“I don’t want to know about evil, I only want to know about love…”

The heading today is a quote from the official website of a great hero of mine, singer, songwriter and guitarist John Martyn who passed away on Thursday this past week. It tells of the essence of a man who wrote many songs about the the vagaries of the subject. Indeed, similar were the words I first heard about him, a fellow student al college back in the late seventies exhorting me to ‘come along to see this guy’ who was playing at Nottingham University, whose songs were invariably written around love.

I did go along, and I was stunned at his musicianship. I’d had the opportunity to borrow an album or two beforehand and was interested in John’s unique style of music already but this live performance was quite something apart. My friend and I had caught a bus from the city out to the University and polished off a drink in the Student Union bar before rushing to the stairs leading to the concert room. At the foot of the stairs stood two men, one with a mass of curly hair, an unruly beard and an earring. In his hands were a guitar with several effects pedals hanging from it. It was John Martyn and his roadie. We had a few quick words with him, wishing him a good gig whilst walking up the stairs, and he took the stage with a crate of beer beside him as we took our places sitting cross-legged on the floor. What transpired was a stunning and original display of innovative guitar virtuosity couple with John’s blues influenced trademark slurred vocals.

From that time around thirty years ago I’ve always felt a special affinity for John Martyn’s music. Not only for it’s excellence but also as a link back those happy and carefree times at college in Nottingham and the great friends that surrounded me in those days. This is perhaps the reason why I was so taken aback to hear the sad news of John’s passing this week. It feels very much like a part of my past has disappeared too.

Love Will Tear Us Apart

I was reminded of the song, Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division, recently.

I think this is a great song of its time (1980). Despite occasional general accusations of doom-laden lyrics by the group, a dark, cavernous sound, and their recurrent themes of bitterness, loss, death and sadness.

One cold winter’s morning some months ago I was walking through a local village, shivering, collar up against the cold biting wind when I heard this song being carried thinly on the frigid breeze and into my head. Unmistakably it was the sound of Joy Division, but why here?

Love in the Asylum

Something a little different today then, a poem.

Not just any piece of verse but quite possibly my favourite one, Dylan’s Thomas’s “Love in the Asylum”. I first read this poem in senior school and was immediately attracted to it. There was always something about the bohemian ways of Thomas that appealed to me but the darkness in this piece of work reaches particularly deep into a soul. For me it’s a cry of helplessness, frustration and longing. A longing for the love and companionship that any person deserves to have, in spite of one’s disability or problems.

Love in the Asylum
(Dylan Thomas)

A stranger has come
To share my room in the house not right in the head,
A girl mad as birds

Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.
Strait in the mazed bed
She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds

Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room,
At large as the dead,
Or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.

She has come possessed
Who admits the delusive light through the bouncing wall,
Possessed by the skies

She sleeps in the narrow trough yet she walks the dust
Yet raves at her will
On the madhouse boards worn thin by my walking tears.

And taken by light in her arms at long and dear last
I may without fail
Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars