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It was on the One World tour that I got to see John Martyn play in concert again. Birmingham Town Hall is a striking Romanesque monument to Victorian provincial achievement, taste & rectitude.
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The first time I saw John Martyn play live was on the 19th of February 1972. Blimey, I was just a baby!
In which a miscellany of John Martyn's live performances and stray studio sessions are assembled into a coherent whole – even if it takes two handily compartmentalised CDs to do so.
"I like the idea of a video that wasn't a concert, and the lads backstage," notes a comfortably overstuffed John Martyn from a similarly overstuffed armchair. "That's Spinal Tap stuff."
Not everything rare is valuable
07 Dec 2011
A shadowy figure from Sandy Denny's early life is Theo Johnson, immortalised in her song 'Next Time Around' as 'Theo the sailor who sings in his lair'.
Still, highly recommended.
Beck, David Gray, Paolo Nutini, Snow Patrol and Robert Smith are among the stars who line up to pay tribute to John Martyn.
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None of it is clumsy but, equally, none of it truly escapes the originator's gravitational field.
