Naoto Shibata

Naoto Shibata (柴田直人) is a leader and bassist of japanese heavy metal legend Anthem. Anthem is on scene since 1980 and Naoto have recorded bass lines for all group’s albums.

Shibata is probably best known, except Anthem, from second part of “Stand Proud!” project, RiP~TtC~ Project (“Rest in Peace ~Thanks to Cozy~”) and his contribution to Konami’s “Dracula Battle Perfect Selection” albums, which feature guitar-laden hard rock reworkings of popular songs from the Castlevania series of video games.

Shibata released a tribute album called “Stand Proud! II” (the first was made by the guitarist SHE-JA), which featured a lot of japanese musicians (Yukio Morikawa, Nov, Minoru Niihara, Genki Hitomi, Hiro Homma, Akio Shimizu, Katsuji, Mad Oouchi, Kenji Kitajima), which contains cover songs from bands that influenced Shibata, like: Bad Company, Black Sabbath, Rainbow, Deep Purple, King Crimson, Wishbone Ash, etc.