It benefits from the warm production of Island records house producer John Wood.
#John martyn albums mac#
Not to be confused with the similarly entitled songs by Fleetwood Mac or Maroon 5, Martyn’s own version of the song “Don’t Want to Know” comes from possibly his best known album, 1973’s Solid Air. This was no challenge in itself, when journalists, seeking a good story, would sneak him in bottles of hooch, directly against the wishes of his final partner. His bad habits ultimately killed this 20-stone diabetic amputee, although, with no small irony, his death came at a time where he had finally taken to sobriety. Said not to be the nicest of men, not least when afire with alcohol, he left a trajectory of broken relationships and broken faces behind him. Sounding as though he was never sure if he was a home counties poet or a Glaswegian hardman, Martyn’s onstage persona and accent slipped randomly from the one to the other, belches and sonnets taking turn for attention. Yet the voice remained–sure, a tad more blurred around the edges–with the songwriting seeming not to suffer at all. Those lifestyle choices visibly destroyed his body, as over the years he became the embodiment of Dorian Gray’s attic artwork. He had the voice and look of an angel at the start of his career, and the recreational habits of the devil. John Martyn was a mercurial man, a mass of paradigms. So it is to John Martyn I turn, with his plea for a little more uplift, a little more enlightenment. I guess I’m hard to kill.” By the 1990s he “cut a shambling, overweight figure unrecognizable from the handsome, curly-haired youth seen staring so hopefully out of his early album covers.”Īfter a burst cyst led to septicemia and forced doctors to cut off his right leg below the knee in 2003, Martyn continued to play gigs in a wheelchair.You getting a bit weary with the news this year? Getting all a bit dark, isn’t it? If evil is too strong a word for this virus, good it certainly ain’t, with some of the actions of our leaders sometimes also bordering on, let’s say, willful. He recorded several mediocre albums in the 1980s and “later confessed that he could not even remember making some of them.” Martyn also grew increasingly accident-prone: He fractured several ribs by impaling himself on a fence, broke his neck by plowing his car into a bull, and “fell offstage on more than one occasion.” Last year he recalled, “I’ve been shot a couple of times as well, but just lay down and pretended to be dead. But heroin and alcohol abuse soon caught up with him. “At his height, every note Martyn played or sang seemed imbued with a spacious elegance and sublime airiness,” said the London Times. He played with Phil Collins and David Gilmour of Pink Floyd, and Eric Clapton covered Martyn’s song “May You Never” in 1977. “Listening to Martyn’s illustrious back catalogue, one hears naïveté, drugged-out experimentation, midlife crisis, and some Buddhism-influenced soul-searching.” Such innovation was an acquired taste although Martyn released more than 20 albums, he never had wide mainstream appeal. Martyn pioneered the use of such gizmos as the fuzz box, phase shifter, and especially the Echoplex, which he “employed to mesmerizing effect on his druggiest, most electric-sounding album, 1977’s One World,” said the London Independent. “It established Martyn’s trademarks-slurred vocals pushed to the bottom end of his tenor, prominent acoustic bass lines that prop up his acoustic guitar that crackled like a dying fire, the electric piano sprinkling in notes here and there.” Another Martyn innovation was slapping both sides of his guitar, which “added an eerie sustain on chords and ascribed a prominence to notes that pierced the blur of his vocals.” Martyn made some “straight-ahead folk albums” before his breakthrough work, Solid Air (1973). There he became the first white solo artist to sign with Island Records, a mainly reggae label. At the age of 18, on an agent’s advice, he packed whatever he could into his guitar case, changed his name, and moved to London. Martyn, who was born Iain David McGeachy, was the son of light-opera singers, said Variety, but growing up in Glasgow, Scotland, preferred the music of local folk clubs. He also engaged in substance abuse and general recklessness before dying from complications of double pneumonia last week. In dissolving barriers between blues, jazz, rock, folk, and the avant-garde, he defied easy categorization and refused corporate attempts to make him more marketable. Musically and personally, singer and guitarist John Martyn was a rebel. The hard-living British musician who defied genresJohn Martyn1948–2009
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