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cious. You might be drinking in the hotel and things might get a bit… strange… but next day he’d be in my dressing room saying how much he enjoyed my set and how pleased he was to have me on the tour. He was very sweet. He’d send me to the bar with a roll of £50 notes and say ‘have what you want and keep the change’ so you’d have to discreetly put the change back in his pocket.
“I did four UK tours with him and that’s how I learned stage- craft in front of a couple of thousand people a night. I was playing music that wasn’t very accessible lyrically or melodically so for me his audiences were perfect and enabled me to become a self- employed professional musician, learning as I went.
“We played together in hotel lobbies and he borrowed my guitar sometimes when he broke a string. I had a Taylor guitar then and he played it at the Roundhouse. I sat there watching John Martyn play my guitar! I’ve never kept ticket stubs or any- thing like that but I kept the strings he played that night – it’s the only geeky thing I’ve ever done. I owe him a heck of a lot.”
sissippi; and we could talk about the dodgy rite of passage gigs on the scary openmic circuit; and the inappropriate support slots, including one infamous gig when he left the stage mid-set to have a fight with rowdy fans of some long-forgotten indie band who took a loud dislike to him. (“I’m not proud of that, I abhor violence – I’d handle it very differently now.”)
W
And maybe we could talk about the songwriting process which he finds so tough. “I can play guitar all day and have a great time but as soon as I pick up a pen it dries up. I must discipline myself, otherwise I just end up playing scales and looking on eBay for old guitars.”
We might even ask him about the different styles his music embraces, which always gets people in a quandary about which box to put him in – folk, blues, Americana or none of the above – but he simply doesn’t think music should ever be lassoed into cor- ners. And we could talk about the album of traditional songs he’s currently too nervous to make. “I regularly play Master Kilby and Lord Franklin in my set and I’d like to do an album of real folk songs but when I hear Paul Brady singing Arthur McBride or any- thing from Penguin Eggs it’s quite intimidating and there’s a real pressure not to screw up.”
What we won’t talk about is the future because he’s not really a planning ahead sort of person.
“When I sold out the Union Chapel I thought ‘now I can retire happy’. I just want to continue playing as many gigs as I can. I’ll never have a mansion full of prostitutes and cocaine but I might get to go on another tour… and frankly that’s what I’d rather have.”
But we won’t talk about that…
johnsmithjohnsmith.com
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e could talk about his subsequent tours with Lisa Hannigan and his growing popularity in Canada and the States, where he decamped to record his second album Map Or Direction out of the back of a car driving through Texas, Louisiana and Mis-
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