True grit

KENNY MATHIESON talks to MARTYN BENNETT about his work at the cutting edge of the fusion of Scottish traditional music and contemporary club culture, and his battle with cancer.

MARTYN BENNETT has seen his musical world turned upside down. His battle with cancer has transformed both his life and his art, forcing him to turn away from the kind of instrumental virtuosity on fiddle and pipes which made his name, and instead embrace the recording studio as his means of artistic expression.
 

His gradual alienation from the instruments he loved has not been a simple or purely physical affair. It reached a peak of frustration on a frenzied day when he found himself cold-bloodedly committing an act that most musicians would rate as their worst nightmare.
 

“I can still play the fiddle or pipes,” he explained, “but I don’t feel any real connection to it any more, which is very strange. For a while I was getting pretty frustrated, and I wasn’t feeling well at that time, and I just lost the plot one day. I had been getting frustrated at not being able to play these instruments in the way that I had always played them, and it started to become a big deal in my mind.
 

“Once that happens it changes things, until one day a blind fit of rage came over me, and I smashed everything. I did it in a very cold fashion at the time, but afterwards I went into shock for days and days – I was so horrified at what I had done that I couldn’t even speak to anybody.
 

“It wasn’t that I couldn’t physically play the instruments, it was more complex than that. It was as if something had been chopped out in the loop between me and my psyche and how I could function with this situation. I can’t really describe it, but it was really disturbing.”
 

His sense of disconnection was not from music as such, but specifically from playing his instruments. I suggested it was impossible to conceive how someone in his position might cope with that situation.
 

“Well, I didn’t cope, I just lost it. It was like murdering my family, although at the moment that I was doing it, I felt a strange sense of power and a loss of power all mixed up at the same time. It’s still something I am coming to terms with, and there isn’t a day goes by without me thinking about those instruments, many of which had been in my family for years.
 

“Even on a practical level I would have loved to have given them to somebody rather than destroyed them. And they weren’t insured. I can’t afford an instrument now.”

Prior to contracting his disease (a form of cancer of the lymphomes), Bennett’s performing career focused primarily around his work in mixing traditional music with contemporary club culture. The ground-breaking Bothy Culture (1997) and its successor, Hardland (2000), established him at the centre of an important movement within the music.
 

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 © Kenny Mathieson, 2003