A Bluffer’s Guide to the New Romantics would probably have Japan down as the thinking person’s Duran Duran. For a dizzyingly short spell in the eighties their dark disco, 21st century cheekbones and bemusing song titles (‘Taking Islands in Africa’ anyone?) helped make them, simultaneously, darlings of both the electronic art-house scene and the readers of Smash Hits.
A band who always felt uncomfortable with the pop-svengali tactics of manager Simon Napier-Bell (who tried to promote singer David Sylvian as the Most Beautiful Man on the Planet) they succumbed to the pressures of fame exacerbated by a strained relationship between Sylvian and bassist Mick Karn. In short, they had all but self-destructed by the time they were making it really big.
This leaves us with seven exquisite studio albums which the Very Best of presumably seeks to distill.
So to the music – well, it’s as powerful as ever: black and white Euro-disco classics that genuinely helped to define an era. It’s ironic that the two personalities who clashed so painfully should combine together so well musically – so well, in fact, it’s sublime: Sylvian sounding like a mournful Bryan Ferry entwines his vocals around Karn’s fretless bass lines that are probably best described as writhing, while spiked percussion punctuates mournful synth wails.
Putting the band’s hits together shows how commercial the band could sound. I remember Japan albums as meandering, contemplative affairs, often angular, often challenging, but here there’s a real flow and playfulness to the proceedings.
Take the Giorgio Moroder-produced ‘Life in Tokyo’ with its synths chopping like helicopter blades, the evil twin of Duran Duran’s ‘Rio’, and the rush of sound that is ‘The Art of Parties’. It’s heady stuff and great disco fare. A cover of the Velvet Underground’s ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ and the exquisite lament of Ghosts provide quieter but equally powerful highlights.
The album has the quiet presence of a ghost itself – a reminder of what was, and a suggestion of what could have been. The light and shadow of an act that made themselves up and tore themselves apart. Find the ‘Rain Tree Crow’ recordings to hear them come together again after years apart, but get the Very Best of to watch them swagger.