Gary West
Luath Press – £30, £20, £14.99
ISBN 9781804251935
By Chris MacKenzie
It’s an awkward moment, in every Martyn Bennett fan’s life, when they try to describe his music to someone who has never heard it. Somewhere in the midst of telling how he plays tunes, on pipes, fiddles and whistles and mixes them with samples of; travellers singing the old bothy ballads, Gaelic songs, poets reciting their own poetry, old vaudeville acts (Harry Lauder no less), Native North American rhythms, Eastern European rhythms, Scottish presbyterian psalm presenting, sounds from nature and then adding a strong club dance beat, it all starts to sound not just faintly ridiculous but downright crazy, and you can see the their eyes glaze over, as your credibility sinks faster than that of a new cryptocurrency offering. In other hands attempting to make listenable music out of that seemingly random (it was never random), collection of sounds would be a disaster, yet Martyn with love and care, so, so much care, was able to coax out music that kept true to the sample’s source while creating fabulous, inventive, and highly original tracks for the twenty first century.
That care, and the meticulous attention to detail, evident in Martyn’s music, is brought to life in Gary West’s new biography of the Newfoundland born musician. Gary’s CV will be familiar to most reading this but for whom it isn’t – he is, a been it, seen it, done it folk musician (Highland pipes, smallpipes and whistles, particularly in the influential Ceolbeg), radio presenter (twenty years presenting the most important piping show in Scotland), author and former professor at the School of Scottish Studies. Indeed, Martyn once introduced him as ‘the slightly academic guy who presents the piping on the radio’. Gary knew Martyn, and with his immersive background in all things related to Scottish traditional music, he is ideally suited to bringing Martyn’s life to the printed page.
The book, commissioned by the Martyn Bennett trust, takes the conventional biography approach, as Gary moves us through Martyn’s life from; birth in Newfoundland, the move to Kingussie in Scotland, then to Broughton Music School in Edinburgh before getting a degree at the Royal Scottish Academy for Music and Drama (RSAMD – now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland), life in Edinburgh followed before the final move to the Isle of Mull. At each of these stages Gary takes us through the key people and events that shaped Martyn’s life and approach to music. As a narrator Gary avoids the biographers curse of all detail but no meaning as he skilfully provides context at a personal and a broader society level. On top of this Gary takes an in depth look at the creation of each of Martyn’s albums and then gives masterful descriptions of the tracks (you will listen with renewed intensity after reading these). The description of how Martyn worked and where he was ‘coming from’ on each album is absolute delight, if occasionally painful to read given the effort he put into his music and the perfectionism he demanded of himself, and others. Given Gary’s academic background you might reasonably expect the book to be worthy but ‘heavy going’. It is indeed worthy, but Gary imbues the text with a deftness of language that keeps the narrative moving at pace. There are times you feel you sitting next to Martyn as he is composing and that has got to be the ultimate accolade for a biography.
As Martyn’s life unfolds, we get to see the desire, the motivation, indeed the need to make music and how brilliantly he crafts the tracks. His dedication to his music comes through loud and clear, although it is the vision that he has for each track that is ultimately the differentiator. That he can see the end point allows him to drive relentlessly towards it, when lesser souls may have quit halfway through and said that’s good enough.
That Martyn could maintain that level of commitment to his music and take it to its zenith with his last album Grit, while enduring the condition, and treatment, of the cancer that would ultimately end his life, at the far too young age of 33, is testament to a strength of character few of us have. Gary address Martyn’s illness in a very sympathetic way without ever intruding on what must have been the hardest of times for Martyn and his family. This is no misery memoir it is instead a celebration of a life.
This biography is a delight, it is intimate and personal yet expansive and contextual. Martyn’s personality comes across on every page as does the love he had for; his family, the tradition, music of almost any kind, his collaborators, the outdoors, and life in all it’s wonderful glory. That is a job well done, Mr West.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source bagpipe.news ’
