Working with the cream of session players, collaborating with leading avant-garde musicians and publishing a limited-edition book of Polaroid collages are a long way from Beckenham, in the English county of Kent, and an upbringing in which he was plain David Batt. Yet David Sylvian, who was once, in those days of rouge and ruffles, called the prettiest man in pop, appears to revel in his social and creative makeover.
He has the demeanour of an arch-aesthete, slightly protective of his past. He has a sharpened intellect, the result of a mixture of college and self-learning, and he speaks the way you would expect him to: precisely, measuredly, a little too earnestly, perhaps, but always with the mark of a calm, unpretentious gentleman.
Now one of the many handsome 40-something men who litter the outer limits of pop, he's immensely grateful, if not surprised, that he has survived in the shark-infested waters of the music industry. It's not as if he has concentrated on a career as such, he says, implying that his output has hardly warranted gossip-fests and home-interior spreads in Hello! or OK! "When I put an album out, the fact that there are people interested enough to go out and give it a listen is very gratifying," he says.
He appears to be the opposite of a grinning pop star, yet he's unsure this is the case. He recognises that, no matter how pop is approached, whether obviously or obliquely, there is always a little bit of show business to art and a little bit of art to show business.
"The trouble right now," he says, "is there's an imbalance to the system. Because of financial concerns, there's a great emphasis on the pure-entertainment side of the industry. There isn't a real nurturing of talent. If people don't make a splash with that first outing, they're basically lost. So lots of compromises are made, and strong, individual voices just don't come cutting through. Everything is a little bit more homogenised than it really ought to be.
"I feel quite pessimistic about the whole climate, which has been going on for the past four to five years. It's really rather unhealthy, and I'm just waiting for the backlash. These voices that are dying to be heard, individuals who have enormous creativity, are fighting against the lack of creativity in the current climate. I think there will be a backlash, a resurgence of far more creative work, coming in time, but we'll just have to sit it out.
"The industry should work with the individuals with unique voices, the people who are pushing the envelope in whatever genre they're working in. Those artists should be supported. That they are not is alarming."
Sylvian came to prominence fronting Japan, the sophisticated glam group, in the mid-1970s. Reviled during the punk era, Japan were more successful - and credible - by the beginning of the 1980s, as a result of their unwitting association with the New Romantic movement. The band's androgynous image - pretty boys in Max Factor with hair by Vidal Sassoon - made them fashionable after years of graft.
Yet Sylvian and company were hardly Spandau Ballet or Duran Duran. Even the titles of Japan's singles - Gentleman Take Polaroids, The Art Of Parties, Visions Of China, European Son, Ghosts - proved them to be cut from a different cloth.
Sylvian defines his career in distinct pre- and post-Japan phases. His work in the band, he says dismissively, achieved a creativity built mostly on artifice. Caution creeps into his voice when he talks about the time; he admits a shift in outlook had dramatic consequences on his reasons for making music. "The motivation behind the creation of the work was radically different than anything which had gone on before, and that's why I draw that defining line," he says.
It was a hint of what was to come: Japan broke up in 1982, but another result was Brilliant Trees, Sylvian's superb debut solo album, from 1984.
"I can still relate to Ghosts, but overall I find it hard to go back and touch base with any of Japan's material. Whereas work such as Brilliant Trees, in terms of my own development and maturing, or what have you, I can still understand where it came from. It's still rooted in the same soil, and I understand the genesis of the work."
Sylvian's latest album, Damage, is a remixed, re-issued live outing, recorded during his 1993 tour with Robert Fripp, his art guitarist in arms. Enlightening in the way that only David Sylvian records can be - its languid, experimental and mercurial melodies are closer to the core of pop music than many might think - it will hardly dent the charts.
"You can decide to remain commercially viable or creatively viable," says Sylvian, who has left Virgin records and recently signed a deal with Warner Classics. "It seems the two very rarely go hand in hand. They do for some time, but there's always a falling off. Bands artists have to be prepared for this and ask themselves what are they doing it for. Is it to see their name sitting on top of the charts? Is it to look at their sales income? Or is it because it might excite them and keep them alive?"
For Sylvian, the latter is what it comes down to: the desperate need to stay vital, alive and in touch with the created work. His primary objective is to give something back in that act of communication. "That's what guides me on so often: wishing to stay involved, excited and connected to my own work. It's great to wake up in the morning and know you can't wait to get back to work. Clearly, that doesn't happen all the time, but more often than not your instincts are true, and you know that a particular area of work should be interesting to you, regardless of the ultimate success, the artistic success, of the work. Sometimes, the work might fall short to its creator, but the experience of creating still justifies its existence."
But what of David Batt? What were his ambitions when he started out? "Totally different to what they are now," he says. "Writing music was an enormous escape for me, rather than a means of touching base with myself - although it was that, too, to some degree. As we all are, I was a complex teenager, and to me writing was a lifeline. I was a very private person back then - very shy, insular, withdrawn - and I found the writing of music to be enormously uplifting."
He also saw it as a way of going out into the world. "In a sense, I didn't have the courage to communicate on a true level, because I was too busy hiding who I was, even from myself. So the work was to push me outside, to engage with the world, and once I was out there, up and running, so to speak, I could see what I was producing musically. I realised I had been going about it all the wrong way. But the impetus was there to communicate and engage with the world around me."
Damage is on the Venture label. David Sylvian is at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin on Wednesday(bookings at 01-6777744)
