Editor’s info:

"One of the great white soul singer voices, by soul i mean Ian Curtis not Jamiroquai."

Alan Mc Gee / March 2005

Leading our fall season will be these two long-awaited collections. One is devoted to Martyn Bates and offers a retrospective of his whole career, now going on for more than 20 years, including his collaborations outside Eyeless in Gaza. The other collection is a similar retrospective focusing on Eyeless in Gaza.

Martyn Bates / your jewled footsteps / SR257 / CD

Eyeless in Gaza / plague of years / SR263 / CD

During those 20 years, against all odds, Bates managed to shape a unique, instantly recognizable form of music - that voice! - based on a deeply rooted, 100% English folk tradition. In our opinion, he is also greatly underrated as a songwriter. In his solo work and in EIG, he has developed what can be called a style: a combination of angst (a working-class hero) and pure melancholia (time irremediably lost, the loss of idealized love), mixed in with an unconditional love of poetry (Keats, Yeats, Joyce) and authentic popular song stylings. In other words, Martyn Bates belongs to a tradition that can be traced all the way back to the troubled times of the Elizabethan era.

YOUR JEWLED FOOTSTEPS journeys through made-in-England pop, folk, poetry recitation and reconstructions of songs whose origins are long forgotten. In addition to Bates' essential pieces, the collection also includes several previously unreleased tracks, including some pre-Industrial sound works predating EIG's formation, in the late '70s.

Please note that on the design front, we will be introducing a new series featuring the artist in his immediate surroundings (studio, home, street, city…), in the shape of a 8 pages digipack

(presenting around 20 photographs) with separate booklet reproducing all the lyrics heard on the CD.