Small Hours
Graeme Thomson
Omnibus, £12.99
To say that John Martyn has got the biography he deserved may sound like a backhanded compliment. But Graeme Thomson’s 2020 book, finally available in paperback, does justice to a complex, mercurial and visionary musician, dealing unflinchingly with his tempestuous nature without ever losing sight of the sublime brilliance of his best work.
Thomson seems to have had access to just about everyone still alive who knew him, many of whom attest to the “angelic” beauty of the young John Martyn and the good days on which he was charming, generous company. But even his closest friends and most ardent admirers grew wary.
A confrontational man with an appetite for excess and a nose for trouble, his drunken escapades became the stuff of legend. By middle age, the once-cherubic singer-songwriter “had come to resemble the gangster of his youthful imagining”, strutting around venues like a “robber baron”. He died in 2009, six years after septicaemia necessitated the amputation of a leg, his body finally giving in to decades of alcoholism and abuse.
“I’m quite sure that any flaw in my character has to do with the divorce of my parents,” he told the author in 2005. Thomson doesn’t come up with any better answers, but Small Hours is nevertheless a thorough and revealing biography.
READ MORE: Musical genius or a wasted talent? In search of the real John Martyn
READ MORE: Kerry Andrew, Mary Costello & Martin Stewart among the best new books
Born Ian McGeachy in Surrey in 1948, the son of two light opera singers, Martyn was raised by his father and grandmother in a large, rambling flat in Shawlands, Glasgow, after his mother walked out on the family when he was two.
The feeling of rejection never left him: though he saw her on visits to England on summer holidays, he wasn’t allowed to sleep in her house. Although academically bright, and one of the more middle-class pupils at his school, he would later trade on the image of a streetwise Glaswegian hard man.
Renamed John Martyn, he burst on to a London folk scene that was dazzled by his sheer talent. But Martyn’s love of jazz, blues and reggae and his stubborn individualism meant that the scene couldn’t contain him for long. An innovative guitarist, who moved on from expert acoustic fingerpicking to exploring sonic landscapes conjured up by echo devices, he marched only to the beat of his own drum. By the 1980s, with a handful of classic albums behind him (to say nothing of the much-covered “My You Never”), he was a long way from the folk clubs, making slickly-produced, but still captivating, rock records in collaboration with Phil Collins.
Though he maintained that domesticity was the enemy of art, Martyn couldn’t live alone. He was married three times, and the chapters dealing with the psychological and physical abuse suffered by his first wife, Beverly Kutner, are some of the bleakest.
When Kutner eventually left him, Martyn made only token gestures to stay in touch with the children, preferring to carry on his “troubadour” lifestyle and plough his earnings into an expensive coke habit while they struggled to get by.
His second marriage, to Annie Furlong, was equally dysfunctional, Furlong departing, like Kutner before her, a “broken and anxious” woman.
Martyn’s fleeting flashes of remorse and self-awareness don’t absolve him, but Thomson acknowledges the tragic, self-destructive toll that his demons took. Martyn poured the best part of himself into songs of poetic longing, in which he could shake off responsibility for the damage he inflicted and reshape the narrative of his life into something more palatable to him.
Thomson’s subtle illumination of the relationship between Martyn and his work is one of the many strengths of a balanced and insightful biography.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here