John was now signed to the Go Discs label along with bands like Portishead. Unfortunately, this was a short term relationship as Polygram soon bought the Go Discs label. Phil Collins and John Giblin both played on the album, which was received well particularly by fans. John improvised most of the lyrics in the studio! A hidden acid remix of Sunshine’s Better with a superb bass-line brings the album to a close on the CD version. Four of the tracks, albeit different mixes, had featured on the Snooo.. CD ep which had been given away free with a t-shirt during John’s 1995 tour. Snooo… was subsequently re-released by Voiceprint.
The dance/remix artist Talvin Singh remixed Sunshine’s Better and this 12 minute remix secured John regular radio air play especially on Radio 1 and was widely played in the dance clubs bringing John’s music to a new audience.
The eagerly awaited cover-album The Church With One Bell was released on 23rd March 1998. A whole generation of blues classics from Portishead’s Glory Box to Billy Holliday’s Strange Fruit, The Church With One Bell, which was recorded in one week in Glasgow, reverberates with John’s vast musical talent. The track selection was quite simple, when John and the band laughed, they chose that track – hard to imagine, as many of the songs are not happy! John’s rendition of Glory Box stands out and has become a great favourite with fans at live gigs, and other songs such as Small Town Talk, Strange Fruit, God’s Song, Excuse Me Mister and The Sky Is Crying are highlights. A challenging selection of songs for John to sing but he took the songs and made them all his own as only he can. “There’s a place between words and music and my voice lives right there,” John says. The album enabled John to purchase the Church next door to his cottage in Scotland where he now lives.
On the 30 October 1998 Live at Bristol 1991 was released a limited edition ‘Official Bootleg’ of 5,000 featuring the line-up of Alan Thomson (bass), John Henderson (drums), Andy Sheppard (saxophone) and Spencer Cozens (keyboards) performing nine tracks in concert. This was closely followed by Serendipity – An Introduction to John Martyn, another compilation from Island, presumably trying to entice those people who didn’t buy the Anthology.
May 1999 saw the release of Another World, made from the One World session tapes, a gem providing an insight into the making of One World and featuring instrumentals and the unreleased Blackman At Your Shoulder. A limited edition of 1,000 copies with a bonus disc, was soon deleted, due to a disagreement between record companies.
In 1999 John moved to Kilkenny in Ireland to live with his new partner Teresa but still spent time in his beloved Scotland. John started the new millennium with a new album Glasgow Walker and a tour of Italy and the United Kingdom.
Glasgow Walker marked a departure for John in that it is the first album he has written on a keyboard instead of his trusty guitar. “Phil Collins suggested I should buy this certain type of keyboard (Korg Trinity) which he uses and that’s why it’s taken me three years to make the album. I had to spend eighteen months learning how to get a reasonable sound out of it. I still can’t really play it”. The Mercury Prize Winner Kathryn Williams sings backing vocals on Can’t Live Without and Fields of Play. John’s favourite song on the album is Wildflower, “That’s real heart on the sleeve stuff. You can’t mistake the emotion in that one.” John prefers writing love songs and says “They come easily to me. I don’t know why, it’s not as if I am an abnormally loving person. I’m an incurable romantic and that can be uncomfortable in these troubled and cynical times. But I am proud of it and I am not going to change now.”
So Sweet is about a friend of John’s who finished her relationship with her boyfriend, and said how sweet it was to be free. John asked her if she found it painful, and she replied “Yeah, but sweet.” The funky Mama T is a song dedicated to John’s partner, Theresa, or Mama T Razor, as she becomes known in the song. The Sunday Times wrote, “He’s writing now as well as he did in his 1970’s heyday when albums like Stormbringer!, Bless The Weather and Solid Air established his reputation as one of the most distinctive talents to emerge from the late 1960’s electric-folk scene.” Perhaps John’s best vocal performance on the album comes last with You Don’t Know What Love Is, which John performs with the Guy Barker Quintet. “Mostly I give my singing seven and a half out of ten,” John says modestly. “But about once every three years or so you hit nine and a half. And when it happens you never really know why it happens.”
This song was recorded by John at the request of Anthony Minghella, a long-time fan, for his film The Talented Mr Ripley and also appeared on the soundtrack album to the film. Set in late-1950s Italy, an expert in forgery, Tom Ripley, decides to assume the identity of the son of a millionaire by killing him. Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow starred in the film, which received widespread acclaim.
The New York Session was released on 23 November 2000. A recording of a radio broadcast in 1998, John and the band had been touring the USA promoting The Church With One Bell album. They were very short on sleep and exhausted with all the travelling when they arrived in New York at Radio WFUV. The studio resembled a broom cupboard! Arran Ahmun, Spencer Cozens, Jim Lampi and John were squeezed into the room. John went on air with his back pressed up against the wall in the tiny studio and an amplifier that didn’t want to behave. John was in playful mood and the presenter got more than he bargained for! There has been a plethora of compilations in recent years such as The Hidden Years, The Very Best Of, The Rest of the Best, Classics and Patterns in the Rain, and other similar releases which are of little added value to fans and so these have not been included in this short biography.
John has a knack of always being at the centre of the ‘what’s happening scene’ and in 2000 Don’t Want To Know was used as the theme tune for the comedy television series Human Remains directed by Steve Coogan and starring Julia Davis and Bob Brydon. Such was the success of the series of spoof documentaries on dysfunctional couples that an update is planned for later in 2001 and the BBC filmed one couple, Fonte and Bunde, as they are known, at the Civic Hall, Guildford during John’s recent tour. John introduced The Fonte Bunde Band to an unsuspecting audience describing them as new musicians ” beyond the pale who take musical entertainment to a new high!” A new video film Tell them I’m somebody else… was released on 24 January 2001 and not only contains some stunning live music but also John as we have never seen him before, just chilling out, joking, talking, in the dressing room and behind the scenes rehearsing before the Glasgow Walker Tour.
104 minutes of John Martyn and the best film to date, an essential addition for all John’s fans. John will also feature on a new BBC DVD release to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of The Old Grey Whistle Test. Presenters of the programme were asked to nominate their favourite moments from the series and Richard Williams chose an early performance of May You Never.
On 12 March 2001 John’s collaboration single with dance artist Sister Bliss went straight into the Official UK Singles Chart at number 31. The song, a cover of The Beloved’s Deliver Me, once again demonstrated John’s versatility as a singer. “John’s brilliant to work with and very approachable. He’s not an ego megastar in any sort of way. He’s just a commensurate musician with a beautiful voice” said Sister Bliss, “he did about 50 vocal takes that were all brilliant. He was just singing it to get the vibe of it and even those vocals were brilliant.”
Renowned as a live artist not to be missed John loved playing live, “I was born to play I love to write, that’s me!” A winter tour in early 2001 with his band was followed by a tour In June with old sparring partner Danny Thompson on acoustic bass. The ”Sunshine Boys Tour” saw John and Danny reunite to play some of John’s classic 70s songs and the tour proved incredibly popular with fans with most venues sold out up and down the country. Unfortunately it wasn’t the happiest of tours and there were numerous disagreements between the two.
