British folk singer Beverley Martyn, known for her collaborations with her former husband John Martyn as well as spirited, sublime solo work, has died aged 79.
A statement from the family of the late John Martyn announced the news, saying she died peacefully at home on Monday. “Beverley was a remarkable woman of great inner strength,” the statement continued. “She was beautiful, intelligent, warm and kind.”
Born Beverley Kutner near Coventry in 1947, she moved to London in her mid-teens to attend drama school and worked her way into the city’s folk music scene, which was flourishing in the early 1960s: she learned to play guitar from British folk legend Bert Jansch, an early boyfriend.
She released a single with her band, the Levee Breakers, the stridently jangling Babe I’m Leaving You, and also recorded solo songs including the enduring Happy New Year, a fuzz-guitar romp written by Randy Newman and featuring a pre-Led Zeppelin Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones among the session musicians. Page later said: “It was a remarkable session, at the time it was recorded I knew that she was a shining talent in the world of performance and songwriting.” Another single, Museum, was written by Donovan.
After becoming romantically involved with Paul Simon during his developmental years in London – “He had a Napoleon complex. Very intelligent. Moody, but witty,” was her assessment of him in a 2014 Guardian interview – she travelled with him to perform at the Monterey pop festival in 1967 (the culture-shifting event where Jimi Hendrix famously set his guitar on fire) and briefly appeared on the Simon & Garfunkel album Bookends, a US and UK No 1.
She became a single mother to a son, Wesley, from another relationship, then met John Martyn in 1969, soon marrying him. Immersed in the folk-rock counterculture in the US, they recorded a duo album, Stormbringer!, in 1969 in Woodstock, with the Band’s Levon Helm on drums and Joe Boyd producing. It was released in 1970, and later that year they recorded and released another, The Road to Ruin (its opening track Primrose Hill would later be sampled by Fatboy Slim).
Beverley also came to know British folk star Nick Drake, who would babysit for her children; they wrote a song together, Reckless Jane, which Beverley completed in 2014.
She and John had two children of their own, but after he pursued his solo career, “my career was over”, she said in 2014. “I had my hands full. I did the odd gig with John, and the odd one on my own, but I had no future.”
Their marriage soured; John, who struggled with alcohol and drugs, became paranoid and threatening. “There was love there – it was the drink and the bad drugs, the very heavy ones, that changed his disposition, and they made life unbearable for anyone around him,” she later said. “I wouldn’t stay with a man who was killing himself.”
She escaped the marriage and moved to Brighton, fitfully making music including with Loudon Wainwright III and Wilko Johnson, but it wasn’t until her 2014 solo album, The Phoenix and the Turtle, that she made a more emphatic return. “It was a great relief to finally do something on my own terms. That was a dream I’d almost given up on,” she said of that project.
That would be her final collection of new material, though in 2018 she released a compilation of her 1960s songs, entitled Where the Good Times Are.
