I have to confess I didn’t know the name Beverley Martyn until I read of her death at the age of 79. More fool me.
She’s one of those characters who popped up everywhere on the English folk scene in its Sixties heyday, and her singing voice has an endearing vibrato that reminds me of Melanie.
In the mid-’60s she wrote, sang and recorded with everyone from Paul Simon, Bert Jansch, Nick Drake, Richard Thomson, Davy Graham, John Renbourn, Ralph McTell and half a pre-fame Led Zeppelin.
She recorded her first single, Babe I’m Leaving You, with a skiffle group called The Levee Breakers, when she was 16 and still at school, after which she moved from her native Coventry to London to attend drama school.
On her first solo single in 1966, a version of a Randy Newman song called Happy New Year, she was backed by a superstar studio band of Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, Nicky Hopkins and Andy White (best known as the drummer on the first Beatles single Love Me Do).
Learning guitar from her boyfriend, Bert Jansch, her next single was a cover of Cat Stevens’s I Love My Dog, followed by a song called Museum written by Donovan, and a Bessie Smith blues featuring John Renbourn.
Invited to New York by her next boyfriend, Paul Simon, Beverley contributed to a song called Fakin’ It on Simon & Garfunkel’s album Bookends – that’s her saying “Good morning, Mr Leitch, have you had a busy day?” – and appeared alongside them at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival.
She is, for better or worse (and it was, sadly, more of the latter) better remembered as the wife of John Martyn, whom she met in 1967. He was a musical genius but also a violent abuser in the grip of addiction to drink and drugs.
They recorded a pair of albums as a duo before Martyn resumed his solo career, the first of them – Stormbringer – recorded in Woodstock with Levon Helm.
Fatboy Slim notably sampled one song, Primrose Hill, from their second album, aptly titled The Road To Ruin, for the song North West Three on his album Palookaville.
After their divorce in 1980 she retired from music to raise her three children. She eventually returned to the studio and stage, performing at a Bert Jansch tribute in 2013 alongside Robert Plant, Donovan and members of Pentangle, where she sang a stunning version of the blues classic Levee Breaks.
A year later she recorded a final album, The Phoenix And The Turtle, that included unreleased songs by Nick Drake and John Martyn.
Here she is, still at the peak of her vocal powers, performing the strange and wonderful song Auntie Aviator, from her second duo album with Martyn – aptly titled The Road To Ruin – at Bush Hall later in 2014, with an astonishing guitar solo by Michael Watts.