1986: Gone To Earth

Growing up with David Sylvian

Disc 1

Research by Cambridge psychologists suggests that our music taste changes as we age. In adolescence, for example, we tend to find music more important and gravitate towards more ‘intense’ genres like punk or metal.

And so it turns out that this was yet another way in which I was not like other 16 year olds in 1986, because I was listening to David Sylvian’s third solo album Gone To Earth, which is not intense, at least not in that sense.¹ It is sombre and swooning, acoustic and lyrical; and half of it, the second disc of the double album, is entirely atmospheric instrumentals of shadowy soundscapes and strange voices.

Those Cambridge psychologists were right about one thing, though: I took it very seriously, almost as seriously as I took myself. I played it on repeat, as one does with new records at that age, immersing myself in the deep melancholy and poetic yearnings. To be fair to my 16 year old self (which is not easy), I was taking myself marginally less seriously than David Sylvian was taking himself. There was a lot of melancholy and poetry to drown in.

Even the titles held great significance to me. Before I bought the album I bought the single ‘Taking The Veil’, a title full of a dark Catholicism, of the self-abnegation and seclusion of a woman entering a nunnery. In my monstrous self-absorption, I felt this was a situation I could sympathise with.

The single’s cover was a Peter Blake illustration from Through The Looking Glass, a book full of absurdism, satire and hallucinatory images; a book both childlike and subversive, and hence close to the hearts of teenagers everywhere.

And the album title, Gone To Earth, was redolent of pastoral romanticism (with a little bit of folk horror lurking in the shadows under the trees). Sylvian says the title was supposed to be a reference to incarnation, to the individual’s birth into the physical world, but I took it as a reference to the acoustic, jazzy influences of the music.

David Sylvian had been lead singer of the pop group Japan, who had ended up as a synth-art outfit whose urban, futuristic sounds had been perfect for the cyberpunk world of the early ‘80s. Down to Earth was different, full of folk and jazz influences, spoken word pieces and an analogue ambience. It was warmer, more human: more ‘down to earth’.

These days both titles suggest something else to me. ‘Gone to earth’ is a fox-hunting term for the moment when the fox retreats into its den and so cannot be chased further, thus ruining the ghastly fun of its unspeakable pursuers. ‘Taking the veil’ is a precursor to leaving the mundane life and all its worldly concerns. That Peter Blake Alice illustration is from the moment where the Red Queen reveals to Alice that she must run very fast to stay in the same place.

This all feels like a frank statement by Sylvian, the most photogenic and enigmatic of all New Romantic pin-ups, that he was trying to escape the business of show and find — to paraphrase an old Japan song title — ‘a new career’.

Not that he and Japan had ever been comfortable pop stars, despite their splendid cheek bones and perfect make up. Indeed, it sometimes felt like they were trying very hard not to be pop stars. They had started out as a glam rock pastiche of The New York Dolls, a style that won them paradoxical fame in the country of Japan² before being ditched in preference of becoming a faux Roxy Music. Then a brush with Giorgio Moroder almost made them synth pop stars; but while Nick Rhodes (and Princess Di) stole Sylvian’s hairstyle, the band gallantly decided not to be Duran Duran and instead became something far more art rock, and far less Top of the Pops-friendly.

In many ways Japan were simply modelling the fashions of pop in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, during the cultural fallout of punk: the adolescent energy of gleeful glam, the DIY spirit inspiring a new generation of synth heroes, the rebellious visual style of New Romanticism. This meant that they looked like a band consistently jumping someone else’s train — New York Dolls, Roxy Music, Giorgio Moroder, Yellow Magic Orchestra — and consistently falling back off, never quite getting it right.

But, as Sylvian has pointed out, a great deal of Japan’s sound came from exactly this failure of imitation. A great deal of artistic innovation results not from deliberate invention but, in Sylvian’s words, from ‘trying to copy something else and failing miserably’; the attempted copy is so warped and distorted by the artist’s personality and worldview that it comes out as something quite new.

So it was with Gone To Earth. Despite including contributions from experimental rock legends (Robert Fripp of none-more-prog King Crimson, Holger Czukay of krautrock stalwarts Can), and being produced by Steve Nye of baroque minimalist instrumental outfit The Penguin Cafe Orchestra, it filters their influence through Sylvian’s own sensibility to create a sound that was unique to him. And to the listener.

Mind you, Sylvian’s choice of artistic collaborators still made waves. I’m pretty sure he’s the reason I discovered both The Penguin Cafe Orchestra and Can, just as Japan’s idiosyncratic covers — ‘Don’t Rain On My Parade’ from Hello, Dolly, Smokey Robinson’s ‘I Second That Emotion’, The Velvet Underground’s ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ -- sent me scurrying off to raid my mother’s Barbra Streisand collection and to hunt out Tamla/Motown compilations.

And then, in the schedule at The Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, I spotted a double bill of films, one of which was called Gone To Earth (1950).³ I had never heard of it, or the other film on the bill, something called Black Narcissus (1947). However, on the strength of the weird coincidence I bought a ticket, and so discovered the film-making partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. I have this album to thank for one of the great and persisting joys of my life.

The innovation through imitation that brought Japan to such a weird place turned into something of an artistic dead end itself; no bands in the late ‘80s sounded ‘like’ Japan. For Sylvian, once the band had split up, where was there to go, but back to Earth? He was not alone in trying to reinvent himself in the second half of the decade. Sting released his similarly jazzy Dream of the Blue Turtles (eheu), Duran Duran were reinventing their sound for Notorious (derogatory), and George Michael had just left Wham! The pop stars were getting older and trying to grow up.

Disc 2

But then, their fans were growing up too. That Cambridge research is right: our music taste changes as we age, becoming mellower and more sophisticated. And that change, in turn, drives the adolescent taste; the desire to establish one’s own individuality in the face of the tastes of the older generation, of parents and authority figures.

But we are also trying to establish our identities as members of a group. Japan’s oscillations had modelled my own attempts at tribal identities, a furious cycling through signifiers and genres that mimicked the changes and discoveries of adolescence: the studded leather bracelet I wore to a Queen concert, the electric blue hair of my Gary Numan phase, the nightshirt I wore when I was a New Romantic, the Victorian undertaker’s coat I wore when I was a Goth. Perhaps the reason why I loved Japan and David Sylvian at the time, and why I still do, is that they changed with me, and vice versa.

They weren’t the only musical artists doing this at the time. The Cure were in the middle of their extraordinary self-reinvention as an off-kilter and joyous pop band, a change that made me just as deliriously happy as their earlier albums had made me reassuringly miserable. Tom Waits was transitioning from barfly crooner to hobo king of circus organists. Paul Simon had just discovered South African township music and put out Graceland.

Bands who maintain a distinct sound often come to be associated with a particular moment in your life; but artists who constantly reinvent and rediscover themselves can be ever-present. If you have never quite figured out your own specific purpose, it’s reassuring to be reminded that Sylvian has never quite inhabited a genre, and that nevertheless his distinct personality continually transmutes his influences into something new, and yet always recognisable. For all the change and innovation, there you are. Somewhere, not all that deeply buried, you are 16 years old, and listening to David Sylvian.

---

For more on the experience of evolving artistic tastes:

1. To be fair, I was about to make a hard turn into Big Black and Fugazi, but that was still a couple of years away.

2. This was pretty much the only fame they ever had and Sylvian has said that they had to tour Japan at least once a year to be able to afford rent.

3. Nothing to do with this album it turned out but, I’m pretty sure, part of the inspiration for Kate Bush’s ‘The Hounds of Love’.