IT WAS AN ALBUM THAT ANNOUNCED BIG CHANGES FROM JAPAN WITH A MORE MATURE, HAUNTING NEW GROOVE BEATING AT ITS HEART. CLASSIC POP DISCOVERS HOW DAVID SYLVIAN AND CO MERGED ORIENTALISM WITH HIGH ART TO FORGE THEIR FINAL AND MOST ESOTERIC COLLECTION

STEVE O’BRIEN

Few musical journeys are as far-reaching and profound as the one taken by Japan between their first album in 1978 and their last in 1981. Much is made of The Beatles’ evolution from the simplicity of Love Me Do to the avant-garde stylings of Revolution #9 in just six years, yet Japan travelled from the try-hard glam-pop of Adolescent Sex to the stark, desolate beauty of Ghosts in just three. At the time they recorded their fi nal album singer David Sylvian was just 23 years old.

Japan released only five albums in their brief life, but only three that really matter. “I avoid looking back at the first two Japan albums,” Sylvian said later. “They were enormous mistakes that grew out of extraordinary circumstances. We were all young and surrounded by older people who thought they knew best.”

The first album that really announced to the world what Japan could and would be was 1979’s Quiet Life. It would be their Rubber Soul, a bold restatement of the band’s musical identity, courtesy of disco godhead Giorgio

Moroder. That creative journey continued on 1980’s Gentlemen Take Polaroids and reached its zenith on what would become the group’s fi nal, and most acclaimed record, the haunting Tin Drum.

What’s especially perplexing is that this beguiling, elliptical record would be their bestselling album, and that its third

single, the defi antly uncommercial Ghosts, would become their biggest hit. When Paul Morley described Tin Drum in the NME as “gorgeously erotic” and “perfectly evanescent” it didn’t sound as though he was talking about an LP that would make it to No.12 in the album chart.

Sometimes, it seems, the public is more discerning than they are given credit for.