Sarah Jane Morris - Sweet Little Mystery (The Songs Of John Martyn) (2019)

Sarah Jane Morris is one of the most reliable interpreters in popular song. Ever since she began her career in Brechtian political big bands before going head-to-head with Jimmy Somerville on the Communards’ joyous version of “Don’t Leave Me This Way”, she has reimagined everyone from Bob Dylan and Sting to Stevie Wonder and Tracy Chapman. When Orphy Robinson recreated Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks last year she took the album’s twin centrepieces “Cyprus Avenue” and “Madame George”, the former in a belted-out blues holler, the latter as an intimate torch song.

Generally she mixes cover versions with her own compositions, but Sweet Little Mystery is devoted entirely to songs by John Martyn. Martyn, who died in 2009 aged just 60, had a career that spanned genres: he was a folk musician in the same orbit as Nick Drake and Jackson C Frank but then dived into jazz and rock and reggae and trip-hop, working with everyone from Phil Collins to Lee “Scratch” Perry. His songs are capable of tenderness and beauty, but his life was a mess. He married fellow-singer Beverley Kutner, subsumed her thriving career into a couple of duo albums and then effectively squashed it; throughout the 1970s limpid and beautiful music dedicated to love and to his children was made by a man awash with alcohol and drugs and, according to Kutner, prone to violence.

Morris’s versions, made with her long-time collaborator Tony Rémy on guitar, capture the beauty and the strangeness but not, perhaps, the dark undertow. The title track comes from Martyn’s Grace and Danger, a break-up album so raw that his label balked at releasing it for more than a year; Morris sings it warm but not desolate, against a blur of organ. “One World” is sunny, with dancing splashes of piano from Jason Rebello. An engagingly funky “May You Never” is less sentimental than Martyn’s performance.

All the wateriness of vibes and Echoplex on “Solid Air”, Martyn’s paean to Nick Drake, is stripped down to voice and bass guitar, a splendidly unnerving performance that culminates in a sped-up instrumental coda over which Morris repeats, “You’ve been walking your line . . . you’d better walk in your line”, alternately gruff and eldritch — the album’s most arresting moment.