Juan Martin is a formidably articulate musician with an unusual wide-minded approach to his own work and that of other musicians, not only in his own field, but those from the past and present in every conceivable area of music.

An outwardly quiet half-Spanish gentleman, Juan is an incredibly able, competent and imaginative acoustic guitarist, the toast of classical concert halls, but who can nevertheless enthrall a rock audience when supporting at the Hammersmith Odeons of this world, and who can make albums such as Music Of A Picture, which has recently been released by WEA.

Before I relate the conversation we had a while ago at his North London home, let me briefly describe some of Juan's achievements over the past few years...

CREDITS

I suppose, if pigeon-holing were really necessary, you'd describe Mr Martin as a Flamenco guitarist, who normally performs and records as a soloist. His first Wigmore Hall concert in 1970 was a sell-out, and he has gone on to sell out the Queen Elizabeth Hall, as well as over thirty other London recital venues.

In 1976, he had a 'turntable hit' (in recording industry parlance). Other records followed, both solo and with symphony orchestras, and of course I'm sure you are familiar with his hit single 'Serenade', which was the love theme from 'The Thorn Birds' TV mini-series in 1984.

On top of that, he's produced what has become a standard text book for Flamenco players, the Juan Martin Guitar Method (United Music Publishers). There are also 26 lessons on cassette tape, plus two other books which are transcriptions of solos from his first solo album.

More recently, there has been the album he made with Simon Phillips and Tony Hymas, which strays into a jazz-rock flavour, plus his acclaimed Music Of A Picture mentioned earlier. Altogether he's made eight albums to date, four of them solo, another with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, plus the ones mentioned above. His arsenal, if you like, of instruments comprises the following:

Two Ovations - one hand-built with a Flamenco action, the other a classical.
One Takamine, with pickups.
An early Fender Stratocaster, which he enjoys for "the aggression" and the fun of pull-offs and hammering on.
His most-used - a 1972 David Rubio custom built classical guitar.
A 1972 Sobrinos de Esteso, which has been a favourite on seven albums.

SYNTHETIC TEXTURES

His current album on the WEA label is Music Of A Picture, in which Juan has written pieces of music for certain works of painted art, such as Picasso's 'Guernica', Lowry's 'GoingTo Work', and many others. To produce this, Juan teamed up with American horn player and keyboardist Mark Isham. Juan long ago saw the possibilities of synthesizer textures combining with the overlaid fluidity of the acoustic guitar to produce a special kind of musical experience, and so when we spoke, I first asked him about the recording of this album.

Juan: "We did a lot of preparation here at my home. I first met Mark through my manager, Fraser Kennedy, about five years ago, and he came over from America to see me. I played some solo stuff for him, and we took off from there. When I had the idea of writing music to go with paintings, I asked Mark over again. He brought his Prophet-5 synth and a soprano saxophone. The first piece we worked on was 'Model Standing By A Wicker Chair'.

Mark was, and is, an ideal musical partner. First of all, he'd been a classical trumpeter, and then he started playing a lot of jazz in New York, and then he got more and more involved with the synthesizer. Incidentally, he's a good piano player as well! He'd also done a lot of work with Van Morrison, so he'd had a lot of commercial experience as well as in the studio. Peter Van Hook was also working with Morrison at the time. So I worked with Mark, and demo'ed a couple of things as well as some things with Peter Van Hook, such as 'Flight To Paradise', which is not on the album as it's not part of the paintings project. So Mark would play into a Revox tape recorder, I'd play acoustically, and we'd keep at a low level to hear what we were doing"

Question: When you wrote these pieces for this album, were you aware of exactly what you were going to do, or did the factor of Mark help delineate the final shape?

Juan: "Well, I'd written the pieces. It started with Picasso, as I'd played at his 90th birthday celebrations. So when Mark came in, it was to finished writing, but without the magical textures from his synths and saxes, which we then proceeded to work out."

Question: How did the 'Guernica' piece and its video come about? (Interviewer's note: Juan has made a remarkably moving soundtrack, all solo guitar, over scenes from Guernica, a town in Spain bombed by the Luftwaffe during the Spanish Civil War. The visuals are actual film of Heinkels and Junkers aircraft bombing everything in sight, interspersed with close-ups of the Picasso painting of Guernica, as well as more actual footage shot on the ground at the time. The whole combines into an incredible montage of the event, but really captures the human suffering and the futility of it all. The soundtrack is sensitively and tear-jerkily written and performed. See it if you can.)

Juan: "That was quite a bit later. I was playing, surrounded by original Picasso paintings, and just improvised from looking at them. These were the original musical sketches, but then I worked from prints, as I'm not wealthy enough to own any of the original paintings! I had the prints up on the wall, and anyway, I'm influenced by painting... my mother is a painter so it's in the blood. I grew up surrounded by paintings. Thus the two most beautiful things in the world... music and pictures have been a natural marriage for me since childhood."

Question: Do you paint yourself?

Juan: "Yes I do. There was a time when I had to decide whether to take up the guitar or the paintbrush. Probably I always knew that I was a better instrumentalist than a painter. I find music more immediate, as music can create instant imagery with sound. With painting, you add a layer... you take off a layer. It's more like the recording process. In the sense of the 24-track studio, you can layer a coat of this or that, touch something up or do an edit. It's like, get rid of that lemon and replace it with something totally different. But the thing of actual performance is great in that you don't have to labour over it.

You labour over the technique for years, but having evolved that technique, it's wonderful to be able to indulge. It's a job, but one's creativity in the truest sense will not happen if you are too geared to commerciality.

It's very hard because we are very insecure as musicians. On the other hand, if you really believe in your ability, and you're trying to make a go of it as a musician, you've got to have some real faith in yourself. A lot of the payment is in the pleasure of working with other creative musicians... you learn the whole time, like a continual student.

Like starting with Picasso... the Picasso Portraits album. Tony Fernandez (who was with Rick Wakeman at the time) and some musicians from The Strawbs, plus a friend at the BBC put me in touch and so we cut a demo. This was around the time that I met Gordon Giltrap. Now, we knew about each other, as guitarists, but Gordon offered to introduce me to Redan Studios in Queensway, which was very generous of him. I then did an album with Tony Hymas and Simon Phillips (who were both with Jeff Beck at the time). Tony said he was willing to rehearse. So we combined grand piano, Prophet and Flamenco guitar to make a very 'up' album. Tony is prolific in his knowledge of scales, and has wonderful fingers! I also did some tracks with Ian Mosely, the drummer for Steve Hackett, with John Perry as bass player. Polydor eventually put the album out, and after that, I moved to WEA, and set about the completion of the Picasso Portraits album.

I realised it was important to talk in the dialect of today. Totally traditional Flamenco music, even if people admired your technique, wasn't a great help.

My first commercial venture was at Abbey Road Studios in 1976, from which I had a 'turntable hit', but then I did my first album with orchestra. It was quite an experience to be put in a box at Abbey Road Studio 3 with this orchestra of top session musicians. They had a regard for me, but still it was a new experience. Herbie Flowers was the bass player, and he introduced me to the electronic tuner.

Nevertheless, I realised that there was a general public out there who would be interested in what I was trying to do. I knew from grass roots experience that this was so. Out came Romance on EMI in 1978. During the same year I wrote my Guitar Method manual, which has since become a standard work, and I also recorded a tape of 26 lessons. That sold out its first print, in Japan and the USA as well as Britain. I get phone calls and letters from places like Poland, asking for copies, that are impossible to obtain there. But it's very nice to give."

MIKING TECHNIQUE

Question: Tell me about your miking techniques. I should imagine with an acoustic guitar that there are a myriad ways of recording, depending upon environment and the instrument itself?

Juan: "The variables are immense. The only things I trust are my ears. Every room, every acoustic situation is different. You can't always say that last time I used so-and-so mics X-feet away. I work basically on the idea of miking two and a half palm-widths away. On Picasso Portraits I used U87 Neumann mics placed to the right of the guitar's soundboard.

Previous to that, whilst at EMI Abbey Road, I used, thanks to the helpfulness of the engineer and his desire to experiment, an old BBC mic, the STC 4038, which is a ribbon microphone. Set up on a boom, the STC 4038 gives a wonderful tone on the acoustic guitar. Ribbon mics don't over-emphasise the top-end, which a lot of AKG mics do, for example. In true terms, this is anti-musical; putting extra top-end on the guitar doesn't necessarily mean extra quality.

The STC 4038 mic gives a wonderful balanced sound. At the time of recording, the engineers continually moved the mic, because its position is very critical. Moving a microphone around the bridge area of a guitar matters by inches. When I did the album Serenade with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at Abbey Road in 1984, which included the hit single (that was actually recorded in 1983), I again used the STC 4038 mic. Abbey Road Studios has a huge stock of microphones, and so one has got to be careful during test runs; you don't want to give everything in a performance until all is right.

Guitars will sound different from day to day - they are living things. The wood is affected by humidity and, of course, air conditioning can be a problem. One should keep trying to find this perfect sound, which you know doesn't exist, but your ear is the guide to find the right emotion. This doesn't necessarily mean sticking to one microphone on all tracks. One could add in other mics on different tracks with this idea, depending on whether you are working with an orchestra or an electric small group."

Question: How successful have you been in using more than one mic at the same time, say, in stereo?

Juan: "On my solo album last year I used three mics simultaneously to record the guitar, but you need to watch out for phase problems. I did it at Flame Studios near Manor House, with Phil de Costa and Mel Simpson. We used one U67 valve mic from Neumann, which gave an extra fatness - great for Flamenco. Traditional Flamenco guitar lacks body by conventional standards, so the slight harmonic distortion caused by the U67 valve mic did nothing but flatter the sound. We used this U67, plus two Neumann U87s on either side. This meant I had to play very cleanly indeed, especially on slides and such like. A good Flamenco guitar should not be entirely buzz-free anyway, because that is part of its sound. But a mic to the left of the fretboard picked up far too much. Still, we recorded each mic on a separate track, giving us an option to use what we wanted on the mixdown.

That approach contrasts totally with any situation arising at, say, BBC Radio 3, where they don't even bother with reverb. If you sound like a drain, then that's your playing... If you sound like an angel, then that's your playing too! It's a bit of an ultimate test. Very good from the point of view of your performance, but if you are doing an album, then you want to get the sound that you feel to be one that works best from the viewpoint of giving people the most pleasure, and that's a totally different story."

Question: How do you manage to adapt yourself so quickly and adroitly from one recording or performance situation to another?

Juan: "One reason I get on well in all spheres is that I like to exhaust all the possibilities of miking and sound production. I have yet to record a solo album that I'm completely happy with. I play better in concert."

Question: So what about an album recorded in concert?"

Juan: "It's getting it done well enough... performance, sound, audience."

Question: Do you think you would perform as well, take the same risks, at a concert you knew was being recorded?

Juan: "Once into it, all would be OK, after a couple of pieces. The ideal would be two or three days at the same venue, record everything, and pick the best later."

Question: Are you at the mercy of strange PA systems, mics, acoustics and mixers as you move from gig to gig?

Juan: "When I'm doing solo tours, I sometimes have to use the PA that is there. Like in Hull the other day. It was a very dead-sounding hall, but last year when playing it they had a digital echo. This year, it had been stolen! So I worked at the sound, and by moving equipment, got a sound approximating what I wanted."

Question: Do you ever use monitors?

Juan: "Only when the hall sound is very dead. I like to hear the sound that is going out, which no monitor, with its restricted frequency range, can carry. Oddly enough, my 'good' acoustics are the worst for a rock band. In 1982 I did an Elkie Brooks tour and Trevor Jordan (who is Elkie's husband) set up the same sound for me wherever we went. He did some very smart work on his Neve desk. We went to places like the Colston Hall in Bristol, which is quite live. Great for me, but awful for Elkie. The rock world needs a flat sound to start out, and then builds from there, whereas I need natural resonance, plus a little help from the PA. Electronic sounds work fine for the bands, but acoustically we guitarists need that 'bloom' to give the note some magic.

But at places like the Wigmore Hall... Well, that was acoustically designed to show off Bechstein pianos. That hall is as good as anywhere, and you don't need a PA at all! If you can do it there, you can do it anywhere. One does not want to become microphone dependent, because when you get up on stage without one, you can feel really naked. So I keep on doing such concerts as the Wigmore Hall - I enjoy them immensely anyway."

Question: So to round things off, let's return to the Music Of A Picture album. How did you make an acoustic guitar sound blend so well with the electronics?

Juan: "There was the beautiful sound of the guitar, and the beautiful sound of the synthesizers. Beauty is beauty. They work together on the ear. With the digital delays available, a naked guitar can work with electronics. If you hit on the right 'room sound', reverb can really smooth the guitar out. It's all in the ear, and the production is everything."

OPEN APPROACH

Question: You have a totally 'open' approach to all music, don't you?

Juan: "I do... it's like your palette. It changes from day to day. Like in Indian music, they have a Raga for the morning, another for the afternoon, and another for evening."

Fairly recently, Juan was invited to be a guest on LBC Radio, which is a premier London radio station, to talk about his life, career, opinions and aspirations.

On 'Mark Smith's London' programme he had to choose (a bit like 'Desert Island Discs') his four favourite pieces of music. Apart from being a superb interview, his choices of music ranged from the classical to a Little Richard track, which further underlines the fact that the man and the musician are indivisible. Juan Martin cares not only about his music, but the whole spectrum of music itself, and interests himself deeply in whatever is going on, or has gone on. Truly, a man with an 'open' approach.