A clear-eyed look at the immense talent and shocking behaviour of a great
British singer-songwriter
To many of those familiar with his work, John Martyn exists in the memory as the angel-haired, soulful-eyed hippie whose honeyed slur of a voice turned his ballad “May You Never” into one of the anthems of the 1970s singer-songwriter generation. Others will recall his innovative guitar playing, which evolved from standard folk-style fingerpicking into electronic storms of ecstatic improvisation. A seductive sweetness and a blazing creativity in his
music reflected genuine aspects of his character. Yet, as virtually everyone who knew him could attest, he was also a dangerous presence whose propensity to inflict mental and physical cruelty brought tragedy to the lives of his
Women and children. The last but one of his long-term partners had an answer not available to all of them: “He could be quite violent, but it didn’t affect me because I used to do kickboxing before I met him. He never landed a punch on me.”
Martyn died in 2009, aged 60, six years after an untreated infection led to the amputation of his right leg. His body weight rose to more than 20 stone from the long-term effects of the alcohol and drug abuse that ran alongside and effectively derailed his career. Had he died in 1975, already with his best work behind him, he would have been welcomed alongside his friend Nick
Drake into the “27 club”, reserved for musicians of that age and generation – others were Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison – who fell victim to the same arc of success and drug-taking. Instead he survived long enough to be cherished by a hard core of admirers and to become the subject of attempted career revivals that usually foundered on his own unswerving gift for self-destruction. It is the
Job of Graeme Thomson, the author of this excellent and necessary biography, to make sense of a tangled and often distressing story, in which the scales are balanced between pristine beauty and damage both primary and collateral.