‘Ghosts’ Japan (1982, 7’, 3:55)
‘Sat In Your Lap’ Kate Bush (1981, 7’, 3:29)
My memory of that ‘Ghosts’ performance onTop Of The Pops is very clear: it was my 18th birthday, 17 March 1982. The historical record is equally clear: Thursday that week was, in fact, 18 March, and asTOTP only ran on Thursday nights, it must have been the day after my birthday, despite my memory’s insistence. That’s what ‘Ghosts’ does; it gets into your head and changes your perception of reality. It’s a spectral brain worm.
I was in an English boarding school where access to television was highly restricted. The school was divided into dormitories and houses. In the house where I lived with 60 other boys, there was a downstairs room with an open fireplace and a few shelves of old books (it was called the library, but books there were used as projectiles or fire-starters more than sources of edification). In a corner sat an old television set in a wooden cabinet. On weekend nights, we all squeezed in, older boys closest to the screen, younger boys sharing chairs and crammed into the back of the room. It was forbidden to turn the thing on during the week. But most of the policing was done by the oldest boys, and that year, I was one of them – a prefect. That meant a few of us slipped in at 7:30 every Thursday, assigning a pair of younger boys to keep watch at the door to stop others coming in and to warn us if the housemaster was striding down the long corridor from his end of the building.
The half-hour show that March evening was the usual mix of genres,
reflecting the wonderful yet often ghastly eclecticism of the UK singles charts in the pre-internet age, the great Album/Singles Era. I can’t claim to have remembered any of the other band appearances, but I know that ABC, Visage and Gary Numan were on that night (all artists that I was into), that the Goombay Dance Band performed (we would have booed and hurled books at the screen) and that it was one of several weeks when Tight Fit were number one. Their dire cover of ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ was a song we loved to hate, and we would gleefully sing along to it at the top of our voices – no longer concerned with getting caught – as each week’s number one was always played at the show’s end.8
The one performance I do remember came somewhere in the middle of the episode, introduced by Radio DJ Richard Skinner with the words, ‘Here’s a brave new record!’ It began with the camera zoomed in on David Sylvian’s face. He looked impossibly beautiful, his face delicate, vulnerable, yet self-possessed. He wore a pale shirt buttoned to the neck. As he began to sing, he looked up and right into the lens, his Bryan Ferry baritone crooning, ‘When the room is quiet...’ And quiet the room was – we were mesmerised. At the first chorus, the camera pulled back to reveal two other band members, one on a synthesizer and the other playing a marimba. There were no guitars in sight, no drum kit. There were no microphones (this was still the time when all performances onTop Of The Pops were mimed). It was as if they were right there inour quiet room.
At the end of the first chorus, the producers cut to the camera suspended overhead, giving home viewers a glimpse of the studio audience. They seemed perplexed, throwing nervous glances at each other. AsClassic Pop later put it, they were ‘stunned into bovine silence. There can’t ever have been a more subversivel
