Martyn Bennett, Celtic music star
deb...@comcast.net
ALAN MCEWEN AND BRIAN FERGUSON
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."
Hyfler/Rosner
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
Hyfler/Rosner
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
