Move over girls…as Cambridge plays host to two male musical maestros this month – dreadlocked acoustic guitar kingNewton Faulkner and up-and-coming singer songwriter Benjamin Taylor.
Louise Cummings talks to both as they prepare to tour the UK
He’s the undisputed king of the acoustic guitar, who lives, eats and breathes music. So when
BRIT-nominated singer-songwriter Newton Faulkner headed off to France on a family skiing holiday last Christmas, he thought he shouldn’t risk injuring his moneymaking fingers, and stayed off the piste.
He was due to begin recording his second album – the follow-up to his million-selling debut – two days after the trip, so erred on the side of caution.
“Then on Boxing Day I slipped over two feet from the front door, landed really badly, fractured my radius and dislocated my right hand,” he says, with a hint of disbelief in his voice.
Rushed to hospital in agonising pain, the 24-year-old, renowned for his long red dreadlocks, was told he needed to wear a cast for two and half months. Then French doctors broke the devastating news that once the cast was removed, Newton may have lost a lot of movement in his hand. But the irrepressible singer refused to give up on his career and, after a frantic flurry of calls to specialists in the UK, learned of a new treatment where a special plate could be bonded to the shattered bone.
However, before he could fly back home Newton would need to have his arm
re-set… without anaesthetic!
“The piece of bone which had fractured off my radius was pointing towards some tendons and nerve endings and if they had touched at all, it would have caused permanent damage. But if I flew, everything would swell up and it would be likely they would contact so the doctors needed to manipulate the bone back in place before I got on the plane.”
As the operation back in Britain was scheduled for the next day Newton couldn’t even have a local anaesthetic, so cue some of the highest top-notes ever to come out of the singer’s voicebox
as two French doctors wrenched his hand back into some semblance of its proper shape.
Full story in Cambridge Style - October 2009.
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