Articles and Interviews

David Sylvian Interview – WDET-FM, Detroit, MI, USA (4.14.99) Transcript by Mark Shanahan

We Have Ways of Making You TalkBy Chris RobertsUncut, May 1999 David Sylvian’s first solo album for 12 years, Dead Bees On A Cake, is his most personal and accessible work to date, and features Talvin Singh and Ryuichi Sakamoto. The former frontman with early Eighties melancholy futurists Japan married paisley Park protégé Ingrid Chavez in 1992. The couple now

David Sylvian undertook an internet webcast interview in September 2000. The video can be seen elsewhere on this site (here). Sascha Paulick produced this article at the time (originally in three parts) including a transcript of the event for the David Sylvian fan-page, Slow Fire, and has kindly given permission for the text to be shared on this site.

Since DAVID SYLVIAN split Japan at their zenith nearly a decade ago his fans have been praying they’d got back together. And now they have, under the name of RAIN TREE CROW. STEVE SUTHERLAND meets Sylvian to discover the impetus behind the band’s re-emergence.

The last two years have been a period of transition for David Sylvian, but he’s now in a new collaboration with Holger Czukay and a new solo single and a major retrospective set of his post-Japan recordings scheduled for November release. PAUL LESTER reports on one of rock’s most enigmatic figures.

Four years in the making, and twelve years after his last solo album Secrets of the Beehive, David Sylvian offers us another opportunity to immerse ourselves in his unique aural landscape with his long-awaited new solo album, entitled Dead Bees on a Cake. The album offers us a sonic experience that is both familiar and refreshingly new. A truly contemporary album, but one that is not guided by the current fashion of the day. A pop album by all...