Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music by Young Rob

Author:Young, Rob [Young, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780571258420
Publisher: Faber and Faber Ltd
Published: 2010-08-18T16:00:00+00:00

The silver chain glints once more, winding back in space and time through the meadows of Richmond and Surrey, to the slippledee-slee, lazy hazy days on the Thames delta, where John Martyn spent most of that psychedelic 1967 summer crooning his mercurial, tongue-tripping confection of sprites and fairy fables to the stoned incumbents of the Folk Barge. Martyn was born to the McGeachy family on 11 September 1948, in New Malden, Surrey. His Glaswegian father and English mother (he also described her as ‘a Belgian Jew’) both sang light opera for a living, but separated not long after the birth of their son, who stayed in the paternal home. Martyn’s upbringing in the hard-knock life of the Glasgow ports – where his grandfather had owned a small fleet of trawlers – was given a flip side by his annual two-month visits to his mother in Surbiton, Surrey (he and his stepfather didn’t see eye to eye, so Martyn tended to stay with an aunt at Thames Ditton, across the river from Hampton Court). He picked up his fascination with the guitar from Scottish folk singer Hamish Imlach, and from watching Davy Graham, Bert Jansch and Robin Williamson up close in his local Scottish folk clubs; while his annual trips to England introduced another world of visions to his artistic sensibility: ‘London was like a dream to me […] even the Southern line, the green trains, and the journey from Waterloo to Surbiton […]. You see I come from Glasgow which is a very stroppy part of town and you don’t have any choice up there – either you’re violent or you’re a weed. And I haven’t got the capacity for being trodden on. I’m a natural born coward just like everybody else, but I don’t like being taken advantage of. I’m probably still the same now. But at the time it was just either eat or be eaten and it was just such a pleasant change to come down here. There were fights in school all the time and knives were bandied about, and it always seemed more civilised to be in England, especially round the Kingston way. It was just a very civilised part of my life.’4

Beverley and John Martyn before the clouds gathered, around the release of their duo album Stormbringer! (1970).

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