Sweet Little Mystery is distinctive vocalist Sarah Jane Morris’ loving tribute to legendary Scottish folk-rock-poet, John Martyn. With her essential, raw and resonating vocals, aided by consummate guitarist Tony Rémy, Morris locates the essence of her immensely talented yet turbulent subject.

Glaswegian John Martyn’s musical journey grew out of the creative folk-rock cauldron of the late 1960s. Initially, his was a fusion of American blues and the traditional Celtic music of the broader British Isles. Over time, Martyn took a more jazz-rock infused path.

When he died prematurely in 2009, afflicted by multiple health issues arising from years of hard living, Martyn left a legacy of 20 albums. He remains a seminal figure—yet maybe not widely known—in the development of British music. Many will recognise his contribution through collaborations with Eric Clapton (“May You Never”), and Phil Collins, who worked on two of Martyn’s albums. On his passing, Collins noted, “John Martyn was unique. Completely unique. He had such power, such emotion in his music that he could overwhelm the listener, even when it was just him and an acoustic guitar.”

For 23 years now, Morris’ signature encore has been Martyn’s Vietnam War protest song, I Don’tWant to Know About Evil. She raises its pleas into a stirring anthem for this and any other times.

As a rare female baritone, Morris identifies with the rich timbre of Martyn’s voice. She playfully notes, “I make Nina Simone sound high!” To listen to Martyn’s songs delivered in Morris’s rich vocal tones is to be marinated in the emotional landscape of his creative intent.

A generous number of teachers and collaborators have enriched Morris' journey as a vocal troubadour. As a teenager, caught in an inescapably existential family crisis, Morris found sanctuary and meaning in the drama department of her local technical college. There director Gordon Valance, introduced her to the Weimar German world of Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill and Hanss Eisler. In music and drama, they wrote of the marginal lives of the hustlers, prostitutes, the unemployed and the poor. Valence declared, “You've been totally alienated. I am the leading authority on Bertolt Brecht in the country. It's all about alienation. This is where you need to be.”

Keen to build on her Bretchian experiences, Morris entered the prestigious Central School of Speech and Drama in London, along with the likes of Kristin Scott Thomas, Rupert Everett and French and Saunders. They were all in each other’s first plays. However, after a year, she was undone by a crisis of confidence. In class conscious Britain, "I seemed to be the only person that wasn't connected with a famous mother or father or a wealthy family...”. But what stopped her in her tracks was a physical attack, which required a lengthy recovery.

Leaving drama school, Morris chanced it with an Italian band that was looking for Janis Joplin like qualities which she readily provided. Morris found singing to be a logical extension of her acting. “I knew how important text was... and by that time I'd already sought out great texts to sing.”

A fruitful collaboration with Tom Waits’ sideman Mark Ribot, enhanced her appreciation for the essential, authentic performance. Once in a recording session, when Morris questioned the quality of what she was laying down, Ribot responded, “there is no bum note. That is what we did, and that is what stays... that’s the way [Waits and Ribot] used to record, and that is how we should record."

Many of certain age might not recognise Morris’ name, yet as the under-acknowledged third member of the Communards, they are very likely to recall her distinctive and unique voice. It’s the voice, that with Jimmy Sommerville, encapsulates an era.

The Communards subversively-radical version of Don't Leave Me This Way leads in with a memorable entwining of her deep female-voice with Jimmy Somerville’s equally distinctive falsetto. Together they joyfully decouple any traditional concepts of gendered vocal roles. Together in Doc Martins, they tore open Thelma Houston’ silkier version from the proto-disco era of mid-seventies. “Don’t rock the boat”.

In a world of Thatcher, Reagan, Gorbachev and the emergence of AIDs, politics was the primary creative driver of the times; and music was the medium. In the UK, the more Mrs Thatcher and her cabinet of closetty, public-school ministers (nursey, whip me!) tried to rein in those naughty homosexuals, the more outrageous they and their associates became. Boy George, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Pet Shop Boys were barging out over uncharted territories, dragging the frontiers of popular culture and young suburbanites along with them. “Relax when you want to come”.''

“Queer” was aggressively out and proud. Armed with a political consciousness, it was never going back. All was “Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat”.

Somerville had been intrigued by recordings he’d heard of Morris but had trouble believing the voice belonged to a woman. Coincidentally, Somerville’s colleague in Bronski Beat, Richard Coles (now a vicar and favourite British TV panel-show guest) had been at the same Brechtian drama school as Morris. So he took Somerville along to a miners’ benefit where Morris was singing. There Sommerville saw with his own eyes who possessed the distinctive voice.

Morris and Somerville quickly found they were musically and politically aligned. "We just really got on, and he said that he'd love to do some singing with me," Morris remembers. They both appreciated their complete differences. We “loved [that] here was this very petite red-headed man with an incredibly high voice... [and a] very tall red-headed woman with an incredibly low voice; so it was already [a] reversal....”

Morris and Somerville met just as he and Coles were forming The Communards in 1985.They first sang together at another benefit, this time for a London gay book shop where they sang Billy Holliday's, Lover Man. “And the record company saw the reaction” Morris recalls, and “suddenly I'm asked to go to America to record the album with them [The Communards]”.

What followed was both intoxicating, and a cautionary tale of record company induced fame. “I went to New York with Jimmy and Rich. We hired an apartment. They had all of their friends come and stay. It was, like an orgy every night.”

Somerville also encapsulated the look of the era. “The flat top was all the rage. And the Ben Sherman t-shirts; I mean, it was a uniform at that point... because he had been so successful in Bronski Beat... he was very recognisable. We got in free into every club.”

Morris concedes, “I thought I would love that which would come with being a famous pop star. We were number one all over the world... it was a fantastic feeling. And then it was a very lonely feeling. In real-time, it was incredibly lonely.” Morris sums up the experience as “you're having your ass wiped, and you're being given this, that and the other free... it's not a real life.”

Morris grew to distrust the motives of people who were circulating through their fame bubble. It's not knowing "if that person following a bit down the street is following me because they're either going to mug me or they think they know me.” And as for Somerville; “people either wanted to bed Jimmy or they wanted to beat the fuck out of him.” Either way, “ they wanted something... Jimmy became recluse after all [that].”

In the late 80s, the massive gains of the sexual revolution of the previous 20 years were yet to flow to everyone equally. It remained a work in progress; as it must still be.

The record company planned to launch Morris out of the Communards into a full solo career. Signed up for world-wide release, her first song was a typically distinctive reworking of the early 70s R&B musing of infidelity, Me and Mrs Jones. ( "We both know that it's wrong/But it's much too strong/ To let it go now...").

Having worked and lived in a creative, expanding and entirely diverse milieu, it never occurred to Morris to change the song’s title to give to a more heteronormative take.

Suddenly the pruriently brutish British dailies and inane tabloids TV shows were butting into her life. They demanded she declare her sexuality—as if that’s what her rendition had to be about. She was asked three times onto the UK TV show, Newsbeat; “and they asked me, ‘are you are a lesbian?’.. as if that mattered.”

In the English speaking world, despite huge investment by the record company, it was if the song didn't exist. It went nowhere.

In the late 80s, it appears that what was chic for the boys was yet to transfer to women. In popular culture, it took KD Lang, four years later, to firmly carve out that space. But identity wasn’t even the issue for Morris. She could not answer a question that was to her, wrong-headed.

However, the song was a massive hit for her in Italy and Greece. Since then she’s had four number one hits in Italy. To this day, she plays arenas and opera houses there. She also still regularly shares the stage in the UK with Jimmy Somerville a couple of times a year (pandemic notwithstanding).

John Martyn's songs provide rich content for Morris. She enriches them with layers she brings from her personal experiences and hard-earned understandings. In Sweet Little Mysteries, Morris delivers revelatory, resonating renditions that translate and infuse the musical legacy of this talented and complex man.

...the sense is not of an easy biographical tribute, but a conjuring of Martyn's very spirit through heartfelt song and loving anecdote.
—The List

There’s no showbiz agenda here, just an amiable desire to share a love of the man and the music she grew up with.
—The Scotsman

Performance enquiries