January was a fierce month for celebrity life expectancy, especially if you are in your late forties and feel you grew up with these people. John Updike. Bill Frindall. Patrick McGoohan (‘I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered’). Ricardo Montalban (‘from Hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee’). Tony Hart and Sir John Mortimer and David Vine. But not John Martyn, please no, tell me that’s a mistake. True, he wasn’t in the best of health. Having drunk enough for two alcoholics and taken enough heroin to floor an elephant, he had his left leg lopped off in 2003 when a cyst exploded, and, once confined to a wheelchair, he piled on the weight. He was never going to make old bones. (He might well have eaten them.) But why now, when he was producing decent records again? Why not ten years ago, or in ten years’ time? Why now?
I have to admit, with some shame (entirely fake, obviously), that I am a relatively recent fan. I note from Facebook that several of my contemporaries have been fans from way back, and all of them seem to have seen him live when he did something catastrophically daft — talking hippyish drivel under the influence, wading into the audience to tackle a heckler, forgetting words, noodling jazzishly. My friend Oisin in Canada ‘is very sad to see John Martyn go, despite being driven to the brink of black madness by his big muff toreador echoplex stylings at Glastonbury ’84’, and I don’t think he’s alone in that. And yet the other side of the unpredictability was a great questing spirit: Martyn’s constant crosspatching of genres simply shows up the poverty of most other artists’ imaginations, the narrowness of their horizons. What took me a while to realise is that if you don’t get it, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there to be got. For years I didn’t get Solid Air, the one album (from 1973) that everyone has. I listened to it from time to time, determined to crack it, but it always drifted by in a blur, its jazzy textures entirely lost on me. Eventually it went to the charity shop. I have been meaning to buy it again but can’t quite bring myself to, for some reason. Maybe I’m working my way back to it, via all the others.
The album that really does it for me is Grace And Danger, his unfathomably bleak break-up album from 1980. He had recorded it three years earlier, but Chris Blackwell at Island famously refused to release it because it was too personal and harrowing. It is both, but it is also beautiful, intimate and completely human — grown-up, I suppose, is the word that comes to mind. Not long ago he played the album live in its entirety, and like an idiot I never got round to going. (Instead I went to Leonard Cohen, believing it to be a Last Chance To See; and what’s the betting that he will be back next year for another go?)
But after years of so-so releases, 2004’s On The Cobbles was a small revelation: great songs played and recorded with incredible warmth, and leaping between folk and blues and jazz (and even mild Pink Floyd-style spaceyness) with a lightness you don’t normally expect from an enormously fat bloke in a wheelchair. Put it this way: it didn’t seem like someone’s final album. A great shame if it was, although obviously it’s even more of a shame for him.
Comments