Gavin Martin
I was saddened to hear Gavin Martin died of a heart attack this month. He was just 60 years old. There was a time when I was a teenager that the NME was massively important to me. For some readers the long, disturbing, access-all-areas on-the-road two-part 1993 feature about Depeche Mode in Hungary might be seen as Martin’s most memorable NME feature. Particularly as it is illustrated with suitably stark Anton Corbijn photography. Gavin Martin always wrote great reviews where he’d really enthuse about; Van Morrison, Lou Reed, Kevin Rowland, Elvis Costello, Mark E. Smith, and Bob Dylan which I would cut out and put inside the sleeves of the albums I bought on his recommendation. He was definitely one of the best writers NME ever had and probably the most passionate. Gavin also contributed to magazines like; Uncut and Vox and for 15 years was the chief music critic for The Daily Mirror.
In April 2017 Gavin released his debut album and sent me this link: Stream End Of The Trail Creative | Listen to GAVIN MARTIN – Talking Musical Revolutions playlist online for free on SoundCloud. We swapped a few more e-mails. Here is some of what we said ...
Harry Pye (HP) Hi again, I’ve listened to half your album so far and I’m impressed. Long Hard Road to be Free and My Daddy Went to Belson are my current favourites. Maybe we could do an interview via email?
Gavin Martin (GM) Sounds good to me!
HP I listened to your track I Want To Tell You Something a few times in a row. I like the sound of your voice and the way you speak. You mention Elvis Costello and Joe Strummer in I Want To Tell You Something – in the lyrics is it fair to say that ultimately you’re saying to a young person: "buy me a drink and I’ll tell you about how great the old days were." I’m wondering do you not think both Costello and (were he still alive) Strummer would hate this idea? Aren't they the kind of guys who are always searching for the latest new thing and believing nostalgia ain't what it used to be?
GM I saw Costello at The Ulster Hall St Patricks Day 1978 and the review ran handwritten in Alternative Ulster. I can send a copy if You’d like to see, I don’t have any copies of AU and Bob Dylan told me never to name drop but the late Ian Dury’s daughter brought the copy with the review round in it – found in her dad’s archive – and Its really a joke, parodying an ole punk character, I’d no more want to talk all night in a bar than any one would want to listen to me.
HP Are there any pals from your NME days that you were keen to send your album to and hear their responses – or did you just want to get this album out for personal reasons and couldn’t care less if anyone else thinks its good or bad?
GM Well I was at NME sooooo long that there’s lots a different eras of NME friends /associates. Some of them have been very supportive and bought early copies. John Mulvey editor of Uncut I knew some at NME. I tweeted him the first track and he responded "Not my thing Gavin, I’m afraid." I was gonna use it as a counterintuitive ad quote thus: "Not my thing Gavin, I’m afraid." John Mulvey , Editor Uncut. What makes John afraid? Find out here ...
HP Did you always intend I Want To Tell You Something to be the first track? Is there another song that nearly came first?
GM These pieces are like lost dogs hanging round my door and since they started hanging round lots more have come to stay. I gotta find a home for them, or build lots a kennels or they wont let me be. My label boss said that singles usually go first on most band albums. Well part from the fact I Want To Tell You Something (a title that conflates, purely by accident, two ace George Harrison tunes) is a single that aint never been released I aint most bands. I Want To Tell You Something was the first thing I ever wrote years ago by the river Hayle in Cornwall. I sat down and set out to write something else entirely I don’t know how the Record Mirror Melody Maker thing came to be but there was it was. When I finished this album and had to put all the pieces together I found it to use method I used to use writing features. Get a beginning and then an end. The rest will fall in place accordingly. I Want To first and Time Spills opens and close a chapter, trace a narrative arc in my humble opinion.
HP Another track on your new album is Thatcher & Savile. Did you have reservation about mentioning John Peel and Ken Clarke in this track? Thatcher giving Jimmy Savile a knighthood made him unstoppable and above the law – is there part of you that believes Thatcher just made a genuine mistake and was taken in by him in the same way everyone else was or do you genuinely believe she was evil through and through?
GM The farcical child abuse inquiry set up by Theresa May when she was at the Home Office, the stuff Edwina Currie wrote in her book about Peter Morrison, the PPS who was the last man left standing with Thatcher at the end of leadership, Corbyn calling off Geoffrey Dickens from investigating Islington care homes, Hague’s time at the Welsh Office kicking Bryn Estyn inquiry into the long grass, Kincora and on and on and on – it is not just Thatcher who has links to child rapists. She was repeatedly warned Not to give JS a knighthood before she actually did, hard to believe that British intelligence didn’t know about his actions either. In 1980 in one of my first drinking sessions at NME I was told “we know what goes on, we know Jimmy Savile goes up to Stoke Mandeville and fucks with corpses” this was all playground rumour too, as Johnny Rotten has recounted. The cultural appropriation that flows from Savile and the psychosexual Oedipal nature of the relationship between Thatcher and her cabinet has barely been touched on. Meanwhile it’s said that top Tories now refer to hedge funder moll May as mummy. Some may see this as highly Freudulent but I think sex and power are kind of indelibly and inextricably linked. I just liked the wee lyrical riff round Peel and the song quoted on his gravestone, a kind of clattering fall down the stairs what have we here, Alice down the rabbit hole introduction to what follows.
Plus I mean COME ON have you seen Peel’s old columns in Sounds, where he dressed up in school girls clothes? This was how the culture operated back then, eyelids barely blinked, all out in the open, I’ll put you over my knee young lady and all that assorted BS – the fucked up legacy of the public school massive, perhaps, but all highly questionable and problematic and, unbelievably, practically ignored completely in doorstopper tomes about the great mon Peel. A little, tiny, we, wee small, miniscule smidgeon of balance and or redress can’t be THAT harmful, can it? Or has John been canonised and I’ve missed a meet?
And Kenneth Clarke DID puff on his big cigar, jovially and often, and was very quick, the morning after Mark Williams Thomas Channel 4 doc on Savile aired, in fact, to issue a statement saying he’d no recollection of ever having met Sir Jimmy And puffing on his big cigar like a front man for the evil BAT spreading death and addiction across the globe Kenny Clarke did that, it’s how he made his HEAPS AND HEAPS of coin. And I didn’t even get round to mentioning ramifications leading from the failed legal action he took against young actor Ben Fellowes.
Things are very far from what they seem and Thatcher and Savile barely scratches the surface.
HP Can you tell me about the musicians you worked with on your album – how much control did you give them and were there any big surprises?
GM To me the astonishing thing about the music on my album is that it was all pre existing, the instrumental track for other songs by the artists concerned. I had worked with musicians before, and would be keen to do so again but I think we’d need to sit down and work on something together from scratch. I only got to make this album because Kelly, label boss and producer, said let’s do it. When we discussed it he was pretty sure that the best way to do it was record my words first, give them primacy then work out the backing track afterwards. On that basis I gave him complete control though of course I could have said no to any track I didn’t because I’m thrilled anyone would care enough to put the time and effort in to match the words to music. The big off the scale surprise was the Coquin Migale Dom Zilla remix on the Bowie track – completely unexpected very different for me and CM, loved it.
I have a U2 piece which isn’t exactly complimentary but Kelly is a MASSIVE U2 fan, they are really important to him on a personal level. Nonetheless he saw the humour in my piece and demo’d up an accompaniment to it.
It’ll be on the next album, this one is already too long for a single vinyl release but there’s a the voice track a Liam Fox piece and that U2 piece waiting for album two. If anyone buys or shows sufficient interest this one, that is.
HP Are you interested in art? Do you ever go and see exhibitions of paintings?
GM I enjoyed the Hockney exhibition at Tate Britain. I liked the room of his 90s Yorkshire Landscapes I think they were - very trippy, eye catching and pleasure creating
One final note, on his last birthday in December, Gavin Martin asked his friends on Facebook to make a donation to Refuge.
Refuge opened the world’s first refuge in Chiswick, West London, in 1971. It is now the country’s largest single provider of specialist accommodation and support to women and children escaping domestic violence and other forms of violence and abuse. On any given day Refuge supports more than 6,000 women, children and men.
If you’d like to make a donation to Refuge please visit: Donate to Refuge | Help Stop Domestic Violence
