Beverley Martyn, a singer-songwriter with a versatile, bluesy voice, who has died aged 79, was a star of the vibrant London folk scene in the late 1960s. She was best known for two albums, Stormbringer! and The Road to Ruin, recorded in 1970 with her then husband, the guitarist John Martyn – after which she had a long absence from the studio while raising a family and trying to deal with the fallout from their troubled marriage.
Having arrived in London at the age of 15 from Broad Heath school in Coventry to study drama at the Corona theatre school, Beverley Kutner, as she was then known, had found herself more attracted to singing in Soho folk clubs than to acting, and had turned down an offer from the Royal Shakespeare Company so that she could be a singer.
She worked with a jug band, the Levee Breakers, with whom she released a single, Babe I’m Leaving You (1965), when she was 18. She also began writing songs, singing at the Les Cousins, an all-night basement club in Greek Street, where other regulars included the guitarist Bert Jansch.
She and Jansch became a couple for a time, and he taught her to play the guitar, while she appeared on the cover of his 1965 album It Don’t Bother Me. Around that time she was signed to Decca’s new Deram label as a soloist, and – now called simply “Beverley” – released her second single, Happy New Year, in 1966, with backing from the ace session men Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones. The song, a Randy Newman composition, was, she complained, “chosen for me”, and was “too dark for the time and didn’t catch on”.
Two further singles followed, including Museum (1967), by Donovan, before a brief relationship with Paul Simon led to her playing at the Monterey pop festival in 1967 alongside Simon & Garfunkel, Jimi Hendrix and the Who. She featured on the 1968 Simon & Garfunkel album Bookends, providing a short spoken section on the song Fakin’ It, then travelled with them across the US, living for a while in San Francisco.
On her return to London Beverley met and married John Martyn, after which they decided to record together. The record producer Joe Boyd, famed for his work with Fairport Convention, the Incredible String Band and Nick Drake,
sent them to Woodstock in the US to record Stormbringer! with a host of musicians that included Levon Helm of the Band. Boyd felt that John “wasn’t really my cup of tea”, but “when Bev announced that she and John wanted to make an album together, I had no choice”.
The LP was dominated by songs written by John, with only three by Beverley, including her thoughtful Can’t Get the One I Want and Sweet Honesty. A similar scenario unfolded with The Road to Ruin, released later in 1970, although it did open with Beverley’s charming, breezy Primrose Hill. Boyd, for one, was frustrated that there were no real duets between the two. Both albums would be regarded as folk-rock classics, though they were not commercially successful at the time.
Afterwards John, who, Boyd recalled, was against the idea of sharing a stage with his wife, went back to being a solo artist, while for Beverley, as she admitted later, marriage meant “my career was over”. She stayed at home looking after her three children (Spenser and Mhairi from her marriage to John and Wesley from an earlier relationship), while also helping to look after the enigmatic and reclusive Drake, “feeding him home cooking and sometimes doing his laundry,” according to Boyd.
Over the years Beverley was the victim of increasingly abusive behaviour from her husband, who fell foul of drink and drugs; a circumstance that had reflections of her childhood in Coventry, where her father, a watchmaker, had been violent towards her mother.
In her pained 2011 memoir, Sweet Honesty, written two years after John’s death, Beverley wrote that he had given her a broken nose, a fractured inner ear and hairline fractures of the skull, “while one night he smashed a chair over me and my arm was damaged when I put it up to protect myself from the force of the blow. He wouldn’t let me call a doctor, let alone go to the hospital”. For Boyd, Beverley was “a lovely person who fell for a bad guy”.
By 1980 the marriage was over and Beverley had moved to Brighton, East Sussex, where she lived on social security and with financial help from friends. But she gradually revived her musical career in the 90s, playing a few shows with Jansch and the re-formed Levee Brothers, and touring with Loudon Wainwright III. In 1998 she released a low-key solo album, No Frills, accompanying herself on acoustic guitar.
In 2013 she was at the Royal Festival Hall in London for a Jansch tribute concert, and the following year she released her finest solo album, The Phoenix and the Turtle, which included Reckless Jane, a song she had begun writing in the 70s with Drake.
A 2018 album, Where the Good Times Are, revived her Deram recordings from the 60s, including impressive, previously unreleased songs, and in 2024 she was included on the compilation album Les Cousins, along with major stars who had appeared at the club.
Beverley is survived by Wesley and Mhairi.
• Beverley Martyn, singer-songwriter, born 24 March 1947; died 27 April 2026
