There is, of course, only one possible association with the words ‘Barnard Castle’. But my decision to travel there earlier this year had nothing to do with a certain bazillion-word blogger, a fact that no one is more pleased to hear than my taxi driver. ‘If a customer even mentions his name,’ he glowers, with the haunted look of a man who has endured a thousand optometry jokes, ‘they can get out and walk.’
We’re threading through country lanes away from the 12th-century fortress, up into softer, greener Teesdale hills, bound for the village of Mickleton. It’s summer, technically, though the Durham weather seems resistant to the idea. Given the sheeting rain, I am keen to stay inside the vehicle, so quickly tell the driver my trip’s actual purpose: I’ve come to pay tribute to my all-time favourite musician – roistering scoundrel and genius guitarist of the singer-songwriter generation, John Martyn, who died in 2009.
Every summer, a hundred or so die-hard John Martyn devotees gather in a far-flung rural pub, chosen seemingly at random by the organisers. It’s a moveable Graceland, a weekend of carousing and mythologising about the big man. The organisers call it a ‘gathering’, but boozy séance might be more accurate: an attempt to conjure John’s spirit through song and story. A typical crowd includes those who knew John personally (bandmates, friends, family, a still spunk-drunk ex or two) and the rest of us – a rabble with no blood or post-coital ties, our only unifying logic a love of the music.
Things can, on occasion, get spicy. At the last gathering I attended in 2016, my friend and I were trying to make a documentary about John. We were interviewing two of his old drinking buddies and our too-probing question about John’s extra-marital affairs on the road caused an operatic bust-up between them. Voices were raised, glasses slammed, an octogenarian with a strong Glaswegian accent bellowed ominously about what would happen if he continued to be disrespected. Though he might have been dead 15 years, John’s life and reputation inspires strong protective instinct in those who loved him. And though he warned against it in his most popular song May You Never, there are plenty still prepared to get hit in a bar-room fight for him.
John was a swashbuckling Glaswegian whose favourite drink was a cider and quadruple vodka. A bear of a man with a golden crown of curls, his voice was a honeyed slur, his guitar-playing a kind of quicksilver. He sang about switchblades and devils and the pleasure of sweet Mary Jane. He once broke his neck after he drunk-drove down an Irish country lane at night and crashed head first into a cow. I was a suburban schoolgirl when I first encountered his music, slightly nervy around alcohol after a bad experience on the Shirley Temples at the Watford TGI Fridays. We didn’t have a huge amount in common, John and I, but I loved him from the start.
John’s accent was unpredictable to the point of schizophrenia. It could aquaplane from Glaswegian hard-nut to English toff to smashed Cockney pirate, sometimes over the course of a single sentence. Perhaps it sounded, to my teenage ears, like a promise, that you could just decide to be anything, anyone. I was fascinated by the snatches you’d hear at the top and tail of live tracks, chastising his techies – ‘chuck it up in the monitors, my wee boy’ – belching and swearing into the mic before launching into a tender love song.
I could tell John was a bit dangerous, a bit fucked-up. Not in the contrived teenage sense of fucked-up, like the girls at my school who smuggled penknives out of art lessons to carve our physics teacher’s name into each other’s arms, but something a bit more elemental, terrifying. I wouldn’t learn until much later, when I read his ex-wife Beverley’s biography, about the painful spiral of addiction and abuse that defined their marriage and which played out publicly in John’s lyrics. Once you knew, you could hear two versions of each song. When I first heard ‘If you laid all night in the rain for me, I couldn’t love you more,’ I thought it was the most romantic declaration of love, but listen twice and it’s also a savage dismissal. The division of tenderness and callousness ran right through both John the musician and John the man.
I could chapter my life with John’s albums. Bless the Weather was moody and folky, good for when you’d had the shit kicked out of your heart. One World was for the final stint of a party, the warm shimmer of John’s beloved Echoplex pedal ideal for floating off to sleep on someone else’s sofa. I’d make a new boyfriend listen to Solid Air, the title track of which is John’s growling ode to his friend Nick Drake, and check to see if they were moved or not.
