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?"

Colin Irwin