by Blemished on Sun Aug 10, 2014 8:17 am
There is a long interview with Simon in the magazine section of The Times (of London) this Saturday (9 August), promoting this book and relating various stories about the artists he managed. It includes a bit about Japan and has a little photo of David.
David Sylvian of Japan must have been a little less exacting. “Five years of my life I spent breaking that f***ing band,” he says in measured tones, “but Japan became the most influential group of the Eighties. Then David said, ‘I don’t want to be a rock star. I don’t want to be famous. I just want to be a kind of Left Bank poet, known and respected a bit’ – a gorgeous David Sylvian moment. That should have been the guy who drove his car into Snappy Snaps; George Michael should have gone through the front window of Harrods!
“The only thing to look out for as a manager,” he adds, “is that the musicians you represent have a total, obsessed, near-suicidal need to be a star. Nothing else matters. The energy and push that makes an artist a star comes from them, not you. You latch yourself on like a jockey on a horse: the horse runs, you pass the winning post and you get your 20 per cent. And when you ask them what they want, they say they want to be successful – they don’t say, ‘We want to have our spots cleared up or be psychoanalysed’ – and to do that very often we turn them into monsters. We cut them off from every aspect of normal life and put them in hotel suites and pack them in cotton wool, an enclosed world with a crew around them. And we put them in limousines and separate them from their public and send groupies and drugs and drinks to their rooms and eventually they find the whole thing … not very nice. They get unhappy. They get miserable.”
And then they blame the manager.
“And then, yes, they blame me! But that’s the job they asked us to do.”