... once you start reading about people you admire, invariably you find that in reality they are pretty despicable human beings (there are exceptions, of course). But does, or should, this negate or devalue their art? For example three of my cultural heroes are George Best, Alex Higgins and Frank Sinatra, all well-documented as seriously flawed individuals with unpleasant and often violently misogynistic traits amongst many others; but isn't this in some way balanced against the immeasurable joy and pleasure each of them brought to their respective fields? Listening to Sinatra, the knowledge that he was a bastard doesn't affect my appeciation of his talent and the emotional truth of his music; equally, knowing that Best and Higgins were at times hopeless, pathetic alcoholics doesn't take away the sublime beauty of their playing.

WAGS and John Martyn? I didn't read the article so I don't know you mean.

I know what you mean, but I try not to confuse the art with the artist. John Martyn's music is beautiful and I'll continue to listen to it, as unpleasant a man as he may have been.

Martyn was a loudmouth piss-artist. But that was part of his charm, at least back then.

Between 1967/69 I saw him several times at Les Cousins, the basement folk club in Soho's Greek Street performing to an audience of maybe 50 to 100 duffle coats and he was never less than spellbinding. Blessed with a fabulous voice, he was also a gifted acoustic guitar player with a uniquely aggressive style. Using a bewildering assortment of open tunings, he would pummel his battered acoustic into submission during every song.

Around 1969 I encountered John in Selmer's guitar shop on Charing Cross Road trying out a Gibson SG electric. I overheard him say to the assistant that he was trying to move away from the acoustic music.

He went on to make some great albums after embracing the Echoplex of course, but I still treasure those five early acoustic records (including the two he recorded with wife Beverley).

Sadly the booze got him in the end and the great BBC documentary filmed just as he lost his leg was painful to watch at times.

they weren't always very pleasant people then my CD shelves would be very empty indeed.

The same goes for all branches of the arts... it seems that Caravaggio was an absolute nutjob who did some incredibly unpleasant things, but that doesn't make his paintings any less profound or beautiful.

Flawed, not fraud.......let he who is without sin etc.....

I suspect most of our cultural and sporting icons are/were bastards to some degree. We just happen to know about the high profile ones.

I don't see many empty seats at Man Utd or Chelsea because of the antics of Rooney or Terry. I'm sure that Goerge Michaels new tour will sell out.

And no, I'm not equating the scale of their "crimes" as being on a par with wife-beating and abuse which can never be condoned.

However, if we avoided those whose antics were less than acceptable there wouldn't be much to choose from left would there?

I think most of his fans knew he was pretty unpleasant, but I chose to gloss over it until a friend of mine mentioned he had been making a guitar for him back at the time of The Apprentice, and had spent a lot of time with him. He refused to have anything more to do with him and had a few stories which I probably shouldn't repeat, but read the biography! However as others have said, it never stopped the music being able to constantly inspire me, and when he died I was really surprised by my reaction - me and Danny Baker, it seems! I felt sorry for the guy as he obviously had serious personality problems as well as musical genius.
Maybe all this coloured the reviewer's thoughts on the last album in the new issue - I thought it might deserve a lot more attention than it got, but I've only heard the title track which I think is gorgeous.

morally flawed individual, would we ignore his Theory of Relativity? There are questionable aspects of Stephen Hawking's character (his treatment of his first wife) but we accept Hawking Radiation and read his work.

I'm not a religous person and can't fully accept the idea that we should love the sinner and hate the sin but I do think it's a pretty good starting point.

If one of my team at work was consummately professional and amazing at his/her job, the fact that he or she is an arsehole wouldn't make him/her any less good at it.

(Actually, the reverse is true: everyone in my team is really nice, but a bit shit. Except me. I'm a bit shit, AND a complete twat.)

I will say this, though: I've never heard a lick of Martyn's stuff, and finding out what a terrible shit he was doesn't make me any keener to make the effort.

to do with public perception, I think.
Phil Spector is one where time will be the judge. How does murder play in the retelling of his story. Music accomplishments first, murderer second or the other way around?

in a technical sense - and the way artists appeal to our imaginations and hearts? After all some people have a soft spot for bands or musicians whose music they don't like BECAUSE of their behaviour good or bad.

There isn't really any gainsaying professional achievements in say science except through scientific rebuttal. Relativity etc can't be challenged on the basis of Einstein's 'image' or 'private life'

But to take up Bobs point - I think (in fact I know) that at work people can be less good at their jobs because despite their skills they are impossible to work with and they detrimentally affect the work and happiness of those around them.

I guess if somebody turns out to be incorrigibly appalling - rather than occasionally so - it must have an impact on how we listen to the music or read the books. This must also be right on the boundary of potential hypocrisy or weak thinking sometimes but its because music and reading are things we generally do for pleasure in a voluntary fashion.

There is a huge range there - and its not an exact science. Some artists who behave terribly - Lennon perhaps - you have sympathy with and it doesn't ruin the music. Some behave so badly - Glitter - its no longer possible to listen to. Some behave so well that people won't listen to them because they are too squeaky clean...

the line you've quoted from from May You Never takes on an extra resonance knowing what you know? If you can't reconcile those two facets of his personality, then imagine what he was going through.

And doesn't this make him even more fascinating as an artist?

I've often wondered about John Martyn's friendship with Nick Drake. We've only heard it - several times - from Martyn, but they seem a very odd pair to have any kind of friendship. Martyn doesn't sound like the kind of guy to put up with Nick's extreme shyness and introversion.

can't speak highly enough of Martyn.

They were both prodigious boozers though, so there's a similarity in that respect.

A friend of mine did a few gigs with him as support. He was a massive fan but JM was a complete c*nt the entire time and my pal ended up avoiding him as much as was humanly possible. Shame.

The danger for those who love his music is to romanticise the artist as a rumbustious, latter-day troubadour, which may have been part of his lyric charm to begin with. Not saying anyone here is doing this, by the way, but just making the point. At the time of his death there were some marvellous, heartfelt tributes, but I don't remember any of the women in his life joining in. Rightly or wrongly, I agree that the artwork has to stand apart from the individual or otherwise be ruined, but the fact that in the years he was getting wasted he was assaulting his wife should make listening to 'Grace and Danger' more difficult to be honest .

I tend to the opinion, voiced by lots of others here, that it is about the work. But then again, if I purchase music by an immoral shitbag, then some of my money goes to him. I'm not sure I'm comfortable about that.

of never meet your heroes you'll only be disappointed.

When he was alive I've no doubt whatsoever that Martyn was capable of being an utter bastard. Anyone who drinks and behaves as he did can't be doing it just to help himself get off to sleep at night, rather it was to blank out some part of himself that he was unable to control. On that score he was weak and cowardly, he was full of demons that revealed themselves with violence that was completely inexcusable. No argument here.

But to call him a "fraud" because of what he sang or wrote is to my mind an irrelevance when it comes to judging his work and performance of it. If anything Martyn The Devil is as valid a contributor to his music as Martyn The Angel. From that volatile personality of extreme opposites came the music and the performer.

No performer is the same "on stage" as "off stage". In that respect all art is a fraud because art is only one narrative about yourself or one reflection of your inner self. It isn't an expression of you in totality no matter how many artists might claim that they put "everything of themself" into a song or a painting or a book.

To drink and self-destruct like Martyn did regularly indicates to me that music for him was an outlet from his ego's natural inclination to fester squalidly in the violent gutter of life. Sometimes he saw the moon reflected in that gutter and with his music he reached for it. But if you believe in the theory of alternative universes then I'd wager there are plenty more alternative universes where Martyn dies sooner rather than later in one of life's gutters.

Or to put it another way music saved him from himself for some of the time but it didn't save his wife from him when music wasn't in the room with them both. I can't and wouldn't even start to try and defend anything he did outside of his music but if I was to judge all artists by their own moral code and behavioural standards I doubt I'd have any art in my life at all. Mythologising artists is also a waste of time in my book because I'm damn sure that most of them are selfish, self-obsessed f**k-ups who can only cope with the ugliness of the real world by running away from it. The untalented like myself have to grind their way through it and look for outlets that provide a brief respite from it.

As Loudon Wainwright says in this month's issue of Word, for a while his music and his performance allows people to stop and step outside of their lives and take a look at their life from another perspective. That's all art is if you look at it objectively in terms of how the majority of us live our lives. If we're lucky we're blessed with family, friends and art. The rest is a grindstone.

Despite knowing what he was capable of as a human being Martyn's music still does that for me, takes me out of myself and away from the grindstone and will always do so. But a little bit of my love for him as an artist died when I read that piece about him last month because I had to "meet him" as a man and judge him on the basis of what he did directly to another human being. But I don't have to make that kind of judgement when I meet an artist solely through his or her art. I can keep it away from the grindstone.

Luckily I'm of an age where I grew up learning about artists just by learning to appreciate their art through constant exposure to it without a running commentary from the media, without having to qualify my enjoyment of an artist by having to factor in society's increasing obsession with judging artist's by non-artistic standards in order to homogenise everything into a marketable product. We're obsessed with "knowing the real person" rather than the artist. Sorry, not interested.

I don't need to know the "real" person to know what their art does for and to me. I don't need myths or legends either. Just the end product and understanding the process that informs the artist is more than enough for me. To try and accommodate a real person with the artist is only chasing shadows. Unless the information about their personality and background adds something to the art it's just gossip and the real world crashing in to monopolise my opinion of them.

I don't want to judge the art I love by the standards of the real world because that's not what I need from art and artists to improve my quality of life. Art isn't about what is right and what is wrong.

I didn't go digging for the detail. It was presented in a magazine I regularly buy and has made me think again about the man and this also means his music.
To put artists on a pedestal as well is dangerous (especially if it's high up,etc) but seriously, if you were doing business with someone and then found out that they had been beating their spouse black and blue would you continue to do so? Just because they play guitar for a living are they above such reprehension?

'cos as soon as I read the article I thought 'Oh sod it', as it was going to make listening to his music - which I love - a bit more difficult. Especially so with some-one like martyn as you listen to may you never, couldn't love you more etc in the same way that you might read poetry..the songs seem to say something about love, respect, yearning.. that you couldn't express ao well yourself. So to find that your proxy voice is that of an arse who has consciously ruined the lives of others is rather a blow. More so as he's speaking of intimacy and love..less annoying with say, Lou Reed.

I will listen to the music again.But probably never enjoy it in quite the same way. Wisdom. A terrible thing

to be able to overlook wife beaters, violent thugs, murderers and even child molesters but Bono tries to save the world from hunger and AIDS and he's the scum of the earth. AND his Band's music is tainted with his terrible unforgiveable goodness too. Odd really.

and look at him!

As we've said hundreds of times on here before - literally hundreds, it's best to separate the rhyme from the crime.

... is that when he was at his worst, hurting his nearest and dearest badly, he had moments of clarity and self regret later, and it was then he produced some of his greatest works: The Grace And Danger and Piece by Piece albums in particular come to mind. However what is significant that all the songs on these albums is that JM's lyrics are all about his sadness at losing his wife and daughter's love (eg Serendipity, Angeline, Baby Please Come Home). At no point in any of these albums does he profess regret about his actions that prompted the circumstances and situation he was in. He was, unfortunately, incredibly self obsessed.
As I have posted here before, I was related to JM, tho' I never met him,(tried once, he was not interested), but I know plenty of people that did. Apparently he did mellow a bit when he lost his leg and moved to Ireland, but the self destruct dial was wound up to 11 by this time. And I wonder how Beverley felt when SHE listened to Grace And Danger?

As I argued in an earlier thread about this, I do enjoy reading good rock biographies and have a passing interest in the off-stage antics of the world's great hellraisers (Moonie, The Stones, Iggy, Morrison, G'n'R, The Pistols etc). But, without wishing to excuse the sort of unpleasantness that John Martyn and others perpetrated on others, it simply doesn't affect my perception of these people as artists and entertainers.

If I only watched classic movies starring actors and actresses who led blameless lives my knowledge about cinema would be zero, beyond maybe a few Disney cartoons. I do think Tom Cruise is a deluded fool for embracing Scientology and proselytising it but then again that's his business and I excuse him because he was so damn good in the likes of a "Few Good Men" and "Collateral".

over the years is how to divorce published information about musicians from their actual music. There's no point trying to judge someone you don't know based on information gleaned from ... oh dear where am I going with this ...

...we can only go by the published information... :-D

that is what has happened to his music for me post WAG article

can't help thinking that his latter years were some sort of karma

Surely we can distuinguish between man and music. Judging one on basis of the other seems to be mixing things. Good artists don't need to be good people. Music should be judged as music. Whether the tune arrived in a dream, was suggested from a friends comment or created by listening to other music is irrelevant to judging the song. Surely not a radical view?

According to Wikipedia, Godwin's Law is evoked "when someone inevitably criticizes some point made in the discussion by comparing it to beliefs held by Hitler and the Nazis".

The crucial point being "criticizes some point made"

Also according to Wiki, "Whether (Godwin's Law) applies to humorous use or references to oneself is open to interpretation, since this would not be a fallacious attack against a debate opponent."

In this case I think the latter is more applicable. ;-)