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one that they started to write together. “He was there shouting out lyrics, sitting on the floor with these young teeny-bopper girls from next door asking is the song about their mother Jane. It could be… though I’ve known a lot of Janes in my time. I didn’t touch the song after he died. When I was going mad, I was praying that Nick would be popular.” It was years before she could return to it.
everley began her songwriting career under the expert tutelage of Bert Jansch. They started living together when she was seventeen (she’s pictured on the cover of his It Don’t Bother Me LP). Just two or three years older than her, he was already an extraordinary guitarist. “Bert taught me the blues in the style of him and Davy Graham and we’d write together. He was writing all the time when I was with him. I’d fall in and out of sleep when he’d stay up all night playing.” He had this image, she says, that made you want to look after him. “And so I washed his shirts. But he only had two!”
She’d put out a record with the Levee Breakers, and had solo releases under her belt by the time she met Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. “They’d come to London, ring on the doorbell, him and Artie, and say: ‘can Beverley come out to play?’ or they’d come up and we’d sit around playing, singing three-part harmony, Scarbor- ough Fair or whatever. The guys I shared the flat with couldn’t believe it. The second time I met Paul he said ‘I’ve got a hit record in the States. It’s climbing up the charts.’” It was The Sound Of Silence. Beverley and Simon became an item and she went to per- form as their guest at the Monterey Pop festival when she was nineteen. “Laura Nyro was the guest of the Mamas And The Papas and I was the guest of Paul and Artie. Everyone was so cool,” she remembers. “Neil Young recognised me from the Bert Jansch album, Phil Ochs followed me everywhere… there was no alcohol at the gig, it was just soft drinks, pot smoking and I guess the odd bit of acid but it wasn’t like Altamont; we were all so innocent: David Crosby, Stephen Stills, the Steve Miller Band, The Monkees, Mama Cass, Jimi Hendrix…” she met them all.
When Hendrix set his guitar on fire, Beverley had the strange sensation of seeing her mother’s face in the flames and sensed that back in Coventry her mother had died, a feeling compounded when a white dove settled near her. “I just knew it in my bones. I just felt it. Something happened. I don’t know what it was – or is. That’s the mystery. There is no empty space. There’s always some- thing there.” She had a “very strong bond” with her mum. “She always said I was different, because I used to wig out when I was a child, I’d be staring out of the window daydreaming; that’s what they’d say, that I was a dreamer, that’s why the line in Aunty Avia- tor, but I wasn’t just staring out the window, I was tuning in.”
If this sounds somewhat hippie, Beverley avidly explores the scientific explanations that underpin human experience and sweetly attempts to simplify string theory for me whilst I’m won- dering: does she regret marrying John?
“I don’t regret that I have two beautiful children with John that are now adults. They are the most important things in my life. My three children [Martyn was step father to her eldest], that’s the most great work I did.”
These days those children are independent adults and so now Beverley Martyn can step right back onto centre stage.
The Phoenix And The Turtle:
www.lescousins.co.uk www.beverleymartyn.com 1965, in the background of Bert Jansch F
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