"Martyn Bates"
"Martyn Bates"
The singer and musician Martyn Bates has since the early 1980s been important to the development of new folk related music. Originally (and still) a member with Peter Becker of the adventurous independent band, ‘Eyeless In Gaza’ he has also had a long concurrent solo career. In his solo work he started to work in experimental folk music during the late 1980s when synthetic and pomp-rock music were the prevailing forms of the time. Folk music was generally ignored at best and often despised, it was therefore an early and bold move to promote the old traditional songs and stories adapted in new avant-garde settings. During the 1990s he started also to work with Alan Trench, the leader of a mysterious band called ‘Orchis’ as a new band called ‘12000 Days’. Since this time Martyn has used these three routes, Eyeless In Gaza, solo and 12000 Days as his creative outlets. Other important collaborations include
`Murder Ballads’, with Mick Harris, `Just After Sunset’, a musical setting of Rilke
with Anne Clark, and `Like a Child Dancing in the Wind’, a musical setting of some
Yeats poems with German drone artists Troum.
2006 has been an active year with the release of a new Eyeless in Gaza album,
two retrospectives, `Your Jewled Footsteps’, and `Plague of Years’ (Eyeless
in Gaza), and a new 12000 days album.