CELTIC music star Martyn Bennett has died at the age of 33 after a four-year battle with cancer.
The gifted fiddler and piper who pioneered a fusion of traditional folk with house, hip-hop and dance music, passed away at Edinburgh's Marie Curie Hospital on Sunday night.
Tributes to Bennett, who beat testicular cancer in 1993, flooded in today, with celebrated accordionist Phil Cunningham saying he would be "sadly missed".
Among the highlights of Bennett's career were performances at the world premiere of the film Braveheart at Stirling Castle, and a gig in front of 10,000 people on the Castle Esplanade during Edinburgh's Millennium Hogmanay celebrations.
His band, Cuillin, also played in a Paris bar before the opening match of the 1998 World Cup between Brazil and Scotland when Sir Sean Connery, Ewan McGregor and Kenny Dalglish joined them on stage. Bennett, who lived in Tollcross, was largely forced to retire from live appearances after October 2000 when he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma.
But he continued to release new albums, including his last critically-acclaimed collection entitled Glen Lyon in 2001.
Cunningham said today his passing was a "tragedy".
"I first met him on Skye when he was just a youngster. He would come to my home and inquire whether I could 'come out to play'. We would just sit round and play music.
"Martyn was an incredibly gifted musician. He was able to pull together all these different threads he had in his head.
"I knew he was very, very ill, but it's still a shock. He was a gentle, thoughtful, polite, lovely person, a real pacifist, and he will be sadly missed by friends, family and fans."
Born in Newfoundland, Canada, in 1971, Bennett moved to Scotland with his mother, renowned folk singer Margaret Bennett, aged six.
Regarded as a musical prodigy, he moved to the Capital at the age of 15 and soon won a scholarship to the Edinburgh City School of Music, based at Broughton High School.
In 1990, he gained a place at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow where he met future wife Kirsten.
Influenced by the dance music scene in Edinburgh's clubs, Bennett created an innovative meld of drum beats and traditional folk on his first album, Martyn Bennett, recorded in 1995.
Solo performances in the city's La Belle Angele nightclub in the Cowgate led to him being managed by The Proclaimers' manager Kenny MacDonald.
"The disease struck him down at such a young age," said Mr MacDonald. "I have no doubt he was on the way to crossover success.
"He was also an exceptional human being. I believe the beauty and vibrancy of his music will live on and influence younger musicians."
Bennett went on to release a number of albums and tour extensively across Scandinavia, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Canada and the United States. In 1998, he won the music category in the Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Awards. He also wrote a 15-minute orchestral piece, McKay's Memoirs, which was performed in Princes Street Gardens during the opening ceremony for the Scottish Parliament.
But having gone through a year of chemotherapy and radiotherapy after his initial diagnosis, the cancer returned.
Simon Thoumire, organiser of the Hands Up for Trad folk event, said: "He had a massive impact when he first arrived doing stuff with the beats.
"That also brought a lot of kids into the scene as they immediately understood what he was trying to do.
He was a lovely guy, really easy-going with so much time for everyone."
Ian Green, who worked with Bennett through his company, Greentrax Recordings, based in Cockenzie, East Lothian, said: "He was a very brave young man. I'm proud to have known him."
Star of the Celtic music scene with a unique pipes and beats sound
Garth Cartwright Wednesday February 2, 2005 The Guardian
Martyn Bennett, who has died of cancer aged 33, was one of Scotland's most feted young musicians. He caused a sensation - and much controversy - in British folk music over the last eight years, as he mixed Scottish bagpipe and fiddle music with techno beats. Bennett struggled with cancer throughout his adult life and recorded his final, and most remarkable work, Grit, in 2003. Here he sampled the voices of Scottish travellers from the 1950s, building a sound collage around them to extraordinary effect. "I don't really know how Grit happened," Bennett said, "it just did. I was trying to keep myself alive and survive something really horrible, and writing music was quite a good way of focusing on it.
"Cancer is a piece of grit inside your soul which you can't get out, so you have to try and make something of it. But grit is also rock salt, an old medicine. I also see it as representative of cultures trying to survive."
Bennett was born into a Gaelic-speaking family in Newfoundland, Canada. His earliest musical memories were of hearing traditional Celtic music played in the farming communities of Cordroy Valley in Western Newfoundland. His family moved to Quebec when he was five, but a year later his parents separated and Bennett returned with his mother, Margaret, to Scotland, initially living on the Isle of Mull before settling in Kingussie, Speyside.
Bennett was introduced to the bagpipe by his history teacher, David Taylor, at school. At the age of 12, he began winning prizes in junior piping competitions. Being a young prodigy meant Bennett attracted attention at folk festivals: he recalled being smuggled into the pubs under someone's coat and getting the pipes out before anyone had noticed the under-age drinker.
In 1986 the family moved to Edinburgh, where he won a scholarship at the City of Edinburgh Music School. Bennett was the first traditional musician enrolled into this classical conservatoire; he noted that the next three years, studying composition, violin and piano, learning to read and write music, were the most important of his life.
In 1990 he gained a place at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD), Glasgow, to study performance on the violin and piano. There he met his future wife, Kirsten.
Just before graduating in 1993 he was diagnosed with testicular cancer. This and his distaste for what he described as the suffocating environment surrounding the UK's classical music industry led him to look for new forms of musical expression. Surviving medical treatment, Bennett bought a keyboard, sampler and mixing desk, and began recording his first album.
Inspired by the rave scene, he played fiddle and bagpipes over programmed dance beats. His self-titled album was released on a small label in 1996, and immediately received attention from the Scottish media. Deals with Rykodisc in the US and Real World in the UK brought Bennett to the forefront of the Celtic music scene, his pipes and beats style winning over young listeners, while alienating many traditionalists.
In 1998, he released Bothy Culture, a pioneering album of Celtic dance mixed with hard electronic beats. Bothy Culture launched Bennett internationally, topping the US college radio charts, and he was invited to perform for the Scottish football team in Paris on the day before they played Brazil in the 1998 World Cup.
In 2000, Bennett released Hardland, another album exploring connections between traditional Scottish dance and techno. His headlining performance at that year's Cambridge Folk Festival was, for many, the weekend's highlight, and suggested he would develop into a major attraction. That October, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma and had to pull out of all future engagements.
He started a course of chemo- and radiotherapy that lasted eight months. During this time, Bennett, who had relocated to Mull, set up a home studio to write his next album.
Further hospitalisation and major surgery followed in 2001. Somehow Bennett managed to record Glen Lyon, a traditional folk album featuring the voice of his mother, herself a noted folk singer.
In early 2003 Bennett destroyed his collection of instruments: "It was the worst day of my entire life. Every day for about three years I'd been trying to play my instruments and I couldn't. Well, I could play them, but the music wasn't coming out of me, it was like I was a ghost, there was no heart and soul in me. And I just suddenly went into this blind rage and destroyed every single instrument I owned, just smashed it all to pieces. It was incredible. I got so angry I murdered my little family of instruments."
Bennett used this period of illness and destruction to create Grit, which won him the best reviews of his career. Yet he confessed that his illness had so scarred him he was unsure if he wished to continue making music.
He is survived by his wife and mother.
· Martyn Bennett, musician, born February 17 1971; died January 30 2005
Storming innovator in Scottish music 02 February 2005 Martyn Knight-Bennett, fiddler, piper and record producer: born St John's, Newfoundland 17 February 1971; married 2002 Kirsten Thomson; died Edinburgh 30 January 2005.
He received sadly little mainstream recognition of it in his lifetime, but Martyn Bennett's innovative work mixing his own thrilling bagpipe and fiddle playing with hardcore techno and dance beats broke new territory. Many had previously tried to blend the purity of traditional tunes with the frenzy of modern club culture and most had failed; but, well schooled in both cultures, Bennett cracked it in inspiring, groundbreaking style.
At least two of his albums, Bothy Culture (1998) and Hardland (2000), are landmarks, transporting beautiful yet often fiery tunes from a more innocent age into the supercharged world of DJs and electronica. His real achievement was to create a buoyant, inspiring new dance hybrid that fed on the grace and richness of the original source of tunes without compromising them. Unselfconsciously, he took folk music several bounds forward, yet maintained the respect of the same traditional music lovers who had acclaimed his sensitive solo fiddle playing years earlier.
He was a visionary whose work was still evolving and one of the tragedies of his premature death at 33 - and the long years fighting cancer that preceded it - is the sense of being cheated out of what would surely have been an even more creative future. His best years still seemed ahead of him.
Bennett had a rarefied background. He was born in Newfoundland, son of Iain Knight and Margaret Bennett, and spent his early years in the Cordroy Valley absorbing the Scots Gaelic culture of the Highlands émigrés in the region. The family spent a year living in Quebec before returning to Scotland to live on the Isle of Mull. They continued a nomadic existence, living in tents with travellers at one point - "My mum was a hippy," said Martyn - but, already showing prodigious musical talent, he wound up in Edinburgh studying classical violin and piano.
It was here that his musical horizons widened. He played violin in a symphony orchestra and fiddle in informal pub sessions, also taking up the bagpipes and, during the 1990 summer of love, acquired a taste for the clubbing scenes in Edinburgh and Glasgow. He also took to busking, and first hit on the idea of playing fiddle tunes over a beatbox he heard pounding in the streets.
With his flailing dreadlocks and high energy, he cut a charismatic figure as he embarked on his bold experiments, exploring his dual interest in the Scots tradition and technology. He worked with another innovator, Martin Swan, on Swan's acclaimed Mouth Music project and in 1996 released his first album, Martyn Bennett, on the small indie label Eclectic. He caused a minor sensation with his explosive live performance at the Braveheart film premiere party at Stirling Castle.
His second album, Bothy Culture, released on the Ryko label in 1998, marked him out as a leading figure in the evolution of Scottish music. Taking its name from the old Highland bothies where shepherds and travellers would meet, rest up, swap tunes and party, the album was a storming mix of Gaelic tradition, raw emotion and glorious, full-blooded dance beats. It also drew on Scandinavian and Islamic music, and sampled the Gaelic bard Sorley MacLean reading his poem "Hallaig" shortly before he died.
The album won him a lot of friends, came agonisingly close to winning a Mercury Music Prize nomination and encouraged him to form a band, Cuillin, including his wife, Kirsten, on keyboards. At one famous gig in Paris before the opening World Cup match between Scotland and Brazil, Sean Connery, Ewan MacGregor and Ally McCoist got on stage to dance with them.
Some of the momentum was lost in the business problems that followed and Bennett moved to the Isle of Mull, where he met a kindred spirit, Martin Low. The result was a fierce explosion of hardcore Scottish dance on the album Hardland, released on his own Cuillin label in 2000. An electrifying live performance topping the Saturday night bill at the 2000 Cambridge Folk Festival is regularly talked of in hushed tones as one of the most spectacular shows in the long history of the festival - reflecting in 1,000 sales of the album at the festival alone.
It was the high point of Bennett's career - less than three months later he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma. The next few years involved intense chemo and radiotherapy and several major operations; at one point he had all his bone marrow replaced.
Yet he still found the time and energy to produce two more albums. On Glen Lyon he recorded the natural sounds and rhythms of the Isle of Skye to accompany the singing of his mother Margaret Bennett, and in 2003 he was signed by Real World, the label founded by Peter Gabriel, to release Grit. It was perhaps the most extraordinary album of his career, sampling the great Scots travelling singers like Jeannie Robertson and Lizzie Higgins and the Gaelic-language singer Flora McNeil and setting them in challenging techno settings.
It was a painful album for him to record - literally and spiritually - and he admitted that at one point he was so frustrated and angry about his own inability to play that he smashed every instrument he had - £20,000 worth - in a blinding rage.
By this time he had already taken the decision not to have any more treatment and accept whatever fate had in store for him. He seemed to have found solace, enjoying living close to the earth in Mull with his beloved wife Kirsten and communing with nature. In contrast to the wildness of his music, he had a gently spiritual demeanour and a wry, sense of humour.
Talking about how during his illness he had turned more and more to the purity of traditional music for his listening pleasure, he said, "I think it's great what you can do with electronics, but why twiddle with knobs when you could be twiddling with a fiddle peg or a woman's breast?"
