Spring 2026 Zine
Take All My Money
Mark Rushton’s Curator Mindset is a place where I talk in 2026 about my ongoing work as a recording artist and visual artist, tech things, and provide music recommendations. This is being released on Saturday, May 9, 2026.
This week’s topics:
Spring 2026 Zine
John Martyn - “Sunshine’s Better” (Talvin Singh Remix)
Spring 2026 Zine
Here’s the JPG version of the Spring 2026 Zine. Pages 4 & 1, then 2 & 3. Flip on the long edge with duplex printing.
Substack wouldn’t let me add the PDF of the merged files. There’s probably a way, but it’s not a big deal.
I have printed copies outside my Fitch Studio on the third floor. And I’ll be sending some in the postal mail to regional creatives. Might leave a few here and there.
I’m not sure if Fitch is going to have a “Spring Open House” - that’s still up in the air. Most of my things can be accessed from the sidewalk outside the building and they’re all free.
When I do mail out the zine, it’ll be in an envelope with these Muhammad Ali stamps. I wanted some of the new Bruce Lee stamps, but they were out.
John Martyn - '‘Sunshine’s Better” (Talvin Singh Remix)
John Martyn’s first wife, Beverley, with whom he recorded two albums, died recently. That got me thinking of this song of his, recorded and remixed in 1996.
I’m not exactly a fan of Martyn’s singing style, although here it works pretty good. I’m more into the original instrumental sounds in his songs over the decades. He was putting his acoustic guitar through numerous effects boxes, including an Echoplex, in the early 1970s.
If you haven’t heard his album “One World”, from 1977, it’s like a proto-trip hop album - almost as if Massive Attack or Portishead were around in the 1970s. Recorded in Jamaica at the behest of Chris Blackwell, it features a song co-written with Lee “Scratch” Perry. Steve Winwood is all over it. The only way I can describe it is “bluesy / jazzy pop songs with vague electronics and effects”. It peaked at number 54 on the UK album chart.
By 1981, his “Glorious Fool” album was produced by Phil Collins - who was kind of busy that year. It made it to number 25 on the UK chart. Collins and Martyn were friends.
For 1996’s album “And”, from which the original version of Sunshine’s Better is on, was partially produced in Nashville. It’s apparently not available on streaming services, but can be heard on YouTube. The album version is similar, but more conventional. Martyn had John Giblin on bass (who played with Kate Bush, during Scott Walker’s avant-garde era, and with every major name in the 80s and 90s) and, of course, Phil Collins on drums. It peaked at 32 on the UK chart.
This remix, by Talvin Singh, appeared on a Cafe Del Mar compilation (Volume 4), a series curated by DJ José Padilla, and was something I bought on CD back in the day. That’s the only way I would have stumbled upon it, other than waking up naked on a beach in Ibiza in 1996.
Singh later went on to win the Mercury Prize for his 1998 album “OK” (if you haven’t heard it, start with the song “Butterfly”). Ryuichi Sakamoto played on it. I owned this when it came out.
For some reason, acoustic artists adding electronic elements or doing remixes usually yield great results. Everything But the Girl’s mid-90s transformation and the electronic remixes done to Damien Jurado’s songs are examples of the kind of thing I enjoy.