Matt Benson: “Life is a really beautiful thing, and there’s so much in the shadows”

Matt Benson has enjoyed a hugely impressive career to date. Playing the trombone as a member of George Ezra’s band since 2017, he has performed at Glastonbury, as well as appearing on Jools Holland’s Hootenanny, The Tonight Show and more.

Now, the Rostrevor musician is ready to step onto the stage front and centre, with his debut album, Sit Back Down Again, having just dropped. How does it feel to have made the shift from sideman to solo act?

“I was trying my best to be this amazing trombone player, and I don’t think that was my destiny,” says Matt. “But it’s definitely a part of my story. I always felt like I was a songwriter, actually.”
Growing up, the musician “couldn’t escape music”, with his mother teaching harp and piano, and his late father playing the trombone and working in a music shop in Belfast. Furthermore, Benson’s beloved trombone has a somewhat mystical origin story.

During the Troubles, the store was blown up, the trombone being the only instrument to survive. The same night, after a thorough scrub in the kitchen sink, his father taught Benson ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ in C Major. “That was the start of a long list of adventures,” he remembers.

The County Down musician vividly recalls the impact of conflict surrounding him growing up.

“You can feel it in the air, really,” he says. “It’s still there, the remnants of it, as with any war zone. The air is somehow tempered.”

He believes the music scene also struggles with this legacy of violence.

“I think the jazz scene in Belfast has always been there, trying to reignite itself,” Benson continues. “There’s so much life in Belfast; it just hasn’t been allowed to express itself, because it’s been encased in this weird silence that comes with trauma.”

In creating Sit Back Down Again, Benson was coming to terms with his own trauma, with recurring themes of loss, family and loneliness. Describing the process as a form of therapy, the songs appeared to write themselves.

“‘Sit Back Down Again’ found me; I woke up with that song in my head,” says Benson. “I went to the keyboard and wrote it down. None of it made sense to me when I wrote it. When I was playing it for a friend a few months after, I realised, ‘This whole song is about my sister dying.’”

The sadness that accompanies the grief of losing someone close is one of life’s most precious gifts, Benson finds.

“A lot of people experience loneliness and losing people and the joy that’s in that. Life is a really beautiful thing, and there’s so much in the shadows of life; in the darkness, there’s a real joy imbued in sadness too.”

That sense of beauty in darkness seems to echo through the people and moments that have shaped Benson’s life. When asked about the most cherished memories and collaborations of his lengthy career, he tells me there are simply too many to count.

Discussing his time with ska legends Bad Manners, however, he recounts a certain trait that drew him to frontman Buster Bloodvessel.

“I learnt a lot from him and Bad Manners,” says Matt. “He just has a lot of charisma, and there’s a light inside of some people that transcends description, really. I saw that in Shane MacGowan as well. And George Ezra has that too.”

Sit Back Down Again blends New Orleans soul, ’60s R&B and vivid storytelling with flashes of fiction. The album is as much a new chapter as it is a revisiting of the past.

“I was always a songwriter,” says Matt. “As a child, I used to sit in the computer room and I would just write story after story. It’s a beautiful thing to have this thing that you created – and it’s exactly the same as writing as a child.”

• Sit Back Down Again is out now.