Robin Denselow 

Beverley Martyn: The Phoenix and the Turtle review – intriguing if uneven comeback for folk star

Longtime mainstay of the British folk scene returns with an intriguing album that's a vast improvement on her last comeback, writes Robin Denselow
  
  

Beverley Martyn
Unexpected range … Beverley Martyn Photograph: PR

A successful comeback, at last, for one of the celebrities of the 1960s folk scene. Beverley Kutner knew and worked with everyone, was taught guitar by Bert Jansch and invited by Paul Simon to play at the Monterey festival. Then she married John Martyn. In 1970 they recorded two albums together, Stormbringer! and The Road to Ruin, after which he went solo and she stopped performing. Her quietly bitter Women & Malt Whiskey is presumably a comment on what went wrong. This intriguing if uneven set is a vast improvement on her last solo release 13 years ago, and includes the gentle, previously unrecorded Reckless Jane, which she co-wrote in the 1970s with Nick Drake. Her singing is hit-and-miss, but she has unexpected range. Best is Levee Breaks, an effective, threatening reworking of the Memphis Minnie blues.

 

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