Category: John Martyn

As John Martyn’s Bless the Weather drifts toward its close, “Glistening Glyndebourne” quietly detonates the boundaries of British folk. What begins as haze — echo, fingerpicked fragments, drifting piano — gradually reveals something stranger and more radical: Martyn using effects, repetition, and rhythm to transform the guitar into an entirely new instrument. In retrospect, the track feels less like an outlier than a doorway into the restless, genre-warping work that would define the next decade of his career.

It is perhaps at the peak of his unhinged behavior in the mid-70s that Martyn stumbled into his creative apex. Solid Air confirmed that the chops were there, but it was with One World that the artist cemented his potential for crafting masterworks that transcend the folk-singer moniker.

When John Martyn set up shop at the Leeds University Refectory, the place was still smoking from legendary sets laid down there by The Who and The Groundhogs just a few years prior. Little did he know, Martyn was about to complete the Leeds trifecta. Live at Leeds finds Martyn barrelling headlong into the uncharted reaches of his own expansive trajectory, flanked by Pentangle’s Danny Thompson on bass and Spontaneous Music Ensemble founder John Stevens on kit.

John Martyn recorded his 1978 masterpiece One World with a cast of characters that included Lee “Scratch” Perry, Steve Winwood, Pentangle’s Danny Thompson and Fairport Convention’s Dave Pegg. But when it came time to promote the album live, the songwriter went out solo – and this selection from his appearance on the German Rockpalast show is a dazzling document of the era.

“Woodstock’s the best place I’ve found so far. I detest New York, but upstate it’s OK.” (John Martyn in Melody Maker, 1970) By the end of 1968, future psych/folk-jazz icon John Martyn was at an […]