The Style Council's Café Bleu and David Sylvian's Brilliant Trees at 40

Throughout the history of pop music, its artists have continuously pushed its musical boundaries. So when is pop music no longer pop? More specifically, but less intriguingly, when is rock music no longer rock? It might seem strange to ask this question of the down-to-earth Paul Weller, who, in the late 1970s, established himself as one of the UK’s most successful songwriters. Weller first came to fame as the leader of the mod rock revival group the Jam, who, from 1977 to 1982, placed 18 consecutive singles in the UK charts. After disbanding the Jam, Weller formed the Style Council and soon earned three UK top ten singles before the release of the band’s debut album, Café Bleu, in 1984. This record furthered Weller’s affinity with Black American music, combining a penchant for classic 1960s jazz with experiments in hip-hop and techno, styles that had not yet made it into the mainstream, even in America.

David Sylvian, who took his name from Sylvain Sylvain of the New York Dolls, became a pop star courtesy of his time with the glam rock turned synthpop band Japan, who, in the same era as the Jam, achieved nine UK Top 40 singles and six gold albums, and, thanks in part to their name, had a Japanese fan club of 30,000 members. Like the Jam, Japan broke up in 1982, and in 1984, Sylvian released his solo debut Brilliant Trees, a record that charted in the UK at number four, eventually going gold. Recorded in Berlin and London with collaborators from the worlds of modern classical and avant-garde music, Brilliant Trees resonated with the eclectic fusions and spiritualism of 1970s jazz.

Both the Jam and Japan had emerged during the punk era, and both Weller and Sylvian expressed a desire to escape the greyness of their surroundings through music, but neither group was strictly punk rock. While Joe Strummer of the Clash was singing about being “so bored with the USA”, the Jam’s earliest albums owed more to the mid-1960s R&B infatuations of the Who and later incorporated more directly the sounds of American soul, all the while paying clear tribute to the music of the past.

Japan’s original look was pure glam, and a few years later, it would not have seemed out of place on the Sunset Strip. Their most obvious early influence was the sleazy rock ‘n’ roll of the New York Dolls. Yet if punk rock was, from one perspective, an upward trajectory from 1970s hard rock, retaining that music’s aggressive energy while abandoning its carnality in favour of a social conscience, then the subsequent paths of both Weller and Sylvian were a sideways step away from the raw power of rock entirely.

1984 came at a peak period for British pop music. It was so successful that it led to a Second British Invasion, mirroring how the Beatles and company had broken through in America in the first British Invasion of the 1960s. This success was largely due to the visibility of British acts on MTV, the newly established television channel devoted to 24/7 music videos. Before the channel’s creation in 1981, making music videos was not the norm in the radio-orientated American market. However, British acts had an advantage in this regard, and thanks mainly to the impact of music videos, in 1983, 30% of US record sales were from British acts.

The leaders of the pack were the New Romantics like Duran Duran and Culture Club. In 1983, Duran Duran’s album Rio, with its typically sensuous hooks and sleek dance beats, spent 11 weeks in the Billboard top ten. In 1984, Culture Club’s Boy George was featured alongside Annie Lennox on the cover of Time magazine. In 1985, Dire Straits, famous for Mark Knopfler’s clean guitar tones and the group’s pristinely recorded record, became the first act to sell one million records on compact disc, the shiny new digital recording medium, with Brothers in Arms.

While neither the Style Council nor David Sylvian achieved US record sales high enough to have been a force in the Second British Invasion, Weller’s modish style and Sylvian’s effete glamour ensured that both were regular fixtures in the pages of the newer British magazines such as Smash Hits, which embodied the new spirit of poptimism, and The Face, which combined a focus on both pop music and fashion. Emerging amidst pop music’s increasingly polished and visual sensibilities were several groups, including the Style Council, whose elegant, jazz-inflected sound became latterly known as sophisti-pop. The most successful of these acts was Sade, whose 1984 crossover jazz album Diamond Life went multi-platinum in the UK and the US. Also in 1984, Joe Jackson, who had started out as one of post-punk Britain’s angry young men, released the Latin jazz-flavoured Body and Soul, which completed his transition away from rock ‘n’ roll that had begun with his guitar-less 1982 album Night and Day.

Another markedly British style of new wave that was less accessible than New Romantic was gothic rock, but both labels were rich with poetic and artistic allusions. The music of gothic rock was crafted with icy keyboard textures, sparse rhythms often programmed on drum machines, and haunting vocal effects such as glossolalia. Its impact could be heard in much subsequent indie rock and art rock. The icon of 1980s British art rock is Kate Bush. Her 1978 hit song “Wuthering Heights”, with lyrics and music inspired by Emily Brontë’s gothic novel, predated many of the bands most closely associated with gothic rock, while her 1985 album Hounds of Love continued exploring novel keyboard textures and unconventional, ethnic rhythms, features that were also present on Brilliant Trees.

The Jam had been the quintessential British rock band of the late 1970s, with their incredible aforementioned run of hit singles and albums, yet this has often been contrasted to their lack of success in America and beyond. It is a standing that, by some metrics, has yet to change. Between 1965 and 1969, the Kinks were banned from touring in America, and during that time recorded concept albums about British social mores.

In the 1980s, Morrissey and the Smiths adorned their record covers with obscure British celebrities and barely toured their music outside the UK. In the 1990s, Britpop faced stubborn resistance in getting attention outside of the British market. Oasis now have 20 million streams a month on Spotify, while (What’s the Story) Morning Glory has 500-plus album reviews on Rate Your Music. The Smiths have 15 million monthly streams, and The Queen is Dead has 600-plus album reviews. The Kinks have a respectable six million streams monthly, and The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society has 300-plus album reviews. For what it’s worth, the Jam have two million streams a month, and All Mod Cons has 100 album reviews.

The Jam formed in 1972 while Weller and company were still in school and frequently gigged at regional clubs between 1974 and 1977 when they signed their first recording contract. Live, they would often play covers of rhythm & blues standards, but a hallmark of Weller’s career would be to filter his enduring love of American music through a British lens. The Jam stood out from the late 1970s punk pack by adopting the sharp mod look and the early sound of the Who. Weller’s lyrics reflected his observations of English society in the manner of the Kinks. Following the breakup of the Jam, Weller invested his earnings from their success to start a record label, Respond Records, and a publishing company that published, amongst other titles, a book about the Small Faces and a book about the influence of Black music in the UK from the 1950s onwards.

Weller’s interest in jazz was inspired by soul jazz organists such as Jimmy Smith, Jimmy McGriff, and Freddie Roach. Yet, this influence came in a roundabout way via Ian McLagan, the keyboardist from the Small Faces, and Steve Winwood, the singer and keyboardist for the British jazz-rock band Traffic. In recruiting keyboardist Mick Talbot, who had briefly played with Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Home Counties boy Weller established links to British Northern Soul. With the Style Council, Weller set himself an uphill challenge. How would a British band playing retro jazz music win over the mainstream music press in the UK or America, fans of Weller’s previous band, or a new generation of transatlantic listeners unfamiliar with Weller’s past?

The type of jazz featured on Café Bleu wouldn’t impress a jazz purist. Mick Talbot was not copping the licks of Thelonious Monk. Many open-minded rock listeners would also be skeptical. It didn’t follow the spiritual jazz inclinations of John Coltrane, which inspired hippies and punks alike. Nor was it inspired by the jazz-rock fusion experiments of Miles Davis. What the Style Council played was a compact, uptempo form of mod jazz that often owed as much to soul music as to any purist notion of jazz.

Keyboardist Mick Talbot’s opening showcase, “Mick’s Blessings”, works a walking bassline beneath fervent soul jazz piano runs. “Me Ship Came In” is a snappy bossa nova, the hybridized Brazilian jazz rhythm co-opted in easy listening, pop, and rock. The lush Parisien jazz of “Blue Cafe” has Weller’s reverb-soaked guitar meshing with a backdrop of strings, which segues into the torch song “The Paris Match”. “Dropping Bombs on the Whitehouse” is peppy hard bop.

While the first side of Café Bleu alternates neatly between jazzy instrumentals and soulful songs, which notably forsook synthesizers, the second opens with two tracks of cutting-edge electro. The critical consensus holds that these experiments were unsuccessful and a poor fit for the record as a whole. Lyrically, the rap “A Gospel” is an urban life narrative in the mode of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message”, and the later records of Public Enemy. “Strength of Your Nature” is a positive-minded chant that predates the conscious hip-hop of the Native Tongues. In 1984, hip-hop was not yet mainstream. Recorded between October 1983 and January 1984, Café Bleu was released in March 1984, the same month as Run-DMC’s self-titled debut album, which would push hip-hop onto MTV and usher in the “Golden Age” of old-school hip-hop. Weller was onto something happening that was going unheralded by the pop-centric UK music press.

Following Café Bleu’s electronic experiments, the album’s second side is brought back to the center ground by the single “You’re the Best Thing”, and two songs which are the closest the album gets to rocking out, “Here’s One That Got Away” and “Headstart For Happiness”, easy-going folk-pop in the collegiate style of Prefab Sprout. Weller’s voice is in elegant form, in contrast to the gravel-voiced British singers of the 1960s, and reminiscent of Curtis Mayfield, most notably in how Weller mimics Mayfield’s distinctive falsetto in “Here’s One That Got Away”. The cheerful album closer “Council Meeting” is reminiscent of the soul instrumentals that became popular for jazz crossovers in the late 1960s.

The Style Council disbanded in 1989 after recording five albums, reinventing their blend of jazz and contemporary urban music to the point where it became commercially unviable. Paul Weller’s third act in the 1990s was to return to his rock ‘n’ roll roots when he became, thanks to the enduring stature of the Jam, the Godfather of Britpop, the style that would return classicist guitar bands to the top of the charts. With Café Bleu, he made arguably the closest a charting British pop album came to encapsulating the rich hidden history of the British soul music subcultures, joining the dots between the mod movement of the 1960s, the Northern Soul scene of the 1970s, and the acid jazz scene of the 1980s.

Inasmuch as David Sylvian has a place in the history of pop music, his legacy exists in the shadow of two other Davids, Bowie and Byrne. As it happens, Sylvian’s birth name was Batt, but then, as Bowie’s birth name was Jones, perhaps that’s not such a cool connection after all. The sense that Sylvian was following in the footsteps of David Bowie was apparent from his wispy blonde hair and his south London drawl. Japan’s musical journey had followed Bowie’s lead. The more conventional songs on Brilliant Trees strongly resemble the spacey funk of Station to Station, whilst its second side is devoted to ambient soundscapes in the manner of Low and Heroes. Those same ambient pieces explored a parallel world of ethnic sounds to the Talking Heads and featured collaborations with musicians whose paths would also cross with David Byrne.

Japan formed in 1974 while Bowie was transitioning away from glam rock. As with many rock ‘n’ roll stories, the band’s exotic name appears to have disappointingly mundane origins. One version of the events is that it was taken from a travel brochure left at a bus station where the group traveled to their first gig. Japan, the country, played a crucial part in the development of 20th-century pop music. Subsequent generations of crate diggers have unearthed a wealth of Japanese pop, rock, and jazz music, but it is fair to say that the Japanese pop scene’s reputation at the time was of being a follower of Western popular trends.

Deep Purple’s 1972 concert recording Made in Japan was for a Japanese audience, but so good was the quality that it was released worldwide and became a classic live album, followed by other live albums such as Cheap Trick at Budokan. The names of punk-era bands, such as the American group Half Japanese and the UK act Big in Japan, indicated that their music would be novel and challenging to conventional tastes and also unlikely to be played very much on radio or TV.

Whatever the true origins are of their name, Japan grew into it and would progress from guitar-based glam rock into synthpop, distinguishing themselves from their contemporaries by using synthesizers to create exotic, rather than robotic, sounds. Japan’s final record from 1981, Tin Drum, was created mainly under Sylvian’s direction. It comprised a suite of songs based on an Oriental theme and was created largely from keyboard presets.

The band were embraced by a Japanese audience and performed in the country in each of the years from 1979 to 1982. The group’s final Sons of Pioneers tour ended in Japan in December of 1982, featuring a guest performance by Yukihiro Takahashi, the singer for the pioneering electronic band the Yellow Magic Orchestra, and a performance of “Bamboo Houses”, one of Sylvian’s earliest collaborations with Yellow Magic Orchestra’s keyboard player Ryuichi Sakamoto. Two years later, the pair would collaborate further on Brilliant Trees. After disbanding Japan, David Sylvian turned his attention to painting and photography and traveled widely in Europe and Asia, while his Japanese partner turned him on to jazz and classical music.

Brilliant Trees develops the sound of Tin Drum by advancing its adventurous keyboard programming with live instrumentation and collaboration, a path shared by the contemporary art rock group Talk Talk. In addition to Ryuichi Sakamoto, Sylvian was joined by the American trumpeter Jon Hassell, who had worked with Brian Eno on the 1980 album Fourth World, and by German sound engineer Holger Csukay, a founder member of Can. Sakamoto and Hassell had each studied musical composition and ethnomusicology at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music and the Eastman School of Music, respectively, and they can be heard together on the amorphous closing pieces “Weathered Wall” and “Brilliant Trees”. Hassell and Csukay had studied together at the Cologne Course for New Music under Karlheinz Stockhausen. Csukay and Sakamoto had both been seduced from their formal musical training by the sounds of psychedelic rock and free jazz.

The first side of Brilliant Trees features guitarist Ronny Drayton, bassist Wayne Braithwaite, and trumpeter Mark Isham, musicians who were part of the contemporary jazz and R&B scenes in New York City. Their urbane sound is inspired by the jazz fusion of Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters, and the earthy, downtown feel contrasts with the cinematic, uptown grandeur of Joe Jackson’s Body and Soul, which Jackson recorded live in New York City. The intense funk of the album opener, “Pulling Punches”, is anchored by a syncopated beat from drummer Steve Jansen and layered with the polyrhythms of Braithwaite’s slap bass, Drayton’s chanking guitar, and Isham’s treated trumpet. On the moody blues of side one closer. “Red Guitar”, this ensemble is augmented by Ryuichi Sakamoto’s vivid piano, featuring the most prominent use of jazz phrasing on a record full of subtle jazz harmonies.

The trumpet is the defining instrument on Brilliant Trees, and breaking the tension created by “Pulling Punches” and “Red Guitar” is a pair of tracks that feature the fluid flugelhorn of Kenny Wheeler. “The Ink in the Well” matches Wheeler’s expressive soloing with the verdant guitar harmonics of Phil Palmer and upright bass of Danny Thompson, the bass player for British folk-jazz legends Pentangle who would also work with Kate Bush and Talk Talk. On “Nostalgia”, Wheeler’s ethereal concluding solo soars above a synthesized soundscape, with the clarity of his jazz voicing in contrast to the otherworldly contributions of Jon Hassell which feature on the album’s second side.

Twenty years prior, jazz had been at a crossroads. Whilst the beginning of the 1960s had seen a bright young generation of players breaking through, the increasing popularity of rock and soul poached many of its listeners, and as both styles became taken seriously as art forms and as vehicles of social change, many jazz musicians sought to invigorate their music both artistically and commercially through jazz fusion. As rock started to settle comfortably into middle age, and synthesizers threatened to strip pop music of its soul, with Café Bleu and Brilliant Trees, Paul Weller and David Sylvian looked forward to jazz as a renewed source of inspiration; but was their pop music still pop?