A hit with almost nothing in it
A synthesiser hangs in the room like frost on a window, no drum kit to reassure you, and David Sylvian’s voice enters as if he were afraid of waking the house.
Ghosts was written by Sylvian for Tin Drum, recorded in 1981 with Steve Nye producing, largely at AIR Studios in London. Richard Barbieri’s electronics and Steve Jansen’s percussion are the furniture. Mick Karn’s bass, the band’s usual signature, is absent. Sylvian has said the arrangement was in his head as he wrote, and that without Ryuichi Sakamoto in the studio it would not have sounded as it did. The single came out in March 1982 and reached No. 5 in Britain, a chart place for a song that is nearly a silence with a melody attached. Pop in that season wanted choruses you could shout. This one asks you to lean in. The band, styled and stared at, had finally made the record that matched the stillness of the photographs.
Sylvian has been unusually direct about it. In 2009 he told Mojo that Ghosts was the only piece Japan made that still resonated with him, because it was the most autobiographical, the only time he let something personal through. It pointed, he said, toward the solo work. Earlier he had put it more simply: he did not think he had found himself in music until he wrote this song. The lyric is a man counting what success has not fixed. The band was becoming famous. He was not happier. Within months of the single, Japan ended. The song had already described the leaving.
The only piece Japan produced that resonates with me now is Ghosts, because it’s the most autobiographical piece. It was the only time I let something of a personal nature come through.
(David Sylvian, Mojo, 2009)
On stage it was a risk, four minutes of almost no rhythm in front of an audience dressed for a sharper band. It worked because the quiet was the point, not a failure of nerve. The 1982 performances, and Sylvian’s later returns to the song with the original backing track, keep the same temperature. Nothing is added to make it friendlier. Radio, having let it in, did not quite know what to do with the next single. There was no formula to repeat. A No. 5 built from frost cannot be turned into a career plan, which is why he did not try.
What remains is the courage of an empty room. Glam, new romantic, art pop: the labels slide off a track this bare. What you hear is a singer who had spent years behind a style and then, once, wrote the thing he actually felt. The ghosts are not costume. They are the fear that arrives when the thing you wanted turns out not to be enough. The synthesiser does not swell to comfort you. It stays, cold and exact, and the voice tells the truth at a volume just above a whisper.
