brief biography

Born in East London in 1951, Martin started writing and performing at the age of 17, playing at folk clubs in pubs in the East Ham, Ilford and Manor Park. (The Central, The General Havelock, The Denmark, plus the Eyes of Time art gallery) before moving to Cambridge (1969-72) where he played at and was later Treasurer and then President of the St Lawrence Folk Song Society, the Cambridge University folk club.

Moving back to London in the early seventies saw a decline and eventually cessation of output as little matters of earning a crust (teaching), raising a family and writing science text books (try an Amazon search…) took over.

The rediscovery of an old songbook in 2000 led to the start of an ‘archiving’ project, resulting in two CDs of early songs, ‘The Album that Never Was’ and ‘Back on the Cam’, which were independently produced and circulated to friends and acquaintances. The first few songs were recorded reasonably ‘straight’ and included some analogue recordings from the seventies, but as the project developed Martin started to experiment with arranging the songs using a combination of live takes and scored/synthesised orchestration with occasional sampling/looping.

This journey of musical rediscovery took a major step forward during an overnight stopover in Bahrain airport, waiting to fly into Beiruit in May 2003, when he passed the time mentally composing songs in a range of styles, which later formed the backbone of the CD ‘Waiting in Bahrain’, containing his first new songs for 25 years.

New songs continued to emerge (between bouts of textbook writing) and further CDs were produced, often inspired by travel. ‘Salawetu’ was followed by ‘My White Ambassador’ – a tribute to the car that epitomises travel in India. These were circulated across the continents as the range of contacts grew.

In 2007, Martin produced his sixth CD, ‘This Precious Moment’ whilst 2008 saw the release of The Mombassa Train followed by Boobies on the Beach in 2009.

All is Vanity in 2011 saw the start of online collaboration with Jon Garvey, and has expanded with several old friends joining in the fun on 2012's Sleeping Dogs, 2013's eclectic & electric German Hat Trick and 2014's more acoustic Random Acts of Kindness. These last two being co-produced with long-time collaborator Steve Franks.

Martin is curently working on his 13th CD, 'Unlucky fo Some'

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