Well, old Father Time finally caught up with John and he died on 29 January 2009. A bout of double pneumonia did for John but even after reading all the fulsome obituaries it still seemed unbelievable that he had really passed away this time. Throughout his life John was a magnet for misfortune and the list of ailments and calamities he survived was genuinely astounding: an exploding pancreas, a leg amputation, impalement on a fence post and a car crash with a cow were the most eye-catching, though during the research for this edition I discovered that he nearly died once from seizures and almost drowned after slamming his head into a rock while swimming underwater. Fist fights were a regular occurrence in John’s adult life and he often claimed that he had been shot at and stabbed a few times. In his day John was also a heroin user, fiendish cocaine addict and habitual hash head.

And then there was the booze … John Martyn liked a drink in the same way as vampires are partial to sinking their teeth into the creamy white neck of a chaste young girl. John adored drinking and loved pubs, saying they were the only place that lost souls really felt they belonged. Over the years John must have drank colossal amounts of vodka, rum and cider. His friend, the great jazz saxophonist Andy Sheppard, still talks with incredulity of seeing Martyn down a full bottle of Bacardi in one swig as he prepared for a gig. Along with the drugs, the alcohol powered John to amazing artistic achievements in the 1970s but it also scarred him later in life. For over forty years, he played a dangerous game of chance with the demon alcohol. In January 2009 it hacked him down … no matter what it says on his death certificate.

The first time I saw John Martyn play live was in tiny smoke-filled club above the Edinburgh Playhouse in 1980. John was at the top of his game on that sultry summer’s night, an effortlessly brilliant musician with an engaging stage manner that seemed to reinforce the musical vibe that he was a genuine, gentle peace-loving good guy who wouldn’t even talk badly to, never mind harm, a fly. When I mentioned this to a friend who vaguely knew his first wife, the reply was quick and to the point … ‘no he’s not, he’s a complete bastard!’ This dichotomy between the mild music and the malevolent, wild artiste never left me and a few years back I decided to write a book to try and find out who the real John Martyn was.

I first spoke to John after visiting his hometown in Kilkenny in the summer of 2004. Unable to speak to him during that visit I left a note behind the bar in his local boozer explaining who I was and why I wanted to write his life story. A couple of weeks later my mobile phone rang … ‘Hi, it’s Johnny Martyn, where are you? … Stornoway? What the fuck are you doing in Stornoway? I thought you were in Thomastown! I was going to take you for a drink!’ Once the confusion was cleared up, he agreed to help me and this book is the end result. Along the way I talked to acquaintances who genuinely adored John. His closest friend, Danny Thompson, summed it up best by telling Q in September 1989:

By way of complete contrast, one former manager refused to speak to me and sounded genuinely fearful at the mention of John’s name. Before he put the phone down he said:

That was the way it was with John. Some people loved him and talked fondly of a warm, generous and loving individual. Others genuinely loathed him and recalled tales of his violent temper, dark moods and drunken debacles.

Music critics were equally divided over Martyn’s abilities. In the early 1980s, when John was hopelessly out of fashion, NME still proclaimed that his music was the very definition of cool. As Nick Kent commented in the paper on 29 November 1980, John’s music at its height possesses that rarest of essences: real soul. Twenty years later, in December 2000, Uncut magazine’s David Stubbs argued that John had made ‘some of the most palpable, almost physically emotional, music ever recorded’. Other critics were less charitable and likened his singing to that of a horribly wounded bear. In NME, 9 October 1982, Julie Burchill – at her most acidic – dismissed John as someone who ‘cooked up aural monosodium glutamate in a melting-pot mind fit for jingles’.

The child of a broken marriage, Martyn was born Iain David McGeachy1 and was brought up in a Glasgow home that echoed to the sound of music. His dazzling ability as a guitarist soon won him acclaim playing alongside his mentor Hamish Imlach. After moving to London he became a fixture on the Soho folk scene, before hitching a ride with the formative label Island Records and releasing a string of the most influential and best loved albums of the 1970s. From Bless the Weather to Grace and Danger, Martyn forged a distinct sound, fusing acoustic and electric music, jazz, blues and reggae in a breathtaking, groundbreaking concoction. In an industry riddled with clones and copycats, no one sounded quite like him. Motivated by the soaring ecstasy of finding love and the sharp pain of losing it he crafted scores of beautiful songs. His herbally inspired live shows became the stuff of legend and he could sell out concert venues around the globe. He remains an influence on every fresh generation of rock stars – acts as diverse as U2, The Verve, China Crisis, Paolo Nutini, The Boy Who Trapped The Sun, Portishead and Beth Orton (who called him ‘The Guv’nor’) all cite John as a major inspiration.

But the music was only half the story. While he produced feather-light, gorgeous love songs, his own private life fell apart in a spectacular way and his two marriages were ripped asunder. Martyn’s life became blighted by drug dependency and chronic alcoholism. He took to hanging out with gangsters and earned a reputation as a heavy individual not to be messed with. Rumours of violence were commonplace. As one of his close colleagues said: ‘It’s hearsay, but it’s a lot of hearsay.’

The bass guitarist Dave Pegg told me how he had moments working with John when he looked in his eyes and was genuinely scared. John revelled in this notoriety, deliberately cultivating a bad-boy image and became a hellraiser to rival the likes of Keith Moon and Oliver Reed. His fellow Scots singer-songwriter Eddi Reader talks of nights on the town with John but admits that she needed the strength of Hercules just to keep up with him.

A renowned womaniser, Martyn claimed to have fathered twelve children in and out of wedlock (others say three children is a more realistic count). Eventually the frenzied lifestyle sapped his creativity and his records became less consistent; overproduced and riddled with drum machines. Back in the 1980s using those devices might have seemed brave and experimental – now they just sound terribly dated. His public profile steadily diminished and as his musical reputation faded he became better known for his personal frailties. While his celebrity admirers Phil Collins, Eric Clapton, Paul Weller and Dave Gilmour became global superstars, Martyn never even troubled the UK album chart top ten and eventually ended up bankrupt. But John had few regrets about the way things worked out – as he often said; he chose the route and the vehicle. When fame stared him in the face, John wilfully rejected it and opted instead for experimenting with all types of music, even hip hop.

Late on in life, Martyn lived in relative tranquillity with his long-term girlfriend in Ireland. But he remained a mess of contradictions. His music was a mirror-image of his personality – veering unsettlingly between the tender and the turbulent. The same man who could write a lyric as benign and beautiful as ‘Curl around me like a fern in the spring’ could also break the ribs of one of his managers during a vicious brawl. In a good mood he was the soul of any party and advocated the benefits of Buddhism and pacifism. John could also be an extremely generous man and an incurable romantic. On one of the occasions I met him, we drove through his teenage stomping ground in the South Side of Glasgow and passed one of the many Asian shops selling beautiful lengths of cloth for saris. John told the driver to stop and sent him into the shop to buy twenty pounds’ worth of the material. Half an hour later he presented it to his slightly bemused Irish girlfriend in their hotel room. But on other occasions his temper flared and he became stubborn, arrogant, angry and resentful about the music industry he despised. Even he admitted that on those occasions he was a nasty person, best avoided.

He was aware of the...