The Lolita Complex: - Scholarly Commons Home

It was, though, with the Yellow Magic Orchestra that Sakamoto first
made an impact on the contemporary music scene, particularly in Britain
and Japan. This band was one of the very earliest to introduce an electro-
synthesised sound to the industry that would become pivotal in pioneering
the post-Punk, New-wave and New-romantic genres. David Sylvian, too,
even prior to his days with Sakamoto, was a major inspiration and has been
popularly referred to as the godfather of New Romanticism. Although he,
personally, has always maintained a reluctance to accept this association,
seeing his and his band’s work as distinguishable from this type of
categorisation, there is no doubt that Japan’s Oriental soundscape can be
heard throughout the early-eighties period, especially in Tears for Fears’ track
The Sound of the Breakdown (1982), as just one of a multitude of examples.
In terms of the New-romantic look, Sylvian’s predecessors Marc
Bolan of T-Rex, Brian Ferry of Roxy Music and his idol Bowie had set the bar
for his dandified aristocratic persona which became a staple image for many
subsequent Romantics. Also responsible for establishing some of the
movement’s major styles were Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren.
According to Gorman:
Deeply under the influence of early Bowie in terms of look… they [the
Romantics] were originally known as the “cult with no name”…. The scene was
eventually dubbed New Romantic, not least because Westwood and McLaren
had turned to notions of pirates and eighteenth-century [models]…. 30
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