STEVE JANSEN
Like any kid growing up at the height of glam rock, almost as soon as 14-year-old Stephen Batt formed a band with elder brother David and his south London schoolmates Richard Barbieri and Andonis Michaelides, they knew they needed cool names.
Barbieri could just about cut it as a rock’n’roll surname, but not Batt, so their singer became David Sylvian, bassist Michaelides became Mick Karn, and young Stephen on drums became Steve Jansen.
“I was going through a big New York Dolls phase,” he explains, “so I went to the phone directory, looked under Johansen and I ended up with Jansen.”
The band named themselves Japan, having “no idea what it meant other than a place far away”. Initially heavily influenced by adventurous avant-glam such as Roxy Music, and the more artful side of American punk, they made slow but determined progress gigging amid a burgeoning London punk scene for which they felt little affinity.
Meanwhile, the stewardship of noted pop schemer and future Wham! manager Simon Napier-Bell helped secure a deal with German disco label Hansa-Ariola, and with guitarist Rob Dean beefing up their sound, two albums of feisty art school glam punk were released and largely ignored.
Success in – naturally – Japan gave the band a lifeline, though, and the group’s growing fascination with Far Eastern culture and sounds was enhanced by the influence and friendship of Japanese techno pioneers Yellow Magic Orchestra.
“I was more interested in offshoots like Brand X when Phil Collins first started doing something a bit different – that stuff was really interesting.”
By 1979’s , Dean’s slashing guitar pivot was increasingly offset by the prominence of Richard Barbieri’s inventive synth, Mick Karn’s curiously elasticated fretless bass and cool sax, David Sylvian’s charismatic post-Ferry croon, and Jansen’s increasingly intricate percussion. By the release of their final album, 1981’s , they were sounding pretty much unlike anyone in western music before or since, carving out a progressive art pop niche with beguiling singularity.
