163. Richard Barbieri
Hoxton Hall
28 March 2017
There aren’t many white whales left in my gig life. Most have either been harpooned long ago or inconveniently died before I got there. But one always remained out there in the mist: Japan, the band that wired my teenage brain to beauty, melancholy, and experimental haircuts.
They were the band. The one my best mate and I discovered at fifteen, two awkward suburban new-romantic wannabees. Our gateway drug was Exorcising Ghosts, that 1984 compilation, trouble was, by 1984 Japan were already two years past their breakup. It was like falling head-over-heels for a TV show only to find out the final season had been cancelled mid-cliffhanger.
We obsessed anyway. Played the albums endlessly. Tried, disastrously, to copy David Sylvian’s haircut (I looked like an escaped choirboy; my best pal resembled a damp fox). Japan became our band, the fragile thread binding our teenage friendship. We overlapped on the likes of Numan, Simple Minds, and Jean-Michel Jarre, but diverged elsewhere. I had a tendency to drift into the weirder stuff: Indians in Moscow, Cabaret Voltaire, Propaganda, basically anything that my friend would have, and still does, describe as “plinky-plonky music.”
Still, Japan remained our anchor. The post-breakup project Rain Tree Crow came and went like a shy ghost, and Sylvian continued his lifelong performance art piece titled “Being a Bit of a Bastard.” We even once bought tickets to see him in Norway (because of course it was Norway), only for him to cancel. Again. Somewhere deep down, we accepted it: the white whale would forever swim away.
Years later, fate intervened in the most British of ways. When I was debating whether to move to a town on the south London and Kent border, I had popped into the local Waitrose to grab some sandwiches. This town was also the birthplace of Japan, so it felt symbolically apt. But what sealed it wasn’t the property, or the schools, it was spotting Richard Barbieri himself, hovering by the baguettes. I took a secret photo and nervously said hello. He was polite, if faintly alarmed at being accosted amongst the ciabattas. But it felt cosmic, as if the universe, via the bakery aisle, was whispering: “Yes, move here. The ghosts approve.” So, I did.
Fast forward to 2017. When Barbieri announced a solo tour, I bought tickets in nanoseconds. Front row. Not quite the full Japan reunion (impossible since Mick Karn passed away in 2011), but as close to closure as we could hope for.
Barbieri took the stage surrounded by a forest of cables and glowing synth modules that looked like NASA built them in 1979 and then lost the manual. The music was, predictably, veering toward the plinky-plonky end of the spectrum: cinematic, moody, abstract, but hypnotic all the same. Even my best friend, usually prone to power-nap through ambient sections, stayed upright and engaged. Then came the encore and the first unmistakable, spectral chime of “Ghosts.”
I turned to him. He turned to me. That look between us said everything: after all these years, we finally made it. Not quite the band, but the sound, that unmistakable, melancholy shimmer that defined our youth, was alive in the room.
For a moment, it was 1984 again. Two teenagers with bad haircuts, staring at the ceiling, letting this strange, beautiful music explain emotions we hadn’t learned to name yet.
As the last note faded, I realised that some boxes in life never really get ticked, they just bubble away in the background softly until one night, in a small hall, a synth wizard plays the right chord and suddenly you’re home again.