Richard Philip Henry John Benson was not a normal person. In the mid-90s, he was a hunk Italian prog guitarist in nuts-tight denim, bare-chested beneath a black silk blazer, famous across Rome for his fretboard stunt show VHS tapes. The guitar tricks on his mail-order “instructional” videos were nearly irreplicable — dizzying two-hand tap triplets into pinch harmonic divebombs. Blistering legato classical runs, done backwards in double time. The guitar equivalent of juggling flaming swords, one-handed, blindfolded.
By the mid-2010s, Benson was obese, mentally unwell, with gnarled arthritic fingers, his supernatural riffage reduced to sloppy, chopping sounds. Live shows found Benson pelted with moldy fruit, raw fish, bags of flour, toilet brushes, chicken corpses, a pig’s head — and worse. It became just another part of the gig, which inched to an eternal close in 2022.
After his death, questions arose: Was late-career Benson simply an empty husk of a man being chronically abused by cruel punters and drugged by managers to keep the show rolling? Or was he music’s version of Tommy Wiseau — the producer/writer/director/star of The Room, who (ultimately) embraced public ridicule and played along straight-faced?
Born in England in 1955, Benson moved to Italy at age 10, and proved himself a prodigy, leading prog outfit Buon Vecchio Charlie to success while still a minor. Film roles followed, along with TV and radio host jobs and a campy Italo disco hit, “Animal Zoo” (“Get up and move to be funky / I want to hear you scream like a monkey”).
By 1987, the self-proclaimed ‘Prophet of Metal’ had ascended to the crest of Italian heavy rock, curating (and appearing on) Metal Attack, a chart-crushing compilation album of Mediterranean bands, with a topless, female centauride strumming a spine guitar for cover art.
After a suspicious plunge off Rome’s Ponte Sisto bridge in 2000, which he denied was a suicide attempt, Benson was reportedly left with mental dysfunctions and underwent prolonged rehab just to stand. He eventually returned to performing in Rome, but his playing was reduced to a special form of horrible, and that’s when guests routinely hurled food, drinks, and diapers, apparently used. Some shows found Benson helped onstage, distant and unresponsive, performing in a chair while being defiled, wiped off occasionally by his wife Ester. Other times he would be energized, clad in bootleg KISS armor and goggles, waving a sword at the flying detritus and hurling trash back at his audience.
“It was not for the faint of heart,” says Andrea Marutti, an electronic musician, who pushed his way ringside at a club in the town of Fiumicino, outside Rome, for a 2006 gig. “The audience at Richard’s concerts mostly consisted of people affiliated with Roman hooligan groups, individuals from far-right extremist circles or heavy metal heads.”
Benson not only played inside a cage but also had a plastic tarp hoisted to shield himself and his band. “After playing a few songs, and in response to the audience’s solemn promise to stop throwing things, the tarp was removed,” Andrea remembers. “From that moment on, a relentless barrage of objects was hurled at Benson, including a can of motor oil.”
As mayhem reigned, the intrepid Marutti stayed upfront, getting doused in flying beer and struck with projectiles.
Drifting in and out of the public eye for years, a wild-eyed Benson guested as a judge on an Italian American Idol knockoff, where producers drove him to seemingly legit on-air breakdowns by repeatedly having contestants perform “Cucciolo”, a cover Benson scored a hit with in 1983 and had come to detest. By 2010, Benson was releasing bizarre recreations of his early trick videos, barely landing every ten or so notes while screaming at the ceiling.
2015 saw his first album in 15 years, the pagan-medievalist epic L’inferno Dei Vivi, and the following year, Duello Madre, a curious album of other artists’ songs with entirely different lyrics. Sanity continued to blur at live shows, heart surgeries left two stents, and, on pain meds for arthritis, a swollen Benson looked disconnected from reality. Unable to pay his medical bills, he petitioned the Italian public for donations, and the fan base came to his aid.
By late 2021, Benson seemed to have returned to relative normalcy, appearing unannounced online minus the makeup and costumes, playing an acoustic number dedicated to his wife, titled “Processione”. It was set for release the following June, though Benson never saw it stream. He died in May 2022 from heart failure, speaking his last words to the boy who ran his social media: “If I die, I die happy.”
Buon Vecchio Charlie’s hard prog is experiencing a resurgence. Benson’s ’90s trick tapes are appreciated as flawless embodiments of the cock-rock that grunge eventually slayed, and his peak shred moves are mentioned alongside Steve Vai’s and Eddie Van Halen’s.
Rumors even persist that the Benson live experience wasn’t simply the abuse of an impaired man, but the dark performance art of a self-aware trollist. We’ll never know.
