T😷M's Night Shift

P.S.: "Graeme asked myself and a few songwriters who were inspired by John Martyn to record versions of his songs as part of the promotional campaign for the book. You can find them all at Folk Radio UK. Olivia Chaney, Karine Polwart, Blue Rose Code, Siobhan Wilson and I covered May You Never, Over the Hill, Couldn't Love You More, Fine Lines and Spencer the Rover." - Findlay Napier

An album that frequently cuts loose from the moorings of conventional songwriting drops a significant clue regarding its intentions in the opening seconds. Martyn comments that whichever sounds the musicians had been creating prior to the listener’s arrival had felt ‘natural’, before sliding sleepily into the opening track: Fine Lines. From the start, we are alerted to the fact that what we’re hearing is merely an excerpt, edited highlights of a larger whole. Inside Out is often guided by surf and stars rather than map and compass, yet there are wonderful songs, too. Fine Lines is one of Martyn’s very best, as tender a song of friendship as May You Never, except that here the love extends beyond a brother to a brotherhood of the ‘finest folk in town’. It reeks of woozy late-night gatherings, the 5 a.m. pre-dawn reckoning when the music settles to a faint pulse, the bright edge of the chemicals begin to soften and blur the senses, and the awareness of a universal human bond is a matter of peaceful certitude. Fine Lines cuts deeper than the drunken arm slung around the shoulder, travelling through skin and bone to the soul, via the deeply felt connections forged in smoke-filled rooms and over smeared glasses, in the warm communion of bodies slumped platonically on sofas. Loneliness is there, too, whispering at the window, the exquisite sadness that comes from knowing that good times are ending even as they are happening. The fragility is so profound one can hear the air shake around the strings, feel the cadences of all those empty spaces.

On an album where the tapping of folk sources was more overt than usual, the highlight is Spencer The Rover, a venerable traditional song with its provenance in East Sussex and Yorkshire, and which Martyn learned from one of the latter county’s many fine folk singers, Robin Dransfield. Martyn was particularly enamoured with it. The following spring, the song gave its name to his second child, christened Spenser Thomas McGeachy. ‘He initially asked me to sing on Spencer The Rover,’ says Martin Carthy. ‘Nothing came of it, in the end. Don’t know why. It tells you a lot about him that he loved that song so much. It spoke to him. It’s a very grown-up song. I never understood it when I was twenty; when I was forty I did. The results were very true to the song, but very John.’ He sang it with rapturous tenderness on Sunday’s Child, and many times more on stage in the years thereafter. Though he did not write the words, in his hands they read like wishful autobiography. In its empathetic depiction of a man who has been ‘much reduced’ and ‘caused great confusion’, one can hear a romanticised echo of Martyn’s own transgressive wanderings. In the song, Spencer has abandoned his family and embarked on a troubled, aimless ramble around the countryside. In Yorkshire, he beds down for the night in a forest. After a restless sleep, punctuated by dream-sent voices imploring him to go home, he returns to the family fold, a near-stranger welcomed lovingly back into their arms. Spencer is thereafter resolved to a future filled with nothing more taxing than taking his children upon his knee and listening to their ‘prittle-prattling stories’. It is a song about setting aside youthful appetites and wild schemes to instead settle for the simplest and most enriching rewards. For Martyn, such home comforts were fleeting and rare. Though they were similarly cherished, at least in theory, they offered only temporary respite. The song smooths out the edges of his cavalier ways. Perhaps that’s why he cradles it like precious cargo. It offers a glimpse of another path, impossible to follow but close enough to touch. He could never have written the words, but he sings them as sacred text. The performance is so powerful partly because it offers the happy ending his own actions denied him.

One World synthesised the old and new, marrying Martyn’s traditional heart and soul to a sinewy energy and fresh, luxuriant textures. Punk had broken through during the period in which the album was written and recorded, but it made little impact on him. He claimed to enjoy the Sex Pistols, and for at least one member of the band the feeling was mutual: John Lydon was a Martyn fan, spotted at several shows. But, for a man beholden to slow music, the abrasion of punk was never going to be his thing, even if he rather admired the attitude. The album was less personal in some ways, certainly less intimate, than Martyn’s recent records. Couldn’t Love You More was the one direct connection to his former work, a simple acoustic performance featuring Danny Thompson’s sawing bass undertow and dappled sprinkles of vibes. The lyric was one of his most tender, if ambiguous, declarations. ‘On a simple level it’s saying, “I gave you everything,”’ says Ralph McTell. ‘On another level, it says, “I didn’t have any more that I could pull out to give you.” He had a light touch, but there was a terrible, awe-inspiring darkness in him as well. He was one of those artists who could articulate what we suspect is this darkness we feel in ourselves. Sometimes we don’t want to see it.’

The unease which runs through Over The Hill belies the breezy hop and skip in the music, with its twinkly conjuring of caravans and campfires. It is a song of conflict, between the open road and the four walls of hearth and home. The title phrase, of course, can also refer to someone who is past their best. The journey Martyn describes is a homecoming – the run into Hastings on the train rolled through rising countryside before the line dipped down to reveal the town – but also a more ambiguous internal one. Martyn often spoke about domesticity equating the death of creativity. He was a subscriber to the Cyril Connolly school of cliché that the pram in the hallway is the solemn enemy of good art, yet he also yearned for his family, its wholesome comforts and simple certainties. In Over The Hill, he is worried about ‘my babies’ and ‘my wife’; worried, too, about what they are doing to him, and he to them.

‘You could put it into a hymn book,’ says Richard Thompson of Martyn’s best-known and popular composition. ‘It’s a beautiful song.’ The most common thesis is that he wrote May You Never for his friend Andy Matthews, who ran the Soho cellar club, Les Cousins. Then again, Scottish writer and folk singer Ewan McVicar has met ‘three people who told me who that song was written about. All different.’ Others theorise that it was written about Martyn’s own children. Paul Wheeler refutes the idea that it is about, or for, any person in particular. ‘As I remember, he wrote it very much as a signature song. It was a very calculated thing.’ Wheeler recollects that the line about love being a lesson ‘we learn in our time’ was loosely appropriated from Lesley Duncan’s Love Song. Such utility is the great value of May You Never. It feels usable, relatable. We all know someone about whom it could or should have been written. It is a series of very secular prayers for a wayward sibling-cum-soulmate to keep his woman close, his temper in check, and to always have a warm place to lay his head. That these pitfalls were all directly pertinent to Martyn’s personal hang-ups and weaknesses lends weight to the interpretation that he was, at least partly, singing to himself. Though it remains his most famous song, covered by superstars and bar-stool amateurs alike, he never quite saw what the fuss was about, and at times resented the dominance it came to demand in his catalogue. When I raised this with him, he shrugged and called it a ‘lollipop’, a sweet, simple and insubstantial diversion.

Black and Irish like a pint of Guinness, as he famously quipped, Phil Lynott's way with words and his on-stage persona made Thin Lizzy one of the most iconic rock bands of the 1970s in Europe. The band's debut album was released in 1971:

One of the most memorable tracks has been called "Eire":

Their breakthrough in the charts was their take on the traditional Irish folk song, "Whisky In The Jar," released as a single in November 1972. Lynott said, ‘After the success of “Whisky in the Jar” there was an awful lot of pressure on the band. People wanted us to record ‘Tipperary’ rocked up, or “Danny Boy” rocked up.’ The song wasn't even put on the forthcoming album. The "Jailbreak" and the song "The Boys Are Back In Town" became a lecture in power-rock, and it turned the boys into rock stars.

Thin Lizzy... Every Album, Every Song presents a history of the band through its musical releases, everything from melodic rock to soul, prog, folk, fusion and romantic balladry. Along the way it follows a series of terrific lead guitarists. At the end of the 1970s, Thin Lizzy featured one Gary Moore, who was receptive to the Irish folk influences and Gaelic melodic phrasing. These influences reached their peak with Moore in the the track "Róisín Dubh (Black Rose): A Rock Legend" from 1979:

Phil Lynott died on 4 January 1986, effectively as a result of a persistent heroin addiction. He was 36.

‘Whisky In The Jar’ (Traditional arr. Lynott, Bell, Downey, full length version 5:45)

Released as a cut-down 3:43 single on 3 November 1972, intended as the B-side to ‘Black Boys On The Corner’ but then promoted to be the A-side before release, this was the song that gave Thin Lizzy their first taste of chart success. This single is almost worth a chapter of its own; it gave the band the leg-up they required and effectively saved their careers (for the first time) and their sanity. The story behind it is not a short one either.

Firstly though, a word about the spelling: Scotch distillers invariably describe their wares as ‘whisky’, without an ‘e’. Most Irish and American brands are labelled as ‘whiskey’ with an ‘e’. When referred to in print, the name of this single is almost inevitably spelt with an ‘e’, which would be the correct spelling – however, neither on the original single nor on any subsequent canonical release, did it ever contain the ‘e’.

After Lizzy’s first two albums bombed, they were starting to lose heart and their record label to lose faith. In line with the mind-set of the day’s serious musicians, Thin Lizzy were never about hits or singles; they were a much more album-oriented proposition; in any case, their whimsical, poetry-based, musically complex approach was never likely to churn out the hits like Buddy Holly’s simple songs or The Monkees’ jolly ditties. Nevertheless, to a record label, a band is just a tool for printing money, and Thin Lizzy needed to come up with a hit single. ‘Whisky In The Jar’ was never meant to be that single; it is a traditional Irish folk song and the boys started playing it at a jam session one night when they couldn’t find inspiration anywhere else. It was their comanager Ted Carroll who spotted the song’s potential in the trio’s hands, but clearly, they were trying to come up with something original and wouldn’t consider recording the old ballad.

Anyway, Lynott reckoned his new song ‘Black Boys On The Corner’ was good enough to make the grade; a gritty, funky piece of rock soul, it got the nod from the label. All 45s need a B-side though, and Carroll was keen to promote ‘Whisky In The Jar’, which played up their Celtic roots nicely, so they reluctantly agreed to hammer out a version.

Clearly, they needed to rock it up a bit, but it reportedly took Eric Bell a fortnight of mucking about, jamming along with a tape copy, before he came up with the now-iconic electric guitar riff that makes Lizzy’s version so instantly recognisable. Interestingly, Lynott and Bell both strum acoustic guitars on this one; Eric Bell said they couldn’t afford to hire an extra musician, but it never seems to have occurred to them to dub on a bass afterwards, even though they dubbed on the lead guitar – so this song contains no bass guitar.

The single was recorded, pressed and released behind schedule, but despite all the sweat that had gone into it, it too dropped like a stone – at first. Decca had insisted that ‘Whisky’ would be the featured song out of the two, so it was promoted to the A-side, and some bright spark had the idea of shipping out miniature bottles of whisky to all the DJs and record stations along with copies of the single.

Meanwhile, a demoralised Lizzy were going through the motions on a German tour. Down and depressed, drinking heavily, Lynott and Bell ended up slugging it out in a hotel one night and Downey threatened to pack the whole game in. Then suddenly, they had word from head office that ‘Whisky’ had hit the charts and was currently residing at no. 25. The tour was a disaster anyway, so they cancelled the rest and high-tailed it back home to promote the single, which eventually climbed to no. 6 in the UK, a massive no. 1 in Ireland, and ironically it ended up getting to no. 10 in Germany too. Amid massive backslapping and relief all round, it gave Thin Lizzy their first appearance on Top Of The Pops and new kudos with Decca. The big time called.

A word about the song itself: It was based on notorious Irish highwayman Patrick Fleming. Not one of Ireland’s finest, he murdered, robbed and maimed indiscriminately, men, women, children, rich and poor alike, and was eventually hunted down and captured. Fleming famously escaped at one point by scrambling up a chimney but was eventually recaptured and was hanged in 1650. It was common for such ‘gentlemen of the road’ to take on a heroic air in their local district, but in Scotland and Ireland, where they tended to target rich English landlords, they tended to be regarded as national patriots. ‘Whisky’ was written about the time of Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland, when England’s repute in Ireland was rock bottom and even a miscreant like Fleming was viewed through rose-coloured glasses. The song was also transferred to America with the Irish emigrants and adapted into various patriotic forms during the Civil War, especially amongst Irish battalions.

If you’ve ever wondered what that ‘Musha ring dumma do dumma da’ bit is all about, with its ‘whack for ma daddy-o,’ the answer is that no-one really knows, as Brian Downey explained to the author: Whoever wrote it originally stuck a Gaelic phrase in there, but over the years, the Gaelic was lost and the English was substituted. I mean the song is pretty ancient; ‘Highwayman songs’ they used to be called. And it was mispronounced over all those years, so it comes out as ‘musha ring dumma do dumma da’, then it’s actually ‘whack fol, (with an L), de-daddy-o.’ In any case, after Thin Lizzy went on to success with the Vertigo label, Decca trotted this one out from time to time. The full-length version was released on 27 Jan 1978, with two later songs, ‘Vagabonds Of The Western World’ and ‘Sìtamoia’ on the B-side. It was then released in 1979 and again in 1983 with ‘The Rocker’ on the B-side. The single appeared on the Decca compilation Remembering Part 1 in 1976 and both versions were included on the 2010 expanded 2-CD edition of the album Vagabonds Of The Western World.