Andonis Michaelides, better known as Mick Karn, was a Greek Cypriot musician who rose to fame as the bassist for the art rock and new wave band Japan. His distinctive fretless bass guitar sound and melodic playing style were a trademark of the band's sound.

Karn was born Andonis Michaelides in Nicosia. When he was three, his Greek Cypriot parents moved with him to London, where he grew up. In his youth, he began playing mouth organ at the age of seven and violin at the age of eleven, before he took up playing bassoon for the school orchestra. As a bassoon player he performed with the London Schools Symphony Orchestra in a concert in October 1972 which was broadcast by Radio 4. However, when his bassoon was stolen and his school refused to buy him a new one, he bought a bass guitar for £5 from a school friend. At school he became friends with David Sylvian and his younger brother Steve. As an escape from their south London environment, they began to play music together, and in June 1974 they made their first public performance.

Initially with Karn as lead vocalist, their band christened themselves Japan in 1974. Joined by keyboardist Richard Barbieri and guitarist Rob Dean the following year, they signed a recording contract with German disco label Hansa in 1977, with which they recorded three studio albums and became an alternative glam rock outfit in the mould of David Bowie, T.Rex, and The New York Dolls.[citation needed] They switched to Virgin Records to record their subsequent albums Gentlemen Take Polaroids and Tin Drum.

As the band started to achieve commercial success with the release of Tin Drum and specifically the single "Ghosts", which reached the top five in 1982, tensions and personality conflicts between band members arose. Tin Drum was to be the band's final studio album. Long-simmering differences among the band members came to a head when Karn's girlfriend, photographer Yuka Fujii, moved in with Sylvian, and the individual members forged ahead with their own projects. Karn said in an interview that as tensions with their record company had abated following Japan's commercial success, band members began focusing on personal differences rather than on the common enemy.

Session work and solo projects

Karn played bass guitar and saxophone on Gary Numan's 1981 No.6 hit "She's Got Claws" and other tracks on its parent No.3 hit album, Dance. In November 1982, Karn released his first solo album, Titles, just as Japan had announced their split. In 1982, Karn wrote some material with Michael Finbarr Murphy, guitarist and writer for Heatwave, Alan Murphy of Level 42, and Diana Ross, among others. They played some low-key gigs around London during the summer of 1982, and then went their separate ways. That same year, Karn appeared on The Old Grey Whistle Test along with Angie Bowie, former wife of David Bowie.

In 1982 he also contributed saxophone playing on three tracks on the Swedish band Lustans Lakejer's album En plats i solen, produced by Richard Barbieri. Although Karn submitted an album's worth of demos to Virgin Records as a more pop-oriented follow-up to his debut solo album Titles, the record label declined to fund the record and it was abandoned. In 1983, he collaborated with Midge Ure on the UK top 40 single "After a Fashion", and in 1984, he formed Dalis Car with Peter Murphy. The duo released one album, The Waking Hour, in late 1984.