From Folkie to MIDI. Chris Maillard finds out how the hard bitten acoustic veteran has been bitten hard by the electronic bug.

Chris Maillard finds John Martyn coming to terms with technology in this 1985 interview from International Musician magazine.

Mention John Martyn’s name to the average chart watching paper-reading Pop-orientated young hipster and you’ll be lucky to get any more than a blank stare. And among the very few that have heard the name, a faint sneer would be the probable reaction.

But in the ranks of the inner circle, the people who make their living from knowing what’s good and what’s crud, his name commands a surprising amount of respect.

John Martyn started in the Folk clubs of his native Scotland 20-odd years ago, during the great folk boom that spawned people like Tim Hardin and Tim Buckley, both of whom are now dead and therefore now safe for the hip to acknowledge as influences (check out This Mortal Coil/Cocteau Twins’ Song To A Siren). But he wasn’t satisfied to remain in the Arran polo-neck and pewter tankard circuit forever, although he had become one of the biggest draws there.

He started playing about with effects and electronics, at first allied to a pickup on his acoustic guitar and eventually using electric guitar. Albums of that period, like Solid Air and One World were full of guitar sounds treated in all sorts of weird and occasionally wonderful ways- restricted in places by the low-tech effects available at the time, but still today listenable as an exercise in someone trying to get new sounds and use them musically.

His albums of today, like the recent Robert Palmer-produced Sapphire and the previous Phil Collins-aided Grace and Danger have veered more towards whole band line-ups rather than the one-man-and-his-guitar style and the feel is now lazy electronic Soul with the still heavily effected guitar and the smooth, relaxed voice backed by synthesizers and upfront fretless bass. Another influence that has seeped through to chartland, funnily enough-check out Paul Young’s Wherever I Lay My Hat for an uncannily close approximation.

“I wouldn’t consider staying still. I couldn’t have kept on doing the Folk stuff, because I get bored too easily. You could say that it’s the ‘urge to create’ that pushes me on from one thing to another, but really it’s just boredom.”

John Martyn is still gigging heavily, too, now with a two-piece line-up; him with guitar and voice, and fellow Scots session keyboard player Foster Paterson on a variety of hi-tech synths and a Sequential Circuits drum machine. He’s tried all sorts of combinations, from using just a double bass player to having a standard Rock band to solo sets. I asked him why he didn’t settle on one solid set-up…

“I just get bored very easily. Two or three tours with any one line-up is about as much as I can handle. I think I took the conventional band about as far as I could; I found it very difficult to stamp a great deal of personality on the songs with that five-piece band and some of the songs, particularly the ballads, lost out.

“I like the idea of using a keyboard player because of the vast range of textures you can get from synths. You can make it sound much bigger than it really is, which I like. I may add a percussionist soon, though-I like the idea of that. My next exercise in band life, I hope, will be a really huge one with brass, strings, the lot. I’ll have to go cap in hand to a lot of people to finance that, though.

“Generally, I love gigging. I play about six months of the year, and I’m a bit old school in that it’s what I do and I like it very much. I wouldn’t mind dying on stage, in harness as it were.

“There has only been one time when I haven’t played and that was a year, year-and-a-half ago when I had a really bad case of ‘writer’s block’. It was awful, I couldn’t come up with any ideas at all-it’s just the sort of thing every songwriter dreads. I cured that by giving up playing entirely until I really had to and that seemed to do the trick.”

What about guitar playing-how has your style changed over the years? “I play less these days, for a start. I suppose I play about half-and-half chord stuff and leadlines now. My style is fairly unusual, I suppose, mainly because of the tunings I use.

“My favourite one, the one my main guitar is tuned to, is DGCCFC. I like that because of the chords you get with it— the two Cs in the middle give it a great harmonic richness, and because it’s neither major nor minor it gives you great scope. Single lines are a bit more difficult with that one because it’s a much bigger jump between strings- five frets rather than three. You have to use quite heavy strings. Mine start at the bottom with a .056.

“If you stick to things for too long you’re in danger of forming a cliche; just disappearing up your own whatever.”

“I also use an old tuning, quite a standard one, which goes DADGAD, and for a few numbers an open C minor tuning comes in handy.

“I use tunings for songwriting, too. Often I’m sparked off by a good chord in a peculiar tuning, and then i’ll transpose that into my usual tuning for live playing,”

What about guitars-and the effects that give them the unusual sound?

“I use Gibsons these days, a Les Paul and my main guitar, a ’65 SG. I used to use Strats with the band, but with the two-piece line-up I need the fatter, bigger sound of the Gibsons. I tried guitar synths, but I don’t like them very much. They’re too quirky for me. As soon as one comes along that’s really good I’ll get one, but as yet they haven’t got it right. I think maybe the only way is to dispense with strings and use some other method of triggering. In fact, having said that, on the track Acid Rain from Sapphire there’s this noise like a strangled elephant. That’s me wrestling with a Roland guitar synth.

“As for effects, well, live I’m using a Pearl effects board with fuzz, flanger, phaser, chorus, and an envelope filter with squelches the sound around a bit. Then I’ve got a Korg Digital Delay, the SDD3000 I think, which is great. I haven’t really had time to get as deeply into that as I’d like but it’s really good. “I’ve been through so many effects over the years. The problem is they seem to vanish off the market so quickly. I used to love an American firm called Foxx who made the most wonderful wah-wah pedal. It came in blue suede finish and it had an absolute multitude of pots inside- you could get any kind of wah in the world from it.

“I used to like Electro-Harmonix stuff, too. It was cheap and cheerful but it did the business. I even called a song of mine Big Muff after their fuzz box. And a few other things.

“Some more classics include a Gibson Boomerang wah-wah, and the old Echoplex tape delay. That’s obsolete now, unfortunately, but it’s still marvellous. If they updated that I’d buy one immediately. You could get such a range of usable sounds out of it.”

“I keep changing around, though, trying new things out. I use synthesisers to write on quite a lot, although I’m not a good enough keyboard player to use them live. I’d like to do an album of ’50s and early ’60s Soul using synths and drum machine. That would be nice. I might at some stage do an acoustic album as well. That would be very cheap to make.

“I just hate to keep on at one thing for ages and ages. Fretless bass, for instance, is an example. I’ve just sacked my bass player, Alan Thompson, because of that. He’s a great player and it’s a lovely sound, but I’ve used it quite up front on the last two or three albums and its time has gone. If you stick to things for too long you’re in danger of forming a cliche; just disappearing up your own whatever. Fretless bass had become the flavour of the month, as well, I count it as one of the things I’ve experimented with and enjoyed using for a while…but no longer.

“I wouldn’t consider staying still. I couldn’t have kept on doing the Folk stuff, because I get bored too easily. You could say that it’s the ‘urge to create’ that pushes me on from one thing to another, but really it’s just boredom.”

---

Note: This interview was originally published in 1985 in International Musician & Recording World magazine and has been published here for archival purposes. You can read the entire magazine scan at World Radio History.