1. David Sylvian was born on David Alan Batt; 23 February 1958 and is an English musician, singer and songwriter who came to prominence in the late 1970s as frontman and principal songwriter of the band Japan.
45 Facts About David Sylvian
1. 2.
David Sylvian was born David Alan Batt in Beckenham, Kent, England.
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David Sylvian grew up in nearby Lewisham, South London, in a working-class home.
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David Sylvian's father Bernard was a plasterer by trade, his mother Sheila a housewife.
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David Sylvian had an older sister and a younger brother, Steve.
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David Sylvian later said he never enjoyed his childhood, mainly because of the environment of mid-1960s Lewisham.
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David Sylvian attended Catford Boys School where he became a friend of Anthony Michaelides, later known as Mick Karn.
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When David Sylvian received an acoustic guitar and his brother a drum kit as Christmas presents from their father, the three boys began to play music together.
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In 1980, the band signed with Virgin Records, where David Sylvian remained as a recording artist for the next twenty years.
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David Sylvian was the first person to introduce Sylvian seriously to jazz, which in turn inspired him to follow musical avenues not otherwise open to him.
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David Sylvian encouraged Sylvian to incorporate spiritual discipline into his daily routine.
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David Sylvian worked with Sakamoto on the UK Top 20 song "Forbidden Colours" for the 1983 Nagisa Oshima film Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence.
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David Sylvian's debut solo album, Brilliant Trees, released in June 1984, was a critical and commercial success.
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In 1985, David Sylvian released an instrumental EP Words with the Shaman, in collaboration with Jansen, Hassell, and Czukay.
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David Sylvian later updated the material in London in an attempt to elaborate on the theme started earlier in Japan, and to further improve the quality of the soundtrack.
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David Sylvian would identify "Steel Cathedrals" as his first experience with improvisations.
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Singer Claudia Brucken stated that David Sylvian helped them with his writing and musical skills on "p:Machinery", pretty much influencing the final structure and atmosphere of the piece.
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That took its toll and David Sylvian found himself in a frighteningly unstable state, which he would experience in varying degrees of intensity over the next 3 or 4 years.
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David Sylvian was unable to work in isolation, but at the same time felt the need to throw himself into collaborative project after collaborative project in a hope of recognising via his response something of what he was dealing with.
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Never one to conform to commercial expectations, David Sylvian then collaborated with Holger Czukay.
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David Sylvian was at Can's studio in Cologne in 1986 to do a vocal for Czukay's record, but instead they started to improvise, and recorded the first piece in three nights.
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For Flux, David Sylvian travelled to Cologne for a two-week creative Christmas break at the end of 1988, so this was planned unlike the unexpected genesis of Plight.
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Concurrent with Weatherbox, David Sylvian released the non-album single "Pop Song".
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David Sylvian first thought of collaborating with guitarist Robert Fripp in 1986, but, characteristically, it took them a while to manage it.
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One evening David Sylvian felt moved to play an acoustic version of "Ghosts", Japan's biggest hit.
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David Sylvian has commented that his improvised and 'unstable' trio work with Fripp and Trey Gunn in Europe was amongst the first times that he enjoyed performing live, and said that 'Up until that point it was all about reproducing the songs and presenting them in such-and-such way.
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Fripp and David Sylvian then recorded the album The First Day between December 1992 and March 1993 at studios in New York and New Orleans, and released the album in July 1993.
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In 1999, David Sylvian released Dead Bees on a Cake, his first solo album proper since Secrets of the Beehive 12 years earlier.
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Sakamoto wanted some English lyrics for his project Zero Landmine, and asked David Sylvian to write a simple, tender lyric that could be sung by children.
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David Sylvian was accompanied on stage by Jansen, keyboard player Matt Cooper, guitarist Timothy Young and bassist Keith Lowe.
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David Sylvian released the album Blemish, which included contributions from Christian Fennesz and Derek Bailey.
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David Sylvian used a different approach with this album, starting each day in the studio with a very simple improvisation on guitar.
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David Sylvian wrote lyrics and melody on the spot, and would follow that up with the vocal recording.
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David Sylvian recorded the EP World Citizen with Sakamoto, which was released in Japan in October 2003, and in Europe in April 2004.
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David Sylvian collaborated with Chris Vrenna's Tweaker again, on the track "Pure Genius", which was released on the album 2 am Wakeup Call.
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In 2004, David Sylvian was commissioned by Madhouse to compose the ending theme for the anime adaptation of Naoki Urasawa's Monster, titled "For the Love of Life", alongside Japanese composer Kuniaki Haishima.
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Simultaneously David Sylvian had started a project with Jansen and Berndt Friedman called Nine Horses.
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David Sylvian took to the road again on 17 September to 30 October 2007 for 'The World Is Everything' tour, which included concerts in Europe, Hong Kong and Japan, featuring Steve Jansen, Keith Lowe, and Takuma Watanabe.
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In 2010, David Sylvian released Sleepwalkers, a compilation album of his collaborative works with musicians over the previous 10 years, including songs with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Tweaker, Nine Horses, Steve Jansen, Christian Fennesz and Arve Henriksen.
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Also in 2011, David Sylvian acted as the artist in residence at the Punkt Festival in Norway.
41.
In 2014, David Sylvian released There's a Light That Enters Houses with No Other House in Sight, a long-form composition with contributions from Christian Fennesz and John Tilbury and featuring spoken word by American Pulitzer Prize winning poet Franz Wright of excerpts from Wright's own Kindertotenwald.
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In 2015, David Sylvian released Playing The Schoolhouse with Confront Recordings in two limited editions.
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David Sylvian collaborated again with Confront Recordings in 2017, with Mark Wastell and Rhodri Davies for the first release of the Confront Core Series, There Is No Love.
44.
David Sylvian contributed to the album To the Moon and Back, a tribute to Ryuichi Sakamoto recorded by various artists who reworked his material.
45.
In 1992, while working on the Sakamoto single "Heartbeat", David Sylvian met Ingrid Chavez, a singer and actress who had been a member of Prince's inner circle.