You know you’ve been around a while when your favourite album has just turned 50.

Solid Air by John Martyn was released in February 1973, when I was a 16-year-old grammar school boy. I still have the original vinyl, as well as a digitally remastered CD version from 23 years ago.

It has never let me down, that record.

The title track was written for Martyn’s friend, Nick Drake, who died 18 months after the album’s release.  It floats mysteriously around the anchoring double-bass of Danny Thompson, whose first fathomless note still affects me, going somewhere deep, ushering in the song. The electric piano provides a bluesy mist through which Martyn’s voice delivers his oblique song.

The mystery is part of the attraction, the not quite knowing what is being said.

How much thinner life would be without John Martyn’s percussive and lyrical guitar playing, the slurred romance of his gravelled voice, or the bolshie beauty of his music.

Many great albums were released that year, including The Dark Side Of The Moon by Pink Floyd. I used to sit and listen to that with a friend who became a GP, drinking strong tea and making solemn observations, as 16-year-olds do.

All very fine, but the Floyd album doesn’t make that magical connection for me, doesn’t do something funny inside.

The album benefits greatly from having been recorded in only eight days by the engineer John Wood. Many of the songs were captured as played, without studio tricksiness, usually the best way.

Estate Of Keith Morris / Redferns / Getty

Aside from that title track, the most famous song is May You Never, a sort of blues prayer for a friend. Wood reveals in the notes to the later CD that Martyn was unhappy with the recorded version, “still swithering” about it as the album was due to be delivered. Wood suggested he “go down to the studio with a guitar and just do it”.

That’s what he did, and the version we have was recorded in one take.

Years later, at a concert in York, Martyn played the song and asked for applause afterwards, saying it wasn’t easy to play.

By then he was unwell due to alcohol and drugs problems and had lost a leg. The beautiful young man of the 1970s was old, heavy, ragged, and yet still possessed of the same spirit, the same ability to convey emotion and romance. He died on January 27, 2009, aged 60, hardly any age, especially viewed from a few years further along.

Incidentally, my wife says May You Never should be played at my funeral, and I won’t argue with that. I’ll be listening somewhere, nodding happily, and saying, ah, yes.

I saw John Martyn three times, once at Salford University just before Solid Air was released, and twice more in York. That first concert was the best, just John and his acoustic guitar, and his bank of effects pedals, including tape delays, that built an endless swirl of sound from one bashed-about guitar.

I’ve never stopped listening since then. Martyn himself didn’t particularly like Solid Air, but that’s sometimes the way with artists, still dissatisfied and never mind the adulation.

Other John Martyn albums from the 1970s such as Inside Out and One World have lasted well too, and get played often in this house, but nothing lingers quite like Solid Air.

Richard Thompson, another of my musical heroes, plays mandolin on the lovely folky track Over The Hill – and aren’t we all that by now. Thompson assesses Martyn’s talent in his highly engaging autobiography Beeswing, writing that “…it’s taken people a long time to realise his genius. Now everyone quotes him as an influence”.

This isn’t just about music. It’s the soundtrack to a life, a musical tape measure. That 16-year-old didn’t look 50 years ahead, and never imagined being 66 and retired, yet here we are.

Solid Air has been there through everything: a long and lasting marriage, three children, and now one grandchild, the loss of friends and loved ones, a lifetime of journalism, being made redundant, working alone at home, busking with a bit of lecturing, publishing a couple of novels, weaving in and out of words.

Our eldest son, born years after the album came out, listens to Solid Air, too, so it’s gone on a generation.

John Martyn looked angelic when young, a bearded cherub almost. But he’d rather be the devil, to lift a few words from track four.