Japan - Gentlemen Take Polaroids
Written by: Moti Kupfer
Release date - 07.11.1980
In March 1980, "Japan" set out on a tour of Japan as part of the "Quiet Life Tour" promoting the album "Quiet Life". The tour included shows across the country, among them the Budokan in Tokyo on March 27.
During the tour, the band's leader and lead singer David Sylvian was interviewed for the Japanese magazine "Music Life". The interviewer was the pianist and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, who was at the time a member of the Japanese art-pop band "Yellow Magic Orchestra".
That meeting marked the beginning of a long and wonderful friendship and of a fruitful musical partnership, which began that same year on "Gentlemen Take Polaroids", the fourth album by "Japan", released on November 7, 1980.
In their early days, "Japan" were labeled a kind of New York Dolls mixed with Roxy Music. The brothers David Sylvian and Steve Jansen (Batt was their original family name) and the bassist Mick Karn attended the same school in South London.
As youngsters, the three played two-chord pieces written by Sylvian, at first with Karn as the singer and Sylvian on guitar and backing vocals. Sylvian became the lead singer in 1974, and in June of that year they performed in public for the first time, at the wedding reception of Karn's brother.
A year later another friend from school, Richard Barbieri, joined on keyboards, and later the lead guitarist Rob Dean. They signed a contract with Simon Napier-Bell, who managed The Yardbirds, and with Marc Bolan.
In 1977 the band signed a recording contract with "Hansa" and became a glam rock band in the style of Lou Reed, David Bowie, T. Rex, Roxy Music and the New York Dolls.
Glam rock was indeed present in their playing style at the start, but from album to album the electronic sound became ever more present, until the sharp change during the recording of "Gentlemen Take Polaroids", the first album by "Japan" for "Virgin". On top of that, friction began to develop between the band members during the recording.
After three albums, Sylvian had gained confidence, not only as a singer and songwriter but also as an arranger and producer. By 1980 he had very clear ideas about how the band should be presented, both visually and sonically, and the new focus he found distanced him from his bandmates.
"There were arguments between me and Dave," recalled bassist Mick Karn. "Recording the saxophone arrangements took days, with only Dave hearing something wrong in every take I laid down. In one instance, assistant engineer Colin Fairley sat patiently and recorded a single word from the song "Methods of Dance" over and over for three days."
Sylvian recognized this neurotic obsession himself and said: "I tend to be too much of a perfectionist. It caused a lot of problems in the studio." The sound that emerged, layer after layer, was dense, polished and panoramic. Sonically, not a hair was out of place. The same could not be said of the crew.
Musically, and even aesthetically, there was little room for Rob Dean in the "Japan" of the 1980s. He struggled both visually and musically. "My creative goals drifted away from the rest of the band, which made it harder and harder to find my place in the recordings," he said.
"The band moved more towards electronic music, with Brian Eno, "Yellow Magic Orchestra" and Kraftwerk being the strongest influences, and guitar started to sound less and less like part of the band's full sound."
"I felt I was holding Rob back, because I had specific ideas for the guitar and kept forcing them on him," Sylvian admits. "It would take hours in the studio, because I'd push him a bit against what he wanted to do. It peaked on "Gentlemen Take Polaroids", as Rob played on only about four songs." Dean was not explicitly told that his services would be largely redundant for the album's requirements; in most cases he simply wasn't contacted.
Back during the recording of "Quiet Life", Paul McCartney himself offered to record guitar parts for their album, which never ended up happening but opened new directions for the future.
Sylvian began to take an interest in bringing outside musicians in to contribute to the studio sessions. Among them was the violinist Simon House of "Hawkwind" (Sylvian tried to teach himself to play the violin that summer, but soon abandoned the instrument).
The album opens with the title track "Gentlemen Take Polaroids", ostensibly a conventional pop song, but Sylvian's sad voice, combined with Steve Jansen's complex drumming and Mick Karn's melodic bass, gives it a twist and lends it a strange, unfamiliar air. Sylvian composed the chorus and the melody and wrote the lyrics. According to guitarist Rob Dean, the band worked on the song for quite a long time compared with the other songs on the album.
The search for solace and escape from reality through imagination and distant dreams fills the next song, "Swing". The lyrics speak of driving a car and conquering islands in Africa, as metaphors for finding a temporary refuge from the complexity of life and relationships.
"Burning Bridges" was inspired by John Hersey's book "Hiroshima", which David Sylvian read. The book reports on the terrible consequences of the atomic bomb dropped on the Japanese city, and Sylvian links the experiences of the six survivors detailed in it to his own experience of burning bridges in his life, which was meant to force him to move on after painful events. The song contains themes familiar from Sylvian's songwriting: isolation, longing and a fascination with the Far East.
The two songs that follow, "My New Career" and "Methods of Dance", fit well together around themes of leaving home and setting out on a new journey in life, along with the experience of learning and adapting to new ways of moving and living, symbolized by dance.
It is the ballad "Nightporter" that became, without doubt, the album's highlight. Its lyrics draw inspiration from the 1974 drama film "The Night Porter", directed by Liliana Cavani and starring Charlotte Rampling and Dirk Bogarde. Bogarde's role as the night porter Max inspired the album cover.
The song is influenced by the French composer Erik Satie, especially his piano pieces "Gymnopédies". It was Sylvian's first song to use a first-person narrative to convey a sense of longing and regret to his audience, through a minimalist arrangement dominated by piano. The piano was played by Barbieri and Sylvian together.
Sylvian's voice and the piano are accompanied by double bass and oboe, played by session musicians Barry Guy and Andrew Cauthery respectively, with keyboards that come in toward the end played by Barbieri.
The song that closes the album, "Taking Islands in Africa", was the first of many collaborations between Sylvian and Ryuichi Sakamoto, who plays keyboards on it. Like many of their songs, this one conveys the feeling of isolation and detachment very well.
The album was certified gold in the UK, but it also began turning the band's hourglass backwards, toward the split that came in December 1982, and not before the band left behind what is considered its greatest work, "Tin Drum".
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