West Brave New Music

The Martyn Bennett Story
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80425-212-3
Verlag: Luath Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 352 Seiten

Martyn Bennett was an artist ahead of his time. Piper, violinist, composer, producer, DJ - his radical blend of tradition and technology created an audacious new sound that was uniquely his own.  Steeped in the folk cultures of Scotland, yet inspired too by deep-rooted traditions from far beyond, his music ignored boundaries and celebrated cultural difference wherever he found it. Although classically trained, he was drawn to the gritty excitement of the urban dance club scene, and his fusion of folk, classical, jazz and hard-edged electronica was championed by the likes of Peter Gabriel and the folklorist Hamish Henderson who labelled it 'brave new music'. This biography traces his story through personal struggles and artistic triumphs, and offers an assessment of his place in the pantheon of major Scottish artists. It is a story of resilience as well as innovation: twice diagnosed with unrelated cancers, his professional career lasted little more than a decade, and he fought serious illness for half of it. He died in January 2005, aged 33. Yet his art continues to inspire: where he led, others have followed, and his music still wins awards and fills concert halls at major international festivals two decades after his death.

GARY WEST is a senior lecturer in Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh. He is also an active traditional musician and teacher, and presents a weekly programme, Pipeline, on BBC Radio Scotland. Originally from Pitlochry in Perthshire, he played for many years with the innovative Vale of Atholl Pipe Band, winning the Scottish and European Championships. In his late teens, he moved sideways into the folk scene, playing, recording and touring with the bands Ceolbeg and Clan Alba, and becoming a founder member of the ceilidh band, Hugh MacDiarmid's Haircut. He has performed on around 20 albums, including his debut solo release, The Islay Ball, and his most recent collaboration, Hinterlands, with harpist Wendy Stewart.

Autoren/Hrsg.

West, Gary

Leseproben

1

Beginnings

IT WAS A potent combination of geology and folklore that made Martyn Bennett. He was born in St John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, on 17 February 1971, his parents, Ian Knight and Margaret Bennett, having met after each travelling to Memorial University to further their academic studies. As a promising young geologist, Ian was keen to explore the rock foundations of the west of the island, while as a folklorist, Margaret immersed herself in the cultural traditions that had evolved on its soils. Both were destined for successful careers in their respective fields, each gaining awards as well as wide recognition and professional respect from their peers. Later in life, Martyn reflected on his roots there:

I don’t know if anyone knows where Newfoundland is! Well, the reason I was born in Newfoundland is simple, because my mother, Margaret Bennett, is a fairly well-known folklorist nowadays and the reason for that is because she went there as a teenager to do a Master’s degree with quite a famous folklorist called Herbert Halpert. She went to Newfoundland to study with him but at the same time she found a community in the west coast. A place called Codroy Valley where people were still speaking and singing songs in Gaelic and playing fiddle tunes and pipes and things and a lot of the stuff they were doing had sort of died out in Scotland – well not so much died out, it was like it had been preserved but in Newfoundland it hadn’t been preserved in a pickling jar. It was actually part of everyday life and so that’s how she ended up there.1 And then she met my father who is Welsh and he was a fiddle player. And I transpired from that!2

The fact that Margaret’s own father had moved to Newfoundland some years before had created an initial close connection there for her, but a further pull was the chance to study under one of the most revered folklorists in the Western world, Herbert Halpert (1911–2000). Her own immediate roots were in Skye, where her mother’s people, Stewarts, had lived for many generations, and where Margaret and her three sisters spent their formative years. With a singing mother and piping father, music, song and story were a constant presence in the family home on Skye, while spells on the Isle of Lewis and in Shetland served only to broaden her cultural awareness and to heighten her sensitivity to the nuances of localised tradition.3

Margaret’s research in Newfoundland took her to the Codroy Valley, a fertile estuary between the Anguille and Long Range mountains on the south-western tip of the island, a rich hunting ground for a youthful Highland folklorist. Settled by Micmac, French, English, Irish and Scots, the rich cultural layering to be found there was always likely to be a magnet for her, but the fact that the Scots included several families of Gaels proved to be an irresistible draw. As she was later to explain in her book, The Last Stronghold, these were mainly secondary migrants who had made the journey across from Cape Breton in the mid-19th century, and who still retained a strong oral tradition, carried by the Gaelic language, that connected them directly back to the west Highlands of Scotland that Margaret knew so well. Martyn was to come to spend a good deal of time in his early years amongst these folk, retaining a lifelong fondness for them and a sense that he had been given an unusual outlook on the world by this start and a feeling of being an outsider:

Martyn, Newfoundland c. 1973.

I still love to go over to Codroy Valley. I haven’t been for quite a few years, but the people there are very interesting. They’re from Moidart and Appin and they’re French, French Canadian as well and they’ve been married into these big families, Cormies and MacArthurs and MacIsaacs, they’ve all intermarried and so they have a very strange view. My early childhood’s a strange view of the world you know? So I started from a strange place.4

When Margaret made her fieldwork visits to the homes of these people she had ‘a very young research assistant’ who would crawl under tables to find sockets for the recording machine and regularly add in some questions of his own to the research encounter:

I’d always give him a role in the collecting trips, carrying a microphone stand, keeping an eye on the tape to make sure it didn’t run out. During the recording session he listened intently, and I didn’t realise until years later what a remarkably retentive memory he had. Not just for tunes, but for words too, and he remembered complete stories – some emerged years later on his albums. What goes into small minds?5

One thing that must have gone into Martyn’s mind for sure was an appreciation that ‘ordinary’ people could have extraordinary stories to tell, and that they themselves are the best placed folk to tell them. Allowing them to do so is what folklorists are all about, and Martyn was to witness many such collecting sessions throughout his childhood years. They had a significant influence on his thinking, his outlook and eventually, his work, and it seems to me that Martyn was to spend most of his life wrestling with that slippery concept which motivated so much of his mother’s collecting: tradition. His relationship with it was intense and complex, yet it sits at the heart of so much of his creative output.

From early infancy Martyn was immersed in traditional music and culture simply by accompanying his mother. Her memories of these encounters and experiences also strongly suggest that Martyn was a remarkably curious and sensitive wee boy, especially when it came to understanding and experimenting with making sound. In a talk to students in the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in 2023, she recounted an extraordinary occasion where she had confiscated the remote control from a toy car from Martyn, who was about five years old at the time, and had been told to stop driving it but had disobeyed. Margaret later discovered Martyn in the kitchen with a pair of spoons. It transpired that he was hitting them together in hopes that the soundwaves might move the car! This early fascination with the technicalities of sound was evident, as his mother remembered, on another occasion, when Martyn climbed onto the knee of an Inuit throat singer at a folk festival in Mariposa, Ontario, and asked to see into her mouth in an attempt to work out how she made such an amazing sound!6

Martyn, Newfoundland c. 1973.

Ian Knight was also drawn to the west coast of Newfoundland, but in his case it was the land itself that fascinated him rather than the ways of life that had developed upon it. From Cardiff in Wales, Ian initially moved to Newfoundland to undertake a graduate degree studying rocks in remote areas of Labrador. He later undertook research for the Newfoundland Geological Survey on the west of the island, including in the Codroy Valley and the neighbouring Anguille Mountains. Ian’s research on the island was a key step in his development as a leading light of Canadian geology, as someone who, in the words of a colleague, ‘reads rocks like a book, with a sharp eye for the smallest detail’.7

Ian and Margaret married in the spring of 1970, but went their separate ways in 1976, Margaret and Martyn moving briefly to Quebec and then on to Scotland. ‘Looking back, I cannot help but see my role in his life as minor, as the time spent together after his mother and I split can be rolled up into not more than a year,’ Ian reflected.8 Living an ocean apart, of course, makes any relationship difficult and the combination of distance and circumstance led him to follow what he describes as a ‘staccato life’ with Martyn, and a relationship that was necessarily shaped by a different ethos. ‘Although it is not widely known’, he pointed out, ‘we shared the same birthday yet were rarely – if ever – together on that day during his early years’. A mid-February birthday does not coincide with lengthy Scottish school holidays and it was only really in the summer and some Easter and Christmas breaks that Martyn was able to spend prolonged periods with his dad. At times they met up in Wales to stay with Ian’s parents, heading out to the Brecon Beacons to climb Pen-y-Fan, or to the Gower Peninsula for cliff top walks. His Welsh grandparents loved him, but rarely saw him, and as Ian acknowledged, they were not closely involved in his life beyond the sending of a card or present at Christmas and on birthdays. When Martyn did visit, rugby matches at Cardiff Arms Park in his teen years were high on the agenda, at least for his grandfather who was an avid fan. On one of his trips to Wales in his early teens Martyn played his pipes on the front lawn of his grandparents’ house dressed up in Highland gear, a sight and sound that the neighbours remembered for many years after.

In the early years following his separation from Margaret, Ian was heavily involved with a Wesleyan church in Mount Pearl, a town adjoining St John’s in Newfoundland. The Church of the Nazarene took an evangelical approach to its teaching and practice, a legacy of the Holiness movement in the USA, and the much earlier teachings of John and Charles Wesley in Britain, and Martyn went with his dad to some of the camps they ran. Reflecting on that time now, Ian speaks perhaps with a hint of regret: ‘I suspect that it was not that beneficial to either of us and it was only after my loss of belief in the early 1980s that we were able to enjoy visits as he grew older’. By his mid-teens, Martyn’s...