Small Hours: The Long Night Of John Martyn

Graeme Thomson OMNIBUS

More danger than grace.

“If anyone else had inflicted the damage,” Graeme Thomson writes of John Martyn’s catastrophic self-destruction, “it would have been a police matter.”

Copious interviews trace a comfortable but wounded youth, and the happy creative heat of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Soho’s 60s undergrounds, where golden boy Martyn charmed and shouldered past his peers to break Solid Air’s shifting, liquid ground. Thomson finds the toughness in this flowing yet jagged music, then watches its sparks sputter for Martyn’s final quarter-century.

Meanwhile, first wife and crushed musical partner Beverley is regularly battered, her life wrecked. Other women are also abused. His stepson Wesley watches The Shining’s mad, axeswinging dad with awful recognition, having grown up “in total fear” of Martyn, his life seeming to hang “by a thread”.

Thomson tethers the sometimes golden music to the often savage man, retaining sympathy for his subject and the casualties he caused. ■■■■■■■■■■