David Sylvian-Ryuichi Sakamoto

David Sylvian – Ryuichi Sakamoto – Forbidden Colours

(Included on the album “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence”, Mca Records, 1983)

Having thrown to the wind the electro-glam-pop fascinations of Japan, the David Sylvian who bursts onto the dazzling early-80s scene as a solo artist is a tormented dandy, in the throes of rejecting every past form of showmanship and eccentricity. No more backcombed hair, kohl-rimmed eyes and neo-romantic starlet make-up. Withdrawn into himself and his inner turmoil, but also prey to an insidious creative paralysis, Mr. Batt is stuck in the pits. And once again, watching over his destiny like a guardian angel – and possibly turning it upside down – is his Japanese friend Ryuichi Sakamoto. “He always knows how to step into the key moments of my artistic life,” his disciple would later admit. So, not content with having already blessed his new solo path with the 7” “Bamboo Houses/Bamboo Music”, the guru from Nakano would set in motion the fateful stairway to heaven that would give the ex-Japan man the biggest (and indeed only) hit of a career that from then on would blossom wonderfully, though always at a safe distance from the machinery of the music business.

The occasion is one of those truly epochal ones: the film “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence” (released in Italy as “Furyo”), which brought together the talent of Nagisa Oshima – the director who had reinvented eroticism in Japan with “In the Realm of the Senses” – the ambiguous allure of a platinum-haired David Bowie (here in one of his finest film performances) and the musical genius of the aforementioned Sakamoto, who found himself split between the recording studio and the film set, playing the cruel and deeply tormented Captain Yonoi, commander of a POW camp in Java in 1942. A small jewel of tension and contradictions, culminating in the now-legendary sacrifice scene of Jack Celliers-Bowie: stepping away from the group of prisoners just as Captain Hicksley (Jack Thompson) is about to be beheaded, the Australian officer kisses the stunned Yonoi twice on the cheeks, sacrificing himself in place of his comrades while, at the same time, exposing his tormentor's unspeakable homosexual passion. A kind of ultimate triumph of love, in all its shades, over the brutality of war and human convention.

The musical alter ego of that cinematic climax – even though it doesn't appear in that very scene – is precisely the film's main theme, “Forbidden Colours” (lyrics by Sylvian, music by Sakamoto), inspired by the story “禁色” (“Kinjiki”, published in Italy as “Colori proibiti”) written in the early 1950s by Hiraoka Kimitake, better known by his pen name Yukio Mishima, the Japanese playwright, essayist and poet.

The song's magical alchemy is even conveyed semantically, in Japanese, through the expression kinjiki, where kin means “illicit” and jiki can mean both “colour” and “physical love” at once. So the “forbidden colours” are nothing other than the forbidden shades of eros, such as homosexual love, banned by the rigid dictates of militarism and the samurai's bushido code of honour.

“Forbidden Colours” expresses exactly this sense of emotional fullness and harrowing frustration, not least through lyrics that are nothing short of heart-rending: “Here am I, a lifetime away from you/ The blood of Christ, or the beat of my heart/ My love wears forbidden colours/ My life believes…”. Lines in which some have also glimpsed Sylvian's gradual break from the Christianity in which he'd been raised. Take that opening line about stigmata that never heal and a faith that demands nothing but blind adherence (“The wounds on your hands never seem to heal/ I thought all I needed was to believe”). And then the blood of Christ, symbol of the Eucharist, standing for a faith now drained of meaning in the face of a new choice of the heart (“Il sangue di Cristo, o il battito del mio cuore”). A reading Sylvian himself has never actually confirmed, though he has repeatedly explained that he gradually drifted away from the dogmas of his childhood, delving into Buddhism and Hinduism, on a wide-ranging spiritual journey that would go on to play a decisive role in his future evolution.

Beyond all this, what remains clear is the sense of liberation – physical and spiritual – expressed by a song that is one long, anguished journey of emancipation: intimate and raw, yet universal. Flashes of soft light radiating through the half-shadow of the unconscious: every chime of the piano seems to probe the recesses of the soul, feeding its vibrations, its tremors, its inner shivers (“my hands in the soil, buried inside of myself”). Sakamoto's accompaniment is a spell woven with the barest of embellishments: a vertigo set to the cadence of piano keys, punctuated by synth touches, a web of legato arpeggios redolent of the Far East, carrying the listener straight into another dimension. A Garden of Eden in lotus bloom. And then the rhythm shifts: slow at first, with the opening sixteen bars in triple time, before settling into 4/4 for the rest of the song, yet without any jolt, without a break in continuity, as if it were all a single, rarefied flow, over which the most celestial of melodies takes flight: achingly sad, a lump-in-the-throat kind of melancholy, but also a free, unbridled flight around that rainbow of forbidden feelings. It's Sylvian's voice that gives shape to this emotional see-saw: torment and ecstasy, sensuality and mysticism, anguish and hope follow one another, sometimes within a single verse, through breathtaking shifts in register.

In 1984 “Forbidden Colours” was recorded a second time and released as the B-side of the single “Red Guitar”, taken from Sylvian's debut album, “Brilliant Trees”, before later being included as a bonus track on the same English artist's subsequent masterpiece “Secrets Of The Beehive”. Other reinterpretations would follow too (by both authors), some instrumental (titled “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence”) and some sung, including an orchestral version sung by Sylvian and featured on Sakamoto's album “Cinemage”. Covers followed as well, including even an arrangement for a video game (International Karate).

No one, however, will ever manage to grasp the song's true secret. Perhaps because, in nature, there was never really any trace of those “forbidden colours” to begin with.

The wounds on your hands never seem to heal

I thought all I needed was to believe

Here am I, a lifetime away from you

The blood of Christ, or the beat of my heart

My love wears forbidden colours

My life believes

Senseless years thunder by

Millions are willing to give their lives for you

Does nothing live on?

Learning to cope with feelings aroused in me

My hands in the soil, buried in side of myself

My love wears forbidden colours

My life believes in you once again

I’ll go walking in circles

While doubting the very ground beneath me

Trying to show unquestioning faith in everything

Here am I, a lifetime away from you

The blood of Christ, or a change of heart

My love wears forbidden colours

My life believes

My love wears forbidden colours

My life believes in you once again

Ride the wave of great music

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17/03/2026