1: Ghosts/Sat In Your Lap

'Ghosts' Japan (1982, 7', 3:55)

'Sat In Your Lap' Kate Bush (1981, 7', 3:29)

My memory of that 'Ghosts' performance on Top Of The Pops is very clear: it was my 18th birthday, 17 March 1982. The historical record is equally clear: Thursday that week was, in fact, 18 March, and as TOTP only ran on Thursday nights, it must have been the day after my birthday, despite my memory's insistence. That's what 'Ghosts' does; it gets into your head and changes your perception of reality. It's a spectral brain worm.

I was in an English boarding school where access to television was highly restricted. The school was divided into dormitories and houses. In the house where I lived with 60 other boys, there was a downstairs room with an open fireplace and a few shelves of old books (it was called the library, but books there were used as projectiles or fire-starters more than sources of edification). In a corner sat an old television set in a wooden cabinet. On weekend nights, we all squeezed in, older boys closest to the screen, younger boys sharing chairs and crammed into the back of the room. It was forbidden to turn the thing on during the week. But most of the policing was done by the oldest boys, and that year, I was one of them - a prefect. That meant a few of us slipped in at 7:30 every Thursday, assigning a pair of younger boys to keep watch at the door to stop others coming in and to warn us if the housemaster was striding down the long corridor from his end of the building.

The half-hour show that March evening was the usual mix of genres,

reflecting the wonderful yet often ghastly eclecticism of the UK singles charts in the pre-internet age, the great Album/Singles Era. I can't claim to have remembered any of the other band appearances, but I know that ABC, Visage and Gary Numan were on that night (all artists that I was into), that the Goombay Dance Band performed (we would have booed and hurled books at the screen) and that it was one of several weeks when Tight Fit were number one. Their dire cover of 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' was a song we loved to hate, and we would gleefully sing along to it at the top of our voices - no longer concerned with getting caught - as each week's number one was always played at the show's end.8

The one performance I do remember came somewhere in the middle of the episode, introduced by Radio DJ Richard Skinner with the words, 'Here's a brave new record!' It began with the camera zoomed in on David Sylvian's face. He looked impossibly beautiful, his face delicate, vulnerable, yet self-possessed. He wore a pale shirt buttoned to the neck. As he began to sing, he looked up and right into the lens, his Bryan Ferry baritone crooning, 'When the room is quiet...' And quiet the room was - we were mesmerised. At the first chorus, the camera pulled back to reveal two other band members, one on a synthesizer and the other playing a marimba. There were no guitars in sight, no drum kit. There were no microphones (this was still the time when all performances on Top Of The Pops were mimed). It was as if they were right there in our quiet room.

At the end of the first chorus, the producers cut to the camera suspended overhead, giving home viewers a glimpse of the studio audience. They seemed perplexed, throwing nervous glances at each other. As Classic Pop later put it, they were 'stunned into bovine silence. There can't ever have been a more subversively funereal performance on the show.'9 As Sylvian dug deeper into his despairing lyrics, Richard Barbieri picked out an ominous melody on his polyphonic Prophet-5 synthesizer. After the second chorus, Sylvian's brother, Steve, mimed his marimba solo - a marimba, of all instruments, on TOTP, played in deadly earnest. In the final chorus, Sylvian raised his voice for the only time - at the 'not' in 'just when I thought I could not be stopped'. It was a moment of restrained anguish, rendered all the more poignant by Sylvian lowering his head at the next line, at the point when he thought his chance had come to be king. But that chance was lost, swept away by the ghosts of his life, by self-doubt, by himself. As the audience applauded, instructed to do so over the final notes, Sylvian again looked down. His head stayed bowed through the camera cut.

Although that end now seems an understated theatrical moment to an obviously mimed performance, at the time, it struck me as stunningly lacking in artifice. In fact, it didn't seem like a performance at all but more like Sylvian sharing his angst and his feelings and baring himself on television in front of everyone. This was not pop frivolity. It was something serious, something new, something beyond new wave and new romanticism and all the other pop genres that had emerged from the creative Big Bang of the late 1970s. It anticipated where pop music might go.

The four-decade run of Top Of The Pops that began in 1964 had many peaks and valleys, but 1982 was arguably right within its highest peak era, that of Michael Hurll's 1980-87 stint as producer. The show had become stodgy and stale by the late 1970s (even as its ratings reached new heights). The occasionally panning cameras were far more likely to catch kids on the floor looking bored or waving at Mum watching at home than to capture a moment of audience rapture. But under Hurll, the studio received a full face-lift. The new style of presentation exuded 'a sense of perpetual motion', with everything 'shiny and new, and very, very '80s.' The audience were encouraged - ordered, if need be, on threat of expulsion - to respond enthusiastically to the bands miming on stage. A song like 'Ghosts', however, was hard to reconcile with the enforced 'frantic party atmosphere.'10 The audience must have wondered, how can we respond enthusiastically to this - something so sombre and strange?

In the week of its Top Of The Pops performance, 'Ghosts' entered the UK singles chart at number 42 (the highest-ranking new entry that week, hence their invitation to appear on the show). TOTP appearances were famous - and treasured - for their positive impact on sales. Like radio play, they were a reinforcement loop, stimulating sales that, in turn, prompted more radio play and more TOTP appearances. Sure enough, 'Ghosts' leapt the following week to number 16, then to number nine, and in April, it peaked at number five. It would later be called 'one of the most remarkable and unlikely entries in British chart history' by one music writer and, by another, 'quite possibly the least commercial song ever to grace the top five.' Sylvian himself admitted years later that he was 'amazed it did as well as it did. It's a little oblique, to say the least.' Classic Pop noted that 'Steve Nye's spare, minimalist production, married to David Sylvian's idiosyncratic songwriting and anguished vocals, made for a pop song unlike any other.'11 When compared to the other songs clustered near the top of the charts that month, it is astonishing that 'Ghosts' climbed so high, and no wonder that it failed to climb higher. In the week it dropped to number seven, the nation's top five comprised an unsophisticated grab-bag of preposterous pop: the wretched Goombay Dance Band (number four) knocked off the top by Bucks Fizz (number one), of the same forgettable ilk as Dollar (number five), with pub singalong 'rockney' duo Chas & Dave (number two) and the ever-awkward Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder duet, 'Ebony And Ivory' (number three), still moving up.12 Such maladroit company made Japan's surprise hit seem even more ethereal, sublime, subtle and - yes - haunting.

To call 'Ghosts' haunting and spooky may seem like lazy music journalism, and those adjectives have certainly become tired clichés of writing about the band Japan. But they are inspired not only by the title but by the music itself, which is deliberately composed and produced to hauntingly raise the lyrics aloft so that, long after the song has ended, they float and follow you - and never quite leave you. Like all pop masterpieces, it clearly reflects its genesis point in the history of modern music, but it is not tethered to it. It is transcendental and as distinct and poignant and unnerving now as it was then.

It was also prophetic. Catalyzed by 'Ghosts', parent album Tin Drum climbed the charts and settled in there for a year. Japan started selling records in quantities that had thus far eluded them. Their back catalogue was re-released, turning old flops into new hits. Media attention was intense. Sylvian was on the cover of New Musical Express, Smash Hits, Noise! and music magazines in Europe and Japan. The band's concerts filled quickly. Recordings from a sold-out six-night run at London's Hammersmith Odeon in the autumn, released as a double album six months later, became the band's highest charting record yet. Their imperial phase was finally upon them; the moment when Japan had 'broken every door', when Sylvian had his chance 'to be king'.

And so, as if the lyrics to 'Ghosts' were his playbook, Sylvian broke up the band. He even blamed the song: 'It was the only time I let something of a personal nature come through, and that set me on a path in terms of...