For the last three days, I’ve immersed myself in Graeme Thomson’s excellent new biography Small Hours: the long night of John Martyn, and Martyn’s music, which I’ve been listening to for 46 years. If you don’t know John’s work (though why else would you reading this?) here’s a playlist I made shortly after he died, aged sixty, in 2009. I discovered John Martyn in the mid-70s, when I was sixteen, and met him when I was 18, at a benefit gig for Liquorice. Writing for this fanzine had led to my studying in Nottingham, where I was in my first term at uni. I was on general hosting and recording duties. Martyn sound checked with a solid electric guitar, which he’d never used on stage…