Sunday's child

In any record collection worth its salt there should be a range of music to suit every mood.

Things to listen to when heading out on a Saturday night, and things to listen to on your return. Albums for good times and bad. Break-up records and make-up records, music to get you in the mood, music to keep the relationship going.

Everyone should also have a Sunday morning record. Something to soothe you into the laziest day of the week. There are Steely Dan records that do the job nicely, tracks by the late Gil-Scott Heron and the very recently departed Richie Havens, and even the obvious choice of The Commodores' Easy Like Sunday Morning.

But for me, there is only one Sunday morning accompaniment: John Martyn's Solid Air, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. Released in February 1973, Solid Air was Martyn's sixth album, and brought the New Malden, Surrey-born, Glasgow-raised singer-songwriter to a new level of creativity.

Today it is regarded as the ultimate chill-out album - arguably the genre's genesis - and hailed by Paul Weller, Beth Orton, Beck, The Cure's Robert Smith and many more for its woozy fusion of acoustic blues, folk, and jazz.

For the sore of head, or those in need of continued stimulation, Solid Air's title track blissfully sets the level, dreamily blending currents of warmth and cool over a spacey intro of Danny Thompson's fluid basslines, Martyn's Martin acoustic guitar and electric piano, before the singer himself semi-slurs the opening lines:

"You've been taking your time, you've been living on solid air/You've been walking the line, you've been living on solid air/Don't know what's going wrong inside/and I can tell you that it's hard to hide when you're living on solid air."

The song is is a tribute Nick Drake, Martyn's friend, whom he would later refer to as "someone who had problems in his nut", and who was, at the time causing Martyn great concern. A year later Drake would overdose on sleeping tablets.

"I loved his music," Martyn told Rock'n'Reel's Johnny Black in 2008, shortly before Martyn himself died of pneumonia complications. "[Nick] was a well-mannered, decent man, gleeful, never said a bad word about anybody," adding that the Drake's "dreadful depression" was a terrible thing to witness. "To watch him go down and you can do nothing for it. You can try but they won't have it. He's the one person I've known that's had that and it can actually kill you."

If Solid Air reflects Drake's decline, the album represented something of a zenith for Martyn, as well as the platform for his own battles. For much of his career, drugs and booze played a playful but destructive role.

In Thompson, he had a sparring partner, big brother and surrogate father rolled into one. Of all Martyn's collaborators, the bass player was his closest. Their fights were legendary (Martyn once woke up in a hotel room to discover he'd been nailed under a carpet by Thompson, who was sitting at the table above him eating breakfast).

But through the booze-drenched excess, Martyn and Thompson produced one of the most unusually symbiotic relationships ever created between two musicians.

Nowhere on Solid Air is this more evident than on Go Down Easy, which opens with one of the most beautiful opening lines ever committed to song: "You curl around me like a fern in the spring". Go Down Easy is classic chillout Martyn: his trademark vocal, acoustic guitar set to some exotic tuning, and Thompson's upright bass woven into the song's sparseness with uncanny instinct.

Some of Martyn's best live performances featured just himself and Thompson, demonstrating how much two musicians, with a single music instrument each, could fill a soundstage. A lot of this came from Martyn's experimentation with the Echoplex. This early tape-based delay device allowed him to create polyphonics from just an acoustic guitar by slapping its bottom string for rhythm while having the Echoplex repeat phrases played on the other five strings.

On Solid Air, this technique transforms bluesman Skip James' Devil Got My Woman into I'd Rather Be The Devil, whose pure blues roots are completely obscured by a studio wigout of jazz bass lines, energetic drumming from Fairport Convention's Dave Mattacks, and Martyn vibing his guitar through the rudimentary but profoundly effective box.

Solid Air isn't, however, just a splifftastic woozefest: May You Never, written as moral support for a male friend who'd found himself involved in a pub punch-up is a gently bucolic folk number, later covered by Eric Clapton on his Slowhand album.

Jellyroll Blues is just that, a sped-up traditional blues, with the bottleneck slide technique of a Beale Street busker replaced by Martyn's remarkable finger-picking style (he was - out of all other things written about him - a truly brilliant guitar player).

Over The Hill, the album's sophomore track, is a delightfully jaunty traditional number, lifted by Richard Thompson's mandolin, and expressing the joys of returning home, being inspired by Martyn seeing his house on the horizon as he neared the coast on a train journey from London to Hastings.

Over The Hill does, however, reveal some of the dark side that was emerging in Martyn's life. "Can't get enough of sweet cocaine/Get enough of Mary Jane/Going back to where I came from/Going rolling back home again/Over the hill", let slip some of the temptations Martyn was falling prey to, and how Hastings became a brittle bolthole.

Homelife was a curious muse in Martyn's career. His 'classic' period - from 1971's Bless The Weather, through Solid Air, Inside Out, Sunday's Child, One World and Grace And Danger in 1980 were strongly influenced by the ups and downs of his marriage to Beverley (the latter album his particularly raw-to-the-bone divorce album), and by his children.

Martyn was never afraid of wearing his heart on his sleeve. There were times when his heart was his sleeve: "Very few people are trying to reach the heart these days," he told the NME in 1973. "I feel strongly that there's a great dearth of the heart everywhere right now."

Beverley Martyn would later say, after they'd separated, that John put so much emotion into his music that there was scant left for her. "Music, makes my heart go, makes me tick," John once said himself. "The money doesn't really matter. If it didn't come in I would still go on playing, singing away. That's me."

And thus he did. When he died in January 2009, Martyn - on a third marriage and minus his right leg (amputated below the knee following a burst cyst), just one of many afflictions he'd dealt with in his life, including being shot twice - was still writing and recording. 

His final sessions appeared posthumously as the album Heaven And Earth. The voice had slowed to a whisky-stewed soup but the spacious jazz of his hero Pharoah Sanders, which liberally found its way onto Solid Air, was still present, along with his penchant for refreshingly emotional transparency.

Solid Air was released in another extraordinary year for music. Just a month before, Pink Floyd had released Dark Side Of The Moon (recently revisited by WWDBD? in Over The Moon), and the year also gave forth The Who's Quadrophenia, Bowie's Aladdin Sane, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road by Elton John, and debuts from Mike Oldfield (Tubular Bells), Steely Dan (Countdown To Ecstasy) and Bruce Springsteen (Greetings From Asbury Park), and Stevie Wonder's Innervisions and Marvin Gaye's Let's Get It On.

In and amongst these behemoths of the age, Solid Air can easily be lost. John Martyn is, today, still admired by many in the know but unknown to the masses. A tragedy.

Despite outliving most people's expectations for his life expectancy - and certainly surviving long past those of immediate friends and collaborators like Drake and Free's Paul Kossoff, Martyn left behind a vast discography.

Some of it is so-so (his '80s 'electric' period went a little too far), but in classics like Solid Air, he covered - over just 35 short minutes - the most mellifluous of records. Or, to quote Beth Orton: "Solid Air is the musical equivalent of a reassuring hug." Yep, says it all.

Stroll on down electric avenue

With the Clan Mumford continuing their waistcoated march across the western world - like a band of marauding Pa Larkins armed with ukes and mandolins - the grand pappy of British folk-rock, Richard Thompson has stormed back this week with Electric, his 22nd album since leaving Fairport Convention.

I must confess, Thompson is one of those staples of British music I've managed to avoid. Not deliberately, mind, but light prejudice and shameful cliches involving beards, Aran sweaters and rural inflection may have been involved. Where I have lent folkwards, it has been in the direction of Nick Drake and, of course, my uber-hero, John Martyn, or towards the Appalachian charms of American roots.

For Thompson, however, Fairport Convention and all that early-70s hurdy-gurdy is a long way behind. Electric is a barnstorming affair, as it's title might suggest, dictated to by Thompson's Stratocaster mastery. It's a finger-picking virtuosity to rival Mark Knopfler, with whom Thompson shares a close musical affinity, stylistically, lyrically and tonally.

Recorded at the Nashville home studio of Robert Plant-collaborator Buddy Miller, Electric weaves in and out of Celtic-tinged rock, honky-tonk and bluegrass with a lyrical spectrum spanning the acerbic and the solemn.

To those familiar with Thompson's output in recent years, Electric may, simply, feel familiar. Like Knopfler, settling in to a sound and a groove. But that would be to unfairly suggest that Thompson turned up, plugged in and went home again.

Stony Ground kicks it off with ribald tale of an ageing lothario lusting after the widow across the street, essentially a bluesy jive about someone not that dissimilar to Open All Hours' Arkright ("Silly old man with his teeth all gone/Poking his nose where it don't belong/She's a rose all right but she's got thorns....").

The title of Salford Sunday provides the premise of a dreary tale about a dreary Sunday in a dreary Manchester suburb, but it's gently shuffling bluegrass (with Allison Krauss on backing vocals) is less another dour Northern tale as one of slight regret at leaving behind a particularly entertaining Saturday night, if you know what I mean.

While list compilers have largely focused on the Claptons, Gilmours and Becks in their compilations of great British guitarists, Thompson has probably never been given the recognition he deserves.

Perhaps its the folk association, but Stuck On The Treadmill provides a snappy showcase of just how gifted - and varied - a guitarist he is, applying a bluesy, bassy edge to opine the cause of the workin' man.

There is more familiar folkiness in The Snow Goose, another somewhat regretful, even mournful tale of a Northern lass, and in Saving The Good Stuff For You, which picks the tone up a notch with the help of fiddles and gee-tars.

Electric may not be the album to change your view of the world, but if you enjoy your Saturday night bar room entertainment guitar-flavoured, you won't be disappointed, from the tankard-swinging ballad Another Small Thing In Her Favour to the honky-tonk funk of Straight And Narrow.

Compared to, say, last year's Locked Down by Dr John, I'll admit that Electric hasn't turned me over in a sweating, heaving wreck of spooky roots blues; but it is pleasantly blessed in the manner that only American folk - as Plant and Krauss themselves demonstrated so admirably with Raising Sand - can do, providing a highly likeable soundtrack to either a night down the pub, or a cross-country trek across Appalachia.

Checking out early

For the return from absence of What Would David Bowie Do? (no note from matron, just been busy with other things), I'd like to draw your attention to death. Not an uplifting topic, nor particularly entertaining. In fact, death is quite serious.

If there is, though, one certainty in life, it is that some day we will all pop our clogs. Sorry if you had another expectation, but it clearly says in the instruction manual that we turn up, we schlep around for however many years the Great Life Lottery allocates us, and then that's it. Ta-ta.

When someone we know, or know of, dies, our response ranges from mortification and deep gloom, to mild acknowledgement and a token, and somewhat disposable, comment of condolence. For the family of the deceased, it's an understandable tragedy, even it provides welcome respite from the condition that preceded the terminal breath.  For everyone else, grief will only ever be an assumed state, the acquisition of a character, no matter how genuinely-intentioned it might be.

This morning I woke up to the sad news that Clarence Clemons, the iconic saxophonist in Bruce Springsteen's E-Street Band had passed away at the age of 69 following a stroke. By spooky coincidence (and unaware that the big man had even been ill) I'd been playing the Born To Run 30th Anniversary box set only the night before, luxuriating in Clemons' sax solo on Jungleland and considering that after lead guitarist, there is only one other solo star in any band.

Clemons was more than just the cool horn player with his moment in the spotlight each time the middle eight came around; his sax, tied to the blatant Spector soundscapes, shaped the Springsteen sound, and made it and Springsteen himself, a musical representation of the size, scale and enormity of America.

It is sad: life is finite, we all know, but seeing anyone who has contributed - even a little - to the cultural enjoyment of my own life pass away while still active and still able to contribute more, saddens me. Is it a vacant emotion? Should I just get a grip?

Last October it was Solomon Burke, a performer who I'd come to appreciate late in my life and even later in his, but whom I realised - only through accessing his back catalogue - what a true musical pioneer he was.  Just last month I was confronted with the demise of another legend, Gil Scott-Heron, whose early albums like Pieces Of A Man exposed me - relatively young - to another side of jazz, funk and whatever it was you could call Heron's music. I felt compelled to express my sadness about his death, for the simple and self-indlugent reason that like so many others who have gone before they should - John Lennon, George Harrison, Nick Drake and my über-hero, John Martyn, to name just four - their music has had a profound influence on my listening enjoyment.

Keith Richards once famously remarked that some musicians aren't meant to live beyond 30 (or thereabouts): the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Keith Moon, John Bonham, Marc Bolan, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison all had some degree of misadventure to their expiration (though to be fair, Bolan's had more to do with his Mini losing an argument with a tree on Barnes Common). Were they just destined to go young? Should we feel any less grief for John Lee Hooker or Muddy Waters reaching their dotages and then pegging out, much like anyone else who isn't in the spotlight?

Not wishing to get over psychoanalytical about it, it boils down to association and impact. John Martyn's death affected me for days, and still does. I should get over it. One musician out of millions. Likewise the comedian and writer Spike Milligan. He was 83 when he went. "He'd had a good innings" trilled the frequently issued and thoroughly vacuous platitude. To me, it was tragic, because it removed someone who had played a part in my own development, the gradual genetic shape-shifting that is each of our lives. Milligan's sense of humour, channelled through tapes of The Goon Show my father blessed my family life with, influenced my sense of fun, appreciation of English wordplay and the absurd, and to this day, still brings amusement to the moribund downward escalator we call existence.

To see great people taken away from the world at any age is, sadly inevitable and inevitably sad. We should move on, celebrate all the other good things that are out there, of course. But those who make some impact on the lives of many and the lives of only a few - who might have only been responsible for something of just fleeting enjoyment - deserve whatever appreciation comes their way.