Q: Where did the idea for “Ghosts” come from?
Restall: “Ghosts” was a labor of love. It was inspired by decades of following pop musicians into unusual places — musically not literally! There was no book about post-pop — I invented that category and defined it and picked three musicians who emerged in the suburbs of London around the same time. I made the argument that they are three key figures in this particular strain of pop music. They wanted to be pop stars and achieve success. And what did they do with it? They then turn around and start making pop music that really pushes the boundaries of what pop music is. They’re making albums that are not commercially viable, that are inventive and embracing the dramatic changes in technology happening in the 1980s in terms of instruments and studios.
Q: What was fascinating to you about these three particular musicians? How are they connected to each other?
Restall: I first started thinking about the book when Mark Hollis died, in 2019. He hadn’t made a record in 20 years, but the seriousness with which his music was talked about, especially in the U.K. and continental Europe, where Talk Talk had their greatest success, was intriguing to me as a narrative. Because I remember loving their first record as a teenager, and then being kind of perplexed when their career took kind of an avant-garde turn.
Then I thought about another Londoner, David Sylvian, who did something similar. I had followed him, too. I was a Japan fan and loved his early solo albums in the late ’80s. And then I watched him sort of just jumping the shark. His stuff became very strange, so out there and odd that it made Mark Hollis’ most avant-garde, uncommercial work sound like Taylor Swift!
With Kate Bush, my argument on how she connects to the post-pop concept is that she’s still flirting with the journey. Sylvian and Hollis just abandoned pop, whereas Bush went back and forth. Even early in her career, she made an incredibly avant-garde album, “The Dreaming,” which you could argue was the first post-pop album ever. And it got a mixed reception — it is greatly admired now, but at the time a lot of people were unhappy with it. After that, she hunkers down and produces “Hounds of Love,” which is her biggest album and launches her in the United States. After that, she swings back and forth.
Basically, these are musicians who did whatever they wanted. They had success, and from there had the opportunity to do what they wanted, even though that might undermine their success and potentially make them bankrupt and destroy everything they achieved. But they went ahead and did it anyway. And that tells us something interesting about creativity. These post-pop musicians have taken a journey into obscurity, into silence. The notion of silence is sort of the ultimate destination of post-pop. Take away the pop elements and in the end, nothing is left.
Q: While you’re analyzing these artists, you’re also including snippets of your own personal history as a young music fan in the 1980s. Why did you decide to incorporate that?
Restall: So, in trying to make the book more readable, I included about 10% memoir-type elements to bring the reader around and help them connect with me and the material. I’m making this journey that I want readers to accompany me on. At first, I had my doubts, thinking, “I’m not interesting, nobody wants to read a book about me.” But, when I’m talking about myself here, I’m not really talking about me — I’m talking about someone who is a music lover and consumer and listener of music. It makes me ordinary, an everyman. There are millions of people out there who have that same experience.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.psu.edu ’
