Japan - Quiet Life

Quiet Life became a springboard to send Japan into radically bold new territory. The album followed its two predecessors in garnering very little interest in the UK, but Sylvian’s beautiful features, tight-fitting suits and elegant quiff had helped make them stars in the country that gave them their name.

The synthesizer fervour that gripped Britain in the wake of Kraftwerk and The Human League’s late-seventies output was particularly beneficial to Japan, who, seemingly overnight, ditched the platform boots and wild hair, refined their make-up, slowed down their sound to take in swirly synth textures and loping fretless bass, and emerged in 1979 with Quiet Life, an album that pushed the elegant, improbably-coiffed Sylvian into the limelight, aided and abetted by some of the band’s best songs, such as the pleasingly camp title track, the driving 'Fall In Love With Me', the ice-cold 'Despair' and a delightfully rigid take on the Velvet Underground classic 'All Tomorrow’s Parties'. Quiet Life deserves to be placed alongside Travelogue, Mix-Up and Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark as one of the key early British synth-based pop/rock albums, as it defined a very European form of detached, sexually-ambiguous and thoughtful art-pop, one not too dissimilar to what the ever-prescient David Bowie had delivered two years earlier with Low.

One of my all-time favourite albums ripped from my CD to MP3

Japan; Quiet Life

1.      Quiet Life
2.      Fall In Love With Me
3.      Despair
4.      In Vogue
5.      Halloween
6.      All Tomorrow's Parties
7.      Alien
8.      The Other Side Of Life
9.      All Tomorrow's Parties (1983 Remix)
10.   A Foreign Place
11.   Quiet Life (Full Length Version)
12.   Life In Tokyo (1982 Remix)