The Man Upstairs
Artist: John Martyn
Label: Voiceprint 
Time: 12 Tracks / 73 mins
Region 0 (playable anywhere)
 
It’s not every singer-songwriter whose passing gets recorded beyond the music press, in the broadsheets and ‘serious’ national radio, but Martyn’s recent death was widely reported. BBC Radio 4 covered it, not just in the arts show, but on the prime time PM programme. 
 
All accounts of his life seemed as interested in his character as his musical achievements. Chris Blackwell, the Island Records boss that signed him, described him as “an angel and a tyrant,” adding that his voice covered both ends of his personality’s spectrum. 
 
This one-man show, recorded a Rockpalast in 1978, shows both his belligerence and his appeal. His abrasiveness shows mainly on the introductions. Right at the start he sits down with a “Hi fans” that he explains by, “It’s the beer, don’t worry about it.” But another side of him opens up when he sings. Just as Irish rocker Van Morrison re-invented himself with a distinctive soulful vocal when he went solo, Martyn has a sound unlike anyone else, built around that velvet, breathy, moody voice. 
 
The songs are also a little bi-polar, swinging between quiet, introspective acoustic pieces and louder, riffier works that often use the Echoplex looping machine, a relatively new tool for solo singers at the time. Whichever style he uses, Martyn plainly likes to push against expectations. Take the way that he growls the title of “Solid Air” among a more buzzy, slurring scat style for the rest of the song. (The track was written as a tribute to his close friend, Nick Drake).
 
Coming only months after his classic One World album, and a few years after Solid Air, there are plenty of key John Martyn tracks featured here. On the Echoplex-based “Big Muff” – a track he co-wrote with Lee Perry that includes this collection’s title – he pings a particularly percussive loop from his acoustic; “Certain Surprise” breaks into spacey noodling before returning to its riff; and his signature “May You Never” appears late in the set. 
 
“Seven Black Roses” is an instrumental piece that he describes as a visual “musical joke.” It is a work that he devised as a way of getting into serious guitar clubs, the visual part being the way he regularly slides the capo up and down the neck every few lines. However self-deprecatingly he introduces the track, it still shows off his dexterity.
 
Visually, we get a few camera angles, remarkable sharpness, plenty of close-ups of the fret board and a few of the pedals. Although there are no special features, during production of this DVD a previously forgotten Rockpalast song came to light – Martyn covering Skip James’ ”I’d Rather Be the Devil,” which he hangs on a very similar riff to that from “Big Muff”. 
 
Whether or not you warm to Martyn as a person, this is a fine record of his work and style, recorded at a key time in his career; and it works very well as an introduction to the man’s music.
 
Derek Walker