Beverley Martyn

Beverley Martyn, spirited British folk singer, dies aged 79

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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

The Story of Les Cousins: Hear interviews, music and the history of this amazing folk club

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By Johnny Fewings

This weeks Jazz, Blues & Beyond (vol128) is a special dedicated to the 1960’s Soho, Folk and Blues club…Les Cousins. I am joined by Diana Matheou, Bridget St John, Beverley Martyn, Steve Tilston, Wizz Jones and Ian Anderson. They all played at the Cousins back in the day, and here they tell their fabulous stories of those times. Ian has recently curated a three disc box set for Cherry Red Records featuring over 70 artists that performed there and this show features 14 tracks from that album.

Review: “Small Hours: The Long Night of John Martyn” by Graeme Thomson

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By the time the mercurial, volatile singer-songwriter John Martyn heard that he had been awarded an OBE for his contribution to British music, he was in a wheelchair, having lost a leg to septicaemia compounded by a lifetime of substance abuse. He died weeks later, before he could accept the honour.

Musicians often embody a garble of contradictions, but the English-born “Scots Belgian Jew” known to his family as Iain McGeachy was a more troubled – and troubling – figure than many from the late-60s. A trailblazing guitarist, he began his artistic life in the crucible of the folk revival that also produced Fairport Convention and Nick Drake. Solid Air, one of Martyn’s most magnificent outings, was written about Drake.

But Martyn took many of his extemporising cues from jazz and he went on to embrace nascent electronics, most particularly the early, spacious effect known as echoplex. U2 guitarist the Edge may not formally concur, but Martyn fans know the Irishman’s signature guitar sound was cribbed from Martyn. John Lydon and Bob Marley were admirers, as were Portishead. (In later life, Martyn did a sterling cover of Portishead’s Glory Box.)

By the end, Martyn had been impaled on a fence post and run into a cow with his car; artistically, he was yesterday’s man, having spent the 80s making slicker, more suffocatingly produced commercial rock music, often in the company of Phil Collins. There were periods when this leading light of the maverick fringe went dark, presumably to avoid the disreputable characters with whom he surrounded himself. The searching artistry of this caustic musician’s musician went hand in glove with dissolution and damage.

To his credit, journalist and biographer Graeme Thomson, author of previous well-regarded works on Kate Bush, George Harrison and Phil Lynott, dives straight into the awfulness of the man in the preface. “He blackened the eyes and broke the spirit of women he professed to love, abandoned at least one of his children and neglected others.”

Martyn’s parents separated when he was young, with his mother remarrying; the young Martyn felt the enforced distance from his mother, Betty, keenly. “He mistrusted women, which turned him into a misogynist,” states the folk singer Beverley Martyn, who suffered his violent alcoholic rages. Her own career did not survive their two-disc partnership; she eventually essayed albums of her own again much later in life, most recently in 2014. When the marriage broke up, Martyn left her, their two biological children and Beverley’s eldest child penniless; they lived off benefits while Martyn fuelled a coke habit. He started another family, forsook them too.

Somehow, this man had the gall to sing about love. Perhaps his best-known early song, May You Never, is an open-hearted blessing: “may you never lay your head down without a hand to hold”.

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