One of our spirals sprouted in 1991, when I saw him at The Untitled Gallery, Sheffield. I was no doubt focused more on my own craft as a musician than the music, but I asked him at one point could I maybe try out his guitar and he just handed it to me, along with an enormous white rectangular plectrum, and went off to the pub. An hour later I knew it quite well, a modest but loud instrument that needed energy and physical strength to play, and which repaid the fight handsomely.

25 years later that little shoot grew back on itself. On jury service, waiting upstairs in an ancient, threadbare Juror’s Hall at the Inner London Crown Court on Newington Causeway – this detail is strangely satisfying – I noticed a Facebook post from John, selling an old guitar in some disrepair. Forgotten memories were roused and I contacted him at once, it seeming immediately essential that I acquire it. And so an 80 year old Epiphone Zenith archtop, once owned by Louis Gallo, crafted in Long Island City, New York, climbed to a further germination.

I first noticed John in a 1986 Wire article, around the time Martin Archer invited him to record his Wild Pathway Favourites in Sheffield. There was a photo. He looked vaguely folky, a robust looking outdoor type, perhaps like an older me. Our paths crossed next at The Red Rose Club in London, him augmenting a bill with Mick Beck’s improvising big band Feetpackets, which I was in. I have a photo of him that illuminates this dim memory. I learned that he had featured in some late night TV programmes called Jazz On Four: Crossing Bridges (1983) that I didn’t catch at the time, before I had an inkling of the free improvisation thing. I now find his playing there, at the age of 29, to be refreshing and vital, the craft sounds well-honed. I’ve seen him many times since, and recall a particularly beautiful duo with Pascal Marzan, somewhere.

We were eight years apart in age, which sometimes felt like much more or much less. We shared rural, agricultural origins and its parallel extensions, like reading the landscape for history and more – me in land-locked Tyrone and he in his early estuarine, salt-marsh world. Plus fascinations with Japanese string musics, ‘effect-less timbral exploration and much else.

It was John’s apparent choice to fight from what seemed to me like a deliberate position of weakness that I loved. It seemed dripping with symbolism and intent. I had played acoustic guitar in jazz workshops (though only because I couldn’t afford an amplifier) and you could see the implications that intentional low volume opened up. To unilaterally limit your reach in a context of more powerful instruments and unrestrained practitioners. I can still see that massed wall of saxophonists’ backs blasting at the wall as I tried to tune up. John, for me, contained an unexpectedly feminine mind and approach within his burly frame. “The right, small, strong voice can easily compete with or overcome the bullies”, he observed, correctly. In Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's 1980s, with the profile of improvised music at rock bottom, John’s approach to his music and life – then as always firmly rooted in love and decency – epitomised our ad hoc and organic approach, celebrating the informal, un-institutional, un-industrial, the self-built. Later, with others, his group based innovations seemed to develop the same thing. That deliberate vulnerability again, whispered conversations this time, like a shared secret or conspiracy, at a time when another music was somehow latent, waiting to re-emerge when the internet’s immature culture gained a little weight. It was something that deliberately brought ‘the other’ into the centre, across border and bridge, rebuilding on the equality that had generated the music’s earlier flowerings.

John’s playing builds on what works, builds on history. There is a potter’s fluid circularity, repeatedly revisiting terrain and shape, knowing the craft of stopped, rubbed, plucked, hammered sounds. Hetero-timbrality is fed in as just a component; he mostly played without preparing his instrument in any way, in standard tuning, alternatives only arriving organically, encountered through performance. His style was much less forced and less mannered than that of many improvising guitarists. Not showy but not garden variety.

And he was a well-read, deep thinker when you got past the agreeable light-heartedness and jokes. The Far Eastern influences on his approach to string playing were under-appreciated. A phrase for harmonics on the guqin for example, “fan yin”, can be translated as ”floating sounds”, and its words for open and stopped tones, respectively as “loose” and “scattered”. An organisation of loose, scattered and floating notes sounds like what John filled an improvisation with. Likewise that big shamisen bachi-influenced plectrum, those buzzy shamisen and biwa sawari sounds and the koto-esque timbres. We can perceive all this, if attuned, in his work, contextualised by some of their attendant aesthetic philosophies too, all of them sourced in a satisfying union from nature and history.