Hey-hey Mama: 50 years of proper Rock and Roll

I don’t know what your memory of 1971 is, but mine’s pretty hazy, mostly because I was 4. But, as David Hepworth’s terrific tome 1971: Never A Dull Moment argued, it was a pivotal year in music - even more so than my own birth year, 1967 (for music, you understand) due to its profound confluence of significant album releases. 

1971 was the year that saw the long playing record, in old money, find its place as one of the major artistic mediums, alongside books and cinema. There had been albums before, of course, and ground-breaking ones, too, like Pet Sounds or Sgt. Pepper, that had made ‘album artist’ a thing in its own right. But 1971 generated an  unprecedented slew of milestone releases, including David Bowie’s Hunky Dory, The Who’s Who’s Next, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, Carole King’s Tapestry, Elton John’s Madman Across The Water and at least 20 more that played their part in defining not just the year but the decade itself (for a more comprehensive list and examination of Hepworth’s book, here’s my post from when it was published).

50 years on, one of those albums stands out, arguably more than any of the others: Led Zeppelin’s fourth album. Colloquially known as ‘Led Zeppelin IV’, the officially untitled record could - should, even - be described as a touchpoint for classic rock as a genre. A bold claim, I know, but within its eight distinct tracks, over a run time of 42 minutes and 34 seconds, it remains a remarkable piece of work by a band that, with it, truly hit their stride. Yes, it contains Stairway To Heaven, a song worthy of discussion all on its own, but within its octet of tracks lies a breadth of hard rock (Black Dog, Rock And Roll), ballsy stompers (Misty Mountain Hop) and those rooted in traditional blues (When The Levee Breaks), mystic, 12-string folk (The Battle Of Evermore, Going To California) and pastoral country references. It’s legacy extends well into its 50-year history, too, with John Bonham’s distinct drums - captured by virtue of the cold, damp stairwell of the Hampshire country house they recorded it in (latterly sampled and used by seemingly everyone, including the Beastie Boys and Beyoncé. 

“It’s like there was a magical current running through that place [Headley Grange] and that record,” guitarist Jimmy Page recently told Mojo’s Mark Blake. Like it was meant to be. Perhaps this comes somewhat from Page’s singular vision. The former teenage guitar prodigy from Epsom, the third of that remarkable trio of Surrey sons to join The Yardbirds (after Eric Clapton had handed the six string reins to Jeff Beck, who in turn handed them to his friend Page) had largely been the architect of Led Zeppelin, the band renamed from The New Yardbirds in 1968. 

Their first three albums had built their profile and credibility on both sides of the Atlantic, riding the post-Beatles wave for British bands with a harder rock tendency in parallel to the early progressive bands that were coming through at the turn of the decade. Notably, Zeppelin built their reputation through, largely, word of mouth and electrifying live performances at events like the Bath Festival Of Blues And Progressive Music and relentless touing in America, playing legendary venues like Bill Graham’s Fillmore East in New York and its counterpart Fillmore West in San Francisco. 

Notably, too, they had deliberately shied away from releasing singles, the primary promotional vehicle of the pop era. This defiance of convention would remain with Led Zeppelin to the band’s abrupt end in 1980, brought about by Bonham’s untimely death. But in Zeppelin’s fourth album, this belligerence found a particular outlet, led by Page’s own wariness of the way the music industry dictated things, leading to the record being as intentionally enigmatic as the band’s reputational rise had been unconventional. 

For a start, the album would go untitled, a notion obliquely referred to in This Is Spinal Tap by the band’s insistence on releasing Smell The Glove with an all-black sleeve and no lettering. While that was a gimmick, Page had another intention: “I didn’t want anyone, including Rolling Stone, making a judgement before they heard the music,” he told Mojo. “I wanted to prove our music wasn’t just selling because of our name.” 37 million album sales may have proven his instincts to be correct, but that wasn’t how Ahmet Ertegun, the legendary boss of Atlantic Records saw it, telling the band it would be “professional suicide” to not even have the band’s name on the cover. “We weren’t backing down,” Page recalls.

So, for a band that had been feted on both sides of the Atlantic as the Second Coming, Led Zeppelin IV arrived with anonymity, not just lacking cover text, but also photographs of the band anywhere in the album artwork. Instead, the front cover featured a 19th-century agricultural oil painting singer Robert Plant came across in a Reading antiques shop, while the rear featured a drab Birmingham tower block, an attempt to highlight themes of urban and rural living. In place of band pictures, Plant, Page, Bonham or bassist/multi-instrumentalist John Paul Jones. Instead, Page came up with the idea of the quartet being represented by four rune-like symbols. “That whole cover was a Jimmy and Robert production,” Jones has said, somewhat sniffily. “I didn’t quite get it myself.”

Page’s own self-designed symbol, ‘ZoSo’, has itself been a source of much debate, with some pointing to the guitarist’s apparent interest in the work of occultist Aleister Crowley as being its inspiration. Collectively, however, the entire approach of IV’s graphic design is probably just one of those rock band gimmicks which, in 1971, meant that anything went and record company marketeers couldn’t say no. Conventions of album design weren’t broken as few had yet been established. “It’s not something to be questioned or dissected,” Page said of the artwork in his interview with Mojo. “Like the album, it was something that was just meant to be. You listened and made up the pictures in your own mind.”

Which brings me back to Stairway To Heaven, a song commanding a cultural mythology all of its own. As Bohemian Rhapsody is for Queen, Led Zeppelin were so much more than this one song, but Stairway will always be their opus, regarded for it’s sheer expanse and complete defiance of pop tradition. Stairway will also never be regarded as a pop song, but that’s what makes it’s lasting endurance even more extraordinary. It was also, famously, never released anywhere as a single, and yet it has received close to three million plays on American rock radio, according to official figures (it was the most requested song on FM radio stations in the US in the 1970s. By a more contemporary measure, it has been streamed more than 600 million times on Spotify. 

To some extent, too, Stairway is the quintessential early ’70s rock album track, and one that - whisper it - comes closer to prog rock than blues-rooted heavy rock. Broken into three sections over its eight minutes, Stairway commences  with the pastoral, arpeggiated A-minor chord so beloved of guitar shop wannabes everywhere (remember the “No Stairway To Heaven” sign from Wayne’s World?), rolling into a folkier groove before rocking out in the final third, Page committing an excoriating solo to it with his vintage Telecaster (a Yardbirds gift from Beck). While this structure clearly creates the attention, its lyrics - penned by Plant while, apparently in a bad mood - have been the subject of intense debate. “Depending on what day it is,” Plant once said, “I still interpret the song a different way - and I wrote the lyrics.” The general consensus is that the “lady who's sure all that glitters is gold” is about a woman who accumulates money, only to find out - badly - that life is meaningless and she wouldn’t get into heaven. Beyond that, Stairway is no more profound than the product of a band at the peak of their chutzpah indulging in the early ’70s penchant for album tracks that got a tad widdly-widdly. 

Jimmy Page has suggested that when Zeppelin started working on the song in October 1970 it was envisaged as being as long as 15 minutes (still quite brief compared with some examples of the prog genre, such as the 23-minute Supper’s Ready by Genesis), with a construct built on a mystical story that leads to a romping climax. Rumours about hidden satanic messages, contained in reverse-recorded passages, have led to some with too much time on their hands to suggest that Stairway was the Devil’s work. Page’s flirtations with the work of Crowley haven’t helped, either (he did, to be fair, buy Crowley’s house near Loch Ness, which only added to the association). Plant has wisely dismissed the suggestions in pragmatic terms. “There are a lot of people who are making money [out of these suggestions],” he has said. “If that's the way they need to do it, then do it without my lyrics. I cherish them far too much.”

While, though, there is some sense of Stairway being something of a millstone for the surviving members of the band, its place is rock music history hasn’t been lost on them, least of all Page: “I thought Stairway crystallised the essence of the band,” he told Rolling Stone in 1975. “It had everything there and showed the band at its best - as a band, as a unit.” Page called it a milestone for the band, and remains proud that it was never released as a single, a point that only adds to its enigma and its lasting significance. That, though, hasn’t indemnified Stairway from critics (even Plant once said in an interview with Q magazine: “If you absolutely hated Stairway To Heaven, no one can blame you for that because it was so pompous” (he has also branded it a “wedding song”). 

Its appearance on Led Zeppelin IV drew no shortage of accusations of being pretentious and bloated. For a song so eulogised now, it wasn’t always so loved by the music press, but then again, they were never the most receptive audience to anything deemed progressive in the early ’70s (although, in my experience, even the most pro-punk/anti-prog journalists all had plenty of art rock in their record collections…).

With John Bonham’s death in 1980 Led Zeppelin came to an abrupt halt. Plant, Page and Jones were persuaded to play at Live Aid five years later, using both Chic drummer Tony Thompson and Plant’s friend Phil Collins on drums (Collins and Page have since traded barbs, with the latter saying the drummer was unrehearsed, and Collins suggesting the guitarist was somewhat out of it on the day. Stairway To Heaven closed the 30-minute set, which also included Rock And Roll and Whole Lotta Love. The song was performed again in 1988 at the Atlantic Records 40th anniversary concert, with Jason Bonham playing drums. The performance wasn’t great, with Plant even managing to forget some of his own lyrics. A better rendition appeared - for the last time - in 2007 when Plant, Page, Jones and Bonham Jr agreed to play at the Ahmet Ertegun tribute at London’s O2 Arena, the final time Led Zeppelin as a band performed on stage. Stairway was a part of Heart’s tribute set in 2012 at the Kennedy Center Honor show, attended by Barack Obama and intended to take a hat off to artists who’d made an important contribution to American culture (the only other British recipients have ever been Cary Grant, Sean Connery and Paul McCartney).

When it was released on Monday, 8 November, 1971 Led Zeppelin IV went to Number 1 in the UK, only narrowly missing out on the top spot in the US. It is still regarded as one of the greatest albums of the classic rock era, and you can take from it what you want in terms of its legacy. It wasn’t Zeppelin’s first and it wasn’t their last, and certainly wasn’t the only memorable entry in 1971’s lengthy parade of classics. But with so much of the music produced that year, it was the work of a group of young men for whom anything went, creatively (though as numerous biographies have revealed, the same could be said of Zeppelin’s touring antics). Unlike today’s somewhat over-curated, packaged pop, it comes from a time when bands had licence to do what they liked, and weren’t dictated to by popular taste or the need to appeal to radio airplay algorithms. Led Zeppelin IV can also be broken down into the individual DNA of the four proponents - the very people depicted by the inner sleeve’s runes - in so far as it draws, in different degrees, from all the different musical interests Plant, Page, Jones and Bonham had at the time - blues, rock, folk, heavy rock and more. “I think that was the beauty of the players, of all of us, that maybe the style went over here, and then over there, and we could cut it wherever,” Plant told Mojo. “But we were in a really fluid creative place.” 

That manifests itself in the album’s eight tracks: in Black Dog’s riff; Rock And Roll’s nod to the musical revolution of the 1950s that set everything in train; The Battle Of Evermore hippy-dippyness (enhanced by Sandy Denny’s co-vocals); Stairway To Heaven’s sheer audacity; the bonkers groove of Misty Mountain Hop, Four Sticks’ rhythmic veracity; the wistful beauty of Going To California; and those signature, pounding drums of When The Levee Breaks, which consciously made the genetic link between original Delta Blues and hard rock. 50 years on, what it lacks in the innovations of more revered albums like Sgt. Pepper before it, or The Dark Side Of The Moon which followed two years later, over 42 minutes it remains an utterly compelling album. 

These days albums seem designed to be dipped in and out of, with tracks extracted for streaming playlists rather than complete, start-to-finish playback. Led Zeppelin IV, over its eight tracks, defies that. It’s also, by the way, much, much more than that one song that closes Side 1.

I hear that voice again

There was hubbub recently, mostly amongst those who care about such things, when a 38-minute film of Genesis playing Le Bataclan in Paris in 1973 surfaced online. Now, it should be stated for the defence that this clip wasn’t of any great cultural significance: this wasn’t a ten-year-old Hendrix writing All Along The Watchtower on a toy guitar (Dylan wrote it, in any case), or hitherto unseen footage of The Beatles in some Hamburg bierkeller. No, this was Genesis, long before their MTV tenure, with then-lead singer Peter Gabriel giving it the full Brian Pern. For those less familiar with this era of the band, and indeed Gabriel (before he left in 1975, promising to “Do a Ferry, or a Bowie, or a Furry Boa and hang myself with it”) the restored, 4K-quality footage featured the band in proto-prog mode, performing grandiose stage epics such as The Musical Box,​ Supper's Ready and pre-punk stomper The Knife, with Gabriel dressed in a variety of outfits (such as a fox’s head and his wife’s red dress) to act out the songs, as was his want in those days, while Messrs. Banks, Collins, Hackett and Rutherford earnestly played around him. 

It’s easy to see, now, how lampoonable it all was (kudos to Simon Day for Pern, and to Gabriel himself for accepting the pisstake in very good humour), but like most of these time capsules that get unearthed from time to time, it served as a reminder of how, in the early 70s, rock music was still relatively new, and anything went. Gabriel’s final turn with Genesis was to take the concept album The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway out on tour in 1975, with the singer’s costumes and stage presence taking even more prominence, often to the mild resentment of the other band members. Two years later (and after the near tragedy of his first wife, Jill, almost dying in childbirth), Gabriel launched a solo career with the first of four albums, simply titled Peter Gabriel (a typically obtuse Gabrielism, which frustrated his American record company, Geffen). With the fantasy stories and extended keyboard noodling of the Genesis albums now behind him, Peter Gabriel (rebranded ‘Car’ by his US peeps) was a melange of themes and styles, from the Springsteen-esque rocker Modern Love to the cod-barbershop plaintive Excuse Me, the now perennial favourite Solsbury Hill (an autobiographic reflection on his ‘release’ from the rock band hamster wheel) and the melodramatic Here Comes The Flood, a song Gabriel also recorded as a haunting, stripped down affair, along with a version in German.

With each successive solo album - 1978’s Peter Gabriel (‘Scratch’), 1980’s Peter Gabriel (‘Melt’) and 1982’s Peter Gabriel (‘Security’) - the somewhat dilettante Gabriel took notable twists and turns of artistic style, delivering a more conventional rock album with his second release, experimenting with cymbal-free drums on the third (in the process “inventing” Phil Collins, who played on the album, with producers Steve Lillywhite and Hugh Padgham developing that famous ‘gated reverb’ drum sound), as well as collaborated with Kate Bush and Paul Weller, before throwing away the rock rule book with his fourth, with its extensive use of the Fairlight sampling keyboard, obscure rhythms and a decidedly un-Western musical fabric.

By the time So, Gabriel’s fifth solo album appeared, he’d established a reputation for artistically interesting, if not particularly commercially impactful, records. Between ‘PG4’ and So he’d also recorded the soundtrack to Alan Parker’s Birdy, which effectively and hauntingly remade existing songs to considerable effect (the jungle drums of Rhythm Of The Heat was a common presence underneath early-80s documentaries). While collaborating on Birdy with producer Daniel Lanois, he commenced work on his next solo album-proper. The final track recorded become the first song to be heard from the album, and it blew everyone away, in every dimension. Sledgehammer was an unashamed tribute to the soul music that Gabriel was obsessed with as a 60s schoolboy (he still considers Otis Redding at Brixton’s RamJam club the best gig he’s ever seen), and with its Stax-style brass, ever-so slightly saucy lyrics, and Nick Park’s pre-Wallace & Gromit plasticine video, it turned Gabriel into a bona fide pop star. Ironically, his former band’s Invisible Touch was released at the same time, with Gabriel and Genesis vying for chart positions throughout the world.

Released on 19 May, 1986, So was, still, quintessential Gabriel. Sledgehammer plus the gospel-inspired Don’t Give Up duet with Kate Bush, the US hit In Your Eyes and the satirical Big Time, all may have introduced Gabriel to singles buyers too young to have remembered Solsbury Hill, let alone The Return Of The Giant Hogweed, but the album was no sell-out. The brooding opener Red Rain launched the audience into Gabriel’s environmental concerns, while Don’t Give Up - for all of its goo-goo romanticism (especially that swoonsome video featuring Gabriel and Bush) and its 1930s dustbowl symbolism - was actually a direct swipe at Thatcherism. We Do What We’re Told (Milgrim’s 37) was a dark essay on the obedience experiments carried out by psychologist Stanley Milgram; the offbeat Mercy Street was inspired by the poetry of Anne Sexton; while the hypnotic This Is The Picture matched Gabriel in another duet, this time with avant-garde multimediaist Laurie Anderson. 

Picture: 20th Century Fox

Fuelled by the success of its singles, especially Sledgehammer and, in the US, In Your Eyes (used brilliantly in Cameron Crowe’s directorial debut, Say Anything…, in a scene in which John Cusack appears, Romeo-like, before his love interest, blasting out the song from his boombox), So went to No.1 in a number of countries and remained on the US chart for almost two years solidly. Sledgehammer itself became a No.1 single on the Billboard Hot 100, ironically, knocking Genesis and Invisible Touch off the top. “There is always wisdom from hindsight,” Gabriel recently reflected. “And because So was my most successful record, I think that a lot of people, particularly in America, think that it was designed to be that. From the other end of it, you never really know which records are going to do well. You know that some things are going to be so obscure and difficult for a mainstream audience that they’re no-hopers but generally, with what I do, it’s hard to predict which albums are going to do well.”

Gabriel says that, while he sort of knew instinctively which of So’s tracks might do well on radio, he was more excited by how the musicians produced what remains, 35 years later, a truly unique-sounding hit record, for that time or any other. Much of that credit goes to Lanois, then one of the hottest producers on the block, having worked with Brian Eno and on U2’s The Unforgettable Fire. “One of the things I learned with [Lanois] is a total respect for the magic of the moment. When you have some spine-tingling event musically, you’ve got to capture it,” says Gabriel, recalling his musical soulmate, Eno’s work with Talking Heads in which raw energy took effort to extract. “I wanted his emotions to come to the forefront [with So],” Lanois himself has said. “To wear no mask and no veil. To have no mirrored contact lenses, no trickery. Just take everything off and let the songs be heard. A nice sequel into the next chapter for Peter Gabriel. I think these songs are more revealing, they are more naked, they are taking risks, and listeners feel that when a man takes a risk.”

It has become something of a cliche to pick up on Gabriel’s long-standing embrace of world music, even the fact that he somewhat invented the term. His Real World label continues to be one of the strongest outlets for the form, and - after a near-bankrupting experience that required a Genesis reunion to bail it out - Gabriel’s WOMAD festival has become an annual fixture for promoting musical diversity. With a roster of musicians from every continent and ethnicity, Gabriel’s Real World label continues to be a positive outlet for music that challenges the notion that it should be both Western and sung in English, a concept Gabriel has championed since Biko on his third album and, more significantly, In Your Eyes, which features Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour. 

“In Your Eyes was the first thing that I’d recorded, I think, with Youssou and it was very important for that reason,” says Gabriel. “It was around the time I was going to Africa and really getting inspired by a lot of the music I was hearing there, particularly rhythmically and vocally. I’ve described Youssou’s voice as ‘liquid gold’ and I think when he comes in singing on that track it’s just a fantastic moment. We’ve since gone on to do a lot of other things, but that was one of the most exciting.” As an aside, In Your Eyes played a tiny part in music technology’s evolution: on So’s original vinyl release, the sonic limitations of the format meant that, due to Tony Levin’s bass, the track had to be listed earlier on the album (something to do with the width of grooves, so I’m told). For So’s CD release, the uplifting song closes it out.

35 years on, So retains a freshness that most of its mid-80s contemporaries would struggle to provide. Many compilations from that time and re-runs of Top Of The Pops expose how production techniques were still transitioning from analogue to digital, with associated aural limitations. With So, Gabriel produced something that spanned so many influences while still sounding unlike anything else. It’s worth mentioning here the record Gabriel released ‘immediately’ afterwards (in 1989, which is quite “immediate” for Gabriel): Passion, his stunning soundtrack for Martin Scorcese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, was another career high point, but for very different reasons, drawing inspirations, musicians and instrumentation from a multitude of cultures, including the Middle East. On balance it remains, perhaps, my favourite Gabriel album - not for its hit songs (there aren’t any) but for the incredible landscapes it paints, inspired by the Holy Land. I played it endlessly a few years ago while driving in that very part of the world, and it was incredibly evocative, even in the very place it was inspired by. 

Steven Wilson

No surprise, then, that Steven Wilson - a musician very much in the Gabriel tradition of never standing still, musically or thematically - is a committed fan of So, comparing it to Kate Bush’s Hounds Of Love, which had come out the previous September: “With this album Gabriel managed to make his sound more accessible, giving him a much broader mainstream appeal.” That is normally quite a tricky feat, especially for an artist hitherto known for his broad experimentation with conventional rock as well as non-Western traditions. But, says Steven, it was without compromise. “This was achieved without sacrificing any of his personality and ambition, or his will to experiment and push the envelope. So has pop immediacy but also artistic depth that bears repeated listening. It’s an extremely difficult trick to pull off.”

So's shift in form for Gabriel was even captured in the record’s graphic design, overseen by Peter Saville, who’d been responsible for artwork at Factory Records, New Order and Joy Division to his credits. To begin with, he wasn’t a fan: “I didn’t actively dislike him,” Saville revealed to the Real World Notes blog of Gabriel’s record label. “He was just not somebody I knew that much about.” Saville, who was brought on board when the album had the working title ‘Good’, was won over to working with the singer after a first meeting at his house near Bath. As Saville and his creative partner Brett Wickens drove back up to London, they listened to a cassette copy of the album for the first time. 

“The first track was Red Rain,” reveals Saville. “If you’re in a sensitive mood and you’ve just seen a car crash [as they had witnessed while approaching the M4] and you hear Red Rain for the first time… it’s quite like, ‘Woooaaah!’. There was a real passion in Peter’s voice and it was very listenable. I didn’t mind it. As we approached the motorway Sledgehammer came on. We stopped the fucking car on the slip road! You know when you’re hearing something important. It was like hearing Blue Monday for the first time. Brett and I just looked at each other and then looked at the cassette player and almost simultaneously we said, ‘That’s a number one single!’ It was fucking brilliant. By the time Don’t Give Up came on I cried a little bit. I hadn’t got far away enough from Bath and that just completely did me in, actually.”

Gabriel’s first four solo albums had all featured covers that had partly obscured his face, rendering the singer somewhat oblique. Even having released singles like Shock The Monkey and Games Without Frontiers in the video age, it would have been hard, in 1986, for mainstream pop fans to identify him. So changed all that, and its black and white cover image played a massive role in that. “Gail Coulson [Gabriel’s manager] had briefed me privately that Peter had to come out of himself for this record,” Saville recalled. “She knew that he had made an emotional album and that he’d written songs and made music which crossed over to other people who were not Peter Gabriel fans. We had to give a face to that. Of course Peter’s natural inclination was towards shyness and not showing himself. But that wasn’t going to do the job because this was 1986, you know.” With two weeks to deliver So’s cover, Saville brought in photographer Trevor Key, who’d produced the art for New Order’s Low Life, another band “disinterested in presenting their own identity” he says. The other graphic standout was the album’s name, presented simply over the singer’s name. It remains to this day one of the most basic but impactful album covers of all time. More importantly, it propelled Gabriel into another strata of fame.

A question remains, however, as to So’s place in the Gabriel canon: without doubt, it transformed him from legacy prog rock star into a genuine pop act, perhaps in a more artistically acceptable manner than his former bandmates in Genesis had done as they consciously moved into the pop-rock realm as a three-piece. But, the original albums that followed So took their time: Us came out in 1992, Up a full ten years after that. The former leant heavily on the break-up of Gabriel’s first marriage, and while it didn’t take the heart-on-sleeve approach his mucker Phil Collins had famously taken with his ‘divorce album’, Face Value, beneath the deep and introspective lines of Digging In The Dirt lay an album forced into the open through the cauterising of emotional wounds rather than So’s at times carefree approach. Up, Gabriel’s last album of original songs, had an even longer gestation, having been conceived originally in 1985. It remains a good addition to the library, with all the sonic layers and ambitious conceptual excursions Gabriel has always been known for, but it, and its predecessor, lacked the immediacy that So had through its hit singles.

It’s been a long time, then, since we heard anything really new from Peter Gabriel. His last new album-proper was ten years ago - the orchestral retreads of New Blood in 2011, preceded by the covers album Scratch My Back in 2010. There has long been talk of an album in the works, but as with everything Gabriel does, he picks and chooses what he devotes his energies to, with music taking a back seat (he owns the record company, so no pressure there). He’s not invisible, he’s not a recluse, and he’s certainly not a one-hit wonder. But with 35 years separating today’s anniversary and So first being released, it’s tempting to look at it through the prism of pop stardom. 

Gabriel has never sat easily with fame. His somewhat diffident personality fits well with his status as an arch auteur, owning a fine body of work but happy to tinker at the edges while being distracted by his myriad worthy causes, such as his long-standing commitment to human rights and The Elders group he co-founded with Nelson Mandela and Richard Branson. At 71, it’s unlikely that Gabriel will grace the charts with another Sledgehammer, but it would be nice if he produced another album with the accessibility of So that Steven Wilson talks of - but without selling out on the musical principles he’s held dear since those very early days with Genesis. 

I can feel it coming in the air tonight - Phil Collins is cool

Picture: YouTube

"No he's not!". "He never will be!". I can hear the tea being spat out from here. Phil Collins is, was and can never be cool. Everyone knows that. The problem is, no one really knows why, or bothers to find out why he shouldn't be. But let's come to that later, because the big news this week, along with the usual apocalyptic yada-yada about COVID-19, Britain being hotter than Hades and the worst recession in human history, is that Phil Collins has returned to the charts thanks to a viral video of 22-year-old American twins Tim and Fred Williams listening to his debut solo single, In The Air Tonight, for the first time.

ICYMI, the twins host a YouTube show, Twins React, in which they review videos of songs they've never heard before. Their reactions are the show's chief selling point but it has evolved into something more cultish, as the brothers from Gary, Indiana (the city on the shores of Lake Michigan where pop's Jackson family came from) explore a wider world of music. At first they focused on rap, with which they were more familiar, but then they were turned on to Frank Sinatra's I've Got You Under My Skin (Tim had, apparently, never even heard of Sinatra) and things like Radiohead's Creep. A review of Dolly Parton's Jolene received two million views, prompting a Twitter response from La Parton herself: "No point in begging. Jolene already stole these two."

My original copy of In The Air Tonight - bought from MJM Records in New Malden in January 1981

So, back to the twins' encounter with Collins' solo debut: pressing play, they are at first mildly intrigued by the opening hiss of a Roland CR-78 drum machine's hi-hat. It was this noise that arrested my interest at the beginning of January 1981 when, browsing in my local record shop, looking for something to spend my Christmas money on, I, too, heard In The Air Tonight for the first time. I was pulled in by those first couple of bars of synthetic beats followed by the three-chord minor key motif from a Prophet-5 synth. Then comes the haunting, echoey vocal: "I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh Lord". In their YouTube review, the Williams twins start nodding and trading comments about the song's overall vibe as it begins, unsure as to whether they're listening to rock music or, due to the drum machine, early hip hop. Halfway through, Collins sings: "Well, the hurt doesn't show, but the pain still grows - it's no stranger to you and me" followed by the thunderous break of live tom-toms struck in quick succession - "duh-DUFF-duh-DUFF-dah-DUFF-DUFF-DUFF-DUFF-DUFF-DUFF!". "I have never seen nobody drop a beat three minutes into the song!" Fred exclaims. “That was cold, that was cold how he did that," his brother adds. "I ain’t gonna lie, Phil, you got me on that". As of Tuesday this week, the twins' video had been viewed more than four million times. Their subscriber base has also gone from 40,000 in early July to 400,000 today. Moreover, their review of In The Air Tonight has sent the song back into the charts. At the beginning of this week it sat at No.3 on the iTunes chart and was the fourth biggest selling song in the US in the week ending last Saturday.

The Williams' fêting of Collins might sound kitsch, like Glastonbury somewhat patronising a Barry Manilow or Lionel Richie with the 'legend' slot, but the now-69-year-old has form in this area: hip-hop artists have long been fans, even putting together a tribute album in 2001, Urban Renewal, that featured the likes of Ol' Dirty Bastard, Dane Bowers, Lil' Kim, Kelis, Pharrell and Montell Jordan covering some of Collins’ biggest hits. They weren’t, though, being ironic.

Here’s where we get into the complicated DNA of Phil Collins' appeal. Up until In The Air Tonight, and its accompanying album, Face Value, Collins had been the drummer in Genesis who, when Peter Gabriel moved on, took over as lead singer. But in the 11 years between joining Genesis, fifty years ago this month, and the recording of his solo debut in 1980, he’d built a deserved reputation as a truly gifted drummer, something his critics frequently forget or ignore. Although Genesis were often derided, particularly by the music press during the punk era (which they survived) for being proto-prog, Collins' own musical sensibilities were often glossed over, despite coming from a musical background that included The Beatles, Motown, Stax and R’n’B, and branching into jazz fusion with the noodle-mungous Brand X and hanging out with members of Weather Report. Collins may never have been considered hip, but he was a highly respected musician, respected across the musical spectrum for his truly inventive, melodic drumming in particular. A case in point is Turn It On Again, the Genesis chart hit. Drum nerds might note that it is in 13/8 time. Who knew?

In The Air Tonight was either a turning point, or even the turning point. Some argue that Collins never bettered it, but that would be unfair. It does, though, stand out in his solo career, a point not lost by the fact that it was the first song on the first of eight studio albums, several of which generated enormous chart hits on both sides of the Atlantic and turned Collins into a global superstar. In The Air Tonight was a defining statement for an artist who'd been, until Genesis had its first chart hit three years before, relatively unknown. It was also unique as a pop song; like Ultravox's Vienna (released five days later), Collins' single was relatively long at over five minutes. Both songs were also divided by tempo changes more than halfway through. Both, too, had a similarly dystopian feel. It was, though, the album that ITAT appeared on that set in train one of the most dominant musical careers of the 1980s and early 1990s. Because, after the opening track, with its added bombast halfway through, enhanced by the so-called "gated reverb" Collins had accidentally invented with producers Steve Lillywhite and Hugh Padgham while working on Peter Gabriel's third album, the album Face Value took an eclectic and meandering path through Collins' personal style palette. Track 2, It Must Be Love, was the kind of saccharine-sweet love song that Collins haters deflected the most. Track 3, a cover of the Collins-penned Genesis song Behind The Lines featured the Phenix Horns, the Earth, Wind & Fire brass section.

Hardcore Genesis fans, who’d barely adjusted to four-minute love songs replacing 22-minute epics, were horrified (worse came with the next Genesis album, 1981’s Abacab, which featured the Horns again). There was a plaintive dustbowl song, The Roof Is Leaking, and more brass-infused R&B in I Missed Again and Thunder And Lightning, and the album closed with a brave, technically brilliant cover of The Beatles' Tomorrow Never Knows, with a production that pointed much of Collins' later studio work back to what George Martin had pioneered with the Fabs to begin with. The trouble was, the albums that followed could be accused of repeating the pattern. Hello, I Must Be Going opened with a slowed down drum pattern reminiscent of In The Air Tonight's drum fill, while also providing a substantial hit with Collins' cheeky cover of You Can't Hurry Love. No Jacket Required included the clearly Prince-influenced Sussudio, and was, arguably, the album with the most hits and the biggest establishment of Collins as one of the 80s' biggest pop stars. But Seriously brought with it a similar array of hits and big productions, including I Wish It Would Rain Down with new chum Eric Clapton, Something Happened On The Way To Heaven and That's Just The Way It Is, though it was Another Day In Paradise that would endure, negatively, as another stick to beat Collins with, being a song sung by a multi-millionaire rock star about homelessness.

Collins' solo career started to spill over into his Genesis work, as the band moved further away from the prog epics about Giant Hogweed, and into becoming MTV darlings with their ‘wacky’ videos for songs like Illegal Alien and Invisible Touch. Collins took the blame for all this, without anyone bothering to know that it was as much the desired direction of Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks to go into a more pop direction. Collectively, though, Collins became an overwhelming fixture of the era. In some ways, he was the '80s. In The Air Tonight had featured heavily in the pilot of Miami Vice, in a scene featuring Crockett and Tubbs cruising down, fittingly, Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, in their Ferrari Daytona. Collins would later appear in the show, playing a shister game show host called ‘Phil the Shill’ (a somewhat notorious part, as the character used the word “wanker” on prime-time US TV at a time when a) it wouldn’t have been allowed on British television and b) most Americans wouldn’t have recognised the word, anyway).

At Live Aid, Collins appeared twice - first at Wembley and then later, courtesy of Concorde, in Philadelphia. Why? “Because they asked me.” Not even he realised how omnipresent he’d become: “I was always there,” Collins told The Guardian’s Dorian Lynskey in 2016 when publicising his autobiography, Not Dead Yet. “I was always in your face. People were always talking about me, usually not in a nice way. There was definitely too much of me.” Peak zeitgeist was probably reached when Bret Easton Ellis wrote his novel American Psycho - later made into a film with Christian Bale - in which the principle character, murderous ‘80s investment banker Patrick Bateman, expounds on Collins’ music: “His solo efforts seem to be more commercial and therefore more satisfying in a narrower way,” he comments in the film adaptation while telling a couple of prostitutes to act out his sick fantasies. This, probably, was at odds with the ‘Nice Guy Phil’ persona that been built up by first being a decidedly un-rock-and-roll rock star, and then developing a solo career around music that, well, your granny would like. But it didn’t stop him selling millions more records, working on Disney musicals like Tarzan, and being the go-to drummer for every Prince’s Trust celebathon (he was a trustee of the charity).

In some respects, there are two, possibly three Phil Collins. There is the gifted drummer who played more of a role in Genesis’s early phase than many would acknowledge, and still kept them interesting when he took over as singer in 1975; then there is the global pop superstar, whose hundreds of millions of record sales, at one point, sat behind only Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson’s respective totals, whose tempestuous love life just seemed to fuel more albums of ballads and self reflection; and then there is a third Collins, vilified for divorcing his second wife by fax (he didn’t) and voting Tory (he didn’t, in 1992, as was reported - he’d told Piers Morgan, then editor of The Sun’s Bizarre column, that he’d consider going abroad if the incoming Blair government raised taxes, which became seen as a hardline Conservative position). But then he met and married his third wife, the Swiss national Orianne Cevey, and moved to the Swiss Riviera. For the tabloids, the story wrote itself.

More recently, though, Collins has been less uncool as unfortunate. Twenty years ago he temporarily lost his hearing, the start of a chain of health issues that have led to, today, him being unable to drum, walking with a stick, and performing from a chair on stage. We can assume that the Genesis reunion tour - now rescheduled to next year - will not see the once impish Collins leap about the stage and perform the elaborate tambourine ‘tarantella’ during the song I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe). Certainly there will be no mesmerising drum duets with second drummer Chester Thompson. Here, then, lay the core of what it was that I liked about Collins in the beginning.

However, this doesn’t address the issue of whether Collins can ever be considered cool, even if his reputation in the music industry - and not just the hip-hop community - is mostly intact. The Tory/tax exile mythology may have skewed views, notably Noel Gallagher’s (and even Bowie once cruelly referred to his ’80s pop spell as “my Phil Collins years”), but for those prepared to wade through the syrup of his ballads - brilliantly lampooned by Spitting Image with a profusely blubbing Collins singing Hello, You Must Be Going - go back to the period of Collins’ history which counts the most for me, as a member of Genesis in their most creative, musically contrarian phase, before the videos and US Top 40 assault.

Even when Collins was ‘just’ the drummer, sat behind the increasingly outrageous Gabriel, guitarists Rutherford and Steve Hackett hunched over 12-string guitars to the right, and keyboard player Banks adopting an equally slumped posture to the left, he applied techniques that made most other rock drummers look decidedly pedestrian (which is why he ended up doing side work for Robert Fripp, Brian Eno, John Cale and other contemporary luminaries). When he stepped up to the lead singer’s microphone, he brought an everyman appeal that contrasted with Gabriel’s previous aloofness. That’s the era I’d point to and say, you know what? Phil Collins was pretty cool. He still is, to be honest, but just don’t let that get in the way of established media lore.

And Then There Were Three...again

Picture: Genesis/Patrick Balls

It's the weirdest of coincidences that, on the day that it was announced that Spitting Image is to return, Genesis announce a comeback tour. Phil Collins was, arguably, a deserved target of the show's ribbing back in the mid 1980s when he was, even by his own admission, everywhere. The show's puppeteers even returned the back-handed complement when they provided rubber versions of the band for their Land Of Confusion single's 1986 video. This period was peak Genesis. Peak Collins, too. Even Mike Rutherford was also getting in on the ubiquity with his side project, Mike + The Mechanics, enjoying a string of hits. Former lead singer Peter Gabriel was also in the midst of his own purple patch with the global success of the So album and its hits like Sledgehammer and Don't Give Up, adding to the visibility of the band he co-formed in 1967 and left in 1975.

That, however, Collins, Rutherford and Tony Banks should have, today, announced a tour of the UK and Ireland, 13 years after what appeared to be their farewell tour, is curious. Rumours have been circulating since January of the trio reforming after they were spotted together at a New York Knicks match, a somewhat random event seeing as neither band member had exactly been seen as fans of American basketball. Moreover, a Genesis reunion - even from lifelong fans like me - is hardly something we'd been counting on. Since their 2007 Turn It On Again Tour it had widely been assumed that the band had wound themselves up. Their studio, The Farm, near Dunsfold in Surrey was shut down, Rutherford appeared to be focusing more on his work with the Mechanics, Banks was focusing on his acclaimed classical music work, and Collins...well, he seemed to have been enduring an endless run of ill-health, including his admission of a near-death experience as he succumbed to excessive drinking. Since then, he has appeared increasingly frail, the result of surgery in 2009 on his back, and continued issues with his vertebrae that has rendered him confined to singing from a chair while performing in solo shows as part of his personal own comeback. Sadly, in his most recent TV appearances, he has looked a painful shadow of his impish former self, coming across as increasingly elderly, despite being the younger of the trio (Banks turns 70 later this month, Rutherford catches up in October, Collins next February).

That places questions on the veracity of the tour announced today. For his solo live performances, Collins has drafted in his teenage son, Nicholas, for drumming duties and with eerily authentic effect, too. Collins' haters, while perhaps justifiably knocking his ubiquity in the 80s and 90s, usually forget what an incredible drummer he was, with a unique melodic ability (his signature In The Air Tonight drum fill actually belies his broader talent, first honed in his early days in Genesis, with its influences of jazz and R'n'B drumming). Thankfully, his son has inherited the drum gene, but a Genesis show without Collins Senior and longterm second drummer Chester Thompson doing their mesmerising duets will be somewhat lacking. It's sad, but I guess not everyone goes on forever.

I should, at this point, declare why I'm so defensive of the band, even in the face of whatever music cred I might profess to have. Genesis, to me, are more than some guilty pleasure. They were the first band I saw live (Wembley Arena, 1981); their 1978 album ...And Then There Were Three was the first LP I bought with my own money (MJM Records, New Malden, inevitably no longer there). I even earned my first writing fee reviewing a 1985 Collins gig at the Royal Albert Hall for the NME. They were, along with The Police, Rush, Bowie and Elvis Costello, amongst the first acts I obsessed over, prompting the teenage me to invest in their back catalogue - albums like Nursery Cryme, Selling England By The Pound and Trick Of The Tail, records which would be defined as quintessential prog rock, without anyone - then or still - fully understanding what that term meant. True, some of their songs, like Return Of The Giant Hogweed and Harold The Barrell, were somewhat outré, but in their first true hit, I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe), they presented a soulful groove more reflective of Gabriel's R'n'B leanings than of the art rock movement they were seen to be at the vanguard of, along with King Crimson, Yes and Pink Floyd. With The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, Gabriel's swansong as lead singer, they even introduced a punk element, with the double concept album charting the journey of Puerto Rican street tough Rael's journey into a bizarre New York underworld. The appeal of music like that of Genesis in the 1970s was the combination of storytelling and engrossing music that drew you in to another world. This wasn't trite pop, a moment's entertainment, but something more involving. No wonder their core audience was, for many years, intense, long-haired young men wearing army-surplus greatcoats and a noted lack of female company. Here, though, is where people lose Genesis. Until Gabriel and guitarist Steve Hackett left the band, they were characterised by wonderful but sometimes meandering fantasy songs. That said, Seconds Out, their 1977 tour album, remains my favourite live album of all, eclipsing even The Who's Live At Leeds and Humble Pie's legendary Performance - Rockin' The Fillmore for energy.

...And Then There Were Three marked the start of a move away from quintessential prog. The single Follow You, Follow Me brought them a new, pop audience. Notably it also marked a greater prominence of women at their concerts. And this was 1978, when punk was supposed to have done away with such bands (a myth - John Lennon was said to be a fan of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, while The Clash's Topper Headon once rushed up to Phil Collins at an airport to declare his appreciation). With their next album, Duke, they were still storytelling, but Collins' increasing pop influence was already notable, with hits (especially in the US) like Turn It On Again and Misunderstanding sitting alongside distinctly Collins-penned love songs like Please Don't Ask, material that had come out of the same writing for his divorce-inspired breakthrough, Face Value. What followed was the band's transition into a fully-fledged pop band, much like The Police or Madness, I suppose, enjoying hit after hit supported by witty videos that brought them to a global audience in a way they'd never really managed during the 1970s when they were, arguably, at their most interesting.

Here, though, marks the dividing line between diehard fans and those brought to the band via the heavily-rotated MTV hits. Some maintain that Genesis lost their soul when Gabriel left in 1975. I'll maintain that they became enriched by the departure. A Trick Of The Tail, which introduced a reluctant Collins as lead singer in 1976, is arguably their best. But the Gabriel era still hangs heavily over the band's legacy. Even reports today about the 2020 reunion tour couldn't help themselves from mentioning that Gabriel would not be taking part. "Peter left the band 45 years ago and he's been trying to live it down ever since," joked Tony Banks this morning about his former schoolfriend. "When they put his birthday in The Times, they always say, 'Peter Gabriel - Genesis singer.' And I think, 'What's the guy been doing since then, for God's sake?'". Taking a more serious tone, however, Banks pointed out that even if they could persuade Gabriel to join them (unlikely as he turned down the idea in 2005), most of the songs people know came after his departure. Fair point.

Picture: Facebook/Genesis/Stephanie Pistel

There are, then, two testaments to Genesis. The band formed at Charterhouse in the late 1960s, and won their first record deal with Jonathan King by emulating the Bee Gees' sound at the time (pre-disco - think Massachusetts) as he was a fan. They spent their first few albums eschewing the blues-based rock prevalent at the time by fusing pop, rock, classical and even jazz sentiments into something truly unique. I'm never going to win over the haters, here, but the 70s Genesis albums still hold a magic, even in some of their unashamedly less cool moments. I suppose you had to be there.

So, will I be there in November when they tour the UK? I'll be honest, my thoughts are mixed: I've always regretted only seeing Bowie the once (the horrendous Glass Spider show in 1997), same with Pink Floyd. I've seen the Rolling Stones five times now, and would readily go for a sixth, even as they age gracefully/disgracefully. Indeed, the Stones are still the benchmark for venerated acts remaining out on the road. Having seen footage of Collins' recent solo shows I'd be lying if I thought he will be anything like the last time I saw Genesis, at Twickenham in 2007. But here's the thing: despite their live prowess, they have always been about the songs. Indeed, when it looked like their recording career wouldn't take off, they considered themselves songwriters first, writing for others. Tony Banks still exemplifies this, being the least comfortable in the spotlight. The stage school-educated, former child actor Collins was always the more natural performer as a result of his upbringing, although even he was initially reluctant to step forward from the drum riser after Gabriel left.

Of all of the Genesis line-up, past and present, still certainly worth watching live, it is guitarist Steve Hackett. He has been successfully touring the classic albums he played on in their entirety in recent years, highlighting the guitar solos that - not always recognised - were as much signature of the Genesis sound as anything else. Hackett's shows, which have included complete renditions of Selling England By The Pound and his final studio appearance, Wind And Wuthering, have brilliantly fulfilled the 'older' fans' needs, even supplanting Gabriel's voice with the wonderfully eccentric Swedish singer Nad Sylvan. Wisely, Hackett hasn't pushed into the band's catalogue after he left, which saw them move away from the "prog" tag, mixing longer and shorter songs and generally being more accessible (in other words, 'commercial'). The hits that followed will, I'm sure, comprise the bulk of their sets in November, much as they were on their supposed final tour in 2007 ("There are a few old dogs that won't be running," Collins said today, pointing out that what they will perform wouldn't include songs powered by his drumming). With Collins himself no longer able to drum, and if still confined to a chair on stage, part of the energy that made Genesis a genuinely exhilarating live act will be lost. Though reluctant to be the frontman at first, his charisma was core to the band's overall entertainment value, often taking a less than reverent tone to songs which, from a certain angle, could be described as somewhat rarified.

What is certainly not the case is that this tour is one last boost to the pension fund. Having sold more than 100 million records over their 52-year career, what's brought them back to the road is the recreation of something they've missed personally. You can be cynical about that, but having followed Genesis for 42 years, what they do together - like it or not - is something special to them. "We all felt, 'Why not?'" Collins told BBC News. "It sounds a bit of a lame reason - but we enjoy each other's company, we enjoy playing together." Rutherford added that with Phil touring again in the last couple of years "it seemed the natural moment to have a conversation about it." And, he added, it's not like they had been overstaying their welcome in recent years. "I worked it out and we've only done two shows in the UK in the last 28 years, so we haven't over-worked it." I'm sure the shows will sell out - Genesis have proven over their five decades-plus to be impervious to fashion - it's just a debate as to whether the magic will be there again.

Johnny Boy would have loved it - Sarah Jane Morris' sweet little mysteries

There is an inherent danger to covering the work of a unique artist: there’s good reason, too, why few successfully (or even at all) carry off imprints of music by, say, Bowie or Queen without sounding like a bad Wednesday night in a suburban karaoke club. For fans (and purist fans in particular) of the original performer, the notion of any form of emulation is fraught: too close a copy and you dismiss it as "so what?"; too outré and you creep close to sacrilege.

Riskier still is if the covers are of a deceased legend like John Martyn. Even his own myriad reinterpretations of his greatest songs didn’t always land well, although that was part of his unpredictable appeal - regularly reworking material to suit his mood, be it acoustic, electric, funked-up, reggae-infused, jazz-influenced, or whatever.

His gargantuan, 17-CD posthumous Island Years box set served testament to this, with its plethora of alternate studio takes and live versions which showcased Martyn's restless reinvention - many the result of what touring approach he was taking at the time (i.e. on his own, with mucker Danny Thompson, or with jazz and rock band backing). So step forward bravely, Sarah Jane Morris and her album project Sweet Little Mystery, which brings her incredible contralto voice together with regular guitar collaborator Tony Rémy, along with Tim Cansfield (acoustic guitar), Henry Thomas (bass) and Martyn Barker (drums), to reinvent some of Martyn's songs in a respectful but rarely (if at all) emulatory way. She is not the first to do this, of course: such is Martyn's appeal that plenty have done so before, most famously Eric Clapton's version of May You Never on 1977's Slowhand album that probably - and sadly - did more for Martyn's bank balance than many of his own albums. In 2011, two years after his death, the lovingly-curated compilation Johnny Boy Would Love This produced an eclectic array of tributes from committed fans like Beth Orton, David Gray, The Cure's Robert Smith, Beck, Lisa Hannigan, Paolo Nutini, Snow Patrol, Bombay Bicycle Club, Morcheeba, fellow folkie Judie Tzuke and Martyn's oft-collaborator and pal Phil Collins.

So what does Morris bring to the table? A huge amount, actually. Martyn was labelled many things during his career, largely because he dabbled in many things, but jazz seems to be one of the roots to his canon. Indeed, having started out in the folk clubs of Glasgow, before migrating to London and clubs like 'Les Cousins' (which artists like Martyn, Ralph McTell and others mistakenly thought was named after a bloke called Les Cousins...) he discovered saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders' album Karma, turning him onto modern jazz. From here on in Martyn worked on textures, especially with his voice. "There's a space between words and music and my voice lives right there," he once explained. The album Solid Air, now revered as the godfather of chillout music, and its follow-up One World, could easily have been regarded as jazz, even through the weed-wooze that they conjured. Which is where, kind of, Morris comes in, with a voice that, in her 60th year, is richly reminscent of Nina Simone or Sarah Vaughan. Married to Rémy, Cansfield and Thomas's guitar and bass work, and Barker's understated drumming, it produces corking versions of my Martyn favourites, like Couldn't Love You More, Sweet Little Mystery and I Don't Want To Know.

Picture: Juliet Matthews

In a live performance at London's Purcell Room to launch the album, Morris and band even put in a rollicking version of Solid Air. Given that this song, a paean to Nick Drake, is, in its original form, as stoner-friendly a piece of music as you will find, the brisk and lively application here is refreshingly inventive. Johnny Boy would certainly have loved it. Closer - but not too close - to the original was One World, easily my personal Martyn pick, with its poignant "To take our place in one world, to make our peace in one world" stepping closer to the original, while Fairytale Lullaby (which recently turned up in a particularly bucolic edition of Countryfile) ambled closer still to its foundation, with its now somewhat outdated proto-folk, Arran sweater-wearing, finger-in-ear lyrics about goblins, elves, pixies and "the magic dancing wood". Taken out of that era and the folk club context, Morris delivers it with a playful earnestness.

The entire Sweet Little Mystery project is clearly a work of heartfelt love for Martyn's music by Morris, and in a stage show directed by the comedian and activist Mark Thomas, there are video inserts featuring interviews with Eddi Reader (with whom Martyn collaborated on a TV performance of the southern blues classic He's Got All The Whisky), fellow Glaswegian and cohort Jim McKnight, and Martyn's sister, Julie Ann. Indeed, these three interviews underscored my fascination with the big man himself: Martyn was born on September 11, 1948 in Beechcroft Avenue in New Malden - a 30-minute walk from the house where I was born. As a young boy (then Iain David McGeachy), his light opera-singing parents divorced, with his father taking the five-year-old John to Glasgow, while his mother remained in the Kingston-upon-Thames area. Now, considering that no one famous ever seemed to hail from my neck of the woods, the discovery that my musical hero John Martyn was born a mile or so from where I came into being 19 years later was a revelation. In interviews - few and far between, it must be said - Martyn would skip between broad Glaswegian (increasingly slurred as life's excesses took their later toll) and a more southern English accent. There are videos of him on YouTube performing in the 1970s with what could be considered a Mockney voice. So to see his two worlds collide in these interviews - the obviously Scottish McKnight and Reader, and Martyn's Kingston-raised "little sister" - provides a delightful set of interludes that also reveal the "grace and danger" that not only titled one of his most acclaimed albums (and a band his nephews play in today), but was his trademark.

Few Martyn tributes have ever abstained from referencing his occasionally appalling, substance-driven behaviour. Indeed, the consensus has always been that his 'danger' and self-destructive nature lead inevitably to his untimely demise at the age of 60, ten years ago this year. But I've always chosen to dwell on his grace, the sometimes impossibly, hauntingly beautiful songs like Go Down Easy and Head And Heart that led his first wife, Beverley Kutner, to remark that he put so much emotion into his music that there was rarely anything left for anyone else. Sarah Jane Morris's Sweet Little Mystery captures much of that emotion but, rather than focusing on the sometimes mawkish nature of his music's beauty, brings it to animated life. If only the same could be done for Martyn himself.

Grace and Danger: John Martyn - ten years gone

If ever there was a combination of contrasting words which perfectly encapsulated someone it's "Grace And Danger", the title of John Martyn’s 1980 ‘divorce album’. For, as it transpired as his career unfolded up until his death at the age of 60, ten years ago today, he was grace and danger epitomised: writer of songs of an almost ethereal beauty and yet capable of the most preposterous damage to himself and those around him.

Much is made of Martyn’s self-destructive predilections, principally drink and other substances, and to look back pictorially over his musical career - a journey that progresses from beautiful, tousle-haired, slightly buck-toothed 20-year-old to grizzled, great bear of a man, performing from a wheelchair, the result of having his lower right leg amputated as the result of a burst cyst - is to watch an at-times agonising evolution. Pity, however, is the last thing Martyn would want or have expected.

He was, at times, as blasé about his condition as those things that led to it. This might sound reckless but to say it was belies the complexities that Martyn surrounded himself in, indulged and even encouraged. And that’s if you’d even heard of him. My frustration with Martyn has always been his lack of fame: despite being feted by the likes of Eric Clapton (whose cover of May You Never, Martyn’s lullaby to his son, was a useful royalties earner) and his great friend Phil Collins, amongst other A-listers, Martyn sometimes seemed to welcome obscurity, an aspect that confounds as much as it frustrates those who’d wish, now, posthumously, he were more than just “acclaimed singer-songwriter, John Martyn”.

It’s too easy to dwell on Martyn’s weaponised dysfunction as a means of labelling him, but he truly encapsulated grace and danger. Perhaps turning a blind eye to the danger, I choose to focus on the grace, and for this he remains, resolutely, my musical hero. I can’t think of an artist who, over 44 years and 22 studio albums and over 30 live and compilations, produced such a prodigious, exquisite canon of work that could both pick you up and bring you down when you are sad, as well as envelope you in a warmth much like his own lyric to Go Down Easy, “You curl around me, like a fern in the Spring”. He was also a master of reinvention and experimentation: coming out of, first, the Scottish folk scene and then, by way of the legendary London folkie hangout Les Cousins (referred to by many, phonetically, as “Lez Cuzzans”, as if run by a bloke called Leslie, as opposed to the more exotic French name it actually bore…), Martyn emerged from his first, somewhat Arran-sweater-and-fingers-in-ear folk albums, to explore the realms of jazz, reggae, rock, funk and even trip-hop. And just when you thought you knew one of his albums, along would come another live release or compilation with completely new arrangements of familiar songs, each as invigorating as the original, and often dependent on whether they were recorded as a full electric band, or a solo acoustic set, or one of many tours with his longtime sparring partner - sometimes literally - Danny Thompson.

In my first encounter with John Martyn’s music I had no idea how much it would become a predominating soundtrack in my life, more than any other artist (including Bowie). Nor would that first encounter reveal the small personal connection I had with Martyn. The encounter came one Wednesday evening in the early 1980s when Gary Crowley had Phil Collins on as a guest on his Capital Radio show. Collins requested Sweet Little Mystery, a song from the Grace And Danger album, on which they had both worked. There is something of a bittersweet irony about this fact: their collaboration came at a time when both were going through painful divorces. With his first marriage irretrievable, Collins started working at home in Shalford, Surrey, on the demos that would eventually launch him as a solo superstar. Martyn, going through a very painful divorce to Beverley Martyn (with whom he is co-credited on the 1970 albums Stormbringer! and The Road To Ruin), came down to stay and work on songs with for what became Grace And Danger. “I’d turned my master bedroom into a studio,” recalls Collins, “and there was a phone on the floor. We both took it in turns to call our relative partners. There’d be all kind of shouting matches going on. It was very creative, because Face Value came out of that.” “We were both going through the same emotional trauma,” Martyn told Q magazine. “There was vast amounts of going down the potting shed together and weeping. I’d phone Beverley and it would be ‘aaargh’, then it would be Phil’s turn. We were both making ourselves terribly miserable, and then playing and singing about it.”

Such was the raw nature of many of the tracks on Grace And Danger that Island Records supremo Chris Blackwell was reluctant to release it. In fact, it would be almost a year late when it eventually appeared ("I freaked,” said Martyn in 1981. “Please get it out! I don't give a damn how sad it makes you feel. It's what I'm about: direct communication of emotion.”). Many will say that Grace And Danger was Martyn’s last great album. It was certainly his last for Island. What followed in the 1980s were a procession of records that took Martyn further away from his folk origins. His next album, Glorious Fool, saw Collins take on production work, and there was a notable shift towards a more mainstream pop-rock sound (for which Collins has frequently been blamed, wrongly). Clapton was drafted in to guest on one track, a reciprocation for his May You Never cover. Perhaps the next run of albums - Well Kept Secret (1982), Sapphire (1984), Piece by Piece (1986), The Apprentice (1990) and Cooltide (1991) didn’t do Martyn as much justice as his more feted releases, Solid Air (1973), One World (1977) and Grace And Danger. And while there was a tendency towards 80s over-production - more synthesisers and less of the acoustic-guitar-and-Echoplex-wooziness of his 70s releases - the essence of John Martyn’s music remained throughout. Sometimes it’s better to listen to some of the many live recordings from this era to hear his soul, not to mention his gift for rearrangements that could transform any element in his body of work, to the extent that you might now own myriad versions of the same song, and yet consider them different pieces altogether.

But to return to that midweek appearance on Capital Radio by Phil Collins, his choice of Sweet Little Mystery led to my ‘discovery’ of Martyn himself, and that tiny personal connection I had. Not being old enough to have heard Martyn’s seminal 70s work, I started buying his albums in, perhaps, the agreed order - Solid Air, then One World, then Grace And Danger. And then, in 1992, a curious compilation came out, Couldn’t Love You More, featuring reworked versions of some of his best songs, like One World, Head And Heart, Could've Been Me and Man In The Station. In hindsight, the album has been slated for revisions that rendered some songs a bit too AoR. But with contributions from, again, Collins and Clapton, plus David Gilmour, it’s a lovely piece of work. It was around the time of Couldn’t Love You More’s release that I made a startling discovery: Martyn had been born, Ian David McGheachy, on 11 September 1948 in my home town, the London/Surrey suburb of New Malden. Growing up, nothing famous happened to or in New Malden, with the exception of Jimmy Tarbuck living in the posh bit, Crackerjack's Jan Francis being spotted now and again in Boots, and a backdrop of one of the town's twin 60s office blocks appearing as a backdrop to Bless This House. And yet, briefly, someone who was fast becoming a musical hero of mine was actually born there! Nothing would knock this from the top of my pile of things I’m most proud of, not even discovering that Bowie launched the Ziggy Stardust tour at The Toby Jug pub in nearby Tolworth, or that Clapton himself went to school in neighbouring Surbiton and signed his contract to join The Yardbirds in a New Malden boozer.

When Martyn’s parents - light opera singers - separated, the-then five-year-old Iain moved to Glasgow with his father. To all intents and purposes, he became Scottish, but once McGeachy became Martyn, he would flit for the rest of his life between Glaswegian and somewhat Mockney accents with impressive ease. In Glasgow the teenage Martyn developed a love of folk music, acquiring an insane talent for the acoustic guitar, and eventually falling under the influence of local folk musician Hamish Imlach. Iain gradually became John, as the prodigious youngster evolved his craft. “John Martyn” was adopted as a stage name, an adaptation of the Martin guitar company (whose acoustic instruments would become intertwined with Martyn’s signature sound in the mid-70s). “Iain David McGeachy” had been deemed too Scottish, so something more neutral was needed: “In those days there was no traditional scene as such,” Martyn told biographer John Neil Munro for his terrific book Some People Are Crazy: The John Martyn Story. “You had to be American-sounding. I was more influenced by American music than Scottish music, so the name Martyn was [friend and later agent, Sandy Glennon’s] idea - it had to have the ‘y’ in it , to sound posh.”

That, then, was the start of a career that would baffle as many as it would enlighten. Martyn’s back catalogue from the early days is worth listening to, if only to hear the folkiness gradually disappear. By the time Solid Air came along, with its title track, a paean to troubled friend Nick Drake, defining Martyn’s ethereal, weed-influenced sound, as well as uniting him with lifelong mucker and bass player Danny Thompson, Martyn was already moving into a more progressive sound. Over the years I’ve devoured Martyn’s work with every studio album he released, and every compilation and box set, some like the epic Island Years box set requiring help to bring home, such was the copious amount of material it contained. I make no exaggeration when I say that if the house burned, this - and my own Martin D35 guitar - would be the only two possessions I’d leap from the bedroom window clutching. Listening to the Island box - remember, he was only on the label for a decade or so - is like repainting the Forth Road Bridge: when you eventually reach the end you’ve got to start at the beginning again. It is that lavish, and that stuffed with live recordings and alternative takes that are the very essence of record collection curation.

There is so, so much more I could write about John Martyn in this post - good and bad - but I and you would be here all week. In some respects, I simply implore anyone who is either unfamiliar or unaware of him to go and spend an evening on Spotify. Or, better still, go and actually buy his records. His death, on January 29, 2009 was sad but, perhaps, not unexpected, even though he’d only turned 60 the previous September. Unlike the ’27 Club’ - Hendrix, Joplin, Cobain, Winehouse, et al - Martin had survived into late middle age against the odds. He’d imbibed forbidden substances copiously, worked his way into drunken brawls and escaped worse, and been appalling to the women in his life. He’d changed from angelic-voiced youth to a wheelchair-bound amputee. The cyst that had burst was, possibly, caused by Martyn having stood heavily on that particular leg on stage over the years. In that there is a bitter irony: an artist sometimes criminally overlooked and under-appreciated, whose final album - which was finished by others after his death - was Willing To Work, the ethic that ran through the 44 years of his recording and performing career, one which never saw him soar to the wealth of so many of his musical acolytes and collaborators.

Somewhere on the Internet you can hear a recording of an extraordinary piece of radio from the day John Martyn died. Danny Baker, then doing a daytime show on BBC Radio London, had just come in to the station when he was told the news. “I almost turned around and went back home,” he said when he went on air, breathless and decidedly downbeat. “This news has knocked me for a loop,” he intoned before commencing a couple of hours of playing only Martyn’s music, while reflecting on the huge influence he’d had on him. It’s extraordinary because Baker was being delightfully self-indulgent. But probably only he could get away with an improvised two-hour show featuring music from just one artist, one who could hardly be thought of as mass market, either. And yet the reverence of the broadcast matched that you’d reserve for the Queen’s passing, or a national treasure of unblemished significance.

I’d hate John Martyn to be remembered for being niche, but that’s just my own frustration that a man whose music has embellished my life like no one else’s wasn’t better known, or more successful. Yes, he was, perhaps, a muso’s musician, someone that former NME journalists like Baker can wax endlessly on, while others with their heads firmly in the clouds of broad popular music wouldn’t know him from a hole in the ground. Martyn’s music touches me today, and the happy coincidence of him being the New Malden brother I never had is nothing more than that, a happy coincidence.

But I’ll leave you with this one thought, of many more that I could commit to the keyboard: shortly before his death, Martyn received an OBE in the 2009 New Year’s Honours list. It would have bemused as much as anything. But 12 months before, the BBC gave Martyn a lifetime achievement award at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, with the gong handed to him by his great friend Phil Collins. “Folk” just doesn’t do his musical canon justice, but in its award citation, the BBC described his “heartfelt performances have either suggested or fully demonstrated an idiosyncratic genius.” I’d say that nailed John Martyn perfectly. RIP.