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John Martyn

By Stewart Lee in The Sunday Times Posted on Sunday, January 21st, 2007

John Martyn’s 70’s, folk-fusion experiments with the echoplex guitar pedal have led to the lazy byline, ‘godfather of trip-hop’, but this is to damn him with ludicrously feint praise. The Don’t Look Back series of concerts, in which artists perform an album from beginning to end, encouraged Martyn to revisit his finest hour, 1973’s Solid Air, last September. The original record saw the dashing young guitarist, members of Fairport Convention and Pentangle, and guests such as the jazz saxophonist Tony Coe, achieve a still unsurpassed blend of songwriterly moves and expansive dynamics.

But on the first night of the Solid Air tour, the kind of band you’d see jamming in a coctail bar in a 1980’s Tom Cruise vehicle subjected Martyn’s masterpiece to the full Level 42 treatment, with swathes of cluttering keyboard effects, trite sax solos, and session musician style fretless bass plonking. Martyn, now wheelchair bound, has survived battles with the bottle, the amputation of a leg, and collaborations with Phil Collins. But could he survive being made to sound like the Miami Vice soundtrack?

Whatever idignities Martyn’s band heaped on his music, his great wounded bear of a voice was still there at the centre, and when he picked up the acoustic guitar for Over The Hill, something of the charm of the original emerged. May You Never, Martyn’s signature song, originally a perfectly formed solo acoustic performance, started well, before the band joined in, the saxophonist getting so excited he was forced to push his glasses back up his nose in between blasts. Ironically, Martyn’s roadie was wearing a Johnny Cash t-shirt, reminding us that, with the right producer, it’s never too late for great artists to reconnect with their essential selves. Even Dylan had to begin again. John Martyn could still surprise us. The goodwill is there. It would be wrong to fail to mention that the evening ended with a rapturous standing ovation.

Martyn’s support act, the anonymously named young singer-songwriter John Smith, was an object lesson in how taste and imagination always outweigh mere musical virtuosity, coaxing all manner of unexpected sounds from his acoustic guitar, and taking daring chances with timing and song-structure. The two verses he sang entirely unaccompanied, to catch the audience’s attention as they wandered into the room at the start of his set, were the highlight the night. You could say it peaked early.

Written by Stewart Lee in The Sunday Times on 21st January 2007. Filed Under: Written For Money
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