Steve Shark Gets Stone, Immaculate Dept.

Girls! Win your dream date with moody n' magnificent Martin!

We've met Martin Stone before on the IoF© with The Action, Mighty Baby and Chilli Willi & the Red Hot Peppers, and Farq touched on his later activities as a book runner.

I've not yet been able to discover exactly what made Stone's career go off at such an oblique tangent, although his interest in the works of M. P. Shiel seems to have played a significant role in it. Shiel was a writer of supernatural horror and historical romances, barely remembered today, but something about his work must have piqued Stone's interest.

Whatever his reasons for becoming a book finder - book runner (UK) or book scout (US), to give his profession the correct titles - they certainly made for a very interesting life, although he never gave up music entirely.

By the 1980s, Stone was making a very good living indeed from the secondhand book market. It's probably all hype, but it was said that if he simply stood outside a secondhand book shop or by a book stall, he could tell if there was something worth buying from them. He was the book equivalent of an antiques "divvy", allegedly possessing some kind of sixth sense of what was rare and valuable. At some time in the 1980s, Stone suddenly relocated from London to Paris after, by all accounts, a coke deal that went badly wrong. Although he eventually returned to the UK several times, most of his book running and musical activities were based in Paris henceforth, although he'd make occasional buying forays into the south of France, being particularly drawn to the Cannes bookshops and markets.

Although Stone remained something of an obscure character until his death in 2016, he appeared in a few books and documentary films, although whether all that much can be learned about him from these is rather a moot point, because the guy was an enigma.

John Baxter's "A Pound of Paper" mentions Stone quite a lot and he dives in and out of the narrative like some sort of semi-corporeal stalker as the author describes his own career as a writer, book collector and film maker. When Stone died, Baxter wrote a long Facebook post which describes him in some detail and is worth reading if you don't want the whole $10 tour you'll get from reading Baxter's book.

Rebecca Rego Barry's "Rare Books Uncovered" is a more general work describing many spectacular and significant finds of rare books, but Stone still manages to blag a chapter all to himself!

In 2000, a book of photographs was published - 22 hand printed, broadsheet-sized photos, 16 pages of text and in a limited edition of 15. There's a description at the link below. I've just seen the current asking price - $4000, which I'm sure Stone would have found amusingly ironic.
https://www.riverrunbooks.com/pages/books/407707/peter-howard-steven-gelberg/martin-stone-bookscout

Stone also appears as a book runner called Nicholas Lane in the novel "White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings" (1987) written by Iain Sinclair. It's a strange, almost surreal, mixture of genres, with book running intertwined with the Jack the Ripper East End murders, seasoned with touches of Lovecraft and Conan Doyle and heavy with references to the occult and psychogeography.

It's not just books in which Stone appeared. He featured in an Iain Sinclair documentary/drama "The Cardinal and the Corpse" along with other denizens of the London book scene. I think it's Stone's music playing at various stages in the film - it sure sounds like him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7n74W9si1o

He also showed up in a short US CBS TV segment about the Paris bookshop scene. John Baxter appears along with Stone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6wtsEl_t3A

Having read and seen all this source material, I think it's fair to say that Stone wasn't the only "character" in the strange world he inhabited [things get a little murkier with "Driff" and his guide to second-hand bookshops, which Stone must have known - Ed.]...

And the later music?

Well, I'll let that speak for itself mostly, with a couple of albums he was involved with during his years in France.

First up, "Les Homewreckers" (1996)- Les Homewreckers, recorded in Paris and revealing a decidedly country influence. Stone's guitar is splendid, although his vocals are a little weak and wavery. Bizarrely, he sounds quite a lot like John Otway. He only really lets rip on "Hey Gyp", which shows that he's lost none of his chops as a guitarist.

The last project he was involved with was with Michael Moorcock's band Deep Fix - "Live at the Terminal Cafe" (2019). He talked about this as his "legacy" album and you can see why. There's no hint that he was coming to any sort of musical "end", although he died very soon after completing work on it in Paris. Still very countryish, although occasionally a tad psychedelic, Stone's guitar playing is excellent. It's by no means a great album - Moorcock is certainly no singer and the whole project simply lacks cohesion - but it shows how Stone could have developed and make yet more great music if he'd stayed with us long enough.

So, there's these two albums for you, plus a folder of photographs including a scan of his obituary in the Times and many photos from the 2000 photo essay, Baxter's and Barry's books, Baxter's Facebook piece as a pdf, and the Sinclair novel. I enjoyed the books about collecting far more than I imagined I would, and Sinclair's book had me hunting down his other works.

To get them, all you have to do is reveal who or what you find enigmatic, and why.