{"id":145,"date":"2003-10-22T15:03:00","date_gmt":"2003-10-22T15:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/?p=145"},"modified":"2003-10-22T15:03:00","modified_gmt":"2003-10-22T15:03:00","slug":"elliott-smith-and-john-martyn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/2003\/10\/elliott-smith-and-john-martyn\/","title":{"rendered":"Elliott Smith and John Martyn"},"content":{"rendered":"

I didn’t take to Elliott Smith’s<\/a> music at first. I checked him out because reviews described the sort of act I normally like. I found the singles I bought a bit wimpy, lacking in substance. Then I saw him on the first night of Glastonbury 2000. He was following the highly touted (and hugely overrated) Badly Drawn Boy in the New Bands Tent. I was knocked out. He had a full band and a sound reminiscent of late period McCartney Beatles. A lot of the songs were about heartache and the meaninglessness of life. They were beautiful pop constructions whose beauty and zest offset the mournfulness of the lyrics. I bought his latest (and, as I’ve since discovered, best) album Figure Eight<\/i> from a festival stall the next day.<\/p>\n

Elliot Smith killed himself yesterday. He was 34, ten years older than Matthew Jay, who I also saw play that day, and who also took his own life earlier this month. I haven’t got anything to say about Smith’s death that I haven’t already said about Jay, below<\/a>. Both of them appear in my novel about that year’s Glasto, ‘Festival’. After reading about Smith’s suicide, I superstitiously went to the John Martyn<\/a> website to check on John’s health. He’s one of my favourite singer-songwriters. I’ve seen him many times since 1976 and did a long interview with him in ’78. I had to push to get him included in ‘Festival’, as he wasn’t terribly hip, but was able to convince my editor on the grounds that he’d appeared on a recent dance hit.<\/p>\n

John’s had plenty of ups and downs, many of them chronicled in his songs. He had a car crash last year. In April this year, he had a leg amputated below the knee. He’s lost a lot of weight since then and, from a brief video clip I saw, seems to be in good spirits. He plays his first gigs since the operation on November the 7th and 8th, in Ireland.<\/p>\n

Welcome back, John.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I didn’t take to Elliott Smith’s music at first. I checked him out because reviews described the sort of act I normally like. I found the singles I bought a bit wimpy, lacking in substance. Then I saw him on the first night of Glastonbury 2000. He was following the highly touted (and hugely overrated) Badly Drawn Boy in the New Bands Tent. I was knocked out. He had a full band and a sound reminiscent of late period McCartney Beatles. A lot of the songs were about heartache and the meaninglessness of life. They were beautiful pop constructions whose beauty and zest offset the mournfulness of the lyrics. I bought his latest (and, as I’ve since discovered, best) album Figure Eight from a festival…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbelbin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}