Ian Rankin’s favourite album of all time: “Songs that defy categorisation”
Anyone who’s spent even a cursory grapple with Ian Rankin’s art will know how present his love of music lies throughout.
A brief rifle through Rankin’s acclaimed Inspector Rebus detective series eagerly reveals the “frustrated rock star” that’s never too far away from his writing pen. Among the titles and chapters of his Scottish sleuthing tales can be found songs or albums from the likes of The Cure, The Associates, Joy Division, and a wealth of Rolling Stones references.
In a feat of meta indulgence, even Rankin’s own musical chops can get a mention; his old punk band The Dancing Pigs he fronted during his Edinburgh university days, makes an appearance in 1997’s Black & Blue. Well, after his success as an author, Rankin still couldn’t resist the musical itch, forming the six-piece Best Picture, boasting the ‘Isabelle’ single and even a live show at 2018’s Kendal Calling in the Lake District.
With such a deep love for music, the proposition of taking a peek into Rankin’s private record collection and gaining an insight into the essential album is an intriguing one. Admitting to such an honour of ‘favourite album’ bestowed to a record changing every month or even weekly, depending on the mood, one album from the leftfield end of folk seemed to compel him in the moment to plump for a John Martyn LP that he holds the dearest across all of popular music.
“What’s so special about Solid Air?” he asked himself in The Sunday Post in 2021. “Great musicianship, Martyn’s voice – that of a whisky-soaked angel – and songs that defy categorisation. There are simple-sounding toe-tappers, extended improvisations, meditations on love, sin and death.”
The mysterious schlieren front cover to Martyn’s 1973 opus illustrates exactly the sonic terrain wandered on Solid Air. Percolating around his bluesy gravel is the fluid and amorphous folk licks lost in a wash of tape delay and Echoplex units, as exact as the album cover’s fingers touching the fluid essence hanging in the air with almost psychedelic taste.
Heady stuff at the time. A committed Status Quo and Alex Harvey fan, Solid Air nonetheless seemed to stick its cerebral hook into the 17-year-old Rankin, only growing more pertinent as the pop climate moved around him in tandem with his personal trajectory.
“Punk came and went, but Solid Air was still there,” Rankin furthered. “I became a student, then a PhD student, then a husband. Kids arrived. I moved houses and countries. Each time, when we moved, the first album on the turntable was Solid Air. It separates good sound systems from bad. And suddenly I’m a successful novelist, and I’ve been invited on to Desert Island Discs…”
Always shifting and taking on new forms, Solid Air is gifted with a strangely inchoate permanence that’s helped Martyn’s introspective folk gem from lapsing into many of his peers’ cliches and pitfalls. It certainly made its impact on Rankin, naming 2016’s Rather Be the Devil after Martyn’s old blues on Solid Air’s apparitional songbook.
