Worlds Of Possibility: Matthew Restall on the Post-Pop Journey

New book examines the creative worlds of Japan, Kate Bush and Talk Talk's Mark Hollis

Commitment, they say, is just the b-side of having limited options. Otherwise, why would you find the stylish members of Japan toiling away under a hail of Punk spit or opening for Blue Oyster Cult? Then there was Kate Bush making her musical bones around southeast London with covers of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Come Together.” Then again it may be harder perhaps, to think of Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis shlepping guitars in and out of pubs while holding down his duties as a roadie for Eddie and The Hot Rods. Where’s the glamor in any of that?

But that’s the compost you’ll find these musical exotics rooting in across the pages of Matthew Restall’s “Ghosts - Journeys To Post Pop: How David Sylvian, Mark Hollis and Kate Bush Reinvented Pop Music.” It’s a bold claim, but one that the Penn State professor maintains has been made before. And even if he isn’t the first scholar to connect those particular dots, you still might find yourself wondering while you stare at the cover if there’s something to his hypothesis.

The book is cast like a double album, tracking several decades of material over four “sides” of text. From a personal angle, Restall’s connection to these artists dates back to when he first spied Japan’s reaching the Top of the Pops summit of their commercial career. It was his 18th birthday, and the band’s lead singer was just about to walk away from their eight-year slog to success. Hollis put in a decade’s worth of struggle from synthpop to jazz-adjacent experimentalist, only to walk off stage and focus on his family. And Bush continues to tease her audience with the promise of albums that appear as randomly as a meteor shower.

Restall maintains that Post-Pop is the place where music is inherently “nostalgic for its pop past;” a place where you take ABBA and add Stockhausen until you can hardly taste the ABBA.”  And that makes sense. All of his principals here eventually shuffled away from the influences that put them in motion as quickly as they could. But now that we all live in a Post-Rap universe, which broke Pop into more identifiable pieces, you’re given to wonder if what balance the artists the author highlights here strike between pioneer and influencer.

If the book at times tumbles a touch too far towards the academic, once you pry apart the seams you’ll find Restall approaches his material in the kind of thoughtful way that ultimately sends you back to the music. If I’m not completely onboard with the premise in the title (Kate Bush may have birthed Tori Amos, but Japan and Hollis’ issue aren’t as obvious….), it did occur to us that one glaring legacy they share is that all three left their fans wanting more.

But perhaps the stronger takeaway here is what Restall comes to in relation to his subject’s direct or indirect spiritual ties to Eno:

“Pop, it turned out, was not limited and simple; it was a world of possibilities. It was not music’s lightweight and inferior genre, unworthy of being taken as seriously as prog rock and jazz, classical and avant-garde; it was unbounded, open to interaction with those other genres. Eno pointed the way to a set of paths or journeys to which Sylvian, Hollis and Bush would, in various ways, commit.”

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Interview with Author Matthew Restall

Tracking Angle: Can you tell us a little bit about how the book came together?

Matthew Restall: The first thing I would say is I came to the project having written a fair number of books on history…books that have nothing to do with music. This book was really a labor of love. There was no reason to write this book other than the fact that I wanted to. But I had an idea and that's usually how one of any of my books start. I have an idea and so I start reading and investigating to see if the idea has any traction to it. And in this case it began with David Sylvian. I thought it was absolutely astonishing (listening) to the first record he ever made in Japan and then listening to the stuff that he's done recently in his sort of weird late life as a recluse up in New Hampshire. How does someone go from that kind of A to that kind of Z? So I didn't come to it saying ‘Oh I'm going to write a book about Hollis, Sylvian and Bush. I started by saying I want to discover why Sylvian did this and that led me to Hollis and then to Bush.

TA: Why did you decide to structure the book in the form of a double album?

MR: Structuring it as a double album was a little bit of a contrivance. I sort of like the idea because I like the idea of using song titles as chapter titles. So the reader would see the song title and perhaps know the song and wonder how that works its way in. So when I use “Happiness Is Easy/Let The Happiness In” they happen to fit in terms of the time period but then when they read that chapter and realize ‘He's writing about mental illness. He’s now exploring the idea that the journey to Post-Pop is only done by somebody who has some kind of relationship with the concept of mental illness. Maybe that’s part of it.’ The reader thinks ‘Oh, oh do you need to do, do you need to have that kind of complex brain chemistry to be the person that goes to Post-Pop?’

TA: Can you connect any dots from these three artists to musicians who are working now? Do you see a lineage there?

MR: It would be very different categories of people, but it would be somebody like Eno. I don't think it ends up being Post-Pop and I do talk about that, but the fact is he's still producing…he's still making music. And he's still making music that I think arguably is kind of playing with these genres like ambient and different kinds of Pop and how do those relate to each other.