAYBACK day in London this where you can actually hear  
some of John Nightly’s music for the first time, have a drink or two, get some Freebie-Heebee-Jeebees and meet the author. 
                                             <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/Tot_Taylor_f8c3f31f-e24d-4a9b-9179-943991dda21f.jpg?v=1690907978" width="404" height="500"> 
Thank you in advance,   Tot Taylor

AMAZON BOOK REVIEWS

TOT TAYLOR: 'PUBLISH!! PUBLISH!!'   The Story of JOHN NIGHTLY'

----------------------------------------------- 
THE STORY OF JOHN NIGHTLY  
by  
TOT TAYLOR  
An UPDATE for PLEDGERS and SUPPORTERS of the NOVEL  -  THURSDAY 22 SEPTEMBER 2016 
 
“So it’s a kind of … ‘mock-opera’ then?” someone said.  
Clever I thought. “I like that!”, I said, “can I use it in the book?”. “Use what you want”, they said.  
 
But as you are all aware, the extended tract that is The Story of John Nightly is already short on modesty. So I’m writing to all of you enthusiastic and generous supporters to answer your many enquiries about delivery (particularly) and to let you know that we now have a potential publishing date for spring 2017. Sounds a long way off, I know. But not when you’re still quite a long way off what we now term as ‘completion’ in all of its various meanings - as I am.  
 
Those of you who read the extract and viewed my film on on the UNBOUND site when you pledged (I discovered that around 40% didn’t - how trusting!), will know that the first sixty pages of the novel were written in a single two hour burst (more or less) as I had no intention of writing anything at all when I sat down very innocently one day and it all came pouring out. The final sixty pages has taken twelve months to squeeze from the ether.  
 
But it’s done now. So… thank you all so much for writing and waiting, for staying interested in the ongoing project that is John Nightly, for Pledging in the first place to make his story come alive and for asking questions in THE SHED behind UNBOUND TOWERS by the windy canal.  
 
Ask some more! We’re choosing the images and copy-editing and all sorts of other types of editing right now so that John Nightly’s meta-journey, his daring advance through the revolutionary upsurge of the 1950s, '60s, '70s, '80s and '90s runs as unsmoothly as possible.  
 
We’re almost there. It’s epic - I promise - (not just because it’s one thousand pages of sheer book). It  will  inspire and it  will  make you laugh  and  cry.  
And don’t worry… like all creative endeavours which exist in their own universe THIS BOOK IS MADE WITH LOVE. Yeah, you better believe it. A mock-opera? No doubt.  
          
Tot Taylor,  London: 22 September 2016 
www.unbound.co.uk/books/john-nightly 
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John Nightly: The Update

To all Supporters and Pledgers of the novel: firstly, thank you for the many, many pledges which has made it possible for 'The Story of John Nightly' to exist. We hit the funding target on schedule thanks to your generosity and interest in this (very involved) story of 'absolute creativity' - in this case applied to music. It's a long novel - approx 1,000 pages - so I will now be finessing all of the various strands of this very complex, very long-term project. Unbound will then take over, firstly with a copy editor, who will go through all of the elements of the book so that it can be put through the production and publishing process. This will take some months and so the novel is scheduled to finally be published in early spring 2017. The various special events, recording-studio playbacks etc are also scheduled for that time. 

In the meantime I will be posting regular updates. Please feel free to contact me direct via the Unbound site or email me at info@johnnightly.com. I'll be happy to hear from everyone. Thank you all again for making the novel possible in the physical world. There's a lot more to come.

you can also follow me on twitter @tottaylor1

here's the link again to the film I made about the novel:

www.unbound.co.uk/books/john-nightly

very best wishes,  Tot                   TOT TAYLOR

'The Story of John Nightly' by TOT TAYLOR - UPDATE: 10 May 2016

To answer all of your questions the PLAYLIST from my DJ stint on @SohoRadio 11-2-2016 
The theme:  so-called ‘pop’ records which were adapted from so-called ‘classical music’ sources or thereabouts…relive it at <a href="https://www.mixcloud.com/sohoradio/soho-garage-11022016/">https://www.mixcloud.com/sohoradio/soho-garage-11022016/</a>

Here’s the List and - thank you for listening and taking an interest… 
THE WINTER CONSORT:  ‘Allemande’ (A&amp;M) 1968 
LOVE SCULPTURE:  ‘Sabre Dance’ (Parlophone) 1969 
LEONARD BERNSTEIN: spoken word intro from  
‘The Norton Lectures’ (Harvard University) 1973 
ERIC CARMEN:  ‘All By Myself’ (Arista) 1975 
THE NEW  YORK ROCK ENSEMBLE (ESP-DISK) ‘Partita #3’ 1969 
TONY BENNETT:  ‘Stranger in Paradise’ (CBS) 1955 
MOTT THE HOOPLE:  ‘All The Young Dudes’ (RCA)1972 
WORLD OF LEATHER:  ‘World of Leather’ (Soundcakes) 1995 
ABBA: ‘WATERLOO’: (Epic) 1972  
another bit of DJ-ing looking at this theme in greater detail is imminent…stay tuned…as they say in the trade...

Soho Radio

‘glittering words, shimmering chords, soaring voice, dazzling smile. He must have been a very special man indeed…’


 
That was my faltering, (twittering) voice the day he died. Usually, when someone you don’t actually know, but admire (greatly), leaves for good, that unfamiliar weird, empty feeling ‘gets better’, i. e. diminishes, as the days go on. But it’s ten days now and that feeling is getting emptier. Did David have (much) more of an effect on me than I imagined? Are those songs and that voice much more in my blood and guts than I thought? Must be, ‘cos things ain’t getting any ‘better’.

 
Due to the event coinciding date-wise with my crowdfunding ‘The Story of John Nightly’, people ask if the novel is influenced by either the man, or his work. The answer is no. I didn’t want any overpowering presence coming into disrupt my 1000 pages. In that respect, David would be ‘too present’. If you put him - even surreptitiously - into anything, he’s gonna mess it up for you. 

 
My thoughts about him are ‘deep', but at the same time short and sweet. From that first (dissonant) chord of ‘Space Oddity' on the school canteen radio to the shocking early morning news in the deadest of months, it was respect, fascination or maybe just ‘wonder’ I felt more than anything else. ‘Space Oddity’s’ orchestral strum lifted my fatso arse right off the suburban settee and into an other-worldly atmos which inspired my cul-de-sac existence. ‘Soul Love’ was the next talisman. ‘Drive in Saturday’, first experienced in the listening booths in Millers Music in Cambridge, the next. Then there were loads of magikal charms, landmark story-songs and productions (depending in which order you bought the cut-outs…).

 
Ziggy at Norwich Regal, was just that - ‘regal’. A much noisier racket than my ears had registered thus far. There were several further live sightings, but by then I was a practitioner myself so of course pre-occupied with my own delusions. The later records, more ‘limousines of sound’ than mere songs, seemed to be designed for a collective or communal audience. I didn’t relate to them quite so much. For me, it was the intimacy of the actor whispering to me, in a sense, consoling me (in music), which will linger on.

 
Poor David. Everyone is ‘on’ him now. They always will be. It won’t fade. It won’t rot. There is no smooth fader movement and as ever, the media pundits get it wrong - wasting their time 'listening to the image’. He was no ‘rock star’ (BBC inadequacy) or ‘Picasso of Pop’ (uh...BBC again…) or ‘pop genius’ (Mr Cameron - oh...). 

He was something else. Really was…

 
https://unbound.co.uk/books/john-nightly

 

<img alt class="doksoft_image_img" height="500" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/CYe4xzJWcAERwp7_cd1bca63-f063-43e2-aa91-273fae8b0d2c.jpg?v=1690907986" width="379">

TOT TAYLOR  -  On  BOWIE

The Story of John Nightly     by Tot Taylor

My (very long and involved) one thousand page novel The Story of John Nightly  will be published by the esteemed UNBOUND. At present they are crowdfunding the book, particularly the print - which is (obviously) going to be expensive. Friends told me it was self-indulgent to write such a long thing but having observed the everyday woes, particularly financial and psychological, facing so many of the truly gifted individuals I have had both the pleasure and the misfortune to encounter, I wanted to find some kind of platform to give them the space they deserved. So I carefully wrapped them up into a handful of characters to play out my ‘work of pure fiction’. And that is…  


 Why I bothered to write The Story of John Nightly…


 

Damn!  I’m sitting here minding my own business about to devour a cheese sandwich. Been looking forward to it all morning. Suddenly a whole load of ‘writing’ comes upon me. Shit!  I’d rather stay with the soft white bread, but aware that the ribbon has descended, I know I must abandon it and open up the detested laptop.

(For a start) I never expected to spend fifteen years of my life writing The Story of John Nightly - or any time at all for that matter. I never expected to be writing a novel in the first place. The word ‘writer’ embarrasses me,  just as the word ‘musician’ always has.  What I am is a ‘creator’ - in general, a ‘composer’… ‘inventor’, if I’m lucky. What I create, compose and invent is words and/or music. 

I had read about how RLS had invented Treasure Island to keep his nephew amused. He’d written it quickly - the story laid out overnight - and drawn the map as well. I was aware that James Hilton had knocked out the devastating Lost Horizon in a couple of months - though I also knew that John Fowles had written, rewritten, then rewritten the rewrite, before remixing, reproducing and remaking from scratch the already published (and best-selling) Magus over a very long period from the early 1950s even after its publication (1977)*. Richard Wagner worked on his final masterpiece Parsifal for all of forty-three years. The subject matter of these works - psychological treasure, youth, age, struggle, glory, rise and fall - and their prolonged, difficult births must have all fed into The Story of John Nightly.

Anyway, it happened like this…

I was in Bristol doing some recording, sometime around the early nineties. I got into a mini-cab on the way to the railway station. The driver was a bit groovier than usual. He had a vibe. It didn’t take me long to figure that this was my childhood hero, bass-player in an heroic era-defining band on the venerable Island label. Why was this former coolcat driving a mini-cab (in Bristol) ? Couple of days later back in the studio in London, a guy was sweeping up end of session debris. He made some kind of unusually incisive remark about the track we were working on. I recognised the (still youthful) cleaner as the teenage frontman of one of the all time classic 60s one-hit-wonders (one of the most significant…still heard daily on the radio), yet here he was sweeping my studio floor. Not long after that a bricklayer who came to fix my roof, admitted that he was now “back on the building site”, as he put it, after having played drums on “at least nine” bona fide Top Ten hits during the punk era. 

The music business is tough, and fame is (almost always) brief. After an initial, generally time-compressed, period of creative activity - or ‘spirit-wind’ as I refer to it in the novel - what the hell are these people to do but go back to the drudgery of everyday life?  I began to think about all those (thousands of) future ex-pop stars? My own pre-pubescent idols. The teenage monsters who enthralled me as a five year old wide-eyed dope, opened me up as a ten year old dreamer, beat me up as a fifteen year old manically busy aspirator, and those who amazed and inspired me when I myself was a (supposedly established) backroom studio wizard.

What happened to these individuals?  These golden children? That was to be the essence of it - John Nightly’s story. Could their lives be combined within a single character? Maybe a handful of characters who, battling with the effects of simply being born a bit too gifted, ‘too clever for their own good’, would suffer for the rest of their lives from what Mr Micawber called being ‘under pressure of pecuniary liabilities’. Maybe they ‘survived’,  their financial wealth intact, they just weren’t famous anymore. As crippling psychologically if you’re a naturally creative, self-taught music-obsessed egotist (like myself) who wants and needs to be loved - not for who they are, but for what they do.

After three or four years of weighing it up. Another couple of years compiling, devouring hundreds of remaindered books about how people in other occupations and in other eras had dealt with their all too brief  ‘spirit wind’, I began to write.

Christmas 2000, I was in the music-room watching a programme about canna plants, followed by a documentary about tides and their wider effect on the weather and on our world in general. That set a scene. I went to my desk and wrote fifty/sixty pages in a brand new exercise book which had been waiting patiently, ready to receive my ‘golden ribbon’. In fact, I had kept buying new notebooks, in anticipation of the act, never doubting that my inspiration was a-coming. They lay unused. Piled up on the windowsill behind. 

That day, I scribbled as fast as my fingers and brain would go, a whole wodge of writing. And that whole wodge is still, more or less, the introductory section of the novel. It describes a meeting, then another meeting, with the same characters, thirty years on. One dramatic scene in the present then the same dramatic scene twenty years previous on another continent. The settings are a kitchen in Cornwall, a madhouse in LA, an ex-vicarage, a China clay pit, a Lyceum ballroom, a terraced house in Cambridge, a rock face, a market garden, a piano-smashing contest, a free festival.

The magoos are the Top Twenty countdown, a churchwarden’s manual, a tides timetable, a Methodist hymnbook, a muse’s cookbook, a scratched bootleg, a gold disc, a Jetstar bass guitar, a mellotron, the score to Holst’s Planets, a child’s violin, a skipping-rope. Places, Times ... Births, Marriages and Deaths which feed into the tale, taking my characters from oblivion to the stars and back. In and out of orbit. In and out of tune - and Time.

To read that very first chunk go to 

https://unbound.co.uk/books/john-nightly

- there’s a film of myself and John Mitchinson of UNBOUND speaking about the book. It really has taken a long time but we’re on the last leg. A whole load of copy-editing, pages and scenes to be cut, an index to expand, record and book catalogue numbers to check, song lyrics still to be written. What happens is that you press RECORD, then PLAYBACK, then you press FAST FORWARD and REWIND at the same time. Just like life itself. 

UNBOUND are 25% there in raising the money to print the damned thing which is of course four times ‘normal novel length’. We know that. But the damned thing is coming out, believe me. And … it’s one hell of a read.

Tot Taylor - Christmas 2015 

 

* John Fowles decided to completely rewrite/revise and then republish The Magus in 1977 when the novel was already an international bestseller. The Magus was first published in 1965, but Fowles admitted he had been writing it “since the early 1950’s”.

The film of me speaking about the book is here - and the PLEDGE button is next door to it !  Get down there quick...it's a real teenscene...

https://unbound.co.uk/books/john-nightly

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</div>

Why I bothered to write The Story of John Nightly

Can John Nightly be brought back to life again?
John Nightly (b. 1948) finds his dimension in pop music, the art form of his time. His solo album becomes one of 1970's bestselling records – but success turns out to have side effects.
Supermaxed in LA after a dazzling career, John renounces his gift, denying music and his very being, until he is rediscovered in Cornwall thirty years later by a teenage saviour dude, who persuades him to restore and complete his quasi-proto-multimedia eco-Mass, the Mink Bungalow Requiem.
This epic novel mixes real and imagined lives in the tale of a young singer-songwriter, to tell a story about creativity at the highest level – the level of genius.

The Story of John Nightly: LOS ANGELES 1971 


 From around the time of the third US tour, mid-July 71 onwards, the Nightly live set tended to be configured in two halves, the first being a slowburner.
 Ashley would begin with a short prologue, one chord held down on the mellotron with his left hand, while he played the Lux Eterna theme on an
 electric harpsichord with his right. Then a waltz treatment of Lavender Girl, a specialty which went down particularly well with stoned audiences.
 The atmosphere would be somewhere between evangelist convention, mime theatre with a budget and rock'n'roll funfair.


 Everyone would be settling down - performers and audience - sunset would come and night would begin to fall. Without any announcement, dressed head to toe
 in white, and in complete darkness save for a solitary guiding torch, a silent, slight figure, a magicien - the Magicien - would emerge from the
 shadows.


 With his guitar set unfashionably high - the way Merseybeat groups held their instruments - the only mahavishnu it could’ve been was John Nightly, if not
 John McLaughlin, who also cut a dash onstage and off in white cotton slacks and polo neck, Royal Navy haircut and twin-necked cherry-red SG.


 In his soft white suit, loosely-tied cravat and felt bolero - one of three or four per night to be sacrificed to the crowd - John would’ve been watching
 the build-up from behind the PA. Getting in the mood, swaying in time to the music before stepping out. As candle-lighters tip-toed around
 the stage, making sure to avoid the perilous tangle of cables and leads, and dancers put their arms around each other to give good luck hugs, there would
 be a gradual realisation among those gathered that the ‘presence’ they’d come to pay homage to was now . . . among them.


 As Ashley continued to improvise, forcing Stravinsky onto Irving Berlin, weaving in and out of Debussy, a dash of Pretty Things here and
 Russ Conway there, the twinkling, skywide star-curtain would appear from smoke-filled scaffold. As it descended, the lighting of candles would gradually
 replace the late evening sun as the stage-set was transformed into a revolving celestial sphere, backlit to reveal the performers, each bathed in their own
radiant glow, while the band took up their positions and dancers trespassed upon the edges of the stage. As if Tycho Brahe had been the set designer for Jailhouse Rock.


After a few minutes or so the preamble would grind to a halt, the circular section of the platform would stop revolving and BANG !


 “I . . .” John would say, “am a traveller . . .”


 “I . . .” the audience would respond, "am a lost child” before the band attempted to reproduce whatever they could manage from the nascent work in progress, the still untitled Black Requiem.


 Security Notice: 
 
 Because of the use of lighted candles in the performance, the stadium manager requests that the audience refrain from smoking, lighting fires or using
 paraffin cigarette-lighters, incense or joss sticks in the main auditorium or the surrounding area
 .

 
 
 
 

 ‘The Story of John Nightly’ CORNWALL 1994 


 Cornwall is yellow in spring. From daffodil acres on sloping coastal plains to the lemon tapers of the Aeonium Heliconia which decorate Endymion Peed’s
 kitchen window. Fiery yellow gorse, nature’s barbed-wire, protects the outland pasture from walkers and hikers. The enemy, unwashed and unwanted.
 TRESPASSERS. Heavy-booted destroyers of coastal fields and plots. Despised by the indigenous population, walkers are both a serious environmental nuisance
 and a joke, as far as the locals are concerned.


 “What are they on?” Mawg would ask,


 “Private land”, RCN would reply.


 John Nightly was always cold. No matter how much heating, natural or otherwise, was turned on in whatever room he happened to be. Ironic of course, given
 that one of his schoolboy ambitions had been to develop the means to conserve and re-use heat and energy produced by natural resources - not to waste
 massive amounts of expensive manmade fuel on plants.


 John insisted on the heating at Trewin being turned up full at all times. As with life in general, everything had to be full-on. All his life he desired
 only intensity. The extremes of things; the rind of the cheese, the pith of the lemon, the spikiest cacti. The quadrophonic system at Queen Square produced
 ear-shattering volume which drove visitors away. In the brief period during which he used a car, he was stopped for speeding three times in one twelve
 month period and never sat behind the wheel (legally) again. He courted the most troubled and troublesome women and conceived of the most unrealistic,
 unreliable schemes, all the time popping pills as if they were polo mints.


 There was never anything at all subtle or moderate about the man or his actions. John would wander through the house accompanied by a small
 convector-heater which he would plug in whenever he sat down, even for a moment or two, and angle directly toward his feet. Heating bills at Trewin were
 astronomical. £900 last quarter for the house and cottage alone with a massive £2,000 odd every three months to heat the sunlounges and outhouses. The bill
 from South West Water was also exorbitant, around £3,000 to £5,000 a quarter. Watering the community properly was expensive. Financially it was daft, but
 ecologically it was completely immoral. Nothing less than a sin.


 The industrial rearing of exotics, both specimen plants and difficult-to-look-after seedlings, isn't exactly a stand-alone activity. Apart from the
 problems of importing them in the first place - many require special licences and stamped government papers, 'plant visas' you might say - the massive
 amounts of soil, fertilizer, drainage material, fibre, compost and the endless pallets of food which have to be regularly purchased in order for them to
 grow and thrive, there is endless administration and bureaucracy to be dealt with in registering each cutting and slip for National PBR (Plant Breeder's
 Rights).


 In retrospect, this turned out to be a very good thing. It meant that every cutting propagated at Trewin Farm, mainly John's Canna Luxor, Lucifer 
 and Mortada varieties, would be subject to a royalty when sold on, just like records, of around 15p per slip. The payments soon accumulated and by
 the final accounts quarter of 1994, songwriting income wasn't the only seasonal distribution to land on Trewin's welcoming mat.


 

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