The John Martyn Moment

Revelation at Reading Festival 1973

I saw John Martyn play live on Sunday 26^th August at Reading 73. It felt rather like the morning after the night before. Except that there had been two nights before.

We’d arrived from Harlow and pitched our tent on the Friday afternoon, thrilled and slightly daunted by our first full festival experience. The puzzling Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen were fun, as well as being amazing musicians who got us on our feet dancing. Top of the bill was Rory Gallagher, who I’d seen earlier that year at the Rainbow, in roaring form. More about Rory in another piece.

Saturday was a full day with some spectacular sets. We got the chance to see good performances from Lindisfarne, The Sensational Alex Harvey Band and Status Quo, all of whom our group of friends knew by name and fame and were seeing for the first time.

Defying the rule of being famous before being able to get an enthusiastic response from a large audience, the completely unknown Tasavallan Presidentti from Finland, and Magma from France singing in an invented laguage, both got loads of applause.

There was a bit of tension at the end of evening when The Faces finally came on stage – the easygoing festival crowd being infiltrated by a slightly more aggressive, pushy, streetwise contingent who’d come for bill-topping Rod the Mod, and that unique voice. We crawled exhausted back to our tents with the feeling that we’d really had our money’s worth.

Then came Sunday. Musically speaking, our brains were just yawning and waking up when a duo set up shop on stage and we were asked to give a warm welcome to John Martyn and Danny Thompson.

John Martyn’s name and face were familiar from the music papers as he was a rising star, but I had no idea what his music sounded like or who Danny Thompson was.

John sat tuning up on what looked to all intents and purposes like an acoustic guitar. Danny was the tall guy who picked up his double bass, an instrument I don’t think I’d ever seen for real before, and began to limber up. There was a moment of quiet suspension, they looked at each other, and then it happened.

The music came from a place I didn’t know existed. I was seeing Martyn play his acoustic but I was hearing sounds that didn’t match. The music from his guitar came in waves, an alien language with more than one voice speaking at once.

Thompson’s bass-playing had a liquid agility which was unlike any electric bass I’d heard. And Danny was dancing, or at least his hands were.

And John was moving in rhythm on his seat, back and forth.

There were only two musicians on stage but they sounded like more. Certainly Martyn sounded like more than one guitarist. Plus, their music created a melodic mix underpinned with percussion, so you could almost hear a drummer pushing your body to move as you listened. But, yes, there was only a guitar and a string bass to be seen.

And then there was John’s voice, which sounded like somebody emerging from either a deep sleep, a prolonged period in zero gravity or a long night on the razzle. He seemed to run the words together, gliding one into another as if they were continuous text, so you couldn’t quite catch the detail.

This added another layer to the waves of music. The effect was uncanny. You had to listen. The problem was to grasp what exactly you were listening to.

There was no QR code giving you access to an explainer. Nobody mentioned Echoplex, which John Martyn himself would describe years later in a documentary as simply a tape delay machine with a recording head, a playback head and a movable head in between, thus giving you almost limitless tape delay. I found that playing in between the delays could give you all kinds of musical patterns.

Sounds simple, except that we only had our eyes and ears to find the answers. People near us in the crowd started talking about how they thought or knew the music was being produced: using pedals. Like Hendrix ? Well, yeah, except Jimi’s on electric and John’s on amplified acoustic. Can you hear those loops that keep repeating ? That’s something he plays once and then gets the machine to repeat. That’s why it sounds like more than one person playing. But he’s an amazing guitarist even without all those effects.

Thompson and Martyn had, of course, been working together for a number of years. There was grace and danger to their collaboration, each delighting in the other’s company.

The fullest official expression of their partnership on record in August 1973 was the album Solid Air which they had toured very successfully. It turns out that a few weeks prior to the Reading 73 concert that they had just finished recording the follow-up album, Inside Out, and the mood of the latter is much closer to the memory I have of the concert. I have no idea what the setlist was that Sunday, but they surely played a mix from both albums.

The duo did so many things that day, hitting off each other’s inspiration ,because they could both follow or lead the way through the pieces they played. Sadly of course, John is no longer with us, but his innovations haven’t dated because his work remains ground-breaking even today. Fortunately, Danny Thompson is still around, and he has shared his testimony on their years together with great feeling and a sense of mischievous humour.

What else can I say ? I only saw John Martyn live this one time. He was a very active live performer, but strangely I never got to see him again. Was he always the way he was that Sunday at Reading? Or was it something special about the circumstances that day which made it such an intense experience ?

John’s been gone since 2009, but the memory of that John Martyn Moment at Reading is still there, and still gives me goose pimples.