John Martyn and Aleister Crowley

 

I'm reading Small Hours: The Long Night of John Martyn  by Graeme Thomson (Omnibus Press 2024) which I'll probably polish off in a couple of days as it's a real page-turner. I just read this passage on page 106 about his time in the early 1970s living in Hastings with wife Beverley (sadly deceased this month see HERE and HERE) and stepson Wesley.

'Two doors down [from 10 Cobourg Place in the Old Town] stood Harpsicord House, where the writer, mystic, magician and "wickedest man in the world" Aleister Crowley had first lived when he moved to Hastings in advanced age, and where the occultist Rollo Ahmed later resided. Martyn was one of a number of musicians, notably Jimmy Page, but also David Bowie, who harboured a fascination with Crowley and his Thelemic ethical code: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."' 

It would be interesting to know more about Martyn's 'fascination' with AC. However, while Rollo Ahmed definitely lived at Harpsicord House, Crowley moved to the guesthouse Netherwood on The Ridge directly from The Bell Inn Aston Clinton on 1 February 1945. Which reminds me that I'm thinking of republishing Netherwood: Last Resort of Aleister Crowley in an affordable paperback edition, finances permitting. Watch this space .... see HERE for the second edition sold out for some time.

Here's another section from the Thomson biography about Hastings: [it] was not an environment where he could easily escape temptation. Numerous pubs were on his doorstep, and within them he was regarded as a local hero. "He was very loved in Hastings," says Wesley Kutner [his son with Beverley]. "He was like a god." "He would spend hours in the Hastings pubs telling stories to a bunch of piss artists, then bringing them all back home to party in our house," said Beverley Martin. "It was horrible ... it had become a non-stop party, with hangers-on banging on our door day and night." "The drug scene there was heavy [says Phill Brown]... Back then it was pretty seedy. There were a lot of musicians hanging around the Old Town, there was a good music scene going on [there still is] and it was cheaper. It was a definite decision for him and Beverley to move out and try to live a cleaner lifestyle."' [p.156]

An earlier post on John Martyn in Hastings HERE

A couple more Hastings characters

The Professionals has been released on Blu-ray and some excellent and very funny reviews can be found here and here.  Interesting to read that Jon Finch was pencilled in for the role of Doyle, but lost the part as he said he 'couldn't possibly play a policeman'; he'd also turned down playing James Bond after Sean Connery bowed out of the lucrative series.  Finch nevertheless enjoyed an eclectic career, serving in the SAS, playing Macbeth in Polanski's famous 1971 film (also featuring a young Keith Chegwin) and bringing Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius to the screen in The Final Programme (1973) rereleased on Blu-ray in 2013.  Finch spent his final years in Hastings and it seems that he led a fairly typical Old Town life - he was found dead in his flat at the end of 2012 aged 70.

This reminded me to check where John Martyn lived during his years in Hastings in the early 1970s: it turns out to have been No.10 Coburg Place, a couple of hundred yards from our house.  Live at Leeds, the album Island didn't want to release, was sold by Martyn by mail order from his house - printing his address on the music press advert unsurprisingly resulted in many an unwanted visitor.  Apparently in the early 1990s he did an impromptu concert by the fisherman's huts, although he had moved away from the town many years before.  It's well known that his song Over the Hill, off his most critically acclaimed record Solid Air, is about Hastings West Hill.  The photo above by Brian Cooke shows Martyn at home in Hastings on 8 August 1971 and was taken from this site.