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Gary Miller's Blog

Feb 09 2017

'Mad Martins' Pre-Order

 

My exciting new project 'Mad Martins' is now available to pre-order from the official Mad Martins Bandcamp Page...

 

...as well as from the official Gary Miller Bandcamp Page...

 

'Mad Martins' depicts the extraordinary lives and times of the notorious Martin brothers, William, Jonathan and John, who were born in the late Eighteenth Century in the South Tyne area of Northumberland...

 

William Martin (1772-1851) was born at The Towhouse, one of a group of old greystone cottages standing on a plateau half a mile west of Bardon Mill, Haltwhistle, Northumberland, during a night of violent thunder and lightning on June 21st 1772. A philosopher, doggerel poet, pamphleteer, engraver and inventor; he aspired to be 'Renaissance Man' and aimed for the 'defeat of learned humbugs':

"Cheer up, you Northumberland and British Bards that can use the pen
And show your divine wisdom for the good of all men…
Cheer up, you Britons, your champion has the battle won,
All the world cannot penetrate the celestial armour he has him upon."

His many inventions included a Life Preserver, a Mechanical Horse, and a Flying Machine. Some of his discoveries and ideas came to him, like his brother Jonathan, in 'dreams and visions of the night'.

 

Jonathan Martin (1782-1838) from High Side, near Hexham, has gone down in history as 'the notorious incendiary' of York Minster. Six years in the Navy (both the Royal and the Merchant) when he was present at the Battle of Copenhagen, gave him a love of roving “which prevented him from settling down to regular employment”. A passionate religious fervour led him to indulge in frequent fits of rage against the clergy, coming to a head with his plot to assassinate the Bishop of Oxford and resulting in his committal as a lunatic at West Auckland and Gateshead Asylums, during which time his first wife died. Eventually released, after two escapes, he travelled to York where he issued dark warnings to the 'Clargy', accusing them of going to plays and balls, playing at cards, and drinking wine.

In Martin's own words: "Hear the word of the Lord Oh you blind Hipacrits, you Saarpents and Vipears of Hell, you wine Bibears and Beffe Yeaters, whose eyes stand out with Fatness… Oh repent for the Sourd of Justic's is at hand. J.M. our sincerest Friend.”

In the early morning of 2nd February 1829, he set fire to the Minster and was later confined in the Royal Bethlem Hospital (Bedlam) where he died in the same year that his son Richard committed suicide.

 

John Martin (1789-1854) was born July 19th 1789 in a one-roomed farm cottage at East Landends, Haydon Bridge, Northumberland, thirteenth and youngest child of Fenwick and Isabella. Although the family was living in poverty, John became the first Martin to attend school. The progressive Haydon Bridge Grammar school provided him with free schooling, and his parents with a cheap form of childcare. He showed an early talent for drawing, utilising the schoolroom walls, the doors of the villagers, and the sandbanks of the River Tyne. An apprenticeship as a heraldic painter with a High Friar Street coach builder in Newcastle was his first taste of work before he headed for London, marrying there at the age of 19 before having a picture accepted at the Royal Academy and later becoming "Historical Landscape Painter to the Princess Charlotte and Prince Leopold", as well as a noted book illustrator. Like his elder brother William, John was an 'all-rounder', devising sewage schemes for London and the Thames and proposals for railway systems, a lighthouse, floating harbour, and an 'Elastic Iron Ship'. He is most famous, however, as a New Romantic painter and mezzotint engraver, celebrated for his epic and melodramatic scenes of cataclysmic Biblical events crowded with tiny figures placed in vast architectural settings.

He paid Jonathan's legal expenses after the Minster fire and took Jonathan's son Richard into his family. He lived at Lindsey House in Chelsea where William died after spending the last few months of his life there.

John Martin died on the Isle of Man on February 17th, 1854.

 

'Mad Martins' is available as 50-track triple CD in deluxe book format, with free immediate full download, or in digital download format only.

Pre-order 'Mad Martins' here.

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