Iain David McGeachy OBE (11 September 1948 – 29 January 2009), known professionally as John Martyn, was a British singer-songwriter and guitarist. Over a 40-year career, he released 23 studio albums, and received frequent critical acclaim. The Times described him as “an electrifying guitarist and singer whose music blurred the boundaries between folk, jazz, rock and blues”.

Before he passed away this week at the age of 60, the singer and guitarist John Martyn had cheated death many times. A former heroin user and lifelong alcoholic who suffered numerous injuries in falls, he also seemed to treat being shot at, pancreatic failure, and a broken neck sustained when his car collided with a bull as occupational hazards.

In April 2003, Martyn’s morale was further tested when a burst cyst led to septicaemia and the amputation of his right leg below the knee. Typically he soldiered on, playing gigs in a wheelchair, and referencing his injury and subsequent weight gain with black humour. “Does anyone require the services of a one-legged Sumo wrestler?” he enquired at some of his last concerts.

Listening to Martyn’s illustrious back catalogue, one hears naivety, drugged-out experimentation, mid-life crisis and some Buddhism-influenced soul-searching. But it is for his 1973 masterpiece Solid Air that he will be remembered most. The influential album’s sublime-sounding pastoral folk and jazz won admirers in Paul Weller and Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, not least for its spellbinding title track, which voiced touching concern for Martyn’s friend and record label-mate, Nick Drake. A shy and vulnerable individual who was John Martyn’s opposite in terms of temperament, Drake, English folk’s tragic seer, would pass away 18 months later.