As the title implies, ‘Small Hours’ was recorded outside in the early hours of the morning at Chris Blackwell’s farm. Martyn liked to end his albums with a lengthy echoplex workout, and ‘Small Hours’ from One World is my favourite of these. ‘May You Never’ is a gentle acoustic folk song, but there’s an undercurrent of darkness about it as well. Clapton later described Martyn as “so far ahead of everything else it was inconceivable”.
Martyn’s best-known song is ‘May You Never’, thanks to Eric Clapton’s cover on 1977’s Slowhand. The closing lines, delivered in a capella (“I want to fall in love with the world/I want the world to fall in love”) are heartwrenching. The 1980s soundscape works for Martyn, with the reverbed drums and jazzy fretless bass providing an appropriate backdrop for his gritty and emotive voice. Martyn’s work after 1980’s Grace & Danger is generally regarded as inconsistent, but ‘Please Fall In Love With Me’ is a gem. ‘Just Now’ serves as an excellent microcosm for Bless the Weather, with Martyn’s vocal tenderly navigating the pretty tune. His solo career started in earnest with 1971’s Bless The Weather, with its gorgeous and atmospheric folk music. Martyn’s first four albums – two as a teenager and the two with wife Beverly Martyn – feel like an apprenticeship in hindsight. Here are ten of my favourite Martyn songs. I’m not familiar with his work after the early 1980s, although his cover of Portishead‘s ‘Glory Box’ is one of his most popular tunes on Spotify. He recorded an impressive body of work, despite a premature death at the age of 60. By the late 1970s few vestiges of his early folk style remained.īorn Iain David McGeachy, Martyn was an underrated guitar virtuoso and a restless explorer. By the early 1970s, Martyn had created his own unique sound influenced by jazz, employing echoplex effects on his guitar, and delivered with a soulful and slurred voice. He started as a folk artist, emerging in the late 1960s alongside Nick Drake and Richard Thompson. Nonetheless, he delivered a string of great records in the 1970s and early 1980s. The late John Martyn never enjoyed the mass acclaim that his immense talent deserved.
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