Folk Off
Folk? Rock? Blues? Jazz? John Martyn was a mixture of all four and certainly one of the most progressive artists of his generation. In an article originally printed in Prog issue 5, the late Tommy Udo recalled close encounters with the maddening, mercurial musical magus.
Words: Tommy Udo
Bearded men with acoustic guitars always appeared to be the antithesis of prog: by their very nature, folkies seemed to be making regressive music, retreating to “tradition”, to rootsiness. They also seemed to epitomise that most nausea-inducing spectacle: the sensitive young man, the lonely boy outsider, the bedroom poet who can’t get a girlfriend and tells the world so in dreadful, self-pitying verse. Who among us has not guffawed uproariously at the scene in National Lampoon’s Animal House when John Belushi, descending the stairs to find some anaemic beatnik with an acoustic guitar serenading a girl with a sensitive folk ballad, seizes the guitar and smashes it savagely against the wall? Who among us hasn’t wanted to do the same to the whey-faced, bum-fluffed fun-annihilators who produce their bloody 12-strings and start picking out Neil Young’s The Needle And The Damage Done at parties?
“The wallflower image was soundly destroyed when John Martyn headbutted my mate in a Glasgow bar…”
John Martyn with bassist Danny Thompson at the Rock Proms at London’s Olympia on July 5, 1974.
BRIAN COOKE/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES
Solid Air (1973).
One World (1977).
BRIAN COOKE/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES
Growing up in Glasgow in the late 70s and early 80s, one of the party favourites of the acoustic guitar and scraggy beard massive was John Martyn’s May You Never, a haunting, Celt-tinged blues ballad from his classic 1973 album Solid Air. You probably heard it murdered many times by some flat-voxed James Taylor wannabe before actually hearing the original.
Your reporter, then, was probably not alone in having, for many years, an unreasonable prejudice against Martyn based solely upon those who sought to interpret his work. This prejudice, like so many, was a stupid one that was happily blasted to pieces in 1978 when he performed Big Muff from the astonishing One World album in a live film for The Old Grey Whistle Test. Fed through a labyrinth of effects pedals, it sounded like the madder end of dub, like music that had more in common with Can than with any of the rootsy folkies that I then so detested. It was one of those what-the-fuck?! moments that we have all experienced upon being confronted with music that blows our minds. Man.