John Martyn: Feeling Gravity's Pull (1998)

After rising to prominence with the late 60’s electronic folk renaissance, John Martyn uprooted songform and subjected it to a serious sonic makeover on a series of albums which rank alongside the best of Tim Buckley and Van Morrison for their radical fusions of folk, soul, jazz and dub. In spite of that, his best music, he says, is yet to come.

"I’m pontificating,” booms John Martyn. “Well, of course, in a church you’ve got to pontificate, ain’tcha? Pon, pon, tiddly-pon. And the pontiff…what? What’s the point of it all?” All I did was ask whether he had a guru. Not such a stupid question, surely – there must have been something, somebody, some beacon guiding him past the myriad obstacles and buffeting winds of a 35 year voyage through music – and I sure didn’t expect him to name some moneyed Maharishi, either. But there he is, old John Martyn, crumpled in his red leather armchair, rigormortised and wheezing with laughter. “Oh, ya beautie!” he cries, finally, when the mirth lets his face uncurl. “Took me quite by surprise, that one. No I do not – simple answer. No, no indeed!” A few more hoots, then: “If I had a guru, it would be Chick Murray, a Scottish comedian. I’ll give you one of his jokes now: I was out walking the other evening. This fellow accosted me, and said ‘Excuse me, sir, is that the moon up there?’ As you would. And I said ‘I’ve no idea – I’m stranger here myself!’”

“For me, it’s Zen,” Martyn continues. “He was apparently a very difficult man, but obviously a very deep thinker.”

John Martyn is midway through moving into a small, former Scots Congregational church next door to his current home in the minute, landlocked Scottish hamlet of Roberton. Above his fireplace, with logs burning in the iron woodstove, are, in descending order: a gilt, French Règime mirror; a round portrait of the poet Robbie Burns; a pair of Buddhas; and a china scroll bearing the Lord’s Prayer. “Just about covers the faiths,” he says, dropping immediately into the vernacular of a Deep South hellfire Baptist preacher: “Fuck who ya want – Buddha will forgive ya, and yah can also pray to de Lawd. All in one day, right on the same rattle shelf – now who’da believed it? Pass me that rattle, I’m feeling holy!”

Like his patchwork shrine, John Martyn’s voices (both spoken and sung), his music – his moods even – are quilted together from scraps of experience gathered during the course of a truly nomadic life. During a conversation he’ll nonchalantly slip from Sarf England drawl to Scots (b)rogue; ironic Lord Snooty sniff to brimstone Preacher Man; character sketches of Lee Perry or Leon Thomas. Since his birth in 1949, to an English mother and Scottish father, he’s forever been shuttling the length and breadth of the equally chequered British landscape, taking on whichever shape suited him best at a given moment. “I’m above nationality,” he says, “I was born in New Maiden. My mother couldn’ae hang on. She was English, you see. In fact she wasn’t; she was Jewish Belgian. So I’m a Scots Belgian Jew. To you.”

Aix-en-Provence, France, winter 1967: American singer Robin Frederick writes a song called “Sandy Grey” after Nick Drake stands her up in a French bar. In the summer of that year she hitchhikes to London, where she meets 18 year old John Martyn. Exit Ms Frederick stage left, rapidly, but the song remains: “Sandy Grey” turns up the following year, as a second track on Martyn’s debut island LP, London Conversation. Six years later Drake makes his tragic exit – pursued by demons – but not before Martyn has written “Solid Air”, the lugubrious word-in-your-ear song addressed to Drake, whose anxiety attacks, depression and dysfunctionality had driven him to the brink of self-destruction. Based on the spectral chord shifts and tremolo-Rhodes licks in Pharoah Sanders’s “Astral Traveling” (from Thembi), “Solid Air” sealed Martyn’s reputation as a master of mood and pace. It came in the midst of an intensely happy period in Martyn’s life. He was married to Beverley, the Coventry-born folk singer with whom he’d already released several albums in the later 60s and early 70s, and was enjoying the kind of extended summer of love which was also a feature of the lives of Tim Buckley and Van Morrison. Like Martyn, they were each building their own canons of electric, visionary, pastoral songs.

Martyn denies knowing the Sanders tune, and seems genuinely amazed at the comparison: “I never thought of that. You could be right. That’s interesting – I’d like to know which came first the chicken or the egg? I probably just beat him to it [in fact, Thembi predates Solid Air by at least two years]. Is it in C minor? I’ll kill him!”

When John Coltrane was drenching jazz in acid, taking fellow Afronaut Sanders with him on a journey to the light, Martyn was in Scotland learning folk blues with guitarist Hamish Imlach, the teacher he now uncannily resembles. He never got to hear Coltrane in the flesh, but remains a fervent admirer or his innovations – on Philentropy, a live album released in 1983, he scats the vocal line from A Love Supreme. “It all became very spiritual for a while, didn’t it?” he says. “And I actually believed it” [Laughs] Then I find out they’re all fucking ravers, selling junk to each other – pissing up and down the bars and beating their missuses up. It came as a bit of a shock, really, ‘cause you get your brainbox built up, thinking, ah, these cats know so much … Coltrane might have cleaned up, but few people ever do, when they get that deep into it. I can’t think of one.