It was around 1981, dawn of the new romantic, that [I]NME [/I]depicted a cartoon of [a]David Sylvian[/a], lead singer of Japan, with his head sat atop the shaft of a penis. At the time I took it as a reinforcement of his iconographic sex god status and put it up on my bedroom wall.
Alas, gone are his famed classic sad, beautiful boy croonings of the ’80s (the delicate, haunting hits ‘Ghosts’, ‘Orpheus’, etc), instead we have three tracks of subliminal ambient craperoo. The sounds made aren’t particularly recognised as coming from known instruments. They are the soft mewlings of a beached whale, a parping foghorn and, just occasionally a jumble of indistinct voices, smothered by more parping (this actually makes it sound a lot more exciting than it is).
How insulting is it when pop stars – good-looking, capable of turning their hand at a tune or two – decide that what they do isn’t dignified enough, never mind the fans, they will create ART?
Sadly, they often turn to instrumental music [I]` la[/I] Scott Walker (hello Damon and ‘chum’ Michael Nyman (!!!)) and negate their being from their works. Well, hello, we’ve got enough moronic ear candy in the form of trance at the moment, thanks. No, we need more personality, better stars, a sex shot, some funking ATTITUDE.
A three-part opus? Eno did this shit 20 years ago and look what we think of [I]him [/I]now. ‘Approaching Silence’, next time drop the ‘Approaching’. Dickhead!