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JAPAN - Cantonese Boy (1982)
This one’s for Mick Karn (1958-2011), who died earlier today after a battle with advanced-stage cancer.
Karn was a founding member of Japan, who aren’t often mentioned when talk turns to the great, creatively original bands of the post-punk and new wave period. The first Japan records were in fact slavish glam rip-offs in the style of the New York Dolls, but the band did a complete about-face in mid-1979, turning to a style closely indebted to contemporaneous Roxy Music: elegant/decadent crooning over measured post-disco beats and lush keyboard textures. Or, think early Duran Duran.
Thing is though, while Duran were copping Roxy, Japan swiftly moved out of that creative cul-de-sac and began weaving ethnic textures into their music: Oriental and Turkish, mixed with a little Germanic oompah structure. None of Japan’s core members played their instruments in recognizeably American or British blues- or R&B-inflected styles, and so what we often heard were incredible, unbalanced-yet-syncopated tracks like this one, which dates from around the time of the band’s final tour.
Mick Karn was more than just the bass player. He also added sax, dida and oboe to the mix, appending both earthy and otherworldly colours to the Japan’s uneasy mix. But Karn’s legacy is his astonishing fretless bass technique: rubbery and tight, it wrapped around the rhythm Japan created via drums and synthesizers. Karn’s bass scores seemed beamed in from deep space, sometimes trance-inducing (“Sons Of Pioneers”), sometimes rhythmically propulsive (“Life In Tokyo”), and sometimes wobbly and queasy (“Visions Of China,” “Cantonese Boy”). I liked the latter ones best, because I’d never heard anything like it in my life, and years later Karn’s work still seems the work of a different player playing to a different song. It’s lead bass work in the way Derek Forbes (Simple Minds) and John Entwistle (The Who) formed a column around which their bands operated, but it also had a popping, frenetic quality about it, like the funk lines John Taylor brought to early Duran records.
Amazing stuff. After Japan split in 1983, Karn formed Dalis Car with Peter Murphy (ex-Bauhaus) for one album, before carrying on as a session musician for the likes of Bill Nelson, Joan Armastrading and Kate Bush. Japan’s core four members reformed for one album, renaming their band Rain Tree Crow for the occasion. Great record, but old tensions resurfaced, and Japan/Rain Tree Crow were put to paid as the album came out in 1991.
