f52 S
o she stayed at home, brought up three
children and lost her sense of self, her health and at one point it
seemed her sanity, as her life as Mar- tyn’s punchbag unfolded with alcohol-unleashed beatings unhesi- tatingly delivered. Beverley, frank and disarmingly honest says: “But we have to talk about the good things! We made some great music,
we made some great songs together,” such as Martyn’s Grace And Danger which started life as Grace In Danger – a song she wrote for her mother, who, knowing she was dying, took the line about courage being grace under pressure, from Hemingway’s book, The Old Man And The Sea and transformed it for her daughter. “‘Always have grace in danger.’ It was the last thing she said to me.” She’s not being disingenuous when she adds. “It doesn’t matter that I didn’t get credited or that I didn’t get the money for the songs John and I wrote together. You can’t put a price on that.” One assumes proper financial recompense wouldn’t go amiss but she’s more cross her children have suffered.
She describes composing with Martyn as “Magic. You can’t talk about it too much. You can’t actually dissect it and know how it works. It was two kindred souls bouncing off each other, creating this energy.” As for her work generally she says: “You don’t really know how you do it. It’s like a flash of inspiration will come in your head, there’ll be a tune, or a lyric and you start playing. I wish I knew what it was. It comes from the ether: it’s almost like when you play a riff you’ve got over again you go into a trance-like state, and you’re immersed in the same alpha waves that are created when you meditate.” She repeats: “It’s some kind of Magic.”
Beverley explains she needs to be tuned in to what’s going on
around her. “It has to be something that moves me. Potter’s Blues [second up on The Phoenix And The Turtle] came from watching Dennis give his last interview at the BBC, he was dying of cancer, taking sips of morphine. Everything he said I tried to put in the song.” It is she says, based on the Jelly Roll Morton song Buddy Bolden’s Blues. Dylan, she says, does this a lot, takes a song and turns it into something else.
She holds Dylan, whom she met, in high esteem and he played a part in the illness that descended after she gave up on her ten year marriage, finally fearing for her life, at which point Martyn (Mr) decamped to Scotland to escape paying any maintenance for the three young children. “It was in 1984 after Christmas. I got very depressed and stopped eating. I got so weak I couldn’t get out of bed. Wilko Johnson had come round about November time with the Dylan album Infidels, before it was out. He said “Listen to this”. I put it on. I couldn’t believe it! Dylan sang: ‘How much abuse will you be able to take?’ I thought that’s what I’ve been, abused.” Rationally she knew: “It wasn’t necessarily that he was talking to me. Dylan writes for all kinds of women. ‘What’s a sweetheart like you doing in a dump like this?’ And my house was falling down, it was cold…” Beverley over-identified with so many things he’d written, that every connection and coincidence seemed overpoweringly real and he appeared mystical and pre- scient. She refers to her brief spell of madness as her ‘Dylanitis’.
She’s not now unscathed. The impact of adrenal overload caused by the hormonal reaction to the ‘fright and flight’ nature of her life with Martyn, has left a legacy of diabetes, an under- active thyroid, and the punching she received has left her with kidney trouble.
Yet she’s strong. Very close to Nick Drake, she knew sadly that he
didn’t share her resilience. “I respected him and he respected me.” Describing their relationship as “spiritual” she says: “it was the high- est form of love.” The first song on her new album, Reckless Jane, is
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