The childhood trauma underlying John Martyn’s best work
When it was released in 1973, the fact that the title track to John Martyn’s acclaimed album Solid Air was inspired by his friend, the folk singer Nick Drake, wouldn’t have generated much interest from the music press.
For one thing, Drake was still alive, a 25-year-old kid with his whole life in front of him, and for another, he was just a low-profile label-mate of Martyn at the time, cobbling together a third album after two commercial failures; it just wasn’t that noteworthy of a storyline.
More than half a century later, though, Solid Air feels like an album and a song, built on a foundation of tragedy, both in its past and impending future. “Don’t know what’s going ’round in your mind,” Martyn sings on the opening track, “And I can tell you don’t like what you find / When you’re moving through solid air, solid air.” A year after the record came out, Drake would be dead, an inevitability that nonetheless had a deep impact on Martyn, who was only 26 himself.
“No matter how much you told him you loved him,” Martyn said of Drake in 2004, “He still couldn’t take it on board. You know, if you gave him everything, he still wouldn’t understand that he was loved”.
The irony in Martyn’s view of Drake, and his frustration with his friend, is that he also saw part of himself in the doomed artist. Whereas the latter was the shy and silent type, fighting his battles inside his own mind, Martyn had a much harder time keeping his own demons from rising to the surface.
“He was a big man, and you never wanted to rile him,” Martyn’s first wife and musical collaborator, Beverley Martyn, recently told Mojo, “As well as black eyes, I got a hairline fracture of the skull, fractured inner ear, kidney damage. I’m still suffering now.”
As soulful, delicate, and sensitive as his music could be, he had a hole in his heart and, like many men of his generation and background, no language or understanding of how to sort through it. Beverley Martyn believed a lot of John’s struggles, including his detachment from his own parenting responsibilities, were rooted in the divorce of his parents when he was five years old, and his subsequent split upbringing between Glasgow and London. In particular, he appeared to have suffered a great deal from losing touch with his mother, who didn’t see him or contact him for long periods of time.
“When his mother passed away,” Beverley recalled, “his half-sister gave him a load of his heart-rending letters to which she’d never replied: ‘Dear Mummy, why can’t I see you? Why don’t you write to me? I love you so much. Will I ever see you again?’ There was a great, deep hurt, and John was damaged… Women were not to be trusted and were abused.”
“Though John came across as a larger-than-life character,” added Solid Air producer John Wood, “it was bluster. Underneath, he suffered a lot of self-doubt and needed reassurance from me, especially with his vocals.” John Martyn didn’t suffer the fate of his similarly damaged friends Drake and Sandy Denny, dying in his youth. Instead, it took several decades for his lifetime of drug and alcohol abuse to take its toll, finally killing him in 2009 at 60. The slow burn at least gave him the opportunity to release over 20 studio albums, some of which rank among the best in the annals of British folk rock, through which he continued to try and exorcise those demons of his past.
“I think I’m possibly prone to unhappiness more than some people,” Martyn told the Irish Independent in 1996, “I don’t mean it in a snobbish, intellectual way, but I just see a lot of things other people don’t see or don’t want to see, and I can’t close my eyes, you know, so I get hurt and sad and a whole lot of other things.”
