Moving through Solid Air: the genius of John Martyn

The Herald Scotland

2 days ago

Martyn, he would later write, was an 'amazing, robust guitar player and had a combative Glaswegian swagger, which immediately made him more than just another 'new Dylan'… To me, he was like a jazz musician, brilliant at improvising, be it with his voice or on his guitar, with a very free sense of timing'.
Blackwell was inspired to sign Martyn to Island, despite his label being chiefly known at that time as a home of Jamaican music.
Martyn's Island debut was London Conversation, released in October 1967, when he was all of 19. Recorded in the space of a single afternoon, its songs – all but three of which were written by Martyn – showcase his dexterous acoustic guitar playing and his way with lyrics, as on 'Ballad of an Elder Woman'. One of the three non-originals was Bob Dylan's Don't Think Twice, It's All Right.
The album was a promising start. Asked in 2008 by the journalist Johnny Black how he felt about the album, Martyn responded: 'I'm amazed at how many young people buy it! People come up to me and they give me albums to sign and that's one of them! There it is. They are influenced by it, it's very strange. Though I find it very straight now'.
By the time of his second album, The Tumbler, which went on sale in December 1968, much had changed.
'Between the two albums', Martyn is quoted today as saying on his website, 'I got exposed to London, you see, and at that time the [guitar] heroes were about, you know, [Bert] Jansch and Davey Graham, and I just kind of listened a lot to music that I hadn't listened to before, and I met [jazz flautist] Harold McNair…. met loads of people all of a sudden. Between the two I just met all these people that were older and more experienced than me musically. That's the reason for the change'.
The Tumbler, which was produced by Al Stewart, was more expansive than the debut. A second guitar, and a bass guitar, had been added to the mix. '[Martyn's] voice was beginning to slur bluesily through the words', Blackwell notes approvingly in his autobiography, The Islander, 'and John's fast, precise guitar had taken an incredible leap'.
Martyn's next two studio projects, both in 1970, were Stormbringer! and The Road to Ruin, both of which teamed him with his new wife, Beverley (nee Kutner), a talented backing singer whose voice can be heard on Simon and Garfunkel's album, Bookends.
Martyn returned as a solo artist in November 1971 for Bless the Weather, which featured Danny Thompson on double bass and Richard Thompson on guitar, and was notable for such tracks as Glistening Glyndebourne, in which Martyn's guitar shimmers hypnotically through an Echoplex tape echo unit. 'Among the flood of primarily reflective albums released this past year', wrote a Rolling Stone critic, 'I think that Bless The Weather is almost in a class with Joni Mitchell's Blue and Jackson Browne, though it is vastly different from either'.
As Blackwell writes, Bless the Weather led to 1973's Solid Air which, that same year, led to Inside Out: 'a trio of classic, critically revered albums where John moved through different states as the sings became more ambient and abstract'. Of the three, Solid Air has come to be seen by many as its creator's finest hour.
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John Martyn was born Ian David McGeachy in New Maldon, Surrey, in September 1948; his parents, both professional singers, were Greenock-born Tommy McGeachy and his Belgian-born wife Beatrice (Betty). The couple's marriage did not last long, and Ian, while still a toddler, was moved to Glasgow to be looked after by his father and his grandmother, in the latter's tenement house in Tantallon Road, near Queen's Park. He was educated at Langside Primary and then, in 1960, at Shawlands Academy.
He became fascinated with the acoustic guitar work of Jansch and Graham and practised endlessly on his own guitar. Hamish Imlach became something of a mentor, too. Graeme Thomson, author of the excellent Martyn biography, Small Hours, records one academy pupil as recalling that Martyn's development on the guitar was 'phenomenal'.
John's first public performance was at Langside Halls, in the latter half of 1965. The venue, he told Johnny Black in 2008, was 'about seventy yards from my house. Somebody didn't turn up so they got me to play for half an hour which was a long time as I didn't have that many songs'.
He became a regular fixture at folk clubs in Glasgow, Edinburgh and elsewhere, his expertise and reputation steadily growing. In the spring of 1967, writes Graeme, Martyn, just 18, boarded a train at Glasgow Central, bound for London. His girlfriend at the time, unaware that he had left, waited in vain for him at Shawlands Cross, expecting to go on a date with him.
In the capital he played such renowned clubs as Les Cousins and began his association with Chris Blackwell and Island. His fourth solo album, Solid Air, may not have charted, but it remains to this day an accomplished and highly-regarded piece of work. As one contemporary review, in Melody Maker, put it: 'How do you begin to describe a guitarist as sensitive and accomplished as John Martyn? Every new album expands one's appreciation of his ability'.
As recently as 2021, Classic Rock magazine was moved to describe it as one of the 10 must-have folk-rock albums. Hugh Fielder writes: 'Running his acoustic guitar into a rocker's array of effects pedals, Martyn picks and strums his way through a set of songs that snake about among jazz, blues, folk and rock – the driving 'Dreams By The Sea', the mellow 'May You Never' and the tripped-out exorcism of Skip James' 'I'd Rather Be The Devil'. Despite most of Fairport Convention turning up for the recording, the sound is still sparse – leaving more room for the mesmerising atmosphere'. To Pitchfork online magazine, Solid Air is an 'astral-folk masterpiece that embodies the British songwriter's mercurial artistry'.
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The album contains one of Martyn's most popular songs, the yearning 'May You Never', which was subsequently covered by, amongst many others, Eric Clapton, Rod Stewart and Newton Faulkner, and was recently accorded the 'Soul Music' treatment on Radio 4. In January 2009, Martyn and his band played a special gig in HMP Long Lartin, Worcs. Erwin James, writing in the Guardian, described there electrifying, emotional impact that the song's lines had on the hard men who were present: "Those lines meant so much to us, among us the down, the defeated, the betrayed and the betrayers – an anthem for relationships, a hymn to friendship and love... The words could not have been written for a more needy audience. As he sang, the depth of our exposure was near tangible".
Reviewing the album upon its release, in the US publication, Creem, one writer was so taken with 'May You Never' that he declared it 'not only one of the best songs he's ever written, it's one of the best songs I've ever heard. Beautiful and stark, it's a song to a friend, really a benediction, a toast ... In short, I can't think of a young, rising musician with more talent or imagination than John Martyn, and I don't know of any better introduction to him than this album'.
Another fine song on the album, 'Don't Want To Know', sees the narrator opting defiantly for love over evil, for a better world than we one we currently have, the one in which 'glistening gold …[makes] sure it keeps us hypnotized').
The album opens with the tender 'Solid Air', written by Martyn to Nick Drake, the troubled, brilliant acoustic guitarist and singer-songwriter whom he and Beverley had befriended. 'You've been taking your time/And you've been living on solid air', it begins. Drake, who had just released what would be his final studio album, the starkly beautiful Pink Moon, had been suffering from mental health issues; he died the following year – November, 1974 – after an overdose of antidepressants.
The three solo albums Martyn made between 1971 and 1973 – Bless the Weather, Solid Air, and Inside Out – are the work of a singular talent. Of the trio, Solid Air remains the most influential and most admired; not for nothing did Q magazine once describe it as one of the best chill-out albums of all time.
'Song for song', Graeme Thomson concludes in his Small Hours book, 'Bless the Weather is arguably a more downright beautiful compositional work, but Solid Air is replete with an elusive and intoxicating atmosphere which makes for a deeper listening experience'.
* johnmartyn.com; Graeme Thomson's book Small Hours: The Long Night of John Martyn (Omnibus Press), is available in paperback at £12.99