When Bryan Ferry appears in a vision, you look for subsequent manifestations in soup bowls, hubcaps, clouds of vape smoke, and Negronis. Wedge haircuts were endangered species in 1994, so David Sylvian and Japan got me hard at the moment when his generation looked louche. But Ferry had released no new material in seven years, thus beginning my deep dive into New Pop, the New Romantics, and every UK artist who embarrassed grad students in the Clinton era.
I bought Gentlemen Take Polaroids and Tin Drum, still beloved by Anglophiles and Britishes mesmerized by Japan’s admittedly mesmerizing Top of the Pops appearance playing “Ghosts,” praised by Simon Reynolds as the most outrageous performance in the show’s history: four mascaraed fops playing their instruments with Keanu-like intensity as if afraid they’d zonk out. Listeners repelled by Sylvian’s voice won’t get far with Japan’s music. A proficient syntheses of Western assimilation of Asian music as opposed to respecting the integrity of Asian music itself, the songs on Japan’s breakthroughs flirt offhandedly and, to my ear, flippantly with totalitarian chic — forget Sylvian, in Sally Jesse Raphael drag, struggling with chopsticks while a photo of Mao glowers from the corner of the Tin Drum sleeve; they’ve got a song called “Rhodesia,” for god’s sake, and readers who can parse “Oh, heartaches from Amsterdam/Masturbated over jilted bouquets/Approximation’s counting on a freight line” should enroll in the Simon Le Bon School of Advanced Lyric Writing.
Still, David Sylvian has recorded compelling pastoral music,: rhythmically pallid, colorful at a top line level, frieze-like. I jonesed for Bryan Ferry, others for Brian Eno and Jon Hassell collaborations; Sylvian’s music approximates them like Change did Chic’s. David Sylvian was still tops at the local bookstore where I worked at the dawn of the new millennium, specifically Dead Bees on a Cake and his two-disc comp, which is tighter than it has a right to be. I often play him when writing before bed.
1. Orpheus
2. Gentlemen Take Polaroids
3. Adolescent Sex
4. Fall in Love With Me
5. Forbidden Colours
6. Quiet Life
7. Nostalgia
8. Ghosts
9. The Boy with a Gun
10. Blackwater
11. Swing
12. Pulling Punches
13. The Art of Parties
14. Taking the Veil
15. Halloween
16. Methods of Dance
17. Wave
18. Talking Drum
19. Nightporter
20. I Surrender
21. Wave
22. Jean the Birdman
23. River Man
24. September
25. Wanderlust
Humanizing The Vacuum 
Not much to add except that I was buying JAPAN records for 40 years now. All great choices but for the luvva Pete where’s “European Son??!!” The apex of their “Moroder Trilogy” [along with “Quiet Life” and the actually produced by Moroder “Life In Tokyo”] that managed to cast actual Moroder production of the band very much into the shade?
On the other hand, the sublime “Gentlemen Take Polaroids” would have to be the number two song here. Such poise and reserve, and yet the closest thing to ebullience that this notoriously depressed-sounding band ever committed to tape. If you can resist the line “breathe life into me, spin me ’round,” you’e beyond hope! I’ve been in a big JAPAN phase of late as I’ve just finished Anthony Reynolds excellent band bio.
I felt the same way you did in 1994. Three cheers for fops and dandies! Down with flannel and pit stains! But it looks as if you either stopped listening to his work or stopped enjoying it around the turn of the century. A few of his more recent tracks would make my own top 25: definitely “A Fire in the Forest” (from Blemish), “Small Metal Gods” (the original version, from Manafon), and “World Citizen–I Won’t Be Disappointed” (the long version, from Sleepwalkers), and maybe a handful of others.
The entire Nine Horses album is worth your attention, too, if you haven’t gotten around to it. It resembles his eighties discography much more closely than the rest of his post-2000 work does. The problem is that it’s hard to single out any one particular song on it for praise, even though the album itself is one of his most consistent.
As for his earlier releases, I could fill an entire top 25 simply with Japan tracks, but the song I most wish you had found a place for is probably “Some Kind of Fool,” the great lost Gentlemen Take Polaroids-era recording he included on Everything and Nothing. It offers one of his most affecting vocal performances, placing his usual flawless artifice in perfect balance with what sounds for all the world like actual feeling. And that’s the quality with which his later work, for all its melodylessness, most surprises me: the sense that he actually means it, which makes me think that he probably always did actually mean it. It’s just that he sounded so debonair that it was easy not to credit him for it.
(You’ve listed “Wave” twice, so you do have room for one more song if you want—whatever your #26 would be presumably.)
Thanks for the recommendations.