Solid Air: An In-Depth Look at the Classic Album by John Martyn

‘To me, Solid Air just sounds like life, both the good and the bad. Some of it sounds like being asleep. Some of it sounds like clouds going past. One moment you’re comforting your suicidal friend, one moment you’re stood in a train station waiting to go home. Another moment you’re settling down with a dream lover. There’s a moment you wake up at the seaside with your head full of cocaine nightmares. There’s a moment where the woman you love, you stole her from your best friend, but you know he’ll get lucky and steal her back, and for some reason you’d rather be the devil. There’s a moment where cities crumble. There’s a moment you’re a jelly roll baker who bakes the best jelly roll in town.’

Solid Air stands not just as John Martyn’s crowning achievement, but one of the defining records of the British folk scene, its stock having risen and risen over the forty years since its release. But what does it all mean? What is ‘solid air’? And is this really ‘folk’ music anyway? By turns impassioned and studious, with enough fresh insight to please even the most hardened John Martyn fan, this crisp, incisive e-book dives headlong into the deep waters of an album that, from beginning to end, runs the gauntlet between mysterious and straightforward, elusive and direct, complex and simple, asleep and awake. First-time writer Richard Connor speculates, theorises, enthuses and effuses on every single corner of the album- why trippy psychedelia sits so well next to acoustic three-minute pop songs about hope and love, why, no matter the quality of John Martyn’s other work, it’s still the firm favourite of fans and critics alike.

A perfect celebration of both a timeless album and an enormous talent, written by a megafan, this is an invaluable addition to the posthumous legend of John Martyn, OBE.

(Also includes an annotated selection of the writer's personal Top 75 John Martyn tracks, providing an overview of his whole career.)