NOTHING STUNNINGLY new from John Martyn ‘other day; but then he’s an artist whose folk-jazz-ballad=electronic fusions have run off the mainstream at a timeless tangent.
Although a new album is projected for next spring it was the one-year-old ‘One World’ and a few of Its predecessor’s that provided the basis for the gig for obviously hardcore fans. It would be nice (if Impossible) commercially to see him packing the Rainbow, but a great deal better emotionally to find him packing the LSE Old Theatre. John Martyn, plays solo onstage, self and guitar surrounded by a barricade of knobs and pedals, heartbeat loops and echoplex spanning out many of his tidily mysterious songs, sung in daintily lugubrious fashion, He’s also but natch a very good blueish acoustic guitarist – one of the few survivors of the Great British Blues tradition, would you but know it hence ‘One World’ (that song) sliding with almost religious grace like a slowed down film of an international gymnastic work and the almost extrovert and funky ‘ZertainZurprtse’. Inevitably, with so much gadgetry around there has to be quite a bit of order and discipline in the set. But at the same time, John Marlyn keeps it real.
Susan Kluth
Record Mirror
25 November 1978
