John Martyn: BBC Live In Concert

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FANS will know that the only predictable thing about John Martyn is his unpredictability. His live performances can touch the heights, and sometimes just bumble along.

Although his voice occasionally isn't at its best on a couple of songs in these sessions, recorded in Paris and London over a 10-year period ¹, there are plenty of good (and now and then great) moments that more than compensate.

John Martyn, Roundhouse, London

John Martyn's singing style and innovations with echo-effects and fuzz-box guitar pedals in the early 1970s were influenced by the free-jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders. On the albums Bless the Weather, Solid Air and Inside Out, he set out to replicate Sanders's incredibly long sustains with his voice and guitar playing.

The collapse of a marriage (or two) has proven to be creatively satisfying for the likes of Abba, Fleetwood Mac and Marvin Gaye, but few accounts of love-gone-wrong come anywhere close to the emotional impact of Martyn's 1980 release

John Martyn: Solid Air,
Royal Concert Hall, Glasgow

JOHN MARTYN: gallows humour

For those who remember John Martyn in his acoustic troubadour days -and there were plenty of them here- listening to him eulogising the best jelly-roll in town to an urgent clawhammer guitar was a sobering experience.