When Beverley Kutner met her fellow singer-songwriter John Martyn in 1969, it would be fair to say that her career appeared to be the more promising of the two.
She was 21, had been signed at the age of 16 by George Martin, the Beatles’ producer, the future Led Zeppelin members Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones had played on her records and she had appeared on Simon & Garfunkel’s album Bookends.
John was a 20-year-old Scottish folk singer who had made a brace of unremarkable albums for Chris Blackwell’s Island label which did not sell. With his career seemingly going nowhere, Blackwell admitted he “didn’t know what to do with him” and offered to hand him over to Joe Boyd, producer of Pink Floyd, Fairport Convention and Nick Drake among others, and whose Witchseason Productions was already interested in signing Beverley.
Boyd was unenthusiastic about John but when the pair embarked upon a whirlwind romance, Boyd suddenly found he had two folk singers for the price of one. “When John started living with Beverley, I was stuck with him,” he recalled in his 2006 memoir, White Bicycles.
His solution was to make an album with Beverley using John as her backing guitarist and in the summer of 1969 Boyd sent the newlywed couple to record it in the upstate New York creative enclave of Woodstock, where to Beverley’s delight they met Bob Dylan, whom she called her “Jewish cowboy hero”.
However, John, with his dominant personality, was not content with merely being a backing musician and Stormbringer!, the album that emerged from the sessions, featured six of his songs and four by Beverley. “It seemed obvious to go as John and Beverly Martyn and to make an album together,” he said at the time. It was a fair point for the album was a folk-rock classic and marked his emergence as a singer and songwriter of obvious talent.
To all the world, John and Beverley Martyn appeared to be folk-rock’s new golden couple and a second album, Road to Ruin, followed later in 1970. Yet it was to be the last record she would make for almost 30 years as her husband launched a solo career and she was left — literally — holding the babies in their clifftop home in Hastings, East Sussex.
An imperial sequence of solo albums by John followed which blurred the boundaries between folk, jazz, rock and blues in thrilling fashion. Many of the finest songs on those records — Head and Heart, Over the Hill, Beverley, So Much in Love With You — were inspired by his wife; but she was no longer part of the creative team and was not even invited to contribute backing vocals.
What followed was a harrowing tale not only of a talented woman sacrificing her career for her husband but suffering unimaginable domestic violence and abuse along the way.
“Initially I trusted him with my life and I thought, ‘This is my soulmate’,” she said. “But John was wounded from the beginning. He mistrusted women because his mother had left him and he treated them really badly, physically and mentally.”
His substance abuse exacerbated their marital problems. “There was love there but the drink and the bad drugs changed his disposition and made life unbearable for anyone around him,” she recalled.
She later told her story in an unflinching memoir titled Sweet Honesty, named after one of her songs on Stormbringer!. At one point he told her: “You’ll never get away from me. I will hunt you down and kill you and whoever you are with.”
She admitted that she was “terrified” but eventually plucked up the courage to leave in 1979, taking with her their two children, Mhairi and Spencer, and her first son, Wesley, from a previous relationship.
The break-up inspired Martyn’s last great album, 1980’s Grace and Danger, full of potent songs such as Hurt in Your Heart, Baby Please Come Home and Our Love in which he laid bare the pain and misery of divorce. After that he continued to record but his songwriting fell into decline and he was never the same force again.
“Was I his muse?” Beverley wondered. “Who knows? But we would play together a lot in the evenings when the kids were in bed, and I think he missed that vibe.”
In 1998 she attempted a low-key comeback when she toured as the support act to Loudon Wainwright and released the album No Frills, yet few paid much attention.
However, following her ex-husband’s death from pneumonia in 2009 (obituary, January 30, 2009) she felt that “something changed and things opened up for me again”. She published her memoir in 2011 and recorded the 2014 album The Phoenix and the Turtle, which returned her to the spotlight, not least because it included Reckless Jane, a previously unheard song she had written with the cult hero Nick Drake shortly before his death in 1974.
“I’m not angry about what happened. Why turn myself into a bitter old woman?” she said at the time of the album’s release. “But it was a great relief finally to do something on my own terms. That was a dream I’d almost given up on.”
She was born Beverley Kutner in 1947 in Coventry and recalled standing on a school desk at the age of five and singing Ella Mae Morse’s The Blacksmith Blues. It gave her a taste for performing, first in school plays and then singing in the local clubs, chaperoned by an older sister who was at art school.
At 16 she left for London and drama school. Hanging out in the capital’s folk clubs she formed her first band, the Levee Breakers. Named after Memphis Minnie’s song When the Levee Breaks which was part of her repertoire, the group was signed in 1965 by George Martin to the Beatles’ label Parlophone and released the single Babe I’m Leaving You.
By then she was in a relationship with Bert Jansch (obituary, October 6, 2011) who taught her to play the guitar, and as a solo singer she became the first artist on Decca’s newly created Deram label. Cat Stevens was the second. Several singles followed, released simply under the name Beverley, featuring songs by Randy Newman and Donovan as well as her own compositions.
Meanwhile she had broken up with Jansch and begun an on-off relationship with Paul Simon, who had left Art Garfunkel behind in America and was trying his hand as a solo singer in Britain’s folk clubs.
“He had a Napoleon complex. Very intelligent. Moody, but witty,” she later said but by 1967 she was in America with him, playing her songs as part of Simon & Garfunkel’s set at the Monterey Pop Festival. She also recorded with the duo on their hit single Fakin’ It and may even have been the girl who “does what she wants to do” in Simon’s lyric.
After several months spent in San Francisco as the summer of love was taking off she returned to Britain with flowers in her hair and a suitcase full of hippy kaftans to cut a striking figure in the folk clubs, where she met John Martyn.
Their relationship launched his career and prematurely curtailed hers — and as things stand he turned out to be the greater talent. But the tantalising possibility remains that if she had continued making music after 1970, Beverley Martyn might have eclipsed him and become Britain’s answer to Joni Mitchell.
Beverley Martyn, singer and songwriter, was born on March 24, 1947. She died of undisclosed causes on April 27, 2026, aged 79