In 2020, Omnibus Press published Small Hours: The Long Night of John Martyn by Graeme Thomson in hardback, an intimate and unflinching biography of one of the great maverick artists. On 14th March Omnibus are publishing the book in paperback.
KLOF Mag previously hosted five specially commissioned videos of Karine Polwart, Findlay Napier, Siobhan Wilson, Olivia Chaney and Blue Rose Code performing John Martyn songs, each one accompanied by a short related extract from the book. To celebrate the paperback publication, you can read and watch them all below:
Pre-Order Small Hours: The Long Night of John Martyn by Graeme Thomson via Omnibus Press | Bookshop.org | Amazon
Graeme is also giving away a signed copy…
Free book! The paperback edition of my John Martyn biography, Small Hours, is published in 2 weeks (March 14). Had loads of lovely reviews. I have a signed copy to give away. Simply RT this & reply with your fave #JohnMartyn song by noon on Thurs, Feb 29. Winner picked at random. pic.twitter.com/SfDzhbBuaL
— Graeme Thomson (@GraemeAThomson) February 26, 2024
Blue Rose Code – Fine Lines
Blue Rose Code, accompanied by a string quartet comprising Seonaid Aitken (first violin), Kristan Harvey (second violin), Sarah Leonard (viola) and David Munn (cello), performing Fine Lines, the opening track on Martyn’s 1973 album, Inside Out.
Credit: Garry Boyle (audio); Graham Coe (visuals)
From Small Hours:
An album that frequently cuts loose from the moorings of conventional songwriting drops a significant clue regarding its intentions in the opening seconds. Martyn comments that whichever sounds the musicians had been creating prior to the listener’s arrival had felt ‘natural’, before sliding sleepily into the opening track: Fine Lines. From the start, we are alerted to the fact that what we’re hearing is merely an excerpt, edited highlights of a larger whole.
Inside Out is often guided by surf and stars rather than map and compass, yet there are wonderful songs, too. Fine Lines is one of Martyn’s very best, as tender a song of friendship as May You Never, except that here the love extends beyond a brother to a brotherhood of the ‘finest folk in town’. It reeks of woozy late-night gatherings, the 5 a.m. pre-dawn reckoning when the music settles to a faint pulse, the bright edge of the chemicals begin to soften and blur the senses, and the awareness of a universal human bond is a matter of peaceful certitude.
Fine Lines cuts deeper than the drunken arm slung around the shoulder, travelling through skin and bone to the soul, via the deeply felt connections forged in smoke-filled rooms and over smeared glasses, in the warm communion of bodies slumped platonically on sofas. Loneliness is there, too, whispering at the window, the exquisite sadness that comes from knowing that good times are ending even as they are happening. The fragility is so profound one can hear the air shake around the strings, feel the cadences of all those empty spaces.
Olivia Chaney – Spencer the Rover
Olivia Chaney performs the traditional English folk song, Spencer The Rover, recorded by Martyn on his 1975 album, Sunday’s Child.
Olivia says of the song: ‘I came to John’s version via Shirley Collins. I loved how John made the folk song his own – you can hear in several of the lines how deeply self-referenced it is: “On the fifth day of November, I’ve a reason to remember.” All the lines about rambling, confusion, etc. He obviously massively related to this song and its old meaning. The line, “as valiant a man as ever left home,” I read that as almost bitter in self-irony, parody, regret. Also for me about to have my own child, living in Yorkshire, the song took on an extra layer of significance!’
From Small Hours:
On an album where the tapping of folk sources was more overt than usual, the highlight is Spencer The Rover, a venerable traditional song with its provenance in East Sussex and Yorkshire, and which Martyn learned from one of the latter county’s many fine folk singers, Robin Dransfield. Martyn was particularly enamoured with it. The following spring, the song gave its name to his second child, christened Spenser Thomas McGeachy.
‘He initially asked me to sing on Spencer The Rover,’ says Martin Carthy. ‘Nothing came of it, in the end. Don’t know why. It tells you a lot about him that he loved that song so much. It spoke to him. It’s a very grown-up song. I never understood it when I was twenty; when I was forty I did. The results were very true to the song, but very John.’
He sang it with rapturous tenderness on Sunday’s Child, and many times more on stage in the years thereafter. Though he did not write the words, in his hands they read like wishful autobiography. In its empathetic depiction of a man who has been ‘much reduced’ and ‘caused great confusion’, one can hear a romanticised echo of Martyn’s own transgressive wanderings.
In the song, Spencer has abandoned his family and embarked on a troubled, aimless ramble around the countryside. In Yorkshire, he beds down for the night in a forest. After a restless sleep, punctuated by dream-sent voices imploring him to go home, he returns to the family fold, a near-stranger welcomed lovingly back into their arms. Spencer is thereafter resolved to a future filled with nothing more taxing than taking his children upon his knee and listening to their ‘prittle-prattling stories’. It is a song about setting aside youthful appetites and wild schemes to instead settle for the simplest and most enriching rewards.
For Martyn, such home comforts were fleeting and rare. Though they were similarly cherished, at least in theory, they offered only temporary respite. The song smooths out the edges of his cavalier ways. Perhaps that’s why he cradles it like precious cargo. It offers a glimpse of another path, impossible to follow but close enough to touch. He could never have written the words, but he sings them as sacred text. The performance is so powerful partly because it offers the happy ending his own actions denied him.
Karine Polwart – Couldn’t Love You More
Karine Polwart performs Couldn’t Love You More, first recorded by Martyn on his 1977 album, One World, and later reimagined on his 1981 release, Glorious Fool.
From Small Hours:
One World synthesised the old and new, marrying Martyn’s traditional heart and soul to a sinewy energy and fresh, luxuriant textures. Punk had broken through during the period in which the album was written and recorded, but it made little impact on him. He claimed to enjoy the Sex Pistols, and for at least one member of the band the feeling was mutual: John Lydon was a Martyn fan, spotted at several shows. But, for a man beholden to slow music, the abrasion of punk was never going to be his thing, even if he rather admired the attitude.
The album was less personal in some ways, certainly less intimate, than Martyn’s recent records. Couldn’t Love You More was the one direct connection to his former work, a simple acoustic performance featuring Danny Thompson’s sawing bass undertow and dappled sprinkles of vibes. The lyric was one of his most tender, if ambiguous, declarations. ‘On a simple level it’s saying, “I gave you everything,”’ says Ralph McTell. ‘On another level, it says, “I didn’t have any more that I could pull out to give you.” He had a light touch, but there was a terrible, awe-inspiring darkness in him as well. He was one of those artists who could articulate what we suspect is this darkness we feel in ourselves. Sometimes we don’t want to see it.’
Siobhan Wilson – Over the Hill
Taken from Martyn’s classic 1973 album, Solid Air: Siobhan Wilson performs Over The Hill.
From Small Hours:
The unease which runs through Over The Hill belies the breezy hop and skip in the music, with its twinkly conjuring of caravans and campfires. It is a song of conflict, between the open road and the four walls of hearth and home. The title phrase, of course, can also refer to someone who is past their best. The journey Martyn describes is a homecoming – the run into Hastings on the train rolled through rising countryside before the line dipped down to reveal the town – but also a more ambiguous internal one.
Martyn often spoke about domesticity equating the death of creativity. He was a subscriber to the Cyril Connolly school of cliché that the pram in the hallway is the solemn enemy of good art, yet he also yearned for his family, its wholesome comforts and simple certainties. In Over The Hill, he is worried about ‘my babies’ and ‘my wife’; worried, too, about what they are doing to him, and he to them.
Findlay Napier – May You Never
Also from Solid Air, Findlay Napier performs Martyn’s standard, May You Never.
From Small Hours
‘You could put it into a hymn book,’ says Richard Thompson of Martyn’s best-known and popular composition. ‘It’s a beautiful song.’ The most common thesis is that he wrote May You Never for his friend Andy Matthews, who ran the Soho cellar club, Les Cousins. Then again, Scottish writer and folk singer Ewan McVicar has met ‘three people who told me who that song was written about. All different.’ Others theorise that it was written about Martyn’s own children. Paul Wheeler refutes the idea that it is about, or for, any person in particular. ‘As I remember, he wrote it very much as a signature song. It was a very calculated thing.’ Wheeler recollects that the line about love being a lesson ‘we learn in our time’ was loosely appropriated from Lesley Duncan’s Love Song.
Such utility is the great value of May You Never. It feels usable, relatable. We all know someone about whom it could or should have been written. It is a series of very secular prayers for a wayward sibling-cum-soulmate to keep his woman close, his temper in check, and to always have a warm place to lay his head. That these pitfalls were all directly pertinent to Martyn’s personal hang-ups and weaknesses lends weight to the interpretation that he was, at least partly, singing to himself. Though it remains his most famous song, covered by superstars and bar-stool amateurs alike, he never quite saw what the fuss was about, and at times resented the dominance it came to demand in his catalogue. When I raised this with him, he shrugged and called it a ‘lollipop’, a sweet, simple and insubstantial diversion.
Small Hours: The Long Night of John Martyn by Graeme Thomson is out on 14th March via Omnibus Press. Pre-order via Omnibus Press | Bookshop.org | Amazon