Psychedelic Jukebox: [1967] John Martyn - Rolling Home

 

Across the Atlantic, in London’s burgeoning folk scene, a nineteen-year-old Glaswegian named John Martyn stepped into Tony Pike’s modest Putney studio with a guitar, a pocketful of songs, and an instinct for crossing borders—musical, emotional, and spiritual. Out of this low-budget session came London Conversation, Martyn’s debut album for Island Records, and within it, “Rolling Home,” a track that on the surface might appear as a gentle folk reverie, but which, in truth, quietly contains the DNA of the artist he would become: experimental, emotionally raw, and deeply attuned to the interplay of texture and narrative.

Martyn was the first solo white folk artist signed to Island Records, a label then dominated by Jamaican ska and rocksteady. Chris Blackwell’s endorsement of Martyn reflected the growing cultural crossover between the British folk revival and the spirit of artistic experimentation beginning to permeate London. The album was recorded for just £158 in a single day—a cost-saving measure, but also a creative constraint that lent the record its spontaneity and honesty. “Rolling Home” is nestled near the heart of the album and features a musical palette that, though modest, reaches beyond traditional folk. Overdubs of sitar and flute, unusual for a debuting folk singer in 1967, do not overwhelm the song but add shadows of otherness, hints of displacement and texture.

John Martyn—born Iain David McGeachy—grew up in a fractured environment. Raised largely by his grandmother in Glasgow following his parents’ separation, he was shaped by the city’s harshness: knife fights in schoolyards, a sense of limitation, and emotional isolation. Yet Martyn found solace and fascination in the music that surrounded him: from Scottish traditional ballads to the rising wave of blues, jazz, and fingerpicked folk. Davey Graham’s groundbreaking fusion of Eastern tunings with Western guitar forms was especially formative. By the time Martyn relocated to Kingston-upon-Thames, he had already begun integrating these sensibilities into a style that felt rooted but never provincial. Kingston's riverside folk clubs, especially the legendary Les Cousins, served as the crucible in which Martyn's voice was forged.

“Rolling Home” unfolds in a suspended state—both in motion and in reflection. Its lyrics trace an uncertain journey, not quite anchored in place or time. The opening lines—“The sun’s around my shoulders, the air’s beneath my feet / The wind is blowing colder, the birds are flying east”—establish a floating perspective. There's no specific location, no character firmly rooted in geography. Instead, Martyn’s narrator moves through a psychological landscape, where sensory perception gives way to emotional response.

“I hear her crying in the wind / I feel her lying in my mind”. These lines are delivered not with melodrama but with a calm ache, signaling a young man who already understands that emotional pain is often quiet, unresolvable, and carried inward. The refrain—“And thoughts of what I told her / return to me and slowly as I get older”—introduces a time slip, an awareness of aging and retrospection unusual for someone just entering adulthood. It’s not merely a break-up song, nor a homesick ramble; it is a mediation on the elasticity of memory, the way the mind folds back on itself while the body moves forward.

Unlike many contemporaneous folk tracks which rely solely on voice and acoustic guitar, “Rolling Home” introduces elements that point toward Martyn’s future as an innovator. The use of sitar and flute here is not gimmicky nor a reflection of the era’s psychedelic tropes; rather, it is contemplative, sparse, spiritual. The sitar doesn’t evoke exoticism so much as distance, the intangible spaces between memory and place. The flute offers no melodic counterpoint but rather exists in the periphery, like wind over empty hills.

It is in this subtle layering of texture that we glimpse the earliest incarnations of what Martyn would fully explore years later with the Echoplex, fuzz, and phase-shifting guitar manipulations on albums such as Stormbringer! (1970), Bless the Weather (1971), and his magnum opus Solid Air (1973). “Rolling Home” may not be a sonic revolution, but it is a philosophical overture to one.

At the heart of Martyn’s work lies a duality: his need for emotional intimacy and his instinct for sonic exploration. “Rolling Home” embodies both. The theme of return—both literal and imagined—would recur throughout his discography. This is the first articulation of what would later become his central motif: the desire to arrive somewhere, be it in love, in sound, or in spiritual clarity, while knowing that arrival may always be elusive. The “home” in the song is not a fixed place; it’s a feeling that flickers, shifts, and sometimes disappears.

It is significant, too, that Martyn—who would go on to struggle with addiction, violence, and emotional turbulence—presents in this early work a remarkable restraint, a gentleness unmarred by the raw force that would mark his later performances. This version of Martyn, then, is an open vessel, allowing the winds of change to pass through him without resistance. He is still very much in the act of becoming.

You might also love Bill Plummer's song "Journey to the East".

Sources:

1. https://www.thelineofbestfit.com/reviews/albums/john-martyn-the-island-years-137805
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Conversation
3. https://johnmartyn.com/lyrics/rolling-home/
4. https://www.forcedexposure.com/Artists/MARTYN.JOHN.html
5. https://www.allmusic.com/blog/post/in-appreciation-of-john-martyn-1948-2009