MARTIN S TAYLOR INTERVIEW
He’s famously the hypnotist who inspired Derren Brown – and yet is also “the hypnotist who doesn’t use hypnosis”…? We chat stage hypnosis, showmanship and subterfuge, science, ‘state’, law and more with Martin S Taylor.
Who better a subject for our inaugural Cosmic Pancakes! performer interview than Martin S Taylor? He’s the hypnotist who inspired Derren Brown regarding hypnosis, but, mind-bendingly, is also “the hypnotist who doesn’t use hypnosis” – how very on-brand for this blog!
I’ve known Martin since he spoke at the second ‘change | phenomena’ hypnotism conference in London, way back in 2011 – his one-hour talk (along with Professor Kirsch’s) is available on YouTube, and is well worth a watch to find out the sorts of things he does in his stage performances. I really enjoyed his presentation and stayed in touch, occasionally meeting up for lunch and hanging out at the UK Hypnosis Convention, which is where I introduced him to Amy.
Our interview over Zoom was a chance to talk shop, to find out what he really thinks hypnosis is, and to understand him better so that we can introduce him to our readers.
Martin explained that he started out learning magic at university, performing for friends and at parties, where he knocked around with a guy who did a bit of informal hypnosis – “So I watched him, I learned and I thought ’this is a bit weird, a bit dangerous. I hope he knows what he's doing’”.
And it was simply Martin telling someone that he knew about hypnosis that presented the opportunity to give it a try himself; a friend had always wanted to be hypnotised so Martin spent 20 minutes swinging an amulet in front of her eyes, telling her she was feeling sleepy, after which he gave her suggestions and she took them. He got her to scratch her nose and rearrange objects, based on post-hypnotic suggestions – a small feat but from which he caught the bug and he spent all summer hypnotising anyone who would listen.
Martin’s first ‘professional’ engagement was filling in for an absent speaker for a university society event. “They said ‘Martin, you're the entertainer, get out there and do a lecture on… hypnotism!’ So I went out and I did this thing. In the first 45 minutes, I spoke about the history on the science of hypnosis, which I'd learned a bit about in the previous few months.” Following his lecture he called up volunteers from the audience and proceeded to hypnotise them, during which he “found some fabulous subjects”.
After repeating the lecture/show a few times, it was Martin’s brother who suggested (!) that he offer it to other universities and start to make money out of it. And when later, after graduation, he got made redundant from his writing job, he worked out he could make a living as a professional stage hypnotist, and it became his full-time career. “It was always a lecture demonstration rather than a show,” he explained, in contrast to the standard stage hypnosis show.
These days, Martin’s show is unique in that he doesn’t hypnotise anyone (more on that later). But I wanted to know if that had always been the case, and what he thought hypnosis was when he started out. “Oh, I thought it was a special state of mind. I thought it was just what everybody, you know, what the man in the street thinks it is. You stare at a glittering light and you go into some mysterious state of mind, kind of like sleep, but it's not really sleeping. You surrender your will to the person and you have, you know, all the crap that everybody believes.”
So clearly, at the outset Martin was a statist, which is really common, because hypnosis really does look like a state, to the hypnotist as well as to the audience. But it was the late magician and skeptic, Lewis Jones, who told him that this was nonsense. “He said, ‘Oh, I don't believe in hypnosis. I don't think it exists.’ He was the first person to explain to me this whole idea of social compliance.”
We had quite the chat about what Martin thinks hypnosis actually is today, and he’s in agreement with Derren Brown, leaning heavily on Graham Wagstaff’s ‘expectation, strategy, compliance’ stance: “For my money, the best description of hypnosis is in Derren’s book, Tricks of the Mind. I think it is wonderfully written and very lucid and very well thought out. It sort of presents the difficulty of trying to try to nail what hypnosis is, while also explaining what we do know about hypnosis.”
But how Martin arrived here was much more fascinating.
“So I was experimenting with ways of doing the show without induction. And to start, everybody does the hand clasp so I did the hand clasp, but that works well enough without an induction. And then you can extend the hand clasp, you get someone and you say, ‘Okay, now your hands are free, but your teeth are stuck together’, or ‘Your hand’s stuck to the top of your head’, or ‘You can't move your arms or whatever.’”
“So eventually, I thought, well, let's try this. Let's see if I can do the whole show and tell people there's no hypnosis; so that's what I did. I took the whole Lewis Jones approach and said, ‘Look, there is no hypnosis, it doesn't really work that way; it’s just suggestion. It's peer pressure. It's compliance. It's obedience, but it still works.’”
When pushed, Martin claimed hypnosis was a mix of peer pressure, social compliance, and suggestion. But he still believed that the induction made people more responsive to suggestion, or that the ‘trance’ (which he believed was the result of a suggestion) made people more likely to respond to the hypnotist’s suggestions. Specifically, he said, “It works better if people believe there is a trance”, which is a really interesting proposition. Believing that a hypnotic state exists makes people more likely to experience one; and if they do experience it, it makes them more responsive, at least according to Martin.
But what about Martin? Does he respond to suggestions? Well, he told us that he had been tested with the Stanford scale (SHSS:C) and scored 50%, making him a medium responder, but that wasn’t the whole story: “Part of me could have said, ‘Yeah, right, I'll go along with this. This is fine. I get it.’ But no, you just do what you feel comfortable doing without actually putting yourself up as a fraud.” So, given Martin’s perspectives on role play and social compliance, we had to privately wonder whether feeling compelled to pass the tests was the same as taking suggestions for him, but unfortunately the conversation moved on quickly and we didn’t get a chance to ask.
But on the state versus non-state debate, Martin was far more generous than I am: “Well there’s the possibility that it works… I think it does work differently with different people. And there's the possibility there are some people for whom they can go into a state.” But when it came to his show, he was very clear about what he was presenting: “I'm doing a demonstration based on suggestion, peer pressure, obedience, and stagecraft, and I create the illusion of hypnosis by manipulating their minds.”
Fun facts that people don’t know about Martin:
He’s never performed in Liverpool, where Graham Wagstaff is based, so he’s never found out what Wagstaff thinks of his approach;
He loves the hypnosis film Dead Again and recommends it to everyone;
He was an expert witness in the hypnotism case, Haworth v Green at the High Court in London, presided over by Lord Justice Leveson.
It was an absolute joy to talk with Martin, even though he couldn’t reveal any secrets about the mysterious Mr Brown. All we know is that they’ve known each other for a long time, and that they are still friends and very much in touch. Martin ended our interview with a bit of insight into the master manipulator: “Derren is a smart guy – he's a nice guy, you know. For all his devious, knavish sense of humour sometimes, basically, underneath he's a very caring guy.”
And there you have it; the man who inspired Derren regarding hypnosis, thinks Derren is a great guy. And, of course, he is. We hope that one day this blog is so important that Uncle Derren (as Amy likes to call him) will drop us the email accepting our standing invitation to succumb to a cosmic interview. Until then, we will find other mortal brains to devour.