Martin Orford Quotes

I think that the influence of the folk music of the British Isles features very strongly in my music and always has done. It's not just there in tracks like "The Field Of Fallen Angels" where the use of various "folk" instruments make it quite obvious; if you listen to tracks like "Provider" from "Subterranea" for instance, that's just a little folk song melody too, though the "drone" sound behind it is from electronic sources rather than bagpipes or hurdy-gurdy! I deliberately write a lot of my material using the Mixolydian and Dorian modes rather than the normal major and minor scales, and this help to define the music as peculiarly English as a lot of traditional folk melodies have a flattened seventh in the scale. However technicalities aside, I am very much a creature of the English countryside and I hope to continue to reflect that in my music.
Martin Orford

Learning a new set of material is always a challenge, but the John Wetton set is actually a really nice one to play. I have very fond memories of seeing John with U.K., so those songs particularly appeal to me.
Martin Orford

IQ was formed in 1981 by myself and Mike Holmes. We had previously been in a band called The Lens, which was mainly instrumental, and we formed the new band to broaden the scope of our music. In actual fact, some of the earliest IQ music was in a dance music vein, a bit like Talking Heads, and it took a while before we settled down into a more prog rock direction. After a couple if independent albums, we had a brief flirtation with a major record deal (Polygram)between 1985-89, but since then, we have been completely independent of the music industry.
Martin Orford