With the impending release of a new compilation of his works – A Victim of Stars: 1982 – 2012 – and the promise of an accompanying European tour (although this now sadly postponed due to health problems), it seems an appropriate moment to take a retrospective look at the career of David Sylvian so far.

If, like me and many of my age/generation/predilections your first encounter with Sylvian was with Japan, the band that he fronted (with brother and continued collaborator Steve Jansen on drums, Mick Karn on bass, Richard Barbieri on keys and – in the earliest stages – Rob Dean on guitars and backing vocals) then you will have experienced one of the late 20th century’s most remarkable musical evolutions. Although never quite the straightforward pop pin-up proposition that their early fame and Sylvian’s reluctant idolisation suggested, if you take the band’s first album, 1979′s Adolescent Sex as the starting-point-of-reference, rather than key late-Japan track ‘Ghosts’ (the first track to be included on A Victim of Stars) then the distance travelled seems all the more remarkable.

Japan’s first two albums (the second, Obscure Alternatives, released within seven months of the 1978 debut) were brash, riff-based and overblown, in thrall to the New York Dolls. Rough around the edges in a way that is rarely heard in the band or Sylvian’s later years, tracks like Obscure Alternatives‘ ‘Deviation’ or the title track from Adolescent Sex itself also show a young, hungry, confrontational side. This is not elegant music, nor is it swathed in much mystique: although Obscure‘s surprising final track, the instrumental ‘The Tenant’, does – arguably – begin to point in directions of future development, with its slow, instrumental, elegiac atmospherics.

The following 3 Japan releases (1979′s Quiet Life, Gentlemen Take Polariods in 1980, Tin Drum from 1981, the band’s final album if you discount the brief Rain Tree Crow reconfiguration of 1991) each saw the band, and specifically their elegantly, delicately beautiful, grave and enigmatic lead singer, edge reluctantly further into the spotlight. Nurturing the fascination with all things oriental first signposted in the band’s name (which, itself, led to a cult following in Japan itself for the band dating as far back as the release of the elsewhere-ignored first album), Sylvian’s smoky croon on tracks like ‘Life in Tokyo’, ‘Cantonese Boy’, ‘Visions of China’ etc was an evolving work-in-progress that seemed to only increase in its mysterious allure against its now more electronic, increasingly risk-taking musical setting.

‘Ghosts’ was perhaps the furthest point that Sylvian was able to go within the context of Japan and is possibly their finest moment as a band. Significantly, it’s the opening track on A Victim of Stars. Its haunted echoes, sparing use of synthesised effects and rich vibrato vocal undoubtedly opened up my teenage musical mind, and surely did the same for a generation of the band’s fans, initially lured by aesthetics that always seemed to fit the template of the chart music of the day more readily than did the frequently dark and challenging music.

Post-Japan, Sylvian was to set out on a series of collaborations and solo endeavours that explored and further stretched some of the elements that were already emerging by the early 1980s. His long-standing partnership with ex Yellow Magic Orchestra electronic musician Ryuichi Sakamoto – the pair first joining up to co-write Japan’s ‘Taking Islands In Africa’ in 1980 – bore further fruit with the elegant double-sided single ‘Bamboo Music/Bamboo Houses’, while as recently as 2005 the pair were still working together, on the first Nine Horses project, Snow Borne Sorrow, with Sakamoto guesting on piano.  Perhaps one of their best-known and most admired pairings came very soon after Japan’s demise, with the tender, sorrowful ‘Forbidden Colours’, written for the film Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence. Notable for the way in which the main melody is provided by the piano refrain which runs counter to, and inbetween Sylvian’s vocal line, the song’s oblique take on the themes covered in the Bowie-starring film about a Japanese Second World War POW camp makes something fresh and intense of its topic, with its – yes – cinematic strings and the expression that Sylvian pours into his delivery of lyrics like “The wounds on your hands never seem to heal” or “The blood of Christ, or the beat of my heart“.

Although this – unfortunately for those of us who think this might possibly have been the greatest ’80s collaboration imaginable – was the closest that he and Bowie ever got to working together, the list of those that Sylvian has worked with over the years is a long and impressive one. As his sound evolved, from the excursions, in the mid ’80s through to the late ’90s, into funk (‘Pulling Punches’, ‘Taking The  Veil’, Jean The Birdman’ and ‘I Surrender’ all falling into that niche category of Danceable-David tracks) and increasingly improvisatory and jazz-inflected work (‘The Ink In The Well’, ‘Pop Song’, ‘Alphabet Angel’, among many more), that list took in luminaries like Arto Lindsay, Robert Fripp and Fennesz, alongside Steve Jansen, a reasonably constant fraternal presence. On this basis alone, following his work over the years – probably more than any other artist I can think of – has meant joining him on a constantly challenging, evolving and inspiring exploration. Thematically and lyrically too, although occasionally prone to the over-working of the autodidact, his career has enriched my knowledge; like a musical gateway drug guiding me towards the realms of the avant-garde that might otherwise have seemed exclusionary, daunting and “not for the likes of me”.

If that all sounds too worthy (and more than a little wearing), then I should also mention just how insidiously, subtly yet distinctly and intensely sensuous much of his material can be. Much of pop music enjoyment has an unavoidably sexual element, and the persona that Sylvian (how knowingly or accidentally being a matter open for debate) created – certainly in the earlier years of his career – coupled to that husky, tremulous croon of a swoon of a voice undeniably plays no small part in his appeal. On the rare occasions when this apparently most reserved of artists tackles matters carnal on record – like the tale of implicit seduction, seductively sung ‘I Surrender’, or ‘Darkest Dreaming”s pleas to “hold me close” – the effect is certainly compelling. He can also do (relatively) un-complex and straightforward too: that neither ‘Red Guitar’, ‘Silver Moon’, ‘Black Water’ nor ‘Wonderful World’ feature much in the way of “out there” experimentation doesn’t, I’d contend, detract from their appeal, exposing as they do the pop-literacy at the core of much of his work.

While it is tempting to try to chart a linear progression through the body of work that could be roughly sketched out as something like glam rock -> new romantic pop -> funk -> electronica -> improvisations -> minimalism this would, in fact, be an over-simplification of a career that has certainly never been simple or simplistic. ‘Ghosts’ (1982) is recognisably the work of the same artist as 2009′s Manafon; the internal torment so starkly laid bare some of his latter-day lyrics a match with those present, albeit more implicitly, from his earliest songs. Rather, it has been witnessing an artist with the guts, the openness and the continued facility to learn and develop, make use all of these qualities to find different means (sometimes whole different media) of expressing and presenting his concerns that has proved to be the most satisfying thing about this ongoing fixation of mine.

That a musician over whom I once swooned with my best friend in my bedroom, a bedroom whose walls were literally adorned with his image, should now prove to have been one of the most compelling, original and experimental artists of the last 30 years is a quirk of fate (as opposed to any miraculous prescience or early good taste on the part of my teenage self). I know this. Nevertheless, fortysomething me can’t quite resist giving teenage me a retrospective pat on the back for having had the good fortune to have somehow fluked her way in at the beginning of what has turned out to be a gratifying and rewarding obsession for the most part of my adult life.

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