Over the Hill and Far Away

Going to a special festival in County Durham.

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.

But last summer, I made a big mistake. A few weeks after giving birth, I got spectacularly sick with ulcerative colitis and spent a month in Northwick Park Hospital, easily the unloveliest stop on the Metropolitan line. The thing about colons is that you only really bother to learn about them when they go wrong, a bit like combi-boilers or the Bank of England base rate. The salient detail is this: I needed a pretty drastic operation to save my life, and when I woke up a nurse was opening my Spotify app, asking what I’d like to listen to.

Easy. ‘John Martyn, Solid Air, please.’

If you ever suspect that you are living through the trickiest moment of your life, here’s what you absolutely must not do. You must not listen to your favourite album. It is difficult to have this sort of foresight when you are yipped out of your tree on fentanyl, though. I listened to Solid Air so much that the clinical noises around me – the rising tri-tone of the IV drip pump, the phlebotomist’s warning of ‘sharp scratch’, endless bleeps and clangs – became indistinguishable from the song itself.

Which is a circuitous way of telling you two things. Firstly, I haven’t been able to listen to John’s music for nearly a year. And secondly, I can think of no better immersion therapy than getting steadily steamed in a remote boozer on the outskirts of Barnard Castle with some ageing hippies.

Hopping out of the taxi, I hear on the breeze the burp and squelch of an amplifier, my siren call. It’s my first night away from the baby and I feel almost floaty with the absence of responsibility. The air fizzes with carnivalesque possibility. To the revels!

But the whiff of anticlimax is immediate: this year’s bacchanal is not in a storied old boozer, but a village hall in a field. The whole thing is apologetically decked out in bunting, a hangover from someone else’s merrymaking. Between this and the sea of chintzy tablecloths covering the cabaret tables, the initial vibe is more Mrs Tiggy Winkle’s tea party than anticipated.

The musical acts are still sound-checking so we’re held in an anteroom, about 30 of us elbow-to-elbow in damp coats. Most have brought tents to sleep in and there is fevered discussion about when the rain will stop for long enough for them to be erected. I nod along sympathetically, the booking email on my phone from my cosy 4* B&B burning a hole in my pocket.

A stressed-out man with an iPad makes his way around the group, tasked with the dual responsibility of handing out wristbands while asking everyone if they’d prefer chilli or coronation chicken in the jacket potato that is apparently included in the ticket price. My heart sinks. The jacket potato news is fantastic, but it does not necessarily suggest a night of Rabelaisian excess lying ahead.

Mercifully, a hatch is thrown open revealing a surprisingly well-stocked bar. We form an orderly queue as the first musical tribute to John strikes up: a skittish guitarist who commits the cardinal sin of trying to sell us his merchandise before he’s played a note. The mood turns in an instant. ‘Tough crowd!’ he says, a phrase which has never endeared an audience to the person dying on their arse, ever. Who is this arriviste sullying our votive altar with his double-sided Eco Vinyl and branded baseball caps? But then he rolls the opening chord of Road to Ruin and his voice is sublime and just like John’s. We forgive him immediately.

I look around the hall at this year’s throng. I’ve always been curious about what happens to countercultural identities as people get older. The majority of men at this year’s gathering have alighted upon the same solution: chuck on a trilby. I presume this decision has been made collectively on a WhatsApp group to which I am not privy. I count seven trilbies at the bar alone, bobbing up and down like little Adam’s apples. There are men in fleeces and trilbies, in Velcro shoes and trilbies, oblivious to the rest of their outfits, happy to let the trilby do the talking. One middle-aged chap wears a hoodie advertising an amdram production of Pygmalion – and a trilby.

I fall into conversation with a wiry man called Don who’s brought his 19-year-old granddaughter Katie along this year to teach her about John Martyn. In the late 1960s, Don shared a stage with John at Les Cousins, the notorious all-night club at 49 Greek Street. ‘It was named “Les Cousins” after a French New Wave film,’ he tells me. ‘But at the time we just thought it was owned by some bloke called Les.’ Don started a courier business, got married and soon the wild Soho afterparties were a hazy dream. Now retired, he tells me he’s keen to have a more ‘experience-led’ life. ‘Basically he’s started taking magic mushrooms again,’ says his granddaughter. ‘I have, yes,’ says Don proudly.

While we’ve been whetting our whistles safely indoors, the day’s heavy clouds have been melting away without our noticing. The doors to the hall fling back on their hinges. ‘The rain has stopped!’ proclaims the stressed-out man in charge of the jacket potatoes. There is a loud cheer as people stumble into the gloam of the field, merrily plunging tent-pegs into the slopping mud. I go out to provide moral support to Don and Katie, but their tents are up in what feels like seconds. We stay in the field talking as the sun goes down and after a while, the music starts up again.

It’s the unmistakable opening of the fan favourite Over the Hill, whose twinkly chords conjure campfires and dark skies. It’s a song about ‘rolling back home again’ to family and domesticity, but also the romantic lure of the open road – something John tussled always with. It’s also the second track on the album Solid Air.

I tell Don that I ruined this song by playing it too much while sick in hospital last year. He tells me that music is ‘pure association’ and that for ages John’s album One World reminded him sharply of his brother – also a John fan – who died in his forties. You can make new associations for songs though, Don says. He gestures towards the dip and the scoop of the Teesdale moors, reaching out as far as we can see. ‘Maybe now when you hear it, you’ll think of this.’