Packaging
6 panel Digipak, 4 colour disc, non-standard black glossy CD tray.
Extra photos include alternative cover from original session. New typeface.
Tracklisting
1. Gentlemen Take Polaroids
2. Swing
3. Burning Bridges
4. My New Career
5. Methods Of Dance
6. Ain't That Peculiar
7. Nightporter
8. Taking Islands In Africa
9. The Experience of Swimming * (B-side from Gentlemen Take Polaroids double 7")
10. The Width Of A Room * (B-side from Gentlemen Take Polaroids double 7")
11. Taking Islands In Africa (Steve Nye Remix) (B-side from Visions Of China single)
Interview
Something on each of these three, 'Gentleman Take Polaroid's'.
DS: Yeah it wasn't an easy album to make we just signed to Virgin and they were very keen to have a new album from us as quickly as possible. But it hadn't been that long before a prior release had been made on a previous label, Quiet Life, and now we didn't feel quite ready to get into writing new material. So I felt a little bit under pressure to write. The sessions were a little bit difficult; we were kinda searching for a sound for that particular album that separated it from the previous because we hadn't quite outgrown the previous record. We were having trouble finding that new sound for 'Polaroid's'. So it took a while to tap into it but ultimately I think we got there and it's a much stronger album that I kinda gave it credit for, initially. And also that's the first time that I wrote material with Ryuichi Sakamoto, the final track on the album is a co-write between him and me.
AFTER collaborating with Giorgio ("I Feel Love") Moroder (something of a coup) on the 1979 single "Life In Tokyo", a staccato slice of nouveau-disco, they recorded their third album, 1980's "Quiet Life". Working with sometime Roxy Music producer John Punter, they began to carve an entirely new sound. With the rockier guitars muted and Barbieri's synthesiser-washes swept to the foreground, Sylvian's vocals were able to relax into a more suave, laconic style, and Karn's bass began to bubble and groove. Tracks such as "The Other Side Of Life" and "Despair" and an addictive cover of The Velvet Underground's "All Tomorrow's Parties" proved the previously louder, brasher Japan had got in touch with their inner melancholy. As the sharply-besuited band's visuals were now less gaudy, more debonair, they found acceptance from the nascent New Romantic movement, though they never felt whole-heartedly part of it. The album gained more generous reviews, and brushed the lower end of the charts. However, the label lost faith - a move they were soon to regret. Japan signed to Virgin, just as the cynics were coming round. Their star was rising.
Wary of fashion but finding themselves in vogue, the group released 1980's landmark album GENTLEMEN TAKE POLAROIDS. It skirted the edge of the album chart's top forty, hovering there for ten weeks. With their former label saving face by re-releasing old material ("Quiet Life" and a cover of Smokey Robinson's "I Second That Emotion" became top ten hits), Japan were in an odd position, with tracks both old and new flying into the popular consciousness. It was the Gentlemen Take Polaroids album, however, which deftly declared their new, soft-spoken, sonic manifesto.
Underneath its iconic sleeve, where the blonde Sylvian of course remained poised, unruffled and dry amid thunderstorms while the band posed like perfect Wildean peacocks who glided when so many other chart acts of the period huffed and puffed, their new music throbbed and trembled with a deeply-felt yet always composed sense of yearning, loss and necessarily vague regret. The record is infused with what Keats called "huge cloudy symbols of a high romance". Seemingly inspired partially by a just-about-bearable nostalgia for black-and-white films, classic English novels and a rapidly-disappearing past, it drew also on faraway, foreign cultures, perhaps as glimpsed on travels. It evoked, too, a marvellous grasp of how to refract emotion through a cool, glacial, modernist sheen, with not a note wasted. The title track (edited for single release) was a seven-minute structure of flawless architectural majesty, moving from ripples to rivers to oceans. Sylvian, writer-in-chief, had found his voice, and the band sculpted new shapes in sound on the jagged/smooth "Swing", Taking Islands In Africa" and "Methods Of Dance". While "Ain't That Peculiar" (another classy, challenging reinvention of a Smokey Robinson Motown composition) seeped with percussive soul, the Erik Satie-soused "Nightporter" (loosely named after the controversial 1973 Liliana Cavani film starring Dirk Bogarde, subverting his own "gentlemanly" persona, and Charlotte Rampling) reiterated Japan's ease with the elegiac, the mournful, the borderline narcissism that is true sadness.
The album won Japan many new admirers, even from those who'd dismissed their flashier, earlier, incarnation. Rob Dean wasn't one of them, however, and the guitarist left, later to work with Gary Numan. By now Sylvian was accompanying Barbieri on keyboards in the studio, and Jansen's drumming duties also involved electronic and keyboard percussion. Karn's unconventional, much-applauded playing had graduated to incorporate fretless bass, African flute and dida.