Most of the modern music chronicles just label Martyn Bates as the singer of Eyeless In Gaza (named after a famous novel by Aldous Huxley), one of the weirdest satellites of the British new wave, put in orbit by Martyn and keyboard player Peter Becker. His particular vocals, like it or not, were one of the distinguishing marks of their crepuscular pop, together with a remarkable set of electric, electronic and acoustic musical weaponry, that enriched their notably and nobly experimental sound. Martyn’s romanticism has often been misunderstood by many reviewers, who barely caught the visceral and somehow autarchic poetics in many of his works. The listening experience he offered by the recent release of “Post-War Baby” in the guise of Kodax Strophes was the guise (forgive the play on words) for this interesting interaction we report below. Enjoy Martyn’s replies and music.
Chain D.L.K.: Hi Martyn! How do you perceive the current zeitgeist? How are you feeling?
Martyn Bates: Right now, I feel fucking great.
Chain D.L.K.: I guess that most of our readers know your name, but maybe the youngest ones don’t. Which (more or less easy to find) records – let’s say no more than 5, even if I know it’s difficult – would you suggest to anyone who never knew your name and want to be introduced?
Martyn Bates: What’s happening Now, that’s the most important stuff – so I’d recommend Post-War Baby by Kodak Strophes, because it’s amongst the most vital music I’ve ever made – with something new & unique to offer. Then Letters Written (1982), for its intense, rarefied, quiet collection of lyric-songs & hymnings. Your Jewelled Footsteps because it puts across well the overall body of solo work that I’ve maintained since 1979. Plague of Years is pretty insightful in terms of my collaborative work with Peter Becker in Eyeless in Gaza. Then, speaking of collaborations – the latest offering from Twelve Thousand Days The Birds Sing As Bells. I’ve been working as a duo in tandem with Alan Trench since 1997 now, so that’s 25 years of channeling peculiar sidereal energy – and The Birds Sings As Bells functions well as a good bringing together of these wyrd/folk/psyche, splintered & often occultural musics.
Chain D.L.K.: One of the releases I keep in my personal collection (and sometimes re-listen with pleasure) with your signature is the triptych of Murder Ballads with Mick Harris. Is there anything unsaid that has been kept hidden from chronicles and chats on that release, which is a masterpiece in my opinion?
Martyn Bates: We’ve only 1 live gig managed, one live gig to date, (October 1999, Berlin). It might well have been nice to make more performances, as this music, paradoxically – given the disturbed level of allegory & metaphor at play – a joy to sing, being essentially two singles strands of sound – one voice, and one strand of deep electronics.
Chain D.L.K.: If you didn’t include in the list of 5 of question 2, I would also suggest the recent excellent albums “Insect Silence” and the recent “Field’s End” as Twelve Thousand Days together with Alan Trench, which I liked even more than the first critically acclaimed one. A question you could expect on this great album. Any words about these astonishing two albums? …and any ones that awesome cover of Black Sabbath’s “Planet Caravan”? Why did you put it as an incipit for “Field’s End”?
Martyn Bates: A good song is a good song. I’ve always wanted to sing this one, and the time seemed right. There is a whiff of the savant genius to that album, likewise much of the rest of the first two Black Sabbath albums.
Chain D.L.K.: You maybe know I come from Italy, but it’s pretty casual I mentioned some releases that have been also pushed by Italian labels (Musica Maxima Magnetica and Final Muzik), but as I noticed that, may I ask you if you have any connection to Italy or Italian scene by chance?
Martyn Bates: Bologna, back in 1988 – a solo concert that gave me heart, after the EIG hiatus (1987-1992). Luciano Dari was a massive help in getting all of that music out there, encouraging & nurturing the project – in several senses. I’ve lost touch with him now, and it would be good to rekindle the friendship.
Chain D.L.K.: Let’s jump back to the present and the reason (or perhaps the pretext) for this talk. Another impressive album, featuring your voice and your “literal” intelligence and poetry… Post-War Baby. First, do you remember the moment when the idea of making it came out?
Martyn Bates: In some senses, the seed-ideas occurred in 1979, pre-Eyeless in Gaza. These ideas were first posited and ran tangentially to DISSONANCE. I still tend to favor the use of the same afterpunk principles when it comes to creativity – a polyglot area of light, stripped-down, rawer, favoring spontaneity – trusting the instinctive and the intuitive.
Chain D.L.K.: In the helpful notes you attached to Post-War Baby, you quoted two possible (possibly implicitly incorrect?) matches by inattentive analysts of this album, which are “Swift as The Wind” and I guess Dylan Thomas’s portrait of young dogs… I’m happy you didn’t mention Stanzas in dejection near Naples!!! Jokes aside, why those quotations? I surmise it’s an ironic statement!
Martyn Bates: No, no, no – I am in earnest. The song Swift as the Wind, that’s the strongest key to the whole work. My ‘notes’ were meant to be ‘helpful’ … but perhaps they were not. I only say this only because to my mind they’ve been seized upon and trampled upon by literalists who seemingly have some difficulty in differentiating between the art and the artist.
Chain D.L.K.: Regarding quotations, the first song quotes a pre-war educator like Arthur Mee (that was also a eugenicist and Darwinian) that had a strong and criticized influence on post-war babies’ education and mindset … how come?
Martyn Bates: Simply, I had access to a set of these old encyclopedias when a child. You know, a wise man once said “the past is a different country – they do things differently there … “. Mee was an Edwardian writer who I’d say had more in common with the self-help movement of Samuel Smiles than the emphasis you’ve outlined and stressed above. His writings were viewed and formulated before the hideous unfolding and outcomes that arose during the main body of the century. Let me state clearly, I’m not in any way shape or form being an apologist here for such hideous beliefs, but I really do strongly feel that by now people should know me & my work & what I do much better by now than to suspect that I’d allow such vile modes of thought to knowingly creep into what I do via my front door.
Chain D.L.K.: “[…] with that seventh year, I became estranged/faces turn to masks, masks that turn away, and I’m left listening as I ride upon the waves[…]” I wonder how many people will think of nowadays situation, after listening to these lines of the beautiful “Shell & Eagle Book”! : D What’s the real and definitely undistorted context of this song?
Martyn Bates: Viewed from one particular perspective, these are visitations from the non-corporeal world, perhaps … phantasms maybe, rafts of knowledge and information. Dreams, colors, arriving fires, amber traps to sidestep, and … new joys, new awakenings.
Chain D.L.K.: Any word on the room described/sung in “Smashed Milk”? Sounds like a scary nursery room?
Martyn Bates: Some earlier acid bands – Clear Light/Airplane/Doors/Country Joe & The Fish/The United States of America … they mirrored back some violence, light, and wonder of my bewildering Methodist religious insights – which was quite the wild ride for a sensitive soul who couldn’t really speak with his parents – loving parents, but parents who did not happen to possess a great facility for language. This sense of wonder never ever leaves what I do – even when it seems far, far away from my mind.
Chain D.L.K.: From “Night Window / Christ Child” (one song or two moments joined together?): “imagination feels like reason, feels like lights: feels like meaning … imagination feels like purpose, feels like focus feels like gold”… not feeling like poison yet? Maybe a question that knows your art very well can understand this question, but can you tell us more about this song?
Martyn Bates: I don’t want to posit an opposition of the world today and the pre-lapsarian world, and this song does not entertain any such ideas. I am simply reporting back from, reporting back on the sensory miasmas/ state of awareness that I experienced. I feel that in some ways we can be said to exist in the past, the present, and the future simultaneously. There are so many things that, as individuals, we know while not being consciously aware that we know these things.
Chain D.L.K.: The only ‘lyrics less’ moment of Post-War Baby is “Paper Swans/Sunny Wedding Of The Painted Dolls/The Cyclopaedia/Pears”… why? Is there any specific reason for such a choice?
Martyn Bates: This piece is a series of impressions gathered, collected from the vast storehouse of my earliest memories. The interplay of a child’s games, in child’s time …which is slow, slow music indeed.
Chain D.L.K.: One of the more fascinating moments of the album is perhaps “Kindred”. Any word about this sort of sinister lullaby?
Martyn Bates: Sinister?! … This song is a poem of enlightenment and true learning … it’s neutral maybe, if anything … no, no! It’s not neutral – it is benign. The internal life is always with is, the antiphony, the rapture even, the ecstasy, that sense of wonder, the feeling of being blessed and violently alive. To “learn the name” is an act of defiance (maybe) … To possess yourself in relation to the universe and divine nature – this is a gift that taunts and teases us all forever, yet it is somehow within the purview of all – and maybe if we could hold onto it for every second of the day, then maybe we’d sort it all out, or probably overload – its too much energy to contain, perhaps.
Chain D.L.K.: I guess effects on voice play a role in some songs. One of the songs where effects are widely used is the last song “Scattered Song”. What’s the reason for this choice?
Martyn Bates: Artistic license/choice of palette and brushes. I wanted to convey a sense of the many-voice, multiplicity of influence, of perspective, of transmission, of reception. My feeling is – is the world a fight? I wonder … I sometimes get the feeling that I am forever being placed in the position of ‘buying into other people’s nonsense’… to be alive is to suffer. Maybe. Maybe not. Do they owe us a living? Maybe/maybe not. Am I my brother’s keeper? Clearly, I am my brother’s keeper – but the perpetual white noise is overwhelming, crushing, and it’s too much responsibility for a single soul to maintain. We are continually called upon to be more than human when palpably we are not Gods – well, not that in that sense anyway.
Chain D.L.K.: Would you say this “Post-War Baby” could be related to any past releases or collaboration or is it self-standing?
Martyn Bates: This is interesting to muse upon. My general feeling is the vast body of my work is all inter-related, it crisscrosses crazily, always has done. I have to say that an interview such as this, where it is obvious that you have done your research, and that you have some new and original questions to frame – such an interview can be of great help to an artist, in that it calls help focus the mind greatly. I’m thinking now that post-war baby in some senses stands alone in its rawness and autobiographical frame of reference. All my songs seek to explore something real, something raw and alive – yet with these, I’ve explored the spiritual world of a child’s mind, with all its vivid, flashing intensity of exploration – its night shadows, its sun joys, its powerlessness, and its nascent and very real primal energy. The seed. The flowering. The light.
Chain D.L.K.: Any work in progress?
Martyn Bates: Post War Baby, there was pretty much enough material in outline/raw ideas to be a double album. I am currently working on this material, but it is beginning to feel markedly different in character from the original set of songs. There is a great deal of re-writing, the thing is re-writing itself … changing shape – it has a life of its own, it seems – as is often the case. The Kodak Strophes material/mode of working is my biggest thrill at the moment – It’s where my true musical heart is – it’s the best thing for me. I am still heavily involved with the Sorry For Laughing project, which is a collaboration between Ed Kaspel, Gordon H Whitlow, & myself. A second trio album is now completed and scheduled for release, and further material is still in the pipeline … the music is an interesting hybrid of quasi-classical influences and different elements of rock. I still have a hell of a lot to say, a lot I need to express – and the creative process, the actual doing of it – it still thrills me. As long as it does that one thing, then I’ll continue to make music, come hell or high water.
Visit Martyn Bates on the web:
https://www.eyelessingaza.com/mb.html
https://kodaxstrophes.bandcamp.com/