Thanks to Robert, I spent most of last night with John Martyn. This is nothing new because John  Martyn features highly in this household. You could say that his music has been the soundtrack of my life with R, right from the very early hours. There was one particularly frantic dash across London in the summer of 1979 to hmv records where I spent most of my money on any and all of his albums before racing back to Victoria Station with seconds to spare before the boat train left.

So I watched the bbc documentary and of course he comes across first as a rite messer - the loudmouth, the wild one, the drugs and the drink. It's all there. But also there is the sadness, the quiet genius, the minute glimpses of deep loneliness and honesty. I read somewhere that he referred to himself as not a folksie, but a funksie. Whatever, his music made my life better in so many ways.