It was March 21…he was living here in Ireland about 40mins from where we live in a village called Thomastown. I think he was 3 nights late turning up for the gig lol
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This was my entry point to John Martyn, aired on the BBC in Summer of 1981 aged 14, it blew my tiny mind. I saw him at the Royal Court in Liverpool in October '81 and he was transcendent, the effect it had on me I will never forget with the magnificent Max Middleton on keys and Alan Thompson on bass. I saw him a further 12 times up to 1987 and to be honest it was with very much diminishing returns. I was at the infamous Mean Fiddler gig in '87 when he was hours late coming on, played one song and promptly threw up into a bucket, gig over. Saw him once more after that at the Town and Country club also in '87and it was dismal, love affair over. I only side glanced at his career after that and was sad to hear of his demise but not surprised. Having read Graeme Thomson’s book ‘Small Hours’ I feel quite differently about him now, a problematic story and I very rarely listen to him. Can you separate the art from the artist? I’m not sure, I certainly have difficulty with it. As a teenager I was a proper fan boy, regularly at the stage door for autographs and adored all his music but now in middle age am very conflicted and saddened at some of his behaviour.
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Not to pile in on the dirt (which I’m obviously about to do) but I interviewed Chris Frantz for the Compass Point project I’ve been toying with since time and he said that when he was there in Nassau on the island they could hear him fighting with his wife (alluded to more than that) and Frantz said ‘I know you guys in the uk love that guy but I went to Blackwell and said if you don’t get him off the island I’m going to hurt him’ as he couldn’t stand by and let it happen. This is all third hand obviously.
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Many will know that Big Muff was the collaboration Martyn made with Lee Scratch Perry. I was unaware of exacyly how it came to be until recently.
A Carry On-style collaboration between John Martyn and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Big Muff came into being at the breakfast table of Island boss Chris Blackwell.
Since then what began as a smutty joke has been acclaimed as one of the building blocks of trip-hop, along with the album – One World – from which it is taken.
Martyn and Perry had met in Jamaica in 1976, where the Englishman had gone with his family to take a break from music and recharge his batteries after punk changed the landscape of music in the UK.
The following year Scratch was in London working with Bob Marley on Punky Reggae Party when they ran into each other again at Blackwell’s home, an old Tudor farmhouse in Berkshire.
The cups on the breakfast table were all modelled on farmyard animals, prompting the eccentric Jamaican to start freestyling about the mating possibilities of the pig and the cow; rambling on in his own inimitable nonsense-verse style about a big muff and a powder puff.
Next day the pair of them got back together to write and record the song in the studio at Woolwich Green Farm, where Martyn was recording with his band, including ex-members of Traffic, Gong, Fairport Convention and Pentangle
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One World is the only John Martyn album I have and it’s unlike anything else he’d done before, with a dubby widescreen sound enhanced by his Echoplex guitar effects and Blackwell’s atmospheric production.
Some tracks were recorded outdoors, with Blackwell running a live feed across the farm’s surrounding lake so microphones could pick up on the natural reverb – and even the occasional goose and train.
- via the Eats, Drinks and Leaves blog
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