{"id":55,"date":"2004-07-06T23:25:30","date_gmt":"2004-07-06T23:25:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/?p=55"},"modified":"2004-07-06T23:25:30","modified_gmt":"2004-07-06T23:25:30","slug":"john-martyn-redux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/?p=55","title":{"rendered":"John Martyn redux"},"content":{"rendered":"

Watching the BBC4 documentary John Martyn: Johnny Too Bad<\/a>, I wondered how on earth I’d ever lost track of John Martyn<\/a> and his music. A little careful mental backtracking brought the realisation that when my last turntable died and didn’t get replaced, I simply stopped listening to vinyl. The programme was as entertaining as it was enlightening and was a very pleasurable way to spend an hour – rediscovering old tracks I half remembered and hearing earlier work I’d never heard. As someone who is usually labelled a folk artist, Martyn is ten times more rock and roll than any of the usual so-called hellraisers. Although being pissed, wrecked, argumentative half the time and in possession of a schoolboy’s sense of humour the other isn’t meant to be big or clever, there is a part of me that sneakingly admires him for this.<\/p>\n

Wanting to fill in a few gaps after the programme, I Googled for his website which is, much to my delight, not some slick A&R person’s wet dream but a lovingly downbeat site tucked away on Freeserve. There, amongst the fan’s Top 40 tracks, quotes and the photomontage, you’ll find a great page called ‘Stories<\/a>‘ where folks have submitted their JM-related tales. One you won’t find there concerns the time when Martyn verbally harangued and abused a bloke who was delivering beer to the Hammersmith pub whose bar he was barely standing at one fine evening back in the mid-eighties. Having given him a right earful, Martyn proceeded to ‘let’ the bloke buy him a drink in order to make up for what ever transgression he had unknowingly committed. Two pints were duly served and a barely coherent conversation ensued. I still have no idea what he said but he went for a piss and never came back so I never got a drink out of him.<\/p>\n

As I still have no turntable on which to play vinyl, I purchased a few of my favourite JM albums, erm, CDs over the weekend to enjoy all over again. The only problem is that I am now wondering what other essential albums are buried in my vinyl collection that I have forgotten about. This could be expensive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Watching the BBC4 documentary John Martyn: Johnny Too Bad, I wondered how on earth I’d ever lost track of John Martyn and his music. A little careful mental backtracking brought the realisation that when my last turntable died and didn’t get replaced, I simply stopped listening to vinyl. The programme was as entertaining as it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bignoseduglyguy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}