I'll confess that I came to John Martyn in the 80s via Genesis - Phil Collins used to drum/produce for him. If that sounds like an inauspicious start to reviewing an album over 30 years old please persevere because the cause is truly saved by the effect.
1973' Solid Air is a musical and lyrical masterpiece worthy of its 2000 remastering for CD. Thanks to Martyn's effortless blending of rock, folk, jazz, blues and soul - mainly centred around his skilled and rhythmic playing of the acoustic guitar - we have an album that has a tempting enough mix of musical ingredients to reach across the decades, offering rich flavours to anyone today who is unhindered by media-driven cravings for the latest release.
That the album succeeds in achieving a timeless quality is helped in no small part by Danny Thompson on double bass. The musical rapport between him and Martyn is one of the album's many pleasures and provides the foundation for the genre-hopping stylings that permeate.
The title track (also the album's opener) encapsulates Martyn's gift for merging musical styles, creating a slow-burning mood piece that defies being pigeon-holed. Even its appearance on some recent 'chill-out' collections - invariably poorly compiled and extremely limited in scope - should not detract the listener from its peerless sound.
Next track 'Over the Hill' is singer/songwriter writ large. Musically it is a wonderfully upbeat acoustic strumalong with guitar and mandolin vying for lead in a way that REM would admire. Lyrically though it is more ambiguous, with Martyn escaping his pressures and demons by the only way he knows how, by "going home...over the hill".
The downbeat tone is more pronounced on 'Don't Want to Know' a universal lament for tolerance and understanding, "I don't wanna know about evil/Only wanna know about love". If that sounds too rooted in its day then try, "Yes it's getting hard to listen/Hard for us to use our eyes/'Cos all around the world is glistening/Making sure it keeps us hypnotised" for a more prescient comment.
The mood and arrangements change with Martyn's version of an old blues number, 'I'd Rather Be The Devil'. But Martyn is no slave to the blues like Clapton, the song's experimental electrification and liberal use of echo (reminiscent of the bass echo used by Roger Waters on 'One of These Days') creates a dizzying drunken atmosphere that eventually eases down to an ambient but no less intoxicating finale.
This closing sound carries over to the opening of 'Go Down Easy' but quickly reverts to a beautiful acoustic love song, "You curl around me/Like a fern in the spring/Lie down here,/Let me sing the things you bring."
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'Dreams By The Sea' comes on like 'Papa was a Rolling Stone' but clocks off with another ambient flourish. However, Martyn is again singing about demons and paranoia, these are "Bad dreams for me/Bad dreams by the sea."
'May You Never' is Martyn in a more positive mood, offering maxims to a close friend, "May you never lay your head down/Without a hand to hold;/May you never make your bed out in the cold./You're just like a great and strong brother of mine;/You know that I love you true."
'The Man In the Station' is perhaps the track - both in its title and tone - that puts Martyn in the same spotlight as his peer and friend, Nick Drake. The album ends with Martyn returning to his blues core on 'The Easy Blues' but again adding a peculiarly rock/folk take on the arrangement.
The album as a whole has an earthy, 'woody' feel - fingers working hard at the strings of double bass and acoustic guitar; Martyn's deep sonorous voice - that never allows the darkness of the lyrics to overwhelm the mood to a point where salvation is impossible. Lyrically it leaves John Martyn wide open to emotional scrutiny. He never shys away from expressing his love, concern, frustration and anger towards both the women and - more pointedly - towards the men in his life.
'Solid Air', the title track, is the most deeply personal song. It was Martyn's attempt to reach out to Nick Drake, already in the grip of depression, "I know you, I love you;/And I'll be your friend,/I could follow you - anywhere./Even through solid air."
Sadly, one year on, Drake was dead. That Martyn hasn't followed Drake is no small miracle given the HellFire Club lifestyle that he has led. He is the rebel poet incarnate, capable of reaching all the extremeties that stem from addiction but also of displaying incredible beauty and honesty in song and verse. Shane MacGowan is arguably the most recent and closest manifestation of such spiritual and emotional juxtaposition in one man.
As a token sound-bite to summarise simplistically this complex man and his music, he stated in a 1998 radio interview, 'I have never been pigeonholed in my life. I mean, have you seen the size of a pigeon's hole?'
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