Japan

I will wait for a sign

And if I should ever cross your mind again

I would sit in my room waiting for night to begin

And holding our breath

We'll face the storm together once again

It's night. But there are no paillettes and glamour, nor glittering suggestions. Here, darkness pushes forward in waltz time, sketched with a deep sense of solitude and poetry. "Nightporter" is one of those songs that, almost forty years after its release, still exerts its chiaroscuro charm intact: a masterpiece of balance and delicacy that rarely happens even once in a lifetime, even if your name is David Sylvian and you're part of Japan, one of the finest bands of British new wave.

It was 1980, and something was truly changing in the musical culture of the time. Punk had swept away almost everything, leaving heaps of rubble behind, but it had also opened the door to different, more direct and essential forms of expression that were no less valuable for it. Listening today to "Gentlemen Take Polaroids", the fourth album by the London quintet, you can still sense the feeling of glimpsing something unique and unrepeatable in that particular form: an inspired, lucid journey towards Eastern mysticism, yet steeped in a noble, pared-down and rigorous strain of pop. "Nightporter", the second-to-last track on that record, is a story all its own. A story to be listened to with eyes closed, to grasp the sacred melancholy of the love it tells of: nocturnal and hidden, unable to reveal itself in the light, yet vital, sincere, overwhelming.

The night porter narrated by Sylvian's knowing pen is a figure both murky and contradictory, like a shadow leaving no trace, caught between withdrawal and the anticipation of pleasure. It's impossible not to recognise yourself in his own feelings as the music unfolds in a soft, dreamlike 3/4 time. Erik Satie's Gymnopédies are right there, just around the corner, with the recurring harmonic alternation in waltz time between A and E minor forming the central idea from which the piece departs and to which it keeps returning, influenced none too subtly by the same dual system employed by the French composer. In itself, the device is simple and not especially inspired, but it grafts onto a lyricism perfectly suited to giving you chills: just a few seconds of singing and the listener is catapulted into a timeless fairy tale. Sylvian's voice bends soft and whispering over Richard Barbieri's few, weighted piano notes, with wholly unusual expressive means and the gentleness of a seasoned chansonnier. Further heightening the magic of one of the finest ballads the 1980s ever produced are the bowed cello and oboe parts played by the multi-instrumentalist bassist Mick Karn, which lock perfectly into the vocal line, phrasing a sequence of notes that could almost live a life of its own.

It's precisely this foray into chamber-music textures that astonishes, harking back to a decidedly cultured and sophisticated kind of songwriting that the punk movement had wanted to sweep away from the world of pop. A world that, at the time, was running into the newly romantic ambitions of Talk Talk, Ultravox and Cocteau Twins, to name a few of the best acts of the period. The ending of "Nightporter", entrusted to Barbieri's synthesizers, which seem to spring from the piano itself before swallowing it whole in a whirl of spacious, evocative sound, is a door thrown wide open onto a bright future, a breach in the night letting in the light of a day never so inspired.

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Could I ever explain this feeling of love?

Nightporters slip away

Ride the wave of great music

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21/03/2026