“I recognise that face over there as well”, said Martin as we stood on the balcony drinking Guinness.

Tonight was always going to be about those haunting memories from the past because, after all, we’d all grown up with this music.

For me it had started all those years ago at college. The lunchtimes spent in music rooms trying to learn the fingering and listening to the records over and over again before those lunchtime concerts in the old deserted drama hut. No surprise then that there were faces here from those times.

“The support sounds like the main act”, I said to Martin but even that didn’t really matter because then he appeared. Wheeled on, arms outstretched like an aeroplane he reached for the microphone and said, “Gentlemen, adjust your goggles - we’re off”, and for those of us sitting and listening we were.

Time changes us all and for Martyn it’s been a tough road of late. Now in a wheelchair after loosing part of a leg to a burst cyst he sits like Falstaff by the fire listening to the band, urging on Martin Winning’s saxophone as he strokes the guitar on his lap.

“I hope no one stickles, we don’t play the tracks in the same order as the album - too many guitar changes for sticklers”, he says tapping at the arrangement of fuzzbox, phase-shifter, and Echoplex into which this guitar is plugged and then the music washes over us again.

This tour of Solid Air (acknowledged by many as his best album) sees the music evolve to cover all of Martyn’s many musical interests. His 1977 album One World led to many crowning him the ‘Father of Trip-Hop” and there were elements of that style along with folk, jazz and blues here tonight.

But at the center of it all was the man the support called “The Guv’nor” and those final numbers when he put down the guitar to sing Rock, Salt and Nails and Never Let Me Go were the most touching. Fragile and strong he held the audience and I wondered just what he could still achieve if he had the wider recognition late in life that Brian Wilson found.

Let’s hope it happens before it’s too late …