The Films of Jon

This blog is diverse, which is unsurprising, since Jon's tastes were, shall we say, eclectic. This, among other things, makes me feel uncertain when talking about the man himself. Other than the lenses in his glasses the only thing I’m even halfway sure of was his taste in films. Jon had no favourites, so here they are.

Werner Hertzog: I watched Stroszek last month and it made me sad, as did Ikiru [Kurosawa], they are too close. However, if you ever wondered why Jon had a thing about the little people, you should watch ‘Even Dwarfs Started Small’, a unique film for a unique man.

Alfred Hitchcock: Jon liked Uncle Alf and appropriately the last film I watched before he died was ‘The Lady Vanishes’. It contains this quote, “I've no regrets. I've been everywhere and done everything. I've eaten caviar at Cannes, sausage rolls at the dogs.” Also he would have wanted you to rent ‘The Lodger’.

Stanley Kubric: He had an unsubtitled, colour copy of ‘A Clockwork Orange’, long before the ban was lifted. His first phone had “Good morning Dave” as its welcome message. He was thrown out of a pub for reading Lolita and he even had a copy of ‘Flying Padre’.

The Wicker Man: The wicker coffin, the picnic basket come suitcase, hell, his mother use to call him the wicker man, what more do you want? It pleases me to report that we gazed on the Summer Isle on a recent holiday. Laughing, Jon had to flee the post office; the assistant’s accent was too good.

Gunhed: This is the film the phrase “baffling ordeal” was invented for. We giggled at it for 90 minutes, eventually it went away. It is a terrible film and I merely mention it because doing anything was more fun if you were doing it with Jon.

Duncan
Semper Firefighter [Genuine JF humour]

The life of Jon Featonby

Welcome to the life on Jon Featonby.

Everyone has their Jon Stories... Everyone who knew or ever met Jon can give an example of the of the things you did with him, conversations you had with him, or what he told you about what he'd been getting up to. They are usually extremely funny, often bizarre, rarely conventional, sometimes disturbing and most of the time something only Jon could get away with. This space is intended for all who knew Jon, in whatever capacity, to share their stories about him; It’s a place to record and remember all the great and unique stuff about him.

I've begun to group the posts into articles, to make it easier to post more comments related to particular peculiarities of Jon. Please feel free to continue to add comments to the orignial post (all still here at the end of this page) and your memories, responses and comments to the articles on this page.

I'll continue this process with grouping more stories articles, but of course, as you would expect with Jon, there are many stories that just cannot be grouped... these will continue to flourish under "incest and country dancing"

Fiddle, Accordion and Didgereedoo

As Chris, Jon's brother, said, Jon oozed music. John and "Fly me to the moon" are inextricably linked. He also often rendered "Let it snow", and "missed the saturday dance..." - But as Jon showed us ... there are many other ways to make music....

Lordhigh said...
One chapel service at School in my final year (1994/5), a small band had been put together to lead the school in singing a new "trendy" hymn. I believe the band was Bernadette Wong on the organ, Ben Grierson on guitar and Greg Coates on drums. Whoever was responsible for this idea had kindly distributed word sheets to everyone on arrival at chapel but Jon and I were the only people who knew the tune (due to finding it in Frankie Carleston's office a few days before).The play over started with Bernadette playing like she was wearing a pair of boxing gloves, Greg banging away exuberantly and Ben doing his best…..Then the singing began; Jon and I in full voice. The only problem being that Jon had decided to sing in the style of a rather bad Elvis impersonator which promptly reduced me (and the rest of the choir) to tears of laughter whereupon all singing stopped. The cacophony of Bernadette, Greg & Ben (sorry guys!) limped on to the bitter end, accompanied only by varying degrees of whimpering and full on belly roars of laughter from within the choir (with Elvis making the occasional, short lived comeback).

Oli said...
"Oh Jonah he lived in a whale. Oh Jonah he lived in a whale. Oh he made is home in that whale's ab-domin', Oh Jonah he lived in a whale." I can still hear Jon quoting these lyrics, and every time he gets to the 'ab-domin' part it makes me smile.

Squidstew said...
One of the last times I saw Jon was in his final year at Rossal, after he'd completed his A-levels. All the DC 6th formers seemed to have taken up permanent residence in the pubs of Cleveleys by the time I dropped in to visit from Uni. Who could forget hurtling up and down the prom between Clevleys and Rossal in a knackered old mini on a warm summer's evening, the windows down, the stereo up, and Jon sat in the back giving a perfect rendition of You Never Give Me Your Money?

Tom Turtle said...
the time when jon, wearing only his ever-present p-j trousers and an enormous fern leaf, in a small amphitheatre in some untraceable part of durham, at five in the morning after some ridiculous night, sang Dido's Lament in his perfect and beautiful falsetto.

Andy said...
Here's to you and your scaffold pole cum didgeridoo Jon.

Lord of the rim said...
Jon, mysterious ladies and myself dancing naked on a roman bridge while he was playing dirty acordeon.......

Benjamino said...
I'm pleased someone mentioned Jon's didgeridoo - a fine example of his ability to turn something mundane into something extraordinary and by coincidence capable of making very loud and ridiculous noises. Fly Me to the Moon was also one of his classic performances, but he also seemed to relish the civilised destructiveness of Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.

Adding to this...
Does anyone remember the full details of Jon's aquirement of an accordian? As far as I remember it, one afternoon in Port Sunlight, Jon came accross a man with an accordian. He started chatting and, being charmed by Jon, the man took him home and give him his own spare Accordian. It took Jon two weeks to teach himself to play....

I know he also started to learn Jewish folk tunes to play on his viola at weddings the weddings he was being comissioned to film.

Any other rememberances of Jon's music....?

The incredible bouncing Jon

There are many stories of Jon's ability to injure himself in the most bizzare ways, and sometimes amazingly survive... those appearing on the blog so far are:

Squidstew said...
The time he was playing with the height adjustment on an office chair, trapped both his arms underneath the seat and then, with almost graceful inevitability, toppled forwards, unable to prevent his face from being the first point of contact with the floor. He blamed Jap at the time, but I reckon it was a universal law that if Jon was in a situation in which he could fall over with a high posibility of personal injury, then he would.

What else? Jon taking an empty pint glass around Senior Club to get money from everyone to buy drinks for the Plastic Armada at our one and only gig. The details are fuzzy, but didn't Jon break his hand on Stiow's head that night?

Tom Turtle said...
The time when my then girlfriend and i left durham for the weekend to go camping. a little worried, i gave jon a brief lecture on personal safety, orientation and so on, then uneasily left town. we returned to find jon looking like the comedy bandaged man - having fallen out of a first floor window into a wheelie bin, then (in a separate incident) he'd been run over by a volvo (trust jon - it couldn't have been anything softer, had to be the toughest car out there) and bounced into a thorn bush. He said, "my leg hurts most, but i'm sprinkled with supplementary pain!"

Obviously the time when Jon dislocatd his collar bone on stage during the second act of Noises Off, then carried on with the rest of the night, and the rest of the run wihout a single complaint.

once, at a party in my dad's barn in devon, jon managed to fall down a steep staircase. as if this were not a bad enough idea on its own, to slow himself down he grabbed the trapdoor above him which slammed shut and left his not inconsiderable weight dangling from only his hand, trapped in the trapdoor. he inevitably broke several bones in his hand that night but refused any fuss and carried on life-and-souling the party without a murmour.

There was always the time in Neville's Cross in the student house i shared with jon and tobes when i had just sat myself down for a cup of tea in the living room. I was just beginning a familiar thought-train about the unknowability of Jon's whereabouts when i heard an (equally familiar) muffled cry from above.

Jon had tripped in our sock box (another story) and begun his hilarious descent of the staircase, across my field of view. head over malco-ordinated heels he fell, striaght into his massive video collection which was housed in a ceiling-height bookcase placed (dangerously it turns out) against the wall at the foot of the stairs.The bookcase, evidently failing the Jon-Test, crumpled and fell on him, showering him with his own collection of world cinema and classic films. Starting to enjoy myself, i relaxed and looked on.

Like a phoenix from the flames, a barely damaged Jon burst from the mayhem he had just created: looking surprised, but still going strong. Fascinating videos fell from around his towering form. Looking satisfied to have landed on his feet, however, he moved towards the centre of the room only to slip on some piece of rubble or other and land bodily on the glass disc (on three flower pots) that comprised our student-budget coffee table. His hip made neat contact with the edge of the disc which, along with six month's-worth of party debris (ashtrays, vodka bottles, bongs) upended itself and covered him with a nuclear winter of ash and suspect liquids. As always, a simple fall or trip was never enough for Jon. He took clumsiness and disaster to a new, noble depth.

Mandie said...
Does anyone remember the night Jon was saved by a Russian girl? It was in my first year at Uni and Jon had taken up residence in our corridor. He had decided to wander off in the middle of the night for one of his 4 hour baths complete with book, radio and bottle of red. I was woken by a grey faced Russian girl standing next to a dripping Jon. He had fallen asleep in the bath and slipped under the water, luckily for him but not so for his finder, he had left the door open in the communal bathroom. Not sure if she was more shaken by having saved him or seeing him in all his naked glory! Jon laughed about it for weeks!

Ayesha added...
...And the random night in Soho when he managed to get threatened at knife-point by a pimp, then get robbed at gun-point TWICE, all in the space of a couple of hours.

I remember...
Jon swallowed a pebble at Tom and Hayleys wedding. Not a small big of gravel. A smooth round pebble - about 3 cm in diameter. He put it in his mouth, swallowed, gulped, gagged, choked a little, his head pushed forward and his eyes popped wide open... and it was gone. He opened his mouth to show me....

I'm sure there are more....

Featonby's phrase and fable

Oli's examples of "jonisms" have set me thinking about Jon's unique turn of phase.... Oli's memorable examples:

Burger King = "The Meated Monarch"
I need a piss = "I must go hence and micturate"
Response to annoying animal "Oh why can't you just hurray up and develop opposable thumbs"

Other quotes from Jon include:

"My leg hurts most, but I'm sprinkled with supplementary pain"
"I feel like i've got alzheimer's syndrome"
"I'm Alec Guiness"
"Help! Bees! Angry Bees!"

I picture Jon picking over some interesting book or strange object exclaiming "Wellity-well"
Or he's coming out from behind Grey bar (or any London pub .... ) at the end of the night shouting "Rouse", "Rrrrrrrrraousse!"

Comments on others you remember?.....