41 f The Songsmith
John Smith can sell out London’s Union Chapel, yet won’t be found on many of the folk festival bills in this issue. All very odd, considering his friends, heroes and influences. Colin Irwin has lots to talk about.
H
is name is John Smith but we don’t need to dwell on that, though people usually do. “My name adds to the ambiguity of what I do, which is why I like
it,” he says cryptically.
People go on a lot about John Martyn too, because he plays guitar rather well and when he sings he sounds a bit like John Martyn in that soulful, moody sort of way. People sometimes accuse him of being a Martyn copyist, which he resents greatly. So we won’t go on about that either. Or maybe we will. Later.
We could talk about Graham Norton; a fan apparently who keeps tweeting how much he loves John’s beautifully weighted album Great Lakes. Every time Norton plays a track on his radio show, John’s record label (himself basically) goes into a tailspin re-ordering copies like mad to cope with the unexpected extra spurt of sales.
And we can talk about the startling cover shot of him catching hypothermia waist-deep in the River Cuckmere in Sussex (“I had waders on and it just reached the point where the water was trickling down my long johns when the photographer
said ‘Perfect – stay exactly like that for 20 minutes’.”)
We could talk about his rather distin- guished beard, his Devon childhood (“though I was born in Essex”), his love of Liverpool where he first went to study music and has now lived for the last thir- teen years; and we could talk about his dad, who still owns an original vinyl copy of Nick Drake’s Pink Moon LP in pristine condition, as well as the first 23 Bob Dylan albums. And it might be fun to talk about his days busking on the streets of Devon “butchering” Reef songs.
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