Small Hours: The Long Night of John Martyn

Prologue

The Road to Ruin

In the opening scene of the movie that will never be made of John Martyn’s life, the camera pans slowly across Island Records’ Basing Street studio. A band recently signed to the label is playing an informal showcase. Fellow artists have come to watch, listen, drink, gossip and offer encouragement.

Through the smoke and sound, a Gorgon crown of golden curls bobs up, then down, then up again. Beneath it is John Martyn. He snakes between the throng, bopping lightly to the music, tossing out jokes, trying on voices, cultivating connections, curling an arm around familiar shoulders. The music never stops and neither does he.

Island in the early Seventies was something like an extended family. Musicians gathered at its offices at 22 St Peter’s Square in Hammersmith, at the Cross Keys pub across the road, or in the studio at 8–10 Basing Street in Notting Hill. By habit and through choice, they played on each other’s records, toured together, often lived together.

If Chris Blackwell was Island’s unflappable paterfamilias, then John Martyn was the favoured wayward child. Full of wit and bounce and bite, he pushed his luck into corners and charmed, or slugged, his way out almost every time.

There is something hugely attractive about a young musician in bloom, on top of their game and acutely aware of the fact, confident bordering on arrogant, flying not just with their talent, but the idea of their talent, the possibilities stretched out before them like the outline of a new country. It doesn’t last – it cannot and should not last – but for a long moment it seems to be that everything they do possesses an intuitive, essential rightness. Their spell charms almost everyone it touches, even if it touches only relatively few. It is the kind of meaningful contact that travels deep rather than wide.

Martyn in the first half of the Seventies was that artist. He and his music walked hand in hand in a kind of golden glow. The best vocalists sing like they speak; Martyn sang like he looked, in hazy, honey-coloured tones, barbed and fuzzy around the edges. He was stoned, certainly, but wired-stoned. Head spinning, feet twitching, fingers flashing; always in motion. Softness and abrasion. Irresistible, seductive, unsafe. He was so good he didn’t trouble himself with the plain art of precision. He made it up anew each time. Martyn was the kind of artist you travelled towards with your heart in your throat, as you travel towards unrequited love or a fire in the woods.

He wrote, sang and performed simple songs with dazzling dexterity and an intensity that bordered on outright aggression. Rocking back and forth, slamming the strings with his index finger and thumb – his great friend and foil Danny Thompson called him ‘Badfinger’ – his energy on stage was volcanic and confrontational: are you with me or against me?

Martyn’s best songs travel down, or up, or around and around, but rarely in a straight line. Melodies blossom then wilt. Time signatures stretch and snap. Rhythms steam, bubble and deliquesce. He loved water and used it again and again as a lyrical and musical motif. It is the element which best fits the sounds he created: ripples, waves, currents, eddies; rocks plunging, stones skimming, whirlpools boiling. He drew fat circles in wet sand, surrendered his anchor to tidal drift, echoed the irregular patter of snow-melt.

Having grabbed a foothold in the rather earnest Sixties folk scenes in Glasgow and London, he soon outgrew what he regarded as their limitations. Folk rock, when it soon came, was firmly 4/4. Martyn kept his own time. He immersed himself instead in spiritual jazz, skeletal blues, reverberating dub, pushing his guitar playing and his voice, stretching his capabilities. It did not carve a route to fame or fortune. He never had a hit single; a sole album scraped into the Top 20. It was just as well. Martyn sold as many records as his life could stand.

The art was magical and unerringly beautiful, fearsomely personal, feather-light and somehow pure. It was also capable of being coarse, aggressive, wayward and indulgent, not to mention repetitive and downright dull on occasion. Its great recurring theme is love, which, given the way Martyn lived his life, is not so much a contradiction as evidence that a sincere belief in the power of love is not the same thing at all as having the desire or the ability to practise that creed. It was certainly not enough to sustain him peacefully through the world, or to protect the world from him. The heart that was always present in his music was a divided one, the beauty mirrored by what Ralph McTell calls ‘an awe-inspiring darkness’. It didn’t always require words. A divine, whirling rage is powerfully evident in ‘Outside In’, just as one can discern a profound commitment to some higher healing force flowing through ‘Small Hours’.

It must have been exhausting being the John Martyn that John Martyn presented to the world. So much so, one suspects that playing music was the only time he was able to get out of the way of himself, to allow himself a break, a breather. ‘The great thing about music,’ he once said, ‘is for those sections of my life that I’m playing, I don’t actually exist and I’m quite convinced that, while other people are growing old during that time, I’m not.’¹

Even during the pauses on stage between songs he was ‘on’, jiving and joking, jousting with the audience, his band, himself. To watch him perform was to witness an unsettling dance between deep revelation and blunt, sometimes brutish, concealment. The music said too much, and he spent the rest of the time – his life – living it down. Some curse: to be so hopelessly in thrall to beauty as to fear it and seek constantly to undermine it. The innate prettiness Martyn possessed – in his face, his voice, his music, his words – was a gift he at first exploited and then actively mistrusted. In the end he simply destroyed it.

Lost inside the music, however, he dropped all fronts, and some purer form of his true self emerged – a romantic, vulnerable soul, minded to love, curving towards peace, no stranger to tears. Did any musician in the Seventies fly so free as Martyn did on Bless The Weather, Solid Air, Inside Out, Live At Leeds and One World? Did any fall quite so far?

So much for the movie.

We were in the beer garden, John Martyn and me, and I could think of no useful means by which to measure the distance his life had travelled from his music. It was the autumn of 2005. Martyn had a little over three years left to live, and the hard fact of his mortality was cruelly apparent and yet somehow seemed absurd.

At this stage in the proceedings, fifty-seven years deep and scored with the irrefutable evidence of a long spell of hard weather, Martyn was a man who tested the limits of the powers of description. He tipped the scales at twenty-something stone, his huge face scarred, his fingers grey and pale and thick as butchers’ sausages. A plump pink abscess poked out from under his shirt. When he stood and leaned on his walking staff, he resembled a fallen Shakespearean king, a titan damned to a dotage of impotent rage. By now, he spent much of his time in a wheelchair.

He had lost his right leg below the knee in 2003 when an infected cyst burst and septicaemia flooded his bloodstream. He had, in effect, poisoned himself to the point of amputation. He now wore a prosthetic where it used to be, which had not been a success. He was on his ninth ‘false leg’ and had put on six and a half stone in the past eighteen months because there was no exercise to be had. He was constantly at war with his absent limb. He explained that now, when he tried to swim, he went around and around in circles. ‘No rudder.’ It seemed a fitting phrase.

There was not the faintest trace of self-pity. Though demonstrably wounded, he still gave off an aura of dangerous power. The trouble was all in the eyes. Even when Martyn was young and terribly beautiful, you noticed it: the potential for lights to switch from green to red at great speed. I had known other men like this. I’d met them in pubs in Glasgow, Bristol, Dublin and London, big men vibrating dangerously on little bar stools, hunched over their medicine, filled with a febrile bonhomie. Big men raised too quickly on stickle-brick foundations, governed by mercurial mood swings that were impossible to read until they had swung right at you.

When I met Martyn, those fires had dampened down, though the embers were still smoking. His predicament seemed karmic, suggesting that the bountiful gifts of his youth had been granted as the down payment on a debt which was now being ruthlessly called in. If anybody else had inflicted the damage on the beautiful young man Martyn had once been, if some third-party aggressor had taken pains to so brutally dismantle and erase all trace of the fellow Danny Thompson calls, over and over, as though summoning him back, a ‘wonderful curly-haired boy’, then it would have been a police matter. As it was, Martyn was both perpetrator and victim of this crime. He looked in the mirror and had all the evidence he needed. No charges would be pressed.

Earlier, Martyn and his partner Teresa Walsh had met me off the Dublin train. I had clambered into the back of their car. Teresa was driving because Martyn was no longer able. I’m not sure he ever had been, though it hadn’t always stopped him.

We tore through Thomastown, an unremarkable county town in Kilkenny, and as we did so I totted up the misfortunes suffered during the last few years alone by the man squashed into the passenger seat. Broken bones, whiplash and abrasions sustained when a heifer smashed through his car windscreen – ‘this black cow jumped into my lap’; a fractured toe caused by stumbling drunk on stage; a split head suffered during an altercation with a rock during an underwater swim. Before that, a punctured lung, a serious stabbing, pancreatitis, prostate trouble, punishment beatings. Then the leg. This was before even contemplating the daily toll taken by the drink, the drugs, the terrible carelessness. With the kind of grimly humorous flourish Martyn fully appreciated, a bankruptcy notice had been served on his fifty-third birthday: September 11, 2001.

We headed to Carroll’s bar in the centre of Thomastown. The sky was a stale grey, the pub sunflower yellow – a popular combination in Ireland. Martyn was clearly well known here, not so much a regular as a one-man income stream. We ordered drinks. Fizzy water for me; cider and quadruple vodkas for Martyn, which he mixed by taking a gulp of the cider and then tossing the spirit into his pint glass. Shake and serve. I’d never seen anyone chance this particular combination before, nor have I since. Another favourite tipple at the time was dark rum and orange.

We passed through the main bar and into the beer garden. A toasted cheese and onion sandwich arrived and was swiftly demolished. Writing this now, I’m reminded of what a musician told me about touring with Martyn in the Seventies. ‘He was like a hyperactive kid. He had to either damage something or at least play with it.’ A toddler kicking a football nearby was bewitched. You could see why. Martyn had charm to burn and presence by the barrowload.

Martyn lived in Thomastown for the last years of his life. What brought a man here? Hard weather, for sure. Money trouble. A fresh start. A good woman. Bed and board. It seemed an odd place to pitch up, until you remembered that Martyn had been pitching up in odd places all his life. There had been formative spells in Glasgow and outer London, but more characteristic had been a desire to lay low in the broom, like some fugitive robber baron making his home in the margins, close enough to strike for the towns when a job called. Places with good fishing nearby and a decent view from the kitchen window to gaze at while cooking. Places where, when you ran out of supplies at midnight, you could call the minicab firm in the nearest town and they would deliver the required dose. Forgiving places.

We talked for a couple of hours, a conversation which will be called back at points during what follows, alongside the recollections of scores of people who knew him, played with him, laughed with him, lived with him. People who loved him and feared him – often at the same time.

As though confirming the well-versed suspicion that there was a range of personalities lurking within that vast broken frame, his accent shifted between matey Cockney-lite and rather mellifluous Glaswegian, sometimes travelling over borders in the space of a sentence. Two men, I thought – and the rest.

In terms of his social status, he aspired downwards. Slummed it. Though his Scottish roots were respectably middle-class, he often adopted the persona of the erudite Glaswegian hard nut. His mother was a light opera singer from Surrey by way of Belgium, but in England he preferred the guise of East End roustabout, all apples and pears and bish-bash-bosh. There are schoolboys who want nothing more than to grow up to be villains. One suspects that Martyn never quite grew out of that ambition.

He expressed his love of Nick Drake, Buddhism, Davy Graham, Teresa and The X Factor alongside his desire to send the royal family to Elba and most of the record industry somewhere worse. At turns he was sweet, tough, slightly terrifying and very funny, exhibiting roughly equal measures of scholarly eloquence, quicksilver intelligence and macho roguery, with flashes of tenderness. If there was guilt – and there must have been – it was not offered up. He seemed cheerfully unrepentant about the many bad choices he had made.

There was an unexpected courtliness, an old-school refinement and a pleasing precision and dryness in his choice of language which reminded me of the great Scots comic Chic Murray, one of his favourites. In some other life and time Martyn might have been a tweedy rural doctor, serially seducing his patients’ wives. Like many brawlers, he was an incurable romantic and terribly sentimental, as given to tears as violence, often in close proximity. The hug and the head-butt were not strangers.

When I left, I did so with some sadness, and I confess a degree of pity. Hard to fear a one-legged man. He must have hated that. As we parted, he appeared concerned that I would miss my train to Dublin. Teresa drove me to the station with minutes to spare. A few days later, when I had flown back home to Edinburgh, my phone rang. It was Martyn, niggled by some relatively innocuous misgiving he had aired regarding a cover version of his much-loved – though not by him – folk anthem, ‘May You Never’, which had been released by an obscure Seventies band many years ago and long forgotten by most sentient beings. The gist was, he recalled, that he had told me he thought their rendition was shit. Please would I not print what he’d said? It was a long time ago, and he didn’t want to offend anyone. I assured him that I wouldn’t, and I didn’t. As I did so, I thought, Why would you worry?

‘He was a one-take man,’ Chris Blackwell told me on the day, three and a bit years later, that John Martyn died. ‘A true one-take man.’

Martyn lived his life the same way he made his music, improvising as he went, with no safety net, admirable in one sense and impossibly irresponsible in another. He tore through it, scattering brilliance and destruction in his wake. He blackened the eyes and broke the spirit of women he professed to love, abandoned at least one of his children and neglected others. He wore his volatility and rage as armour, perhaps, but it was volatility and rage just the same.

Despite the murk of his life, the good heart of the music shines through. Whether it shines sufficiently brightly to penetrate the surrounding darkness is perhaps the wrong question: one would not exist without the other. His first wife calls Martyn a ‘Luciferian’ and his stepson sums him up as ‘a disaster; this guy was demolition man’. His daughter Vari describes her relationship with Martyn as ‘one of the best of my life’. To Danny Thompson, he was ‘totally beautiful’. He has been called a waster and a genius. Softness and abrasion. You either take your pick or wonder whether it may yet be possible for one person to be all these things, and more.

PART ONE

The Winding Boy

1

We are in the beer garden, John Martyn and I, talking about and around Philip Larkin’s most famous line of poetry. They fucked him up, he says, his mum and dad.

‘I don’t care what anyone says, a good gran beats a good mother anytime. They have all the experience, so they’re not learning on you. That said, I’m quite sure that any flaw in my character has to do with the divorce of my parents. I’m very sure of that.’

There’s much here to untangle: a tight hard knot of abandonment issues, armchair psychology, insecurity, projection, love and hurt. Before all that, the cavalier reference to ‘any flaw’. That there were indeed character flaws – armed to the teeth and hunting in packs – is hardly open to question. The flaws, in a sense, are why we are here. In the pub in Thomastown, lines from Martyn’s wonderful song ‘Head And Heart’ seem to float in cartoon speech bubbles from the super-charged cider. This is the man who desired to be loved ‘like a child’.

The divorce of his parents occurred at an age when Martyn was still soft fruit, ripe for bruising. It was not simply the painful matter of the end of their relationship, but the fact that, in his reading, he was not claimed by his mother in the spoils of war. Instead, he was raised by his father and grandmother, visiting his mother during summer holidays. In the early Fifties, for a young child to live apart from his mother was unusual to the point of social transgression. For a two-year-old, it was simply incomprehensible. The confusion spread through his life, spilled ink on a blank white page. At least, that was the way Martyn felt about it.

His parents were Thomas Paterson McGeachy and Beatrice Ethel Jewitt. At the time of his birth both were professional singers. ‘They weren’t real singers, they were light opera singers,’ Martyn told me. ‘It was all ever so upmarket and highbrow, or so they thought. Not really my caper. In fact, they rather detested my voice. They said I was a trickster, because I didn’t do’ – and here he made an awful shrill noise – ‘the opera thing.’

Beatrice was born on December 10, 1924 to Maud and Harold Jewitt, into a Jewish family that had moved, after her arrival, from Belgium to England.* Her father was a broker for a shipping company, her mother a housewife. They lived at 34 Compton Avenue, in the new and affluent garden suburb of Gidea Park in Romford, Essex. Beatrice had an older brother, Harold Jr, and a sister, Ivy, six years her senior, to whom she remained close.

Martyn’s paternal family was big and boisterous by comparison. His father was the second oldest of seven children born to William and Janet McGeachy, who married in 1916. Tommy was born in 1919 in Greenock, a port on the Firth of Clyde, where his father worked for Scotts, the shipbuilders. During the First World War, as a marine engineer, William had sailed to Calcutta and Rangoon. Later, the family moved to Edinburgh, where William bought a major shareholding in Lothian Motors on Gorgie Road, and where Tommy’s three younger sisters were born. They later settled at 10 Tantallon Road in Shawlands on the Southside of Glasgow.

The Second World War broke out when Tommy was twenty. He served in Italy as a volunteer temporary sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Reserve and sang opera for the troops on the radio. Everyone who knew him, at all ages, remembers his gift. ‘I could be coming down Tantallon Road and you could hear this incredibly beautiful voice ringing over the streets,’ says Linda Dunning, Martyn’s girlfriend and latterly fiancée between the ages of sixteen and twenty.

It was a talent Tommy shared with his wife-to-be. In her late teens, Beatrice began singing under the stage name Betty Benson. A soprano, she was a regular on the General Forces Programme and the Home Service from 1943 onwards, often performing with the Harry Fryer Orchestra. As one of the titular attractions in The Three of Us, which aired on Sunday afternoons, she sang alongside Sally Douglas and Lorna Martin. ‘Three newcomers,’ announced the Radio Times, ‘three girls still in their teens.’ In 1947 she appeared in Music in the Home on the Light Programme. According to family lore, one of her friends was a young Julie Andrews.

Mostly her career involved performing in variety shows, revues and pantomimes. She was singled out in the Burnley Express as ‘the sweet of the party’ and performed often with Chalmers Wood and His Scottish Dance Orchestra. Heavily trailed in the Daily Record, she sang as a featured vocalist at the Kelvin Hall in Glasgow on December 23, 1945 – which is where she may have first met Tommy McGeachy.

By the following year, the pair were performing together, often in Scotland, billed as Betty Benson and Russell Paterson: Paterson was Tommy’s middle name and the maiden name of his mother. They garnered brief but admiring notices in the local press. The uncredited reviewer for the Dundee Evening Telegraph, watching Hello Summer at the Perth Theatre on June 21, 1947, observed that ‘the soloists are in good trim. Russell Paterson and Betty Benson are sweetly sentimental.’ Later in the season, a writer for the same paper noted ‘the fine tenor and soprano voices of Russell Paterson and Betty Benson… [They] carry the audience with them in their song numbers.’

In September, shortly after the end of the summer run in Perth, they married in New Malden, a town in Surrey on the suburban fringes of London. They were staying at 58 Beechcroft Avenue, a handsome, semi-detached Thirties villa, with a front and back garden, on a horseshoe-shaped road.

Almost exactly a year later, on September 11, 1948, Ian David McGeachy was born in New Malden.* Tommy returned to treading the boards, in short order appearing in Giggles & Girls at Dundee’s Palace Theatre the following month and in Goldilocks and the Three Bears, a pantomime at the Glasgow Pavilion, in December. Betty was back home holding the baby. She wouldn’t do so for long. The marriage was a short season. It did not run and run.

Martyn claimed he once saw his parents perform together before they separated. ‘About fifth on the bill would be Mummy and Daddy, Betty Benson and Russell Paterson – Scotland’s Troubadour. They sang stuff like Gilbert & Sullivan. I remember them singing [Émile Waldteufel’s] The Skaters’ Waltz in the Gaiety Theatre, Ayr, with my mum in a dazzling Victorian outfit.’¹

If this is true, he possessed excellent recall of his earliest experiences. Within three years of his birth, his parents had not only divorced but Betty had already married again, in October 1951, to Peter Donaldson. In the fallout, it was agreed that their child would be raised in Glasgow by his father and grandmother, and that he would visit his mother during the school holidays. Within the family, it was believed that Betty had wanted to continue her career and felt she could not do so while looking after her son.

Martyn once told me he was bequeathed a sense of decency from his father and a wandering morality from his mother. She was, by several accounts, a fascinating woman. Independent, clever, direct, funny, free. She married three times, became a mother twice more in her forties, and lived with a certain resistance to convention. In his teens, his mother’s lifestyle opened Martyn’s eyes to the attractions of the bohemian life, but, as both a child and a man, he also resented the implications and consequences of some of her decisions. Those who witnessed them together are in no doubt that she loved him, and he her, but it was a complicated relationship. ‘His mother gets a bad rap as the person who abandoned her child, and it just wasn’t as straightforward as that,’ says Linda Dunning, who knew Betty well in the mid-Sixties. ‘This certainly wasn’t a child whose mother didn’t care about him – that was far from the truth.’

Nevertheless, it proved difficult to foster a traditional mother-andson dynamic with a woman he saw for only six weeks each summer. Periods of sustained closeness in his late teens and early twenties were followed by longer periods of minimal or zero contact. Martyn’s own children met their paternal grandmother only once or twice, and never formed a relationship with her.

Both parents continued to sing professionally once the marriage had ended. For Betty there were theatre runs in Bolton and Eastbourne, and in the summer of 1952 a season not far from Glasgow, at Troon Concert Hall, which may have provided an opportunity for Martyn to see her perform and spend time with her. Otherwise, her visits to Scotland were, at best, infrequent. For all the McGeachys remember, his mother never came to see him at home, and the divorce and its aftermath were not discussed, even as Martyn travelled through childhood into adolescence and adulthood. ‘Nobody really talked about it; they would shut things out,’ says Martyn’s cousin, Alison McGeachy. ‘Betty lived down south with her new husband. I don’t ever remember her being mentioned, actually.’

Tommy subsequently appeared in several Harold Dayne productions: light comedies with musical interludes, variety shows and pantomimes called things like Cinderella Sally, Autumn Leaves and For the Love of Pete, often forming tenor and soprano acts with Grace Calvert or Greta Hagan. In October 1951, the month his ex-wife remarried, the Arbroath Herald and Advertiser announced a forthcoming attraction, The Fighting Flanagans, at the Dundee Palace Theatre, featuring Russell Paterson among the cast. The Winter Show of 1952 found him performing at the Empire in Inverness.

While his father was away, Martyn was looked after by his grandmother in the family home. He had grown into a happy, garrulous child. His father later recalled that, on one of the first occasions he had brought his toddler son to Glasgow on the train to visit his family, the boy talked non-stop for the whole journey, charming everyone in the carriage. One school friend recalls that his mother called Martyn ‘Mr Speak-A-Minute’, because when he came around to play he never stopped chattering. As he sang many years later, silence never was his thing.

In later life, Martyn often turned up the temperature of his raising on the mean streets of Glasgow. To hear him tell it, adolescence was a blizzard of razor fights, gang wars and back-alley rumbles. Yet he was not a rough boy and he was not raised in roughhouse ways. His grounding in Glasgow was firmly middle-class. The Gorbals would have swallowed him whole. ‘He couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag,’ says Brian Stanage, who first met Martyn when they were both four years old and who remained a close friend throughout their school days. ‘He was the most passive guy. It was like wrestling with a blancmange.’

Situated near the end of a leafy street of fine sandstone tenements, 10 Tantallon Road was a beautiful old flat occupying the top floor and attic space, overlooking the entrance to Queen’s Park, one of Glasgow’s finest public parks. There was a playroom with a snooker table, a scullery, more bedrooms than could be counted on one hand, and a sitting room with fine bay windows looking onto the street, with furnishings which included a piano, comfortable couches and vases filled with fresh flowers. Martyn’s close friend at secondary school, Davie MacFarlane, remembers Tantallon Road as the first time he had been served spaghetti that hadn’t been decanted from a tin, and where he first tasted home-made lemonade.

Most of the bustle took place in the kitchen, with its large wooden table and Rayburn stove. At the end of the long downstairs hall, a staircase led up to the top floor, where Tommy kept both budgies and lodgers, who occupied many of the upper bedrooms. Number 10