51 f A Well Kept Secret
She was cruelly forced out of the limelight and had a promising career stolen from her, but Beverley Martyn has been a survivor. Four decades on, Elizabeth Kinder hears about Beverley’s well overdue comeback.
band John Martyn, Beverley Martyn’s put a new album out. The Phoenix And The Turtle (Les Cousins) is a subtle and beauti- ful record that gently draws you in and grows and grows on you. It’s a solo out- ing with a fine band – as Stormbringer was initially supposed to be. The reason for the hiatus, bar the quiet release No Frills in 1998 featuring just Beverley and her guitar, is down to the fact that the choice of titles for those 1970s releases proved entirely prophetic.
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Her latest album is named after the Shakespeare poem about the death of ideal love. It would be easy to infer that it alludes to Martyn’s relationship with her ex, which began happily she says, with “this beautiful love we had that was real and we were glowing with it. We were beautiful.” But The Phoenix And The Turtle actually flags up her early love of Shakespeare. A talent for acting saw her mentored by the RSC and a shoo-in on the drama course at London’s
Beverley in 1970…
mere 44 years after the release of the celebrated albums Stormbringer and Road To Ruin, which she recorded with her then hus-
Corona Theatre School by the time she was sixteen. In the event she decided against joining the celebrated acting company, hav- ing found her singing voice and an appre- ciative audience amongst the capital’s thriv- ing mid-‘60s folk scene.
It’s a voice that’s acquired a rich patina with passing time. On her early records it’s crystalline, pure and elemental. It’s still elemental. At a recent London gig, I was struck by how the sound seemed to spring straight from her guts, somehow bypass- ing her vocal cords. And now, like Mari- anne Faithfull’s, it has a smoky edge, the voice of someone who’s seen it all and lived to tell the tale.
I went to meet her at her home on the south coast, a sunlight-filled flat with views over the salt-wind battered grand Georgian architecture of the old town. Her face is remarkably unlined. “Someone’s looking after me,” she laughs.
Well, they might be as far as her looks are concerned, her hair – still long – once black is now lighter, her skin is clear and her strong cheekbones stand testimony to her family’s East European Jewish roots. With regards to other aspects of her time on this
…and Beverley today
planet, I suggest that whoever’s looking out for her has mostly kicked back, put their feet up and dozed-off on the job. I mention that her autobiography, Sweet Honesty: The Beverley Martin Story (available via Amazon) might just as accurately have been called John Martyn Stole My Life. She laughs: “Maybe Well Kept Secret, the title of his 1982 album, would be better.”
It would be kinder to her ex and also true. Beverley’s talent was clear to the ‘who’s who’ roster of great musicians who both worked with her and saw her per- form in those heady years when she was setting out, but after choosing to embrace the role of Mrs Martyn, her life was swal- lowed up in a strictly supporting, unac- knowledged role. Joe Boyd, to whose Witchseason company Beverley was signed as a solo artist, remembers that after she started working with John Martyn, they were supposed to go out as a duo, but that after one gig or so, John wanted her to stay at home, “wash his shirts and have his dinner on the table at a certain time”. Her husband stepped up into the spotlight and his well-documented and acclaimed musical and drug-related career.
Photo: Keith Morris
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