John Martyn

By Garth Paulson

Two and a half hours can be a very long time. This is the approximate running time of John Martyn’s double-disc compilation Classics, and it is two and a half hours of some of the most boring music ever made.


John Martyn used to be a fairly major folkie in the seventies, when he actually did make songs that could be described as classics. A lot of those songs are on this album, but not in their original versions. That would have been downright decent.


What we get instead is a double disc of the versions he recorded in the late eighties and early nineties, the low point of his career.


What Classics sounds like is the adult contemporary music forced into the background of a cab ride–tolerable for a while but impossible to listen to for two and a half hours without falling asleep, or dying.