John Martyn’s Grace and Danger was released 45 years ago this month. It is probably John Martyn’s masterpiece, although it is a howl of pain. It is our Album of the Month over on our Facebook group.
It had been recorded fifteen months earlier, during the summer of 1979, with a tight group of musicians—Phil Collins (that Phil Collins) on drums, John Giblin on bass, and Tommy Eyre on keyboards, with Martyn playing guitars.
But Island Records boss Chris Blackwell was so distressed by it when he heard it that he decided not to release it straightaway. If that seems like eccentric behaviour by a record label it was because Blackwell was good friends with both John and Beverley Martin, and Grace and Danger is John’s response to the breakdown of their marriage.
It’s possible to think that it would have been difficult to be married to John Martyn. At the One World site, Johnny Black says of this period,
His drug consumption was prodigious; he embarked on an affair with singer-songwriter Claire Hammill while he was married to Beverley; he insulted his audiences and picked fights with promoters, musicians, journalists and pretty much anyone who got in range.
Somewhere in the same article, Martyn does acknowledge that the end of the marriage was his fault. All the same, that doesn’t mean that he wouldn’t be upset by it. It did hit him hard: he disappeared further into a welter of drink and drugs.
One of the reasons I think that Grace and Danger is Martyn’s masterpiece is that you can drop a stylus anywhere on either side—if you’re listening on vinyl—and you recognise the sound instantly. Some of that is down to Martyn’s unmistakable guitar style, but the bassist John Giblin deserves a lot of the credit. He played with Collins in the jazz-rock group Brand X, and there are times on here that he sounds like the great jazz-rock bass player Jaco Pastorius, all fluid lines and bending notes.
All but one of the tracks on the record were written by Martyn—the exception was The Splinters’ Johnny Too Bad, from The Harder They Come, which Martyn may have taken as being semi-autobiographical.
The others are all takes on the break-up, from the first song to the last. The titles tell their own story: Hurt in Your Heart, Baby Please Come Home, and Our Love, for example. And so do the lyrics, not so much heart on the sleeve as all over the front of his shirt. On the closing track, Our Love, for example:
Our love
Once was you and me against this world
Made a man from a boy
And made a woman from a little girl
Our love
Once was deeper than the darkest blue could be
Now I find I have to search my mind
To find the smallest trace of you in me
Phil Collins was probably cooler in 1979, immediately post-Genesis, than he is in hindsight, although seems hard to believe. But Collins was always a good drummer. And Grace and Danger was recorded two years before Collins launched his solo career with the blandfest that is In The Air Tonight. Collins was also going through a painful divorce, which he also captured on record in his solo debut Face Value, and he and Martyn bonded over their shared experience.
Chris Blackwell always gets a bad rep in the telling of the Grace and Danger story for delaying its release. Martyn was apoplectic about it, telling Blackwell,
‘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.’
Certainly it caused the end of Martyn’s professional relationship with Island Records. But maybe Blackwell just thought that ‘It’s not all about you, John’. I think we can believe that he was acting in both their interests, not releasing a record this raw while the emotional wounds were so exposed.
Grace and Danger wasn’t a commercial success—how could it be?—but it was a critical success. It has certainly stood the test of time.
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Header photo of John Martyn playing at the University of Bristol in 1978 is by Tim Duncan, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0
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