John Martyn

Glasgow

John Martyn was born Iain David McGeachy, the son of two opera singers: his mother Betty was Belgian-Jewish, and his father Tommy came from Greenock. They divorced when he was five, and he grew up in Glasgow's Queen's Park with his father and his grandmother Janet. He went to Shawlands Academy and then Glasgow School of Art, which he left for music. The Glasgow folk singer Hamish Imlach took him under his wing, and he was playing professionally at seventeen.

In the late 1960s he moved to London and worked the Soho folk clubs, Les Cousins among them. At nineteen he signed to Chris Blackwell's Island, the label's first white solo artist, and London Conversation came out in October 1967. The Tumbler followed in December 1968, already leaning toward jazz.

Beverley and the Echoplex

He married the singer Beverley Kutner, and in 1970 the couple made two duo albums, Stormbringer! and The Road to Ruin. On Stormbringer! he began playing his acoustic guitar through a fuzzbox, phaser and Echoplex, the sound that became his own. He later said he bought the Echoplex only to copy the sustain of the saxophonist Pharoah Sanders. The couple moved from London to Hastings Old Town, and Bless the Weather (November 1971), his first solo album after the duo years, holds Glistening Glyndebourne, described as his first real Echoplex piece. That month Island also put out May You Never as a single, and it flopped.

Solid Air

Solid Air (February 1973) was made with the producer John Wood in about eight days at the end of 1972, with Danny Thompson's double bass at its center. Its title song was written for his friend and labelmate Nick Drake. The album sold better than anything he had made, though Martyn thought it rushed and for years preferred Inside Out, an improvised record issued eight months later. After Drake's death in November 1974 the title song came to sound like a requiem.

Sunday's Child followed in January 1975. When Island declined Live at Leeds, recorded with Thompson and the drummer John Stevens, he sold it by mail order from his Hastings home. A break that included time in Jamaica with Lee "Scratch" Perry led to One World (1977), produced by Blackwell largely outdoors on a Berkshire farm. It was his first album to chart, and it later led commentators to call him the father of trip-hop.

Grace and Danger

His marriage ended in 1980. He had recorded Grace and Danger with Phil Collins on drums in summer 1979 as it came apart, and Blackwell held it back for more than a year because he found it too sad. Martyn moved to WEA for Glorious Fool (1981), produced by Collins, and Well Kept Secret (1982), his first UK Top 30 album, then returned to Island for Sapphire (1984) and Piece by Piece (1986) before leaving the label in 1988.

In the 1990s he recorded for Permanent, Go! Discs and Independiente. And (1996) took on trip-hop textures, and The Church with One Bell (1998) was a set of blues covers. That same year he and Thompson played Solid Air for the second series of BBC Scotland's Transatlantic Sessions.

Last years

In 2003 a burst cyst led to septicemia and the loss of his right leg below the knee. The BBC documentary Johnny Too Bad (2006) followed him through it and the making of On the Cobbles (2004). On his birthday in September 2006 he played Solid Air in full at the Barbican in London, then on a UK tour. Phil Collins presented him with a lifetime achievement award at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards in February 2008, and his last concerts that November revisited Grace and Danger. He was made an OBE in the 2009 New Year Honours and died in County Kilkenny, Ireland, on 29 January 2009.

Eric Clapton said Martyn was so far ahead of everything it was almost inconceivable. Portishead and the Durutti Column have cited him, and The Edge has pointed to his Echoplex layering. The tribute album Johnny Boy Would Love This, with Beck, Robert Smith and Paolo Nutini among many others, came out in 2011, and Graeme Thomson's biography Small Hours followed in 2020.