Richard Benson

Guitarist and media personality Richard Benson died on May 10, 2022, at the age of sixty-seven. Italian-British, born in Woking in 1955, he had been active since at least the early Seventies, but his recent fame was due above all to the productions of his later years, spread via the internet. Musical and non-musical videos that, playing up a character grown ever more eccentric over the years, sent his notoriety through the roof as a sideshow phenomenon. Richard Philip Henry John Benson, however, was also much more than that. Here are five videos to retrace his story.

Dated 1971 but not released until 1990, the sole album by the Roman band "Buon vecchio Charlie" marks Benson's non-debut on record: he joined the group at a very young age, credited as writer, singer and acoustic guitarist. The tracklist features three songs, long and elaborate as befits progressive compositions, a genre of which the album is a solid and rather early example within the Italian scene. The style is graceful and dynamic, with pastoral moments giving way to darker atmospheres and driving passages featuring flute, sax, keyboards and electric violin.

The opening track, "Venite giù al fiume", which beneath its classical-leaning mood incorporates sections of Edvard Grieg's "In The Hall Of The Mountain King", gives a good idea of the band's style, one that anticipated other Italian symphonic rock experiences and carried a personality all its own. Side note: the showy guitarist who peppers the track with proto-hard solos is not Benson, but his bandmate Luigi Calabrò (who would later co-found, with other members of the group, the homegrown jazz-rock outfit Bauhaus, whose only LP, "Stairway To Escher", was recorded in 1974 but not released until 2003).

After being part, in the early Seventies, of the staff of the radio programme "Per voi giovani" (where he ran the "Novità 33 giri" segment), Benson moved into the world of local TV, perhaps the medium that would go on to shape his public persona more than any other. From 1979 and throughout the Eighties and Nineties, he hosted the weekly show "Ottava nota" for the Lazio-based broadcaster TVA 40, in which he reviewed new releases with great expertise in hard&heavy, progressive and fusion. It was largely thanks to this work that he built up, over the years, a cult following, made up of admiration and gratitude for his skill at explaining things and the passion with which he covered music otherwise largely ignored by the Italian media.

The promotion of metal sound and culture in Italy also took other forms in the Eighties. As a producer, he made the two compilations “Metallo Italy” (1985) and “Metal Attack” (1987), dedicated to the Italian scene (on the second record he also plays on several tracks). Again in 1985, he appeared as a guest on Renzo Arbore's legendary TV show “Quelli della notte”, where, not without a healthy dose of self-mockery, he played the caricature of the “American-style metalhead” during the “look parade” hosted by a young Roberto D'Agostino.

It was a few years later that he made a cameo in Carlo Verdone's film “Maledetto il giorno che t'ho incontrato” (1992), in which Benson holds forth on the guitar playing of Jimi Hendrix in the fictional TV segment “Juke-Box all'idrogeno”, once again in a mode both knowing and farcical (and never missing the chance to namedrop his idols Yngwie Malmsteen, Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Tony MacAlpine).

The other pillar that makes Benson a significant name on the Italian scene is his work as a guitar teacher. Keenly attuned to developments in neoclassical metal and progressive metal, he trained advanced students drawing on the styles of guitar heroes like Vinnie Moore, Paul Gilbert and Yngwie Malmsteen. In the early Nineties, he released several instructional audio cassettes (complete with accompanying booklets) aimed at building up playing technique. An excerpt from a 1991 interview with the magazine “Chitarre” is telling of his outlook: “What matters is how you take these notes, what colour you give them, what relationship you build between string, finger and heart. Anyway, I think you get to these things gradually — in the meantime I say ‘let's play our fingers'. If you can't go fast, it's hard to grasp the soul of the guitar, or at least you'll surely do it better once you've learned to go at two thousand [notes per minute]…”.

Richard Benson's first solo album came out in the late Nineties. “Madre tortura”, recorded with the Italian metal band Mizar, offers up a heavy sound with gothic and neoclassical touches, mixed with blues tracks and overwrought spoken-word episodes. At one point in the instructional videocassette “La velocità di esecuzione nella chitarra metal progressive”, Benson breaks down the construction of one of the tracks, displaying his usual musical competence but also a flair for verbal exaggeration, which would grow considerably more pronounced in the years that followed.

The record was not well received by the specialist press: what undermined the musical result above all was his imprecise technique. People close to the guitarist at the time later claimed that his famous speed of execution had been hampered by the onset of a form of arthritis, which caused growing difficulty in moving his fingers.

No account of the man can leave out the years of decline — and, paradoxically, of his renewed fame with a wider audience. In September 2000, under circumstances that were never fully clarified, Benson fell from the Ponte Sisto in Rome and had to go through a period of rehabilitation. His comeback saw the by-then former guitar hero increasingly play up the theatrical, grand guignol side of his shows, at the expense of the music and of the credibility as a connoisseur he had built up over the previous decades. The new audience for his live shows and videos, meanwhile, was no longer interested in technically informed metal exegesis, but in a relationship with the performer that mixed pity and mockery. Dwelling on the memory of chickens, infernal sticks, sacrifices to Satan and far-fetched tall tales is, however, beyond the scope of this brief article. YouTube is already more than capable of showing us that side of the man.

For those untouched by the pleasures of the whole backdrop looming over us, we press on undeterred, through metal, through progression, to expand our shores.

(Closing lines of the videocassette “La velocità di esecuzione nella chitarra metal progressive”, 1999)

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