While Solid Air is his most beloved album, Martyn didn't care for it, thinking it was too rushed, its patchwork nature betraying a lack of commitment. Later in 1973, Martyn devoted himself fiercely to his musical vision. That year Inside Out liquefied his psychic rift into lava and ocean spray, Martin's words became garbled. Inside Out is where he completely cuts the line to his barge folk roots, abandoning songwriting based on the specificity of improvisation that is cut and reassembled in the studio. A cult audiophile treasure and Martyn's personal favourite, it was a colossal commercial failure.
For a long time, if Solid Air it was a litmus test for future musicians, it was a hidden, whispered classic among the most dedicated box diggers. But in the early '90s, during a stint in Chicago, Martyn was exposed to hip-hop – and through his second son, Spenser – drum n' bass, acid house and jungle, which he incorporated into his own recordings. On his return to the UK, Martin signed with Go! Records, same label as Portishead. After Go! Co-founder Andy Macdonald sold it to Polygram, founded Independiente and brought Martyn with him—this time billed as “the godfather of trip-hop.” Martyn covered Portishead's “Glory Box” in 1998 The Church with a belland in the early 2000s, Solid Air was being reassessed as a harbinger of late-90s remixed pop sensibilities. Beth Orton, whose work would combine folk music with electronic decoration, was mentioned glowingly Solid Air as “one of the first ambient records I ever heard”. “Solid Air” was even included in a 2000 Q Magazine collection CD called Essential Chill Out.
And in November 1999, Martin's past resurfaced in another fortuitous way. A Volkswagen TV ad was widely seen, with a car full of attractive Gen X-ers wordlessly driving a drop-top Cabriolet through the idyllic nighttime hills of Northern California. He was honored in “Pink Moon”, posthumously bringing Nick Drake back in touch with the tasteful and adoring audience that eluded him in his lifetime. Towards the end of his life, Martin loathed questions about Drake and called his late friend's hipster cult “creepy” and “creepy”. Perhaps it stemmed from guilt: A month before Drake's suicide, he and Martyn had a vicious argument that was never resolved. When John phoned that Drake had died in November 1974, he laughed – an “alarming” laugh – and told Beverly curtly: “He did.” Then he left the room and disappeared for two days.
Symbolically, Martin left this room forever. If Solid Air at the crossroads of a battle between his quiet paternal and belligerent hedonistic side, the rest of his life would veer towards the latter: alcoholism, drug abuse, emotional abuse, physical abuse, divorce and ill health. For the rest of the 70s, as his vices swelled and his mental health declined, Martin's imagination persisted. His seventh album is released on Island, by Bless the weather until the 1980s Grace and Dangerit's amazing, each LP as unique, an acoustic subversion of the singer-songwriter movement as anything from Tim Buckley or Joni Mitchell. But it is Solid Air this exemplifies Martyn's art, a preoccupation with the in-between, as he said The Telegraph in 2006: “There's a void between the words and the music, and my voice lives right there.”
