May you never meet your heroes, in the small hours
THE release of Small Hours, Graeme Thomson’s biography of the late John Martyn, reminded me that I was a witness to what was possibly one of the happier moments of Martyn’s life.
One day in the 1980s, I was on Grafton Street when I saw Martyn walking hand in hand with a woman into Weir’s jewellers. I later realised the woman must be Annie Furlong, then a studio manager at Windmill Lane, and that their visit to Weir’s must have been connected to the fact that they were soon to be married.
Anyone who saw them that day, however briefly, would have seen nothing more than a couple of beautiful people, having a great time.
But given what we know now about John Martyn, we can’t be sure that this vision of happiness lasted for the rest of the afternoon — or even for the time they were in Weir’s.
Certainly the marriage didn’t last, there was a lot of drinking, Martyn was horribly abusive, as he had been to his first wife and musical partner, Beverley Kutner.
And while it is unwise to form a view of someone’s character from their dealings with journalists,
I do remember being in the Hot Press office when the writer who had just come back from trying to conduct an interview with John Martyn described him simply as “a bollocks”.
That said, the late Philip Chevron told me that the John Martyn he encountered one day seemed to be “a lovely man” — and on that day no doubt this was true.
For all his impossibility as a human being, Martyn was a great artist — he embodied
DARKNESS: John Martyn
this mad paradox that a person can produce work that is stunningly gorgeous, and yet be possessed of such darkness, be capable of atrocious behaviour.
And he also represents a time when a fairly wellknown person could live like that, and still have a career — last week Tom Meighan, the singer with Kasabian, pleaded guilty to assaulting his ex-fiancee, and while there was outrage that he only got “community service”, we can take it that Meighan the rock star is finished.
For years, many of us knew very little about the “real” John Martyn. Maybe we just weren’t all that interested in the private life of someone who didn’t seek publicity on those terms, who was judged only on his music and his public persona — in which capacity he may have been a “bollocks” to interviewers, but that was allowed.
Annie Furlong died in Kenya in 1996. I didn’t know her at all, but when I read the news, I remembered that scene on Grafton Street a long time ago — and maybe John Martyn remembered it too.