Music and Art

John Martyn - John Peel's Sunday Show, Paris Theatre, London, England, May 9, 1971

It's John Martyn! Hi, John. Here, we've got an all-too-brief performance for the legendary John Peel. Just four songs, but every moment is absolutely wonderful. Martyn starts off in fairly straightforward acoustic mode with the gentle "Tree Green" and an embryonic rendition of "Bless The Weather." But by the end, John is looking towards his more sonically adventurous work, with various effects beautifully enhancing his guitar work.

"The Echoplex gave an elasticity to his guitar, set up a rippling pond of ricocheting waves into which Martyn would chop new pulses, as if tossing pebbles into a mazy mirror. 'I just like the idea of making a machine human in that way,' he said, 'and I like impressing the humanness of yourself onto a machine rather the other way around.'" — Electric Eden, by Rob Young