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