Martin is a multi-award winning musician and Ivor Novello winning composer. As a member of Lau he has won four BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards for Best Group an unprecedented four times. In 2015 he was nominated in the Best Musician category. In 2014 he received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists in recognition of his talent as a composer. In 2019 he won the Ivor Novello award for his sound walk “Aeons” that was part of The Great Exhibition of the North.
Born into a family of traditional music and trained by Bert Santilly, one of the contemporary accordion world’s most respected teachers, Martin gained a strong grounding in numerous styles and techniques at an early age, including spending time in Hungary with some of the leading lights in Balkan and Gypsy music. Soon after finishing school he was gigging full time and at twenty joined Eliza Carthy, princess of English folk music, with whom he worked for several years. Recordings with her include ‘Red Rice’, ‘Anglicana’ (both Mercury Music Prize short-listed) and ‘Angels and Cigarettes’. This fruitful musical relationship blossomed in the form of the critically-acclaimed Carthy-Green duo album ‘Dinner’ featuring JC001 (Nitin Sawhney) and Eddi Reader (Fairground Attraction). After opening for Joan Baez in 1999 as part of Eliza Carthy’s band Martin was invited to join the Joan Baez band and between 1999 and 2001 he toured extensively with her in America and across Europe, including a solo feature as part of her show.
In 2001 Martin met The Be Good Tanyas whilst touring in Canada, and was invited to appear on their album ‘China Town’ and tour with them in the UK between 2001-2003. He also played with the Linda Thompson band for the full tour of her 2004 album ‘Fashionably Late’ across the USA and the UK.
Martin’s career as a composer began in 2003 when he was invited to write music for the goliath environmental theatre piece ‘Albatross’ based on Shackleton’s journey and including a 40 foot steel ship and full pyrotechnic show. Albatross was the centrepiece of Glastonbury Festival’s Theatre Field in 2004. Martin formed the multi-award winning experimental folk trio Lau in 2005 with Aidan O’Rourke and Kris Drever. The band play almost entirely self-composed material and have a substantial fan base in the UK and internationally. Lau tours and performs regularly in the UK and abroad.
