A CURIOUS MIX OF BRITISH FOLK MUSIC AND AMERICAN POLITICS
In this first instalment of our After Hours Sessions, Gwenifer Raymond performs a live acoustic guitar session in the Turnstone Guitars workshop with her haunting, percussive fingerstyle playing filling the same space where the guitar was made.
Filmed on a Turnstone Select Series TG model, this series invites exceptional artists to perform on our hand-built acoustic guitars after hours, capturing the sound of the instruments and the spirit of the place they’re crafted.
Cartoon by Benjamin Slyngstad.
Singer-songwriter was known for collaborations with former husband John Martyn as well as star-studded 1960s singles and 2014 comeback album
By Ben Beaumont-Thomas
British folk singer Beverley Martyn, known for her collaborations with her former husband John Martyn as well as spirited, sublime solo work, has died aged 79.
A statement from the family of the late John Martyn announced the news, saying she died peacefully at home on Monday. “Beverley was a remarkable woman of great inner strength,” the statement continued. “She was beautiful, intelligent, warm and kind.”
Born Beverley Kutner near Coventry in 1947, she moved to London in her mid-teens to attend drama school and worked her way into the city’s folk music scene, which was flourishing in the early 1960s: she learned to play guitar from British folk legend Bert Jansch, an early boyfriend.
She released a single with her band, the Levee Breakers, the stridently jangling Babe I’m Leaving You, and also recorded solo songs including the enduring Happy New Year, a fuzz-guitar romp written by Randy Newman and featuring a pre-Led Zeppelin Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones among the session musicians. Page later said: “It was a remarkable session, at the time it was recorded I knew that she was a shining talent in the world of performance and songwriting.” Another single, Museum, was written by Donovan.
After becoming romantically involved with Paul Simon during his developmental years in London – “He had a Napoleon complex. Very intelligent. Moody, but witty,” was her assessment of him in a 2014 Guardian interview – she travelled with him to perform at the Monterey pop festival in 1967 (the culture-shifting event where Jimi Hendrix famously set his guitar on fire) and briefly appeared on the Simon & Garfunkel album Bookends, a US and UK No 1
She became a single mother to a son, Wesley, from another relationship, then met John Martyn in 1969, soon marrying him. Immersed in the folk-rock counterculture in the US, they recorded a duo album, Stormbringer!, in 1969 in Woodstock, with the Band’s Levon Helm on drums and Joe Boyd producing. It was released in 1970, and later that year they recorded and released another, The Road to Ruin (its opening track Primrose Hill would later be sampled by Fatboy Slim).
Beverley also came to know British folk star Nick Drake, who would babysit for her children; they wrote a song together, Reckless Jane, which Beverley completed in 2014.
She and John had two children of their own, but after he pursued his solo career, “my career was over”, she said in 2014. “I had my hands full. I did the odd gig with John, and the odd one on my own, but I had no future.”
Their marriage soured; John, who struggled with alcohol and drugs, became paranoid and threatening. “There was love there – it was the drink and the bad drugs, the very heavy ones, that changed his disposition, and they made life unbearable for anyone around him,” she later said. “I wouldn’t stay with a man who was killing himself.”
She escaped the marriage and moved to Brighton, fitfully making music including with Loudon Wainwright III and Wilko Johnson, but it wasn’t until her 2014 solo album, The Phoenix and the Turtle, that she made a more emphatic return. “It was a great relief to finally do something on my own terms. That was a dream I’d almost given up on,” she said of that project.
That would be her final collection of new material, though in 2018 she released a compilation of her 1960s songs, entitled Where the Good Times Are.
.Source: Beverley Martyn, spirited British folk singer, dies aged 79 | Folk music | The Guardian
Looking back at ‘Never Been In A Riot’, the 1978 debut single by The Mekons that parodied and criticised the message of The Clash’s debut single ‘White Riot.
By Ben Forest
Overstating the importance of The Clash on the punk landscape of the 1970s is a virtual impossibility; for many people, Joe Strummer’s outfit embodied their ‘the only band that matters’ tagline in every aspect of their existence. It is worth noting, though, that not everybody was quite so bowled over by the output of the London outfit.
A couple of hours up the M1, in the musical haven of Leeds, one group of art school students were so perturbed by The Clash’s debut single ‘White Riot’, in fact, that they took it upon themselves to launch a response, in doing so sparking one of the most enduring outfits of the punk and post-punk age: The Mekons. Source: The 1978 Clash parody that launched a punk institution
For those whose memories have been destroyed by youthful glue-sniffing or pogoing accidents, ‘White Riot’ was an often misunderstood track by the Strummer-Jones songwriting partnership. In essence, the song bemoans the complacency of white working-class people, who are not as readily prepared to stand up against their oppressors as the Black population – “Black man got a lot of problems, but they don’t mind throwing a brick”.
While probably well-meaning, the sentiment of the song is more than a little naive. After all, white people in London weren’t being subjected to horrific racist abuse, institutionalised oppression, and police brutality on a daily basis. Even still, the single had a far more noble aim than many people gave it credit for at the time, with some misguided audiences assuming that the band were calling for race riots.
Luckily, The Mekons were intelligent enough to understand that Strummer and the band weren’t calling for race riots, but that didn’t mean they were any less offended by the track. According to Kevin Lycett, the band thought the song’s sentiment of “I want a riot for us poor downtrodden white people” was nothing short of offensive, and so they decided to write a satirical response to the song, in the form of ‘Never Been in a Riot’.
An endearingly DIY recording detailing a bloke who has, as the title suggests, never been in a riot or done much of anything else, the single lays bare the phoney machismo present throughout a lot of the early punk scene, as well as the rather naive message of that Clash single.
Within only one minute and 46 seconds, The Mekons had established the entirety of their sonic manifesto, arguably in a much more effective manner than The Clash had done with their own debut single.
‘Never Been in a Riot’ was The Mekons’ very first release, and it earned the Leeds band an immediate cult following, spurred on by the fact that it was listed as single of the week in the New Musical Express at the time, even if it was never in any danger of breaking into the singles charts. From there, the outfit’s reputation only seemed to grow, and the follow-up single ‘Where Were You?’ remains an indisputable classic of the early post-punk period.
Today, bordering on half a century later, The Mekons are still going strong with upwards of 25 albums under their belts and an audience that has largely followed them through that extensive discography. Right back at the beginning, though, it all started with a parody of The Clash.
Source: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/1978-clash-parody-launched-a-post-punk-institution/