Japan were always a bit of a mystery. They were certainly different, but they were also operating in musical territory where they were bound to suffer from lazy comparison and ill-considered labelling. Of course, in many ways they were asking for it. The androgynous image might well have had its origins in The New York Dolls but there was also that identifiable Roxy Music elegance to their particular glam approach. Sylvian's vocal stylings were obviously closest to those of the singing quiff himself and those Ferryisms are still intact on his latest recording, Dead Bees on a Cake.
But whether Japan really qualify as glam rock is probably neither here nor there. Pop music history will always be remember them as New Romantics, the haircuts and the mascara having long ago marked them out as possibly unwitting trailblazers in that particular craze. As New Romanticism bloomed, Japan were swept up and dropped into a very mixed make-up bag that included everyone from Spandau Ballet to Culture Club and perhaps none of it doing much justice to the musical possibilities of Sylvian, Jansen, Karn and Barbieri. Now living in northern California, David Sylvian, a once rather reluctant interviewee, readily acknowledges that blond affectation that fuelled the success of Japan and talks with considerable certitude about the pitfalls of image.
"We start out very young in this game. We don't have that much time to find out who we are before we are up on a stage projecting this and that.
"It took a while to sort it all out to be honest. I found that when I started making music in the late seventies, I used it to disguise who I truly was. It was a means of escaping who I was rather than expressing myself. The evolution of Japan was me slowly stripping away at that disguise and trying to reveal myself. I hadn't really been able to do that with the band until I wrote Ghosts and I felt that I was having some kind of breakthrough. But of course the band was breaking up at that stage and it was too late. Ghosts was the first time I managed to express myself with something that wasn't cluttered with other images and metaphors. It was also a very personal piece, which again is something which is often quite difficult to project through the democratic workings of a band. But when I saw that possibility it opened doors for me."
And so, for many reasons, Japan split at the very peak of their success. They had managed a series of hits in Britain at the start of the 1980s and had reached the top 10 twice in 1982 with Ghosts and a remake of Smokey Robinson's I Second That Emotion. Particularly big in Japan and with their album Tin Drum enjoying considerable success, Sylvian decided to go out on his own, finding a new collaborator in Ryuichi Sakamoto of the Yellow Magic Orchestra. A track called Forbidden House was included on Sakamoto's soundtrack to Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence and Sylvian's first solo album Brilliant Trees appeared in 1986. It was an introspective and quite complex affair but nevertheless the album yielded a hit in Red Guitar.
To be a solo artist who could collaborate with particular sympathetic musicians was to be obviously the way forward for Sylvian "For me it was a always means of stretching myself as a writer. That was my goal. To put myself in a situation where I was not entirely clear how I would respond and to be provoked by other artists to respond in a variety of different ways. That's what I was hoping would happen and it occasionally did happen. There are compromises to be made yes, but there are many rewarding aspects to the idea of collaborating. You already have an idea of what's in you and you put yourself in a controlled situation which you hope may bring it forth. Of course you are choosing the personalities you are involved and while you really are in control of the situation to some degree, there are always unknown elements and they are the things that you hope will work on you and surprise you. And you may surprise yourself. It's a means of stretching yourself further than you are likely to just working under your own steam."
Throughout his career Davis Sylvian has collaborated with the very best of people - among them Robert Fripp, Virginia Astley, Bill Nelson and Holger Czukay. On the new record he is joined by serious names like Bill Frisell, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Marc Ribot. Between the lot of them they have come up with a varied and multi-textured album that features everything from John Lee Hooker on a loop to Sakamoto's Gil Evans impression. Sylvian is still clearly energised by the rewards as much as by the potential difficulties of collaboration. And he takes none of it for granted.
"It tends to work in different ways. I start arranging a piece of music and I start to hear certain voices performing certain roles. Obviously they have to fall into my own frame of reference so it's a matter of who I'm aware of and who I'm listening to. Going back to my first solo album I would write a piece like Brilliant Trees and Jon Hassell's trumpet would come to mind as something that would fit in perfectly. It was a bit of a jump in those days from working with session musicians - something which really scared me - to a situation where musicians would come in and respond to the work in a profound way. So I tried to handpick musicians that I was aware of and where I could kind of gauge how they might respond to the work - and just make that call. And I was amazed at how many people responded immediately to the invitation. That was an eye-opener. People just don't get asked often enough! Maybe I take it a little more for granted now than I did then - but not really - I'm always grateful."
These days David Sylvian has little truck with the whims of pop music and fashion. His CV places him in rather more avant garde territory where he concentrates on his solo work, assorted collaborations, commissions, photography and performances. There have been videos, installations and publications and yet hardly a backward glance to the glory days of Japan - apart from a quite unexpected reformation under the name of Rain Tree Crow at the end of the 1980s.
Now based north of San Francisco, Sylvian lives a quiet life and enjoys the process of making music free of the restrictions of pop stardom and all its works.
"If I had my own way there would be complete silence. There would be music but there would be silence surrounding it. I sympathise with certain novelists who write their books in solitude and the publisher puts it out and suddenly they're on this train across the country doing book-signings and radio shows when it's just not in their nature to be like that. I'm happy in my solitude and I feel that silence best benefits the work. It has always been a problem for me but less so now. I feel very grounded and rooted in life in a way that I didn't before and I'm less vulnerable to the negative influences that come with this kind of attention. But the industry needs my support in promoting the record and I do the best that I can. I do want people to hear the record - I mean the whole point is to communicate."
David Sylvian has been around more than one corner since he first made an arty record called Adolescent Sex in 1978. He has been pinup, pop-star, enigma and serious musician. Twenty years on from his first recording, with plenty of time to reflect, he finds himself happy. Away from the bedlam of a stardom that was founded largely, as he acknowledges, on fashion and artifice, he has emerged as a spirited musician with an impressively independent focus and an absolute seriousness about the work itself. The make-up long washed away, it's now all about the music itself and what he firmly believes it can achieve.
"We all care about what happens our work. You want it to reach people and you want it to touch people. You may have 100,000 people buying it but how many of them will truly take the time to listen to it and be touched by it? I think music is enriching and life-enhancing. I think it's an affirmation of life and can work as an aid to bring us into contact with that rather neglected part of ourselves that we tend to run away from at tremendous speed on a daily basis. It's a form of meditation in many ways - both to make it and to listen to it - in the same way that poetry is.
"You have to be creative in your listening and it's enormously rewarding and beneficial in our lives. It gives us small epiphanies that stay with us and help us hold on to who and what we are."