Outpost 13: The Atrocity Exhibition from Ballardian on Vimeo.

Eurydice in a Used Car Lot. Margaret Travis paused in the empty foyer of the cinema, looking at the photographs in the display frames. In the dim light beyond the curtains she saw the dark-suited figure of Captain Webster, the muffled velvet veiling his handsome eyes. The last few weeks had been a nightmare – Webster with his long-range camera and obscene questions. He seemed to take a certain sardonic pleasure in compiling this one-man Kinsey Report on her . . . positions, planes, where and when Travis placed his hands on her body – why didn’t he ask Catherine Austin? As for wanting to magnify the photographs and paste them up on enormous billboards, ostensibly to save her from Travis . . . She glanced at the stills in the display frames, of this elegant and poetic film in which Cocteau had brought together all the myths of his own journey of return. On an impulse, to annoy Webster, she stepped through the side exit and walked past a small yard of cars with numbered windshields. Perhaps she would make her descent here. Eurydice in a used car lot?

The Concentration City. In the night air they passed the shells of concrete towers, blockhouses half buried in rubble, giant conduits filled with tyres, overhead causeways crossing broken roads. Travis followed the bomber pilot and the young woman along the faded gravel. They walked across the foundation of a guard-house into the weapons range. The concrete aisles stretched into the darkness across the airfield. In the suburbs of Hell Travis walked in the flaring light of the petrochemical plants. The ruins of abandoned cinemas stood at the street corners, faded billboards facing them across the empty streets. In a waste lot of wrecked cars he found the burnt body of the white Pontiac. He wandered through the deserted suburbs. The crashed bombers lay under the trees, grass growing through their wings. The bomber pilot helped the young woman into one of the cockpits. Travis began to mark out a circle on the concrete target area.

J.G. Ballard, Chapter One: ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, The Atrocity Exhibition.

Presenting ‘Outpost 13: The Atrocity Exhibition’, a video directed by Mark C and produced by Outpost 13: Stuart Argabright, Mark C and Kent Heine. The full 35-minute film is based on J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, and is part of a performance piece that debuted in Porto, Portugal at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, with o13 performing the soundtrack live.

The excerpt here features narration from Ballard’s text by David Silver with Jen Jaffe and Esther Ahn, and images by Robert Longo, Adrienne Altenhaus and others. o13 have also completed a 10-minute video, soundtrack and narration for ‘Time, Memory And Inner Space’, Ballard’s 1967 essay, with narration by Judy Nylon, once of the group Snatch and a former collaborator of Brian Eno’s, plus a CG video by Austrian artist Patrick Quick.

Recently, 013 have been performing The Atrocity Exhibition and ‘Time, Memory And Inner Space’ in New York with a live soundtrack and sound design.

Outpost 13:
Mark C: guitar, synthesizers, vocals
Stuart Argabright: synthesizers, laptop, vocals
Kent Heine: bass

The author of Lord Horror.

Interview by Simon Sellars.

This, the second of our three-interview series with Savoy luminaries, covers the company’s musical and spoken-word output. Part 1, with Michael Butterworth, discussed Savoy’s publishing arm, and part 3, with John Coulthart, will cover Savoy’s visual/comics/graphics output. To coincide with this series, we also ran a Savoy/Ballardian Microfiction competition.

This interview is in two parts. In the first, David Britton discusses PJ Proby, Ballard, Fenella Fielding, Ian Brady, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds magazine, Heathcote Williams and his own upbringing. In the second, he discusses New Order, Joy Division, punk, Manchester music, Kingsize Taylor, The Cramps, Zappa, Beefheart and Springsteen. Interspersed throughout both parts are sound clips from Savoy releases [NOTE: sound clips don't work in Google Reader].

..:: Don’t forget Part 2 of this interview!

Excerpt from forthcoming release: Fenella Fielding reading from JG Ballard’s Crash. Courtesy Savoy Records (2010).

Savoy music and talking books can be purchased from eMusic, iTunes and Savoy Books.

IN PART 1 OF THE SAVOY INTERVIEWS with Michael Butterworth, we learnt all the gory details about Savoy Books, “England’s only truly alternative and autotelic publishing company”, founded by Butterworth and David Britton in 1976. The Savoy roster includes many writers who appeared alongside Ballard in New Worlds magazine — including Michael Moorcock, Harlan Ellison, Charles Platt, Samuel R. Delany, Langdon Jones and M. John Harrison — and the company itself has been hit by multiple scandals, including the imprisonment of Britton twice on obscenity charges. But what about the musical arm of this black empire? Savoy Records is the company “responsible” for resurrecting the career of PJ Proby, the trouser-splitting redneck-rock anti-hero from the 60s and repackaging him as a return-of-the-repressed Frankensteinian monster. It’s the company that claimed Madonna guested on one of its records with Proby, singing a song that “glorified sex with young girls”. It’s the company that used a “quote” from Prince Charles on one of its record sleeves, in which the Bonny Prince was alleged to have said: “Only dickheads die from cocaine. The best people used it and are still using it”. It’s the company that turned horrorshow characters from its demented comics into recording “stars”. And today, it’s the company attempting to resurrect (despite her apparent protests) the actress Fenella Fielding’s career, with a covers record of modern-day pop songs and — of all things — her spoken-word rendition of Ballard’s Crash. Nestled like toad in the hole among all that headspinning madness is a brace of great tunes, embracing muscular dance, redneck folk and way-more-punk-than-punk theatrics. Stuff New Order, Joy Division, Ballard, Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, Prince Charles, Lord Haw-Haw, the Queen, the IRA, Bowie, Phil Collins, Proby, the Cramps, the Stooges and Prince into a blender filled with flesheating worms, and the brown goo flowing from the nozzle is nothing less than Savoy Records. But handle with extreme caution, for the worms will still be alive.

LEFT: PJ Proby and Peter Hook of New Order in Suite 16 recording studio, Rochdale, circa 1984. From the “Love Will Tear Us Apart” sleeve.

Savoy Records seems to anticipate, heighten or subvert certain commercial trends. The work they did with Proby ironically comments on all those cynical marketing exercises whereby old has-beens like Tom Jones re-record hip songs like “Kiss” by Prince. But instead of trying to revive old careers, Savoy amplifies all the reasons why these “has-beens” fell from favour. The furore surrounding the sleeve of the Lord Horror record, with its fake Prince Charles quotes and other unspeakable anti-semitic rants attributed to nasty Savoy characters, seems to say that punk never went far enough. For Savoy, the equation could be something like this: “Siouxsie Sioux and Sid Vicious wore swastikas on their clothing, but it was only for show. They were never really interested in pushing people’s buttons. If punk really wanted to shock with Nazi imagery, this is how it should be done”. Here is a parallel universe where punk was always shocking, and never mere window dressing for clothes horses.

In part 2 of the Savoy interviews, we have David Britton himself to tell us all about the music biz, in what amounts to only the second full-length interview he’s ever given. David is very much a man of mystery — not only does he rarely speak on the record, but to this day, as far as I know, there have been no adult photos of him published. It was with that puzzle in mind that I went to sleep one night in 2008, when I first had the idea of approaching these people for their story, thinking intently about the Savoy empire and what it all meant…

That night I dreamt a very strange dream, which I recall very well. David Britton and Michael Butterworth had invited me to their glamourous beach shack. After a few drinks, they gave me a rather expensive surfboard and, smitten with the board, I excused myself, took my leave and paddled out to sea. But I pushed out too far, and being a hopeless swimmer panicked and turned back. The water was red by the way, but it wasn’t blood — that’s just how it was in this world. On the way back I noticed a crack in the board. I was apprehensive but felt that David and Michael wouldn’t mind, and that they would understand that it was a design flaw rather than my clumsiness that had cracked it.

When I got back to their shack, they had, according to a note from David, decided to go on holiday, although they had left me keys and the note said to let myself in and make myself at home. I remember thinking that although I had met Michael before in the dream world, David always kept himself hidden when he spoke to me, talking from behind doors and curtains. When I opened the door, they were inside after all — they were running late, and were still packing. And I had to catch my breath because there, right in front of me, was the mysterious David Britton! Returning early from the water, I had caught him by surprise, and he hadn’t had time to hide himself from me. In fact, he was frozen in mid-stride like a statue — having heard the door open, he was attempting to run for cover behind the curtain. I took in the sight of something I’d never seen before: David Britton. He turned out to be very tall and lean, although not skinny, more the naturally athletic type, with swept-back medium length hair. He was wearing shorts and had some kind of snake tattoo on his lower legs and ankles. He seemed very graceful and, after he had relaxed from being caught out, said hello to me in a cultured English accent.

Then Michael offered to sell me some books, David some records, and I woke up…

Two years later, I conducted this interview with David Britton by email. I still have no idea what he really looks like.

Prince’s “Sign O’ Times”, performed by PJ Proby. Courtesy Savoy Records (1989).

SIMON SELLARS: David, in our interview with Michael, he said that New Worlds was the inspiration for Savoy Books. Looking back at New Worlds, there seems an obvious rock ‘n’ roll aesthetic through the magazine — a savage blend of experimental pop culture shot though with various rock allusions. Was this in turn an influence on Savoy Records?

DAVID BRITTON: In the 1960s, New Worlds was the literary equivalent of the Beatles. That decade produced some fine magazines, literary ones like Evergreen, Transatlantic Review and Encounter. Only New Worlds possessed the true primogeniture of a rock ‘n’ roll quality. In my mind it sat well with the music experiments of the day, and had a harder edge than the best of the underground magazines — Oz, IT and so on. It was rock ‘n’ roll in literary form, and to me Ballard and Moorcock were as revolutionary and exciting as Beefheart and Zappa. As a boy I’d been very taken with Weird Tales. Its pulp ambience, Virgil Finlay’s illustrations and the writer-triumvirate of HP Lovecraft, Robert E Howard and Clark Ashton Smith held a special appeal. To find a magazine in the 60s that seemed as exciting as Weird Tales must have been in the 30s was a real inspiration. To perhaps overstretch an analogy, you might say that Ballard was the equivalent of Lovecraft, Moorcock was Howard and, at a push, Aldiss was Smith. Michael Butterworth had already made his presence felt in New Worlds. I’d seen advertisements around Manchester for readings he did with New Worlds regulars such as Libby Houston, and I was conscious at the time of being an onlooker staring through a window into a creative world out of my reach. Michael had been at the heart of New Worlds at the peak of its run; I was jealous of that but also inspired that a writer from Manchester had actually made it. When I met up with him in the early 70s, I began to feel that my time might be coming.

LEFT: David Britton’s copy of Passort to Eternity.

SS: Michael detailed in length the influence of Ballard on his own writing. Was it the same for you?

DB: As a teenager, Ballard’s short stories constantly looped through my mind in a way his novels did not. The “compact” novels with their strange, evocative compelling prose were both adult and original. I was familiar with some of them from Ted Carnell’s New Worlds/Science Fantasy magazines, but they didn’t properly come into focus for me until I read them collected together in the Berkley paperbacks — The Voices of Time and Passport to Eternity — which I read while living in my North Manchester home, in Blackley, going to and from work in a rather pointless way.

On my route to the factory to combat the boredom that lay ahead, I played games, giving certain plots of ground “Ballardian” qualities. A grass verge, so nondescript, became significant. The steep incline in Victoria Avenue concealed the approaching ocean from “Now Wakes the Sea”. The dead waters of the Rhodes Wood Reservoir, ringed with poinsettia, twinkled alienly. These internal miseries came to be a ticking clock of my life, a way of measuring the passage of time. Later came the more intense fiction of “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race” — Ballard rewriting a hero of mine, Alfred Jarry — and the one piece that really connects to Lord Horror, Ballard’s article “The Alphabets of Unreason”, the first piece I’d read that put a modern finger on the appeal of the Third Reich and Hitler. No moralising, just a recognition of the Reich’s genuinely seductive theatrical power: “The psychopath never dates”; “Hitler is completely up to date”; “Hitler’s revulsion against the Jews was physical, like his reaction against any peoples, such as the Slavs and Negroes, whose physique, posture, morphology and pigmentation alerted some screaming switchboard of insecurity within his own mind”. This was powerful stuff in 1967, and it came courtesy of New Worlds. The only other person whose force of opinion hit me that hard was Professor George Steiner, many years later, talking on The Late Show about Leni Reifenstahl’s Triumph Of The Will. Very eloquently he said that while the appeal of Reifenstahl’s film was beguiling and the imagery of the Nazi state sucked you in, the correct response to it was a very emphatic, “Thank you, but no.”

In my writing, however, Moorcock had been more of an inspiration to me than Ballard, and I played to that influence in the early manifestations of Savoy; you might say Michael Butterworth filled a gap in the Savoy ethos with his own Ballard influence. Our collaboration on Lord Horror came out of the editing partnership on the small press magazines, and developed with the founding of Savoy. M John Harrison worked with us for two years and his presence was probably as much of a catalyst for Lord Horror as my later imprisonment in Strangeways; these things opened the doors to my beginning in writing. Harrison was a friend and an inspiration, I’ll be forever grateful to him for that. It’s frustrating that Lord Horror never appeared in New Worlds; I’d come of age too late to be a part of those wonderful heady days. But the novel is inspired by the New Worlds philosophy. It’s a homage, and an attempt to continue the tradition of Ballard and Moorcock, Harrison and Langdon Jones. The connection was continued when we published Lang’s story collection, The Eye of the Lens, and later hired him to proofread Motherfuckers.

SS: How did growing up in Manchester influence your worldview?

DB: There’s a notorious — to us — moment in the TV interview which Ballard gave to Jeremy Isaacs on Face to Face where he says that his writing career took the imaginative route it had because of his childhood in Shanghai, and he doubted if he would have become a writer if he had grown up in a suburb of Manchester. Well, he’s on record all over as saying the dullness of the suburbs gives birth to anarchy and strange impulses — that’s the entire subject of The Unlimited Dream Company — so, actually, I think he would have faired better than he thought. Though I spent nearly all my younger life trying to escape it, determining that it would not be my limit, North Manchester in the 50s and 60s where I was born and grew up is, in a sense, my Shanghai. By my teens, its terraced slums had been razed and replaced with a nondescript mess growing into a landscape of quiet desperation, a bleak “Ballardland”, artistically and spiritually, that pushed me to make the local library a second home in search of a richer imaginative life. I did escape, finally. But since I have left, its disaffected characters and its underbelly of absurdity, grimness and black humour has risen in significance in my mind, providing an unlikely creative font that I drew on for Lord Horror and all my subsequent books.

Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire”, performed by PJ Proby with the Savoy Holman Hunt African Orchestra. Courtesy Savoy Records (1990).

SS: What was the impetus behind Savoy branching out into making records?

DB: Michael had been friendly with Heathcote Williams and his London-based anarchist press, The Open Head Press, in the 1970s. Open Head were releasing records, and one of their 45s, “Sid Did It”, an anti-punk song, was a truly demented parody of the Sex Pistols. That had a big influence on us: a book publisher releasing records. Also, the biography we were meant to be doing with PJ Proby wasn’t getting anywhere, and I began to realise we were being irrevocably drawn into recording him.

“Shoot Yer Load” by Meng & Ecker. Courtesy Savoy Records (1989).

SS: Is there a conscious continuity between Savoy books, records and comics, aside from the integration of characters like Meng, Ecker and Horror?

DB: Rock ‘n’ roll’s spirit is hopefully always with us. It’s the bottom-line inspiration for Lord Horror, Meng & Ecker, La Squab and everything I’ve written. The rhythm of psychomorphic Horror is set to a rock ‘n’ roll beat. Rock ‘n’ roll and Auschwitz spell Lord Horror. To me, there’s inevitability in their blending. The bittersweet euphoria of rock ‘n’ roll with the most perverted campaign of terror in the history of the world. One breeds heightened life, the other depletes the human spirit. Positive and negative in the extreme.

The seeds were all there from the beginning. I don’t know how conscious a process it was, but I didn’t see there were boundaries. We were already mixing genres. It was a mindset we had together, and the multi-media approach unfolded quite naturally. Jack Trevor Story’s novel Man Pinches Bottom has a central character that comes from the world of Fleetway comics. The main protagonist in Nik Cohn’s novel I am Still the Greatest Says Johnny Angelo was a rock singer amalgam of PJ Proby and Elvis. All the threads of Savoy — books, music, graphics — can be knitted together to make a matching coat of its colourful contributors, real or imagined. You could easily place PJ Proby into the Meng & Ecker comics without it seeming contrived. The real life William Joyce/Lord Haw-Haw had been a comic character in Radio Fun in the 1940s, so right there Horror had visual ancestry. During the Second World War, Joyce’s radio broadcasts came from the Nazi station Reichsrundfunk via Radio Luxembourg. Ten years after Haw-Haw, Luxemburg happened to be the station from where young cockney Gus Goodwin, the first English rock ‘n’ roll disc jockey, beamed out his loon-a-tickery to grateful teenagers. Simultaneously, Alan Freed was banging his shoe on the table, also broadcasting on Radio Luxembourg, exhorting his clarion call to “get with it”. Gradually, through a glass darkly, the real and the unreal intertwined. It was a logical if deviant sideways step to have Haw-Haw by way of Horror broadcasting rock ‘n’ roll from Auschwitz into Albion. It doesn’t matter whether they’re from the world of comic, books or music or real life.

The authors co-opted by Savoy — Henry Treece, Heathcote Williams, Harlan Ellison, Ken Reid, David Lindsay, Maurice Richardson — dance to the same magical fugue. As we went along, it became more of a conscious process. We set out to replace what we saw as a bogus mainstream with an alternate reading list. Membership to the Savoy Irregulars was regulated stringently. It was an elite membership, with no room for a “Martin Amis”, a “Bono” or an “Art Spiegelman”. Moorcock probably supplied the blueprint here. Over his career he championed so many eclectic people, joining them together in New Worlds and in his own fiction.

Image from PJ Proby promotional booklet, Savoy 1984.

Iggy’s “The Passenger”, performed by PJ Proby. Courtesy Savoy Records (1995).

SS: What’s remarkable about Proby’s story? What does he signify to you?

DB: Proby’s appearance and general demeanour coincided with the psychology of a particular group of 1950s American actors and singers who appealed to me during my formative years. They conveyed the image of the romantic rebel that belonged to a world so remote from the everyday world of North Manchester. That “Rebel Without a Cause” sneer of Dean, Brando, Dennis Hopper, Rod Lauren and Vic Morrow. The pedigree extends to Lash LaRue, Johnny Weissmuller and Buster Crabbe, and is rockabilly’d up further in pre-army Elvis, Eddie Cochran, Johnny Burnette, Gene Vincent and, the honorary overseas member, Vince Taylor. They had a mean-as-shit hero/hoodlum look, the wild kind of chaps that creep through a David Lynch film. The attitude is no better formed than in PJ Proby. When our paths finally crossed, I had a first-hand chance to experience the most charismatic, angry, anguished and flawed man I’d ever encountered.

“A very good friend of ours”: The Beatles introduce PJ Proby in 1964.

PJ Proby: Three-week Hero. Part 1 of a short film about the man himself. Part 2 is here.

Proby was, still is, a very talented individual, who had the top of the showbiz world dangling just out of reach whilst being psychologically incapable of controlling himself. He was a redneck visionary who ran out of his natural decade into another, even stranger one — the 1960s. Nik Cohn’s take on him in Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, the first serious book on rock ‘n’ roll, is a perfect summation, encapsulating what was so great about him. A magnetic ball of self-destruction, a swaggering egomaniac who could have been the greatest star in the world. He either had it all taken away from him by internal psychosis, or he was a joke that misfired. He could have joined the Beatles or Led Zeppelin, taken the Elvis route or, completely at home, sauntered into William Burroughs’s world. He could have been tattooed with William Blake’s The Red Dragon and given Hannibal Lector a run for the aperitifs. He was Dennis Hopper out of Blue Velvet displaced to Manchester and the Yorkshire Moors.

In 1985 [Proby] was living in the Yorkshire village of Haworth, home of the Brontës, when he was visited by the founders of Manchester-based Savoy Books, Mike Butterworth and his partner David Britton, who has devoted his life to blasphemous sedition. Britton wrote the notorious novel Lord Horror, most copies of which were seized, on publication in 1990, by the Greater Manchester Police

“Jim was lying low, after the affair with Alison,” says Butterworth. “We wanted to relaunch his career.”

PJ Proby’s collaboration with Savoy produced a number of intriguing recordings, including his versions of “Anarchy In The UK” and TS Eliot’s The Wasteland.

“I had no idea who TS Eliot was,” says Proby. “But the more I do The Wasteland, the better I get.”

“One day the world will realise what a genius he is, and by then it will be too late,” Britton said. “Proby is a walking piece of art. His talent needs preserving for future generations.”

After Britton’s mother died, the three gathered at her house at Saddleworth, overlooking the scene of the Moors Murders. There, with Proby larking about on the Zimmer frame that had belonged to the deceased, they worked on his single “Hardcore”, which, unless I’ve missed something, remains the most offensive record ever released. (“Everything y’all think is fun,” Proby once said, “I think is boring.”)

Butterworth says Savoy stopped working with Proby, “because he asked for £2,000 to read one poem. I said: ‘Jim: it’s only nine lines.’ He said, ‘Maybe – but you will have my voice forever.’”

Robert Chalmers, “PJ Proby: Could the now-penniless singer be ready for a comeback?”, The Independent, 30 September, 2007.

SS: Proby lived in Manchester — an intriguing prospect. Tell me about it.

DB: By the 1980s, Proby was moving between bedsits and squats and sleeping on pub floors in the same North Manchester streets I’d been born in. How incredibly coincidental is that? What force of fate had dragged him from Texas to 1950s Hollywood, then over to England in 1964 and dropped him twenty years later in the arsehole of England? Mr Teen Spirit comes to Oldham, marching pie-eyed down Brompton Street, once the home of William Joyce/Lord Haw-Haw. Another coincidence. Joyce wasn’t physically a presence during my youth — he had lived around Shaw, Mumps and Oldham in the early 1920s and was hanged as a traitor after the Second World War –– but he was a local legendary bogeyman. What Proby and these kinds of outsiders signify for me has induced much speculation, but a common factor seems to be the need to transcend the normal in all of its ambivalent complexity. These dark pilgrims must fascinate anyone with a fiery imagination, even if in reality you wouldn’t like your life to go down some of the paths they tread. Above Oldham, for example, on the looming moors, lies the everlasting presence of another disenfranchised North Manchester man, Ian Brady.

RE/Search publisher V. Vale & J.G. Ballard, 1982. Photo courtesy RE/Search Publications.

SS: Is it too farfetched to draw a connection between Brady and the environment he grew up in?

DB: Brady lived alongside me. He, and I — as a very young man growing up in the slums of North Manchester (Harpurhey and adjacent Gorton) — never met, but geographically we were separated by only a couple of miles. His world was my world, annexed between factories, offices and abattoirs. Both of us faced a life of futility with few options and seethed together in our impotency, disenfranchised by inclination from what was on offer around us. I lucked in, escaping into books; Ian lucked out, performing the ultimate act of alienation.

Excerpt from forthcoming release: Fenella Fielding reading from JG Ballard’s Crash. Courtesy Savoy Records (2010).

In the first of the Ballard RE/Search books, Ballard commented that he found Brady’s juxtaposed tape-recording of “The Little Drummer Boy” with the cry of a tortured child significant, something new on the annals of crime, the bringing of electronic technology into the act of murder. He believed Brady had subsided into a deep depression, and was totally institutionalised. But nothing could be further from the reality. Over the years, I’ve struck up a correspondence with Mr Brady, and he remains articulate, well informed. He knows who Mr Ballard and Mr Burroughs are, and has come to some kind of terms with the way his life has played out.

A Texas boy, a Glasgow boy, a local boy: at overlapping times we have inhabited the same two square miles of the city, and have all run foul of authority. Lord Horror was banned in the courts, Proby was banned from stage and television, a complete blackout that ended his career, and Brady is in prison for killing children. And Joyce. That a traitor to England, the writer of Lord Horror, the infamous killer of children and a doomed rock ‘n’ roll showman have voyaged through the same miniscule wasteland is a beguiling fact. There’s something of Iain Sinclair’s psychogeographical potency about it.

SS: Do you have a favourite Proby story? Something that sums up the man’s essence?

DB: Jim Proby came up with the best epitaph in the history of the world. When asked by an Irish reporter what he would like engraved on his headstone, he instantly replied, “Rather be here than with you, cocksucker”.

Excerpt: PJ Proby reading from Lord Horror. Courtesy Savoy Records (1999).

SS: What was the approach with recording the Lord Horror reading? How did Proby feel about such extreme material? When he breaks out laughing, is he in character, or is he amazed at what he was been given to read?

DB: He spoke the words to Lord Horror as easily as pulling on an overcoat. When Michael and I were writing Lord Horror I was in weekly contact with Proby, and his personality was a constant in my mind. I attempted to carry his schizoid menace into the book. When Jim reads the dialogue “Move now, or I’ll release you right here”, that gives life to a whispering, serpentine intonation of his that I’d transferred into the book. I rhymed the words, the inflections suggested in them, to mirror his real-life speech patterns. When Jim came to deliver these lines and others, it was no surprise that they sounded exactly as I imagined they would. Nothing over-the-top disturbs PJ Proby. During the recording, which took two days, for sure he laughed often, and welcomed the excesses of the book. It didn’t strike him as being beyond the pale. God bless the man and his good heart!

Fenella Fielding at Strongroom Studios. Photo courtesy Savoy.

PiL’s “Rise”, performed by Fenella Fielding, from the as-yet-unreleased Fenella Fielding: the Savoy Sessions. Courtesy Savoy Records (2010).

Fenella Fielding IS! A 21st Century Goddess of Audio Art and Noise Illusion!
…
Her Succulent/Velvet-Blue-Saloon vocal tones made me believe I was having Naked Lunch in a Berlin bubble-bath, next to Marlene Dietrich… Somewhere in Berlin, circa 1928-1932.

Hence, we have a message in a bottle, from a 21st Century, Axis Sally/Tokyo Rose: Fenella Fielding.

Bring on the smelling salts! Then give me the Silver-Spoon and Golden Needle, so I can blend into the Wonder-Word Void, where Ms Fielding must surely reside.

Excerpted from Kim Fowley’s liner notes for the as-yet-unreleased CD, Fenella Fielding: the Savoy Sessions. Courtesy Savoy Records (2010).

SS: I think I can guess why you got Kim Fowley in to do the liner notes for the new Fenella Fielding CD… There’s something Probyesque about him, isn’t there?

DB: Kim Fowley is another of rock ’n’ roll’s mavericks, with an appreciation of culture that goes a lot farther than the music scenes to which he’s been attached over several decades. We needed someone who could put Fenella’s Savoy recordings in an imaginative context, and recognise the impulse behind such atypical compositions. There is also a whacky menace to Fowley. You find that in the music which birthed his persona — “Esquirita and the Voola”, “Rockin’ Bones”, “Alligator Wine” — at the head of which is the surreal snake of “Papa Oom Mow Mow”, which he produced. He’s also responsible for the daffyness that is “Alley Oop”.

I’d followed his progress since he came to England with Proby in the mid-60s. Zappa’s first album, Freak Out, used Kim’s spooky vocals. His “Help, I’m A Rock”, was the high point — and the strangest — of a very strange album. A few years ago I downloaded some interviews and part of his self-penned history from Rock’s Backpages. Was there ever a more astute all-seeing chronicler of the rock ‘n’ roll business, I thought? The man could write as insightfully as Nick Tosches and as colourfully as Hunter S Thompson. Kim had another unique quality. He wrote from the inside out, almost without peer, documenting rock history firsthand. In one of the articles he says this: “I’m not a purist.… In other words, I do all this stuff for reasons that nobody else makes records. I think, ‘What would happen if Vera Lynn sang “Louie Louie”?’ Well, I’m the kind of person who’d find Vera Lynn and persuade her to record ‘Louie Louie’ and then I’d make a better record of Vera Lynn doing ‘Louie Louie’ than the Kingsmen would’ve ever done, y’know what I mean?”

We’d approached the Fenella and Proby projects in exactly this manner. When I re-read that quote last year, it was obvious that he was the man for the job.

It’s fairly easy to grasp — if not necessarily empathise with — the inflammatory aims of [Savoy's] most controversial book. Britton was driven, among other things, by a desire to bait his long-standing enemy, the then-chief constable of Manchester, James Anderton. In Lord Horror, one of Anderton’s homophobic outbursts is replicated with the word “homosexuals” replaced by “Jews” throughout. Britton was duly rewarded with a four-month sentence, served in Risley Remand Centre and Stafford Prison. The overall tone of some passages of Lord Horror is such that reproducing quotations in a family newspaper is simply not an option. As I recently explained to Britton, my own preference, if I ever find the copy that is festering somewhere on my shelves, would be to incinerate it rather than sell it for the £300 that the edition now fetches.

Britton says he was interested in the “subtext of menace” in Fielding’s voice. The actress, for her part, says she knows nothing about Lord Horror, but does add, “Historically, I have never thought of the police as great literary critics.”

Robert Chalmers, “The lady vanishes: What ever happened to Fenella Fielding?”, The Independent, Sunday, 24 February 2008.

SS: How did you come to work with Fenella? Obviously, she’s a very charismatic person, but how does she fit into the Savoy story?

DB: It was in the Savoy offices, sometime at the beginning of the new century, a winter fire blazing. “We should do a reading of the ‘Oi Swiney’ chapter from Motherfuckers,” Michael said casually. “And get Fenella Fielding in to do the dirty deed,” I replied. Laughter. Twenty minutes later. “You know, that’s not a bad idea,” Michael eventually says. So that was the start.

I’d heard her on Radio 4 performing Noël Coward, and on BBC 2 providing the narration for a version of Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin. Jonathan Meades had also used her voice for one of his BBC films so we knew she had a formidable character. But it took us two years to bargain with her before she came into the studio. Wisely, we decided that “Oi Swiney” was a non-starter for such a refined lady of the theatre and the BBC. We decided it was more appropriate for her to read the first couple of chapters of La Squab, the new Lord Horror novel, more quirky, not as scatological. She came into the studio professionally prepared and did the most magnificent reading — Art Nouveau by way of Wind in the Willows, with a drip of steel in her voice. Totally spellbinding. It sent a chill up our spines and we fell in love with her. How lucky, so late in the day, we were to come into contact with yet another charismatic performer, this time one with such a deep understanding of culture, opera, theatre and literature. Here was an opportunity to take Savoy in a fresh direction and for us to learn new tricks.

Fenella Fielding on the Morecambe and Wise show, 1969.

Her first reading at the Strongroom, Shoreditch, impressed us so much we doubled her fee and proposed a new commission, Eliot’s Four Quartets, which she subsequently recorded. Over the next couple of years we did extracts from various books. Her reading from Love, Moorcock’s forthcoming memoir of Mervyn Peake, was a high point, as were her takes on “Pale Roses” and extracts from An Alien Heat, which opened out the stories and truly capture the prose. We then moved operations to Lisa Stansfield’s studio in Rochdale, and after a further year spent on and off there the Fenella project came to a sudden end. She decided after all that work that she didn’t want a music album we’d done with her to be released.

Even at this late date I’m still not exactly sure what she objected to, but the door is not completely closed.

Excerpt from forthcoming release: Fenella Fielding reading from JG Ballard’s Crash. Courtesy Savoy Records (2010).

SS: But her reading of Crash will be released?

DB: Yes — it’s just a question of timing.

Fielding has the allure of Hollywood about her, while having an eccentric English demeanor, and has what we think is the perfect voice for reading Crash. It took us a great deal of effort to get her to do it. At first, she was cautious, because she didn’t want to do anything that she thought might demean women. After protracted discussion, which went on for about a year, she finally took the advice of an ex-BBC director friend, who assured her that it would be OK. She did the reading, but would not read some of the more violent heterosexual sex scenes involving women.

Michael Butterworth.

SS: Michael explained in his interview a little of the circumstances behind the Crash reading. It’s a strange mix, but she pulls it off really well. That steely ambivalence in her voice, especially describing some of Ballard’s more outre passages, seems made for the job. Could you tell us whether you instructed or directed Fenella in any way, or was it just a matter of her voice being suitable for the project as is?

DB: Right from the start, she was on top of the material. We respected her, and encouraged her to go as far as she could. In the end, she went farther than she, or us, thought. Her Crash reading had the same quality as her Four Quartets — it was perfect naked. To put on a musical backing would dilute the words and lessen the power of her reading.

SS: As the author of Lord Horror, do you see any affinity between that work and what Ballard was trying to do with Crash — in the sense of offering a provocation so shocking and alienating, yet one shot through with an undeniable, if undoubtedly perverse, logic?

DB: Shortly after first reading Crash in the early 1970s, I’d seen Dr Chris Evans [Ballard's long-time friend; SS] give a talk at an SF convention. It was quite a revelation: here in the flesh was Vaughan in all his feral erotic intensity. Evans prowled the stage just oozing sexuality. He wore a black biker’s jacket and a blue denim shirt open to the midriff. You might have got into a car with the Doctor, but you wouldn’t have accompanied him up a dark alley. Of his talk, I can’t remember anything, just his physicality remains in my mind. No doubt this subjective observation made by a stranger isn’t a full picture of Evans’s personality, but I’m sure it was this aspect of his friend that Ballard homed in on. Evans had been one of the catalysts for the book, lifted from life and conjured into a deviant Minotaur by Ballard’s imagination. A sweet image to me: Evans and Ballard haunting the motorways of England for auto-sensation.

Crash and Empire of the Sun are probably Ballard’s best books because both are based to a greater or lesser degree on real people: Evans and Ballard himself. In Ballard’s other books, the central characters tend to be ciphers rather than real individuals. They’re still great works but don’t possess that extra quality that gives authority to Crash and Empire of the Sun. Using real people and recreating them as fiction is, of course, not original, but Ballard’s use of Evans stayed a potent one with me. Perhaps it was at the back of my mind when William Joyce — as Lord Haw-Haw — came into focus. Certainly, Crash was the yardstick book for Lord Horror. Ballard showed great courage in following through with a book that has transcended every other English work of groundbreaking fiction. It’s the rock upon which every “dangerous” book published since has foundered. How inauthentic American Psycho and its ilk look next to Crash!

SS: Could you offer any other thoughts on Ballard’s legacy?

DB: His legacy? Perhaps trying to encourage Will Self that he is capable of writing a convincing novel.

Excerpt from forthcoming release: Fenella Fielding reading from JG Ballard’s Crash. Courtesy Savoy Records (2010).

..:: Now move on to part 2 of the interview, in which David discusses New Order, Joy Division, punk, the Manchester music ‘scene’ in general, more Proby, Kingsize Taylor, The Cramps, Zappa, Beefheart and Springsteen. Interspersed throughout are more sound clips from Savoy Records releases.

Back-cover sleeve for “Blue Monday”, by Lord Horror with the Savoy Hitler Youth Band.

Interview by Simon Sellars.

This is the second of a three-interview series about Savoy Books. It discusses Savoy’s musical and spoken-word output, and the interview is in two parts. In the first, David talked about PJ Proby, Ballard, Fenella Fielding, Ian Brady, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds magazine, Heathcote Williams and his own upbringing. Here, he discusses New Order, Joy Division, punk, Manchester music, Kingsize Taylor, The Cramps, Zappa, Beefheart and Springsteen. Interspersed throughout both parts are sound clips from Savoy releases [NOTE: sound clips don't work in Google Reader].

New Order’s “Blue Monday”/Springsteen’s “Cadillac Ranch”, performed by Lord Horror with the Savoy-Hitler Youth Band. Courtesy Savoy Records (1986).

SS: Why is “Blue Monday” such a touchstone for Savoy? You first recorded it as “Lord Horror with the Savoy Hitler Youth Band”, and now Fenella has sung it for you — twice.

DB: When we first recorded it, just a couple of years after the original, the song was very much a touchstone for a generation, an anthem. We tended to choose anthemic songs, and most of the covers we did signified something special to different types of contemporary music fans: “Sign O’ The Times”, “Anarchy in the UK”, “Heroes”. We became quite accomplished at putting the clog in. Our version of “Blue Monday” is a tongue-in-cheek piss-take, with a dash of venom on the blade. With “Blue Monday”, quite intentionally, we had connected into the zeitgeist of the 80s. Over the years, the song’s reputation has grown into something rather extraordinary. Twenty years after the first recording we went back into the studio with Fenella, and this time adhered to the original “Blue Monday” lyrics. Fenella delivered these in a sort of mock serious way that had been denied to us using a male vocalist. The song happens to work better with a female. And no woman could do it better than Fenella. She first sang “Blue Monday” knowing nothing about its meaning. After Michael gave her more details about the band and explained the significance of the song, she insisted on doing it again. We led off Fenella Fielding: The Savoy Sessions with this second version of “Blue Monday”, with its controlled feeling, and closed with the first version, which I meshed with Cochran’s “What’d I say”. Those are probably our final takes on the song!

New Order’s “Blue Monday”, performed by Fenella Fielding, from the as-yet-unreleased Fenella Fielding: the Savoy Sessions. Courtesy Savoy Records (2010).

SS: With the original “Blue Monday” single, how on Earth did you come up with the idea of splicing Springsteen with New Order?

DB: There was a touch of the Don Quixote about the venture, wasn’t there? I didn’t think “Blue Monday” merited the reputation it received in the press — or that New Order deserved the weight placed on them by music critics. The percussive throb of the record, and Hooky’s bassline, was good, I thought, while the lyrics seemed fifth form, weak and ineffectual, like the group’s other lyrics. But Michael had been present at New Order’s original Power, Corruption And Lies session at Britannia Row Studios, and had come away with the suspicion that something quite unique had occurred. Despite my misgivings, this was something I took on board. I was attacking something — “Blue Monday”/New Order — with a reputation that has increased year by year.

But the idea behind mashing it with Springsteen’s “Cadillac Ranch” is actually more complex. I wanted to see what would happen blending together the 50s with the 80s like that, fusing the chain of rock’s history. And choosing Springsteen was a gambit, to lure Kingsize Taylor out of retirement. At that time, Springsteen was writing credible pastiches of 50s-type rock ‘n’ roll songs, and we thought they would act as bait for Kingsize, who had retired from the music business in 1966 and was refusing all attempts to get him to return. We knew he wouldn’t be able to relate to Bernard’s original “Blue Monday” lyrics, but he might be receptive to “Cadillac Ranch”. We made demos of “Blue Monday”/”Cadillac Ranch” and “Born in the USA”. Unfortunately, when we sent him the tapes, it came back that he wasn’t interested at all. So eventually, Bobby Thompson, second lead singer in The Dominos, Kingsize’s original band, laid down the “Cadillac Ranch” vocal for us. We had to forget “Born in the USA”, which remains unreleased, because Bobby couldn’t hope to get his larynx around such a big song. On the other hand he could — and did — do a great job on “Cadillac Ranch”, despite having a cold on the day.

The vocals were recorded in Peter Hook’s Rochdale studio, from where we nicked a couple of “Blue Monday” samples. A couple of years later, Michael Butterworth nearly managed to get New Order to record with Michael Moorcock. We had in mind Moorcock doing “Blue Monday”, singing the original New Order lyrics.

SS: There is some irony in Savoy’s “Blue Monday” being banned for its “Nazi” sleeve, while New Order, and indeed, Joy Division, gained mass acceptance by using Nazi imagery.

DB: They only whispered it. We shouted it.

SS: On the other hand, can you really be surprised about the single being banned, given the sleeve and the temper of the times? Could you really expect a different result? If you had that time again, would you handle Savoy Records differently? It seems a shame that these great songs and arrangements have rarely been heard.

DB: We wouldn’t do anything differently, and cheerfully didn’t give a fuck about the times or what people thought. The packaging of the records had to stand out, be visually arresting, and remain true to our ethos. We weren’t a band, and couldn’t promote the records in the usual way, so the cover artworks had to pique people’s curiosity, which to an extent they did. Unfortunately, although we were very happy with the choice of graphics, the sleeves could have been better designed. Neither of us knew John Coulthart then, and we couldn’t find a designer who would touch them — too offensive.

No matter how outrageous the sleeves were, it was important that the music stood outside of the packaging, and had an independent validity of its own. You can’t wave an iconoclast’s flag and, beneath its twirl, not deliver a sound musical recording. Encouragingly, we got quite respectable reviews in the music press.

Sleeve for “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, by PJ Proby.

Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, performed by PJ Proby. Courtesy Savoy Records (1985).

SS: Savoy’s take on “Love Will Tear Us Apart” was hardly reverential.

DB: I didn’t have any reverence. I couldn’t see virtue in it. In making our version I was just marshalling another kind of Manchester attitude — get in there and give it some turmoil, and see what would come out of that.

Manchester, since the 50s, has been a rock ‘n’ roll city. By 1964 I’d seen all the original American rockers passing through — Cochran, Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard. The blues guys had been here — John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, and so on. The Beatles, before they were nationally famous, made their television debut in Manchester’s Granada Studios. I remember watching their regular television appearances on Scene at 6.30pm, presented by Michael Parkinson and Bill Grundy. They played live in Manchester, but I never saw them live. All through this period there were dozens of local bands, interspersed with Liverpool bands, playing clubs like The Oasis, the Twisted Wheel and the Manchester Cavern, minor forerunners of the Hacienda.

So as the 60s progressed, I’d seen most of the bands that appealed to me — Stones, Who, Hendrix, Floyd, Zappa and Beefheart. By the time we’d reached the mid-70s and the punk era, I was pretty jaded musically. The seminal wonders of the rock ‘n’ roll world had passed before me. With the exception of the Pistols, who had genuine attitude, and Ian Dury and the Blockheads, there was little in punk to impress. The Clash were an imitation, created by sweat, the Damned an Alhambra pantomime. But I have to admit that even the worst proponents of punk were better than prog rock! They satisfactorily swept that away, at least. Punk’s fuck-off quality was a native characteristic of my own city, and was familiar to anyone sentenced to spending time in North Manchester.

SS: Do you like any of the post-punk Manchester bands?

DB: The advent of Joy Division, The Fall and the others didn’t really touch me. Besides, there wasn’t a decent singer amongst any of the Manc groups. I’d had a lifetime of hearing flat Mancunian vowels and consonants, and didn’t want to listen to more of such shenanigans on record. I had to cross my legs when Morrissey started bleating, and chuckle at that Cheeta-impersonating chappie from the Stone Roses attempting to wrestle a decent noise from a stillborn larynx. Then Oasis showed up, demonstrating how to do poor karaoke Beatles. Singing ability wasn’t the point, any more than knowing how to play a guitar, or knowing how to draw properly if you were a cartoonist. These Manchester bands were promoted in the NME, written up by a posse of Manchester-based journalists, including Paul Morley and Jon Savage, who I often saw in the Savoy shops. Before the late mid-70s the music papers were dominated by old-guard journos, and these new writers were able to push Manchester groups in a way that was not possible until then. Writing about The Smiths, Joy Division, The Buzzcocks, they cemented Manchester’s musical reputation.

Ironically for me, the Savoy shops were a mecca for this generation, and we sold everything to attract them. Our main source of musical attraction were bootlegs. Consequently, most of the local groups would come in individually. I related better on a personal level than I did admiring their music, and it was most interesting talking with them. Mark E Smith spoke about Bo Diddley and Arthur Machen in the same breath. Ian Curtis and Stephen Morris enthused about Moorcock, Ballard and Beefheart. When the young managers of our shops took over the music play list, they hammered-out “Totally Wired” or “She’s Lost Control” fifty times a day, so this stuff was a daily background I was conscious of. It was when I was listening to it that I started thinking about Kingsize Taylor, a man with a voice that could ignite solvents.

The more I heard of the local bands and the kind of music they were playing, the more I thought how interesting it would be to get Kingsize over from Liverpool to put that hard, scalding voice on something contemporary. Since buying his album, The Shakers, in 1964, I saw him as being the most authentic of English rock ‘n’ roll singers, and his band The Dominos the best English instrumental rock ‘n’ roll outfit.

SS: What’s your opinion on the Curtis and Joy Division reputations today? Are they a a fair musical legacy for the city to carry?

DB: Joy Division and the Hacienda are to Manchester now what the Beatles and the Cavern have been to Liverpool for years: marketing tools for the council and property developers.

Front-cover sleeve detail for “Raw Power”, by Lord Horror and the Savoy King Cocaine Band.

Iggy & the Stooges’ “Raw Power”, performed by Lord Horror with the Savoy King Cocaine Band. Courtesy Savoy Records (1987).

SS: Do you think classic Savoy tactics — fake Prince Charles quotes, recording redneck homophobic stars, plastering sleeves with satirical anti-Jew statements — could cause such outrage today in the 21st century?

DB: Political correctness runs rife through the mainstream media. Even given the Internet, sensitivities seem almost to be of a lower tolerance than at any time in the past. The media is hypocritically full of “outrages”. On certain subjects there is less freedom now than there has ever been. I mean that most sincerely. These days you cannot part your hair to the right without some crossbred cunt being “outraged”, creating headlines in the papers. I don’t think we could even get those particular record sleeves printed today. Then again, I’ve not seen art as satirically offensive as it is on our record sleeves. Racism, cold and hard, is the new rock ‘n’ roll.

SS: What part did you and Michael play in the actual recordings: as producers or musical directors? What was your approach to production?

DB: Leiber & Stoller at one end, and Rick Rubin at the other. It’s a general rule that usually it’s the producers who make successful records, not the artists. The 50s were full of one-hit producers who made great records but were a backroom force. I’ve diligently read the history books of rock ‘n’ roll, particularly in the byways of rythm’n’blues and rockabilly. Take Art Rube, the man responsible for the 18-month run of Little Richard hits on Speciality Records. Without his input, the records wouldn’t have sounded anything like as thrilling, something not lost on me when we set to do our own recording.

Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight”, performed by PJ Proby with the Savoy Holman Hunt African Orchestra. Courtesy Savoy Records (1990).

We work obsessively at the tracks, coming back time and time again until we have an optimum mix that we have taken as far as we can. By careful editing and re-recording, we were able to keep control, eventually ending up with the all-round performance we had planned. That Flaubert saying, “Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work”, is true with records. You have to drop on the chance as it occurs. That’s a sweet guitar. That’s a good rimshot. Did the singer just belch, there? Keep the melody, but don’t let it get smooth. Do the unexpected. Come away from the studio with a record that contains elements of our personalities. So when Michael and I mesh together, at its best the result is “Hardcore” and “In The Air Tonight”, and at less than best, “The Mugwump Dance”. We won’t mention “Tainted Love”.

Nothing is slapdash, even though it may superficially appear to be. Essential to avoid is the Jools Holland effect, producing a poor phantom of the original. Our records have to power, squeak and thunder, have an independent life, and if they fall out of time and over the edge, so what?

“Hardcore: M97002″, performed by PJ Proby. Courtesy Savoy Records.

SS: Why was the house style of the early Savoy records hi-NRG electro-type stuff?

DB: When we first started recording, there were no decent local musicians capable of playing the kind of antediluvian rock ‘n’ roll we wanted. Having to rely on technology was no bad thing. It gave us control over the way the records sounded. You couldn’t tell a drummer that he was drumming like a muppet and lacked timing, however you could adjust a knob on the desk to produce the most wonderful motherfucking drum Ragnarök. With a studio full of techno tricks, it was the ideal time to be making records. Rick Rubin’s work with the Beastie Boys — tracks like “Brass Monkey” — was an inspiration.

We gradually gathered about us a group of really good people who could come at the technology from both ends — Peter Saynor, a local musician-producer is tippety-top notch and has a rough edge, ideal for us on early stuff like “Heroes” and “Blue Monday”, cut in the 80s. With our covers Peter can interpret what we want, and help us to achieve something that adds to the original. He returned to help us with tracks on the Fenella album. Stephen Boyce-Buckley, our right-hand in the studio for the last twenty years, is one of the best engineers/arrangers in Manchester. He is classically accomplished. We used him like a ratting-dog for all the Fenella tracks. At the Strongroom, for the talking-book tracks, it was his ear we relied on for nuance, for the “space in between”, that helped Fenella get a grip on material that she wouldn’t normally have done. He has good people skills, great personal empathy and can get the best out of the most unlikely people and situations.

Back cover sleeve of “Jessie Matthews” for the Reverbstorm comic, vol. 1 no. 8. Design by John Coulthart.

“Reverbstorm”, performed by “Jessie Matthews”. Courtesy Savoy Records (1994).

SS: “Reverbstorm” is probably my favourite Savoy release, a track that seems to reconcile the energy of Britain’s dancehall culture of the 60s and 70s with the momentum of the electronic scene of later years. Can you reveal the story behind it?

DB: That’s our take on it, too. But to me personally the marvel of “Reverbstorm” is Paul Temple’s lyrics. “Literate” and “exciting” are hard things to mesh. He did it with such unlaboured panache. Northern Soul was his drug of choice, of course. He’d absorbed it in a way that only a true enthusiast could. It was a spectacular sight to watch Temple’s Wagnerian Soul Fraternity (WSF) at a soul night at Wigan Casino. When Paul sallied out on the dance floor, ahead of his group, he proceeded to whirl like a cool dervish.

Classic Northern Soul dancing.

He came to us as a journalist from the Melody Maker, because he admired the records we did with Proby and wanted to offer us something as intense. He had the whole of “Reverbstorm” worked out on a marvellous little demo. We translated that, kicked up the high energy a bit by adding saxes and Jessie Matthews on vocals — after thirteen years staying cold, Jesse very kindly jumped out of her grave to sing for us. The record came easier than almost anything else we did. The song lit the fuel — the WSF ethos of “jumping the ether” — that drives the Reverbstorm comics, and gave them their name.

SS: I was most surprised to learn that Savoy published fan books on bands like Led Zeppelin and AC/DC. I find it bizarre that you were addressing these rock behemoths in what seems a relatively straight and reverent fashion! How did these publications come about?

DB: We didn’t take them seriously. They occurred during a transient period between the first Savoy phase (Savoy Books Ltd) and the new Savoy post-1984, between bankruptcy and renaissance. We did the books to keep our hand in, slyly using them to push our own agenda. In David Bowie: Profile, we ran a photo of Harlan Ellison, suggesting in the caption that his short story “A Boy And His Dog” had been an influence on Diamond Dogs. In The Legendary Ted Nugent we ran a picture of Harlan, a Burne Hogarth Tarzan illustration, a photo of Hunter S Thompson and a set of Jim Cawthorn’s illustrations eulogising Nugent. Heathcote Williams and William Burroughs went into the AC/DC book. It was a way of retaining a slight balance on the bollocks we were producing. Omnibus Press, where Miles worked as an editor, and Proteus Books were the two publishers we worked most with. Bob Wise, the MD at Omnibus, looked over Miles’ shoulders the whole time, interfering and applying censorship. We had to leave out the more interesting pictures of Ted and AC/DC!

Right at the start of Savoy, I edited a cut-and-paste booklet called The Lives and Times of Captain Beefheart, with Jim Cawthorn’s lettering on the cover, for another publisher. Also a Frank Zappa booklet. These were closer to my and Michael’s tastes, and when packaging the later music books we tried to interest the publishing houses in Beefheart, always our main man — the only legitimate genius in rock — but no editor would commit. When we tried to get a deal for a PJ Proby biography, we were laughed out of every publishing house in London. Packaging books was never going to be our metier. It’s a shite-pit out there, and basically we ended up just adding to the crap. The heading on our Kiss book says it all — “The Savoy Kiss of Death” — absolute rubbish! We feel guilty that we were unable sell a good book on The Cramps, but it wasn’t for not trying. Although there are Cramps books now, at the time there wasn’t the remotest interest. We left the field with no regrets, and moved into actually doing the music.

SS: The Cramps are another of your rock ‘n’ roll touchstones. Why?

DB: They represented, as far as possible, the nearest thing that a modern band can come to the ultra-primitive genuine 50s rock ‘n’ roll music.

SS: I love The Cramps — first three albums only. I’m far less keen on their later career, when they traded on their horror-rock legacy and steadily diluted that primal appeal. I imagine you feel the same way!

DB: They never lost it as a live act, but as you point out, on record they ended up in a blind alley. As a band, they were never as convincing after allowing Nick Knox to exit. Bad judgement. Their later albums were rather embarrassing. They’d lost that sense of the real thing, and Lux’s lyrics were contrived and asinine, lacking his previous wonderful poetic gift for words. It’s probably unrealistic to expect any band to be creatively valid after their first couple of years. I’ve never managed to quite come up with a satisfactory explanation as to why this should be. Youth, testosterone perhaps, is the cause. Little Richard (a demon broken out of Hell) cut his major records in eighteen months. The next forty years were a creative dead end; nothing worked for him. That “magic” in his voice had fled. The Cramps lost it, but throughout their career, however unconvincing they became, they championed the Right Stuff. Lux’s and Ivy’s enthusiasm, and the legacy their musical knowledge have left us, remain a beautiful bounty. Can you imagine the Ramones being as articulate and knowing as the Cramps were?

Front-cover detail for “Garbageman” (Cramps cover), by Lord Horror with the Savoy Gustave Flaubert Salammbo Orchestra. Art by Kris Guidio.

The Cramps’ “Garbageman”, performed by Lord Horror with the Savoy Gustave Flaubert Salammbo Orchetsra. Courtesy Savoy Records (1990).

The Cramps retained mystery. A move to Europe where they’ve always had a big following would have made financial sense, but Ivy cannily understood that half the nature of their appeal was their absence from the everyday. Their decision to stay in downtown LA, forging an intriguing rock ‘n’ roll myth about themselves amongst legends of the starlost — the Three Stooges, Republic serials and The Little Rascals — was the right one. On his trip to Los Angeles, Ballard commented that he found LA a “scary place”. Ideal for the Cramps, then. What would Ballard have made of the Cramps, if his allegedly tin ear hadn’t got in the way of accessing them? And the reverse — what would the Cramps have made of Crash? Being film buffs, they very likely caught Cronenberg’s film of Crash. I can’t believe they wouldn’t have loved it. They knew what they were doing and why they were doing it, what to touch and what not to touch, and to home in on the essence. In their heyday they were a key to unlocking my imagination. “The Human Fly” and “New Kind of Kick” would be the background accompaniment to Lord Horror as he made his septic way through the teeming Judenhäuser.

SS: Do you agree with Dave Mitchell, who wrote in A Serious Life that “the musical equivalent of Savoy’s programme is the early Mothers of invention”? If not, what is?

DB: Well, certainly the Mothers are an influence. They mixed-and-matched in a unique manner and had a sardonic edge that was most refreshing. Zappa took Varèse, Stravinsky, Don & Dewey, The Penguins, and conjured an original hybrid. It is a brew to intoxicate the most questing. I preferred the early Mothers to say, Hendrix, or The Who. Hendrix was a showman and a great musician (impressive, cultivating ‘Purple Haze’ from Philip José Farmer’s Night of Light), but those Mothers’ albums had more meat on their bone. They had an other-world quality to them; a nice line in cod operatics that punched the point home, too: “A world of secrets on the earth”, delivered in high-pitched pachuko weasellings. The first tour of the original Mothers was a revelation, as impressive as fuck. They stretched what you knew. So theatrically avant-garde and freaky and quite New Worlds. As a group they mirrored, in their oddity, speculative fiction writers like Spinrad, Farmer, Sladek and Disch. A Dada/Surrealism. “The Heat Death of the Universe” and “The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod” are New Worlds titles that could have come off any Mothers album. Zappa’s outfit was musically sophisticated and complex, yet down and earthy, and nodded to the future while being conscious of the past. Zappa name-checked Kafka’s “In The Penal Colony” the way Moorcock would George Meredith’s The Amazing Marriage. Dave Mitchell got it right, but underneath the 60s freakery was, you know, 50s rock ‘n’ roll, and my lifetime’s obsession with Larry Williams’ Speciality Records.

Interior artwork by David Britton from the Captain Beefheart booklet, circa 1972.

SS: You’ve said that the dictate of Savoy Records is “deconstruction, angst and the Spirit of the furies”. Can you elaborate?

DB: Just a fanciful way of saying that good records can often come out of conflict. Decades, styles-in-flux, misfits, jammed together, upsetting the unwritten tenets of musical genres, marrying the old and the new. The true spirit of the furies was P J Proby. Add to that the crossover between maverick literature and maverick music. I’m sick to death of music hacks referencing Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners, or wretched Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity being toted as some kind of valid rock ‘n’ roll literature. The cross between pulp and rock and maverick literature is seldom touched on in a way that is illuminating, yet there’s a whole deeper world here. It’s always surprised me the worlds of pulp and music don’t interact more than they do.

In our records we try to carry an enthusiasm for the mysterious emissaries from the world of pulp — Cornell Woolrich, Clark Ashton Smith, Boris Vian, Hope Hodgson, Alfred Jarry as well as Planet Stories, the Olympia Press, Black Mask, B-movie westerns and the Saturday morning serials. In all this subterranean material, there’s a correlation with the underbelly of rock ‘n’ roll, particularly classic rock ‘n’ roll. One of my ideas was to make this apparent, to charge it into the fabric of our records. In our version of “Anarchy in the UK”, Harlan Ellison jostles with TS Eliot. We have PJ Proby saying, on the lead-in to “Jim Dandy”: “My name is Jimmy, I’ve been around a long, long time”. Proby comes on as Walter Cronkite on the Lord Horror recording. “Bumble Bee” by Laverne Baker rears up in “Shoot Yer Load”. Tiger Tim is sampled snuffling in the background thunder. Aubrey Beardsley is pictured on the centre label of the “I’m On Fire” 12″. A Frank Frazetta’s illustration of Buster Crabbe is on “Hardcore”, a photograph of C L Moore on “Raw Power”. On the sleeves there are quotes from the likes of Kierkegaard, Spinoza and Shelley. A bit of the literary underworld and a bit of the overworld carried into our records in the way they look and sound.

This history of yesterday is important to us, but we don’t altogether “live in the past”. We’re not blind to the enjoyables of now. Iggy and Lydon remain as great on stage as they ever were. The White Stripes, Imelda May and young Amy Winehouse, not sounding an echo of someone else’s hard won individuality, are brilliant. I’ve never read better books than Blood Meridian and The Kindly Ones. Jimmy Ballard and Lux Interior might have left us, but Mike Harrison and Mike Moorcock are still producing. So right there is the best reason to carry on living and working.

SS: Looking back at the history of Savoy Records, what stands out in your mind? What are you most proud of?

DB: The answer is: I’m proud that we accomplished such successful records as a by-product of our main aim. We followed on from Moorcock’s idea, in The Condition of Muzak, of Jerry Cornelius fictionally making records… To have Lord Horror making records in real-time was an amusing notion — and didn’t he do it with some panache?

David Bowie’s “Heroes”, performed by PJ Proby. Courtesy Savoy Records (1986).

+ Savoy Books.
+ Savoy Records.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ “Driven by Anger”: An Interview with Michael Butterworth (the Savoy interviews, part 1)
+ Ballardian/Savoy Microfiction competition winners
+ James Cawthorn, RIP: 1929-2008
+ Ballardcraft: Ballard/Lovecraft
+ ‘Get Lost’: Burroughs on Curtis
+ Bunker Tales
+ Horror Panegyric
+ A Home and a Grave: Mike Holliday on The Unlimited Dream Company
+ Angry Old Men: Michael Moorcock on J.G. Ballard

JG BALLARD, 1930–2009

Originally published in Architectures of the Near Future: Architectural Design (ed. Nic Clear), September-October 2009. pp. 5, 6-11. Reproduced with permission.

James Graham Ballard was one of the most original and distinctive authors of the last part of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. His writing encompassed topics as diverse as ecological crisis, technological fetishism, urban ruination and suburban mob culture, and he pursued these topics with a wit and inventiveness that is without equal.

Ballard’s understanding of architecture and architects, and his prophetic visions, made him one of the most important figures in the literary articulation of architectural issues and concerns.

From the description of futuristic houses that empathise with their inhabitants, to the bleak characterisation of gated communities consumed by sex, drugs and violence, Ballard’s world is highly prescient and ruthlessly unsentimental. At a time when architectural discourse has become wholly subsumed by the moneymaking pre-occupations of the architectural profession, the writings of JG Ballard serve as reminder that architecture is about people, the things that they do and the places where they do them. Sometimes architecture will involve terrible people doing terrible things in terrible places, but the enduring nature of the human species is that we will always carry on; there is, after all, always the future.

Nic Clear, 2009.

Introduction: ‘A NEAR FUTURE’, by Nic Clear.

Of all the arts, architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic, with which, in the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated relationship.

Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991, p 5.[1]

Later, as he sat on the balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.

JG Ballard, High-Rise, 1975, p 7.[2]

Architectural design is always about the future; when architects make a proposition they always assume that it takes place in some imagined future. Architects nearly always assume that this future will be ‘better’ than the present, often as a consequence of what is being proposed. Architecture is, by its very nature, utopian.

Contemporary architecture, unlike earlier models of ‘utopian’ architecture, or perhaps because of the stigma attached to those models, has resisted an explicitly social and political agenda. Instead it has become driven by ‘ideal’ formalist agendas facilitated by the ‘shape-making’ potential of new computer-based design tools and funded by speculative finance.

Indeed, the most important transformations that have occurred in architecture over the last 30 years have not been in the shifts in fashion marking out new typologies, new forms of representation, new materials or new forms of manufacture; the biggest single shift has been in the new economic relations within the building industry and the new forms of contractual relationships that this has brought about. The rise of fast-track construction in the 1980s heralded a major change in the motivations for construction and brought about a homogenisation of building output largely predicated on maximising the economic value of the project, often with little regard for its social value.

And with the introduction of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) the current UK government has turned even health-care and educational building programmes into a speculative enterprise. PFI has always been presented as a cost-effective way of financing large infrastructural projects; however, like the government’s recent bail out of the banks, it works on the principle of the public financing the risk while the private sector skims off the profit.[3]

For a number of years the single model that has shaped the type of future that the architectural profession has based its assumptions on is one of unfettered consumer expansion. The majority of recent architectural debates have not tried to call into question the economic imperatives of late capitalism that drive financial speculation and generate the context within which private development is presented as the only option. Even the avant-garde architectural firms of the 1980s are now operating as large international commercial practices, and the Deconstructivists have proved to be more than enthusiastic capitalists. The critical and intellectual ambitions inspired by Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Guy Debord have been replaced with the monetarist ideologies of Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan.

The architectural profession has embraced the late capitalist model enthusiastically and uncritically, while all the time pandering to the concepts of social and environmental responsibility. The fact is that this model has been funded through speculative investment, and now that the money has run out the profession is bereft of alternatives.

The promise of an ‘urban renaissance’ has left buildings empty and negative equity is becoming once again the dominant economic value across the property world.

The architectural world has proved completely incapable of suggesting what the future may hold; can one still believe in the shiny renders of the corporate architectural complex when this world has replaced a vision of the future with an image of the future?

But the profession is resourceful and in the same way that all contemporary architects play the ‘sustainability’ game, whether they are designing sustainable airports, sustainable shopping centres, sustainable luxury hotels, sustainable office blocks, sustainable cities in the middle of deserts or sustainable single private dwellings for the ultrarich, we will, no doubt, see a gritty ‘new realism’ starting to appear in architectural discourse that responds to the new economic conditions.[4]

Exactly how these new imperatives will drive the formal shape- making methodologies that have filled so many glossy pages for so long we shall see; and how will the interactive and responsive landscapes interact with, and respond to, bankruptcy, increasing unemployment and a general sense of despair?

Nic Clear, ‘Game with Vestiges: After Ballard Triptych, 2009′. The series of drawings here was set up in the same way as any standard CAD drawing in VectorWorks using layers, classes and libraries of objects. The drawings work as a narrative triptych, bringing together a number of elements — cityscapes, high-rise buildings, surrealist curios, fetish and banal objects — all in keeping with the memory of ‘Jim’, to whom the drawings are dedicated.

Progress
Contemporary culture has put its faith in the ideology of progress; progress will make things better, as well as making things faster and smaller (or bigger depending on the value system). This faith in progress and betterment fails to ring true in the light of economic downturn, environmental catastrophe, increased levels of crime, the threats of terrorism and global pandemics.[5] If the future cannot be guaranteed, where does that leave architecture?

However, a loss of faith is only a problem if that faith exists in the first place.

Within literature there is a major strand that looks at the future in a completely different way; science fiction can also be seen as a ‘utopian’ genre,[6] and in works by writers ranging from Jules Verne and HG Wells, through to Aldous Huxley and George Orwell and more latterly Philip K Dick, JG Ballard, Neal Stephenson and William Gibson, the future is depicted in a variety of different hues, not all of them as rosy as the futures promised by the architectural profession. As a result such speculations are often more believable.

While these writings appear to reflect on the future, more often than not they are actually concerned with issues contemporaneous to their production. To cite two obvious examples, Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Orwell’s 1984 (1949) are political reflections on the societies around them, and in Huxley’s case it is not altogether clear whether he is entirely critical of the world that he describes.

However, the writings of JG Ballard are of particular interest here as they filter through a number of the texts contained in this issue, either directly or lingering in the background.[7] Ballard is of special significance largely due to the fact that in so much of his writing architecture and architects play such a pivotal role.

The prescience of Ballard’s writing is obvious; his early works encompass environmental disaster, both drought and flooding; in the 1970s, novels such as Crash[8] and High-Rise[9] dealt with technological fetishisation, urban anomie and alienation, and, long before such issues hit the mainstream, he looked at the links between consumerism and social collapse. In his recent writings, Millennium People[10] and Kingdom Come,[11] Ballard depicts a Britain bereft of social values other than those of daytime TV and the shopping centre, and while his central characters can lack credibility his general description of the cultural landscape is far more accurate than almost anything that has been published in the pages of any recent architectural publication.

The future as presented by Ballard is often stark, bleak and uncompromising. There are few happy endings in his future. However, his faith in our collective ability to endure almost any hardship, drawn almost certainly from his experiences in Shanghai during the Second World War, leads us to believe that despite whatever is thrown at us we will adapt and we will survive.[12]

Like Ballard, let us not despair; though the future may be uncertain, uncertainty is not without its attractions.

The current economic situation offers great potential for developing a new agenda in architecture. The fact that the discipline of architecture has become synonymous with the architectural profession is something that will no doubt become contested as unemployment rises throughout the building industry[13] — those of us who can remember previous recessions can also remember them as highly creative periods. The fact that architects may have to redefine their operations is potentially a wonderful opportunity to recalibrate and reconsider who and what architecture is actually for.

This will bring to life the obvious gulf between expectation and reality that permeates architectural practice. Architecture is a wonderful discourse and training; however, it can be a very tedious job. Of course it does not have to be like this. Freed from the limitations of the profession, architectural projects can offer fantastic opportunities to develop narratives that can help us understand why we are doing the things we do.[14]

The fact that architects may have to redefine their operations is potentially a wonderful opportunity to recalibrate and reconsider who and what architecture is actually for.

In particular these uncertain times may be a blessing for a younger generation of designers; equipped with a vast array of technical skills and understanding they are almost certain to cope with the vagaries of future practice. As the skills demonstrated in many of the projects collected in this issue suggest, future architects may be just as adept at web design, graphics and film-making as they are at producing information for buildings.

The last few years have witnessed a gradual disenchantment within architectural education with the goals espoused by the architectural profession. Increased levels of student debt coupled with a creeping homogenisation of architectural practice have resulted in there being a darker aspect to student projects. Rather than shrinking away from the potential difficulties, the younger generation of architects may use information technologies to create new sites of architectural endeavour and give a whole new meaning to the term ‘architectural design’.

The essays and projects gathered together here cover a wide variety of positions. Many develop the themes suggested by Ballard and others, while some give the current situation a broader historical perspective, suggesting that certain of the scenarios that we face are not without precedent.

Nic Clear, ‘Game with Vestiges: After Ballard Triptych, 2009′. The series of drawings here was set up in the same way as any standard CAD drawing in VectorWorks using layers, classes and libraries of objects. The drawings work as a narrative triptych, bringing together a number of elements — cityscapes, high-rise buildings, surrealist curios, fetish and banal objects — all in keeping with the memory of ‘Jim’, to whom the drawings are dedicated.

Matthew Gandy’s ‘Urban Flux’ gives a historical perspective to our current situation and argues that we need to recover the urban imagination in order to enrich 21st-century public culture. Michael Aling returns to his home town of Swindon, statistically the most average town in Britain, to find people sharing identities, stricken with gout and going to a deserted shopping centre for no real reason other than to fulfil a forgotten collective desire. And John Culmer Bell looks at the nature of electromagnetic radiation as a shaper of 19th- and 20th- century urban form, provocatively questioning whether sacrificing the pleasures of ‘noctambulism’ simply on environmental grounds is actually a good thing.

Bastian Glassner of uber-trendy video directors Lynn Fox presents a series of luxurious images, hybridising the body as meat, a clear homage to Francis Bacon (pun intended) with a bit of Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse thrown in.

Soki So reimagines Piranesi’s Carceri as a near-future Hong Kong with a series of appropriately spectacular and sumptuous images that also address real concerns over the concept of urban intensity and vertical sprawl. Rubedo send out a provocative declaration concerning the omnipresence of technological systems and the necessity of developing transdisciplinary tactics to negotiate the immersive hybridised spaces of late capitalism.

Richard Bevan constructs a worryingly believable scenario whereby Heathrow airport becomes a carbon casino trading in carbon credits with air-mile-hungry oligarchs gambling to stay aloft, and Geoff Manaugh explores and questions the use of the term ‘feral city’. In ‘London After the Rain’, Ben Marzys presents a beautiful graphic Surrealist landscape, a posthuman picturesque. In ‘L.A.W.u.N Project #21: Cybucolia’ the Invisible University suggest that the near future may carry with it many of the seeds sown with 19th-century Romanticism; and Dan Farmer suggests that the near future may be all in the mind with excerpts from his research on cortical plasticity. Ben Nicholson reflects on his 2004 book The World Who Wants It?, one of the finest pieces of satirical writing of recent years, and presents a series of images that were absent from the original publication.

Simon Sellars and George Thomson explore the most explicitly Ballardian line, with Sellars looking at the aural nature of the urban environment, beautifully illustrated with Michelle Lord’s exquisite assemblages, and Thomson reimagining Ballard’s ‘Sound-Sweep’ as a community occupying a derelict M25.

Finally, Art in Ruins show work from installations that are 20 years old, an important conceptual reminder that none of the ideas in this issue are particularly new.

This issue was first conceived in 2007; the proposal was put forward in early 2008 and most of the text written late 2008/ early 2009. You will be reading this, at the very earliest, in autumn 2009. Like any other architectural project its relevance is shaped by a number of external forces far beyond the control of its authors; the economic events that are taking place as this text is being written (and rewritten) make any allusion to future certainties look foolish. The severity of the current economic situation makes any attempt to try to predict what light, if any, is at the end of this particular tunnel seem absurd. However, what happens if we imagine a number of scenarios, not necessarily the usual convivial scenarios that mainstream architecture usually relies on, but scenarios where the traditional certainties are replaced by something less predictable? Like the heroes of many of Ballard’s stories, the authors of the essays in this issue face the future with a sense of resigned stoicism and the ability to create beauty wherever they find it.

In many ways the near future could be very much like the past, with one obvious exception — it will be completely different.

Notes
[1] Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1991, p 5.
[2] JG Ballard, High Rise, Jonathan Cape (London), 1975, p 7.
[3] See George Monbiot, ‘The Biggest Weirdest Rip Off Yet’, Guardian, 7 April 2009. In this article, Monbiot references a paper published in 2002 in the British Medical Journal in which five key criticisms were made of the PFI funding of hospitals: 1) that PFI brings no new capital investments; 2) that the assessments of value for money are skewed in favour of private finance; 3) the higher costs of PFI are due to financing costs which would be incurred under public financing; 4) any PFI schemes only show value for money after ‘risk transfer’, for risks that are not justified; 5) PFI more than doubles the cost of capital as a percentage of annual operating income. From Allyson M Pollock, Jean Shaoul and Neil Vickers, ‘Private finance and “value for money” in NHS hospitals: a policy in search of a rationale?’, BMJ, Vol 324, 18 May 2002, pp 1205–09.
[4] One can imagine that such texts have already begun to emanate from Rotterdam and Boston.
[5] For a critique of ‘progress’, see John Gray, Heresies Against Progress and Other Illusions, Granta Books (London), 2004.
[6] See Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, Verso (London and New York), 2005.
[7] Ballard has been a central interest of my diploma unit at the Bartlett School of Architecture where I have been running a programme entitled ‘Architecture of the Near Future’ for several years. The work of Michael Aling, Richard Bevan, Dan Farmer, Ben Marzys, Soki So and George Thomson, all contributors to this issue, came out of this programme.
[8] JG Ballard, Crash, Jonathan Cape (London), 1973.
[9] JG Ballard, High Rise, op cit.
[10] JG Ballard, Millennium People, Flamingo (London), 2003.
[11] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, Fourth Estate (London), 2006.
[12] Beautifully described in his memoir Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, Fourth Estate (London), 2008.
[13] Job losses in architecture between February 2008 and February 2009 were reportedly up by 760%. See Will Hirst, ‘Architect Job Losses up by 760%’, Building Design, 20 March 2009, p 3.
[14] The drawings that accompany this essay come from my sheer enjoyment of producing CAD drawings simply because they are something I like doing.

Text © 2009 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Nic Clear.

Nic Clear, ‘Game with Vestiges: After Ballard Triptych, 2009′. The series of drawings here was set up in the same way as any standard CAD drawing in VectorWorks using layers, classes and libraries of objects. The drawings work as a narrative triptych, bringing together a number of elements — cityscapes, high-rise buildings, surrealist curios, fetish and banal objects — all in keeping with the memory of ‘Jim’, to whom the drawings are dedicated.

…:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Stereoscopic Urbanism: JG Ballard & the Built Enviroment
+ ‘Architectures of the Near Future’: An Interview with Nic Clear

Information on Architectures of the Near Future: Architectural Design.

In this highly pertinent issue, guest-editor Nic Clear questions received notions of the future. Are the accepted norms of economic growth and expansion the only means by which society can develop and prosper? Should the current economic crisis be making us call into question a future of unlimited growth? Can this moment of crisis – economic, environmental and technological – enable us to make more informed choices about the type of future that we want and can actually achieve? Architectures of the Near Future offers a series of alternative voices, developing some of the neglected areas of contemporary urban life and original visions of what might be to come. Rather than providing simplistic and seductive images of an intangible shiny future, it rocks the cosy world of architecture with polemical blasts.

* Draws on topics as diverse as synthetic space, psychoanalysis, Postmodern geography, post-economics, cybernetics and developments in neurology.
* Includes an exploration of the work of JG Ballard.
* Features the work of Ben Nicholson.

Editorial (Helen Castle ).
Introduction: A Near Future (Nic Clear).
Urban Flux (Matthew Gandy).
Postindividualism: Fata Morgana and the Swindon Gout Clinic (Michael Aling).
Urban Otaku: Electric Lighting and the Noctambulist (John Culmer Bell).
The Groom’s Gospel (Bastian Glassner).
Hong Kong Labyrinths (Soki So).
Distructuring Utopias (Rubedo: Laurent-Paul Robert and Vesna Petresin Robert).
The Carbon Casino (Richard Bevan).
Cities Gone Wild (Geoff Manaugh).
London After the Rain (Nic Clear).
L.A.W.u.N. Project #21: Cybucolia (Samantha Hardingham and David Greene).
Cortical Plasticity (Dan Farmer).
The Ridiculous and the Sublime (Ben Nicholson).
Stereoscopic Urbanism: JG Ballard and the Built Environment (Simon Sellars).
The Sound Stage (George Thomson).
Recent History – Art In Ruins (Hannah Vowles and Glyn Banks/Art in Ruins and Nic Clear)

Practice Profile.
Snøhetta (Jayne Merkel).
Interior Eye.
Biochemistry Department, University of Oxford (Howard Watson).
Building Profile.
St Benedict’s School, West London (David Littlefield).
Unit Factor.
Migration Pattern Process (Simon Beames and Kenneth Fraser).
Spiller’s Bits.
Mathematics of the Ideal Pavilion (Neil Spiller).
Yeang’s Eco-Files.
Computational Building Performance Modelling and Ecodesign (Khee Poh Lam and Ken Yeang).
McLean’s Nuggets (Will McLean).
Userscape
Scaleable Technology for Smart Spaces (Valentina Croci).

Images by Michelle Lord, from Future Ruins (inspired by JG Ballard’s ‘The Ultimate City’), 2008.

‘Pulled apart by the elders, many of the sets revealed their internal wiring. The green and yellow circuitry, the blue capacitors and modulators, mingled with the bright berries of the firethorn, rival orders of a wayward nature merging again after millions of years of separate evolution.’

JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’, 1976.

Originally published in Architectures of the Near Future: Architectural Design (ed. Nic Clear), September-October 2009, pp. 82-7.

The fiction of JG Ballard was centred almost wholly on the built environment. Ballard took architectural design to its logical extreme and then contorted it further. Simon Sellars looks at how architects can learn from Ballard and, specifically, his use of urban sound as a metaphor.

In JG Ballard’s ‘The Sound-Sweep’,[1] the sonic strata of everyday urban life – a ‘frenzied hypermanic babel of jostling horns, shrilling tyres, plunging brakes and engines’[2] – is so without respite that it is literally embedded within walls and surfaces and must be vacuumed away with a device called the ‘sonovac’. The central character, Mangon, is a mute who has developed hyperacute hearing, making him a valued sound- sweep. His main client is Madame Gioconda, an ex-opera singer whose career ended with the advent of ‘ultrasonic music’. Ultrasonic producers electronically rescore classical symphonies into musical notation that operates on a subliminal level, making use of the sensorium beyond the normal range of the human ear. Supposedly the new music, ostensibly silent, has richer texture, theme and emotion, but whether this is merely a placebo effect to placate the frazzled masses remains ambiguous.

Mangon strives to resurrect Gioconda’s career, but when he does eventually stage her comeback, she botches it, her voice so cracked, out of practice and out of tune that it causes great distress to all who hear it. The story ends with Mangon driving off in his sound truck as he turns on the vehicle’s inbuilt sonovac – filled with the city’s sonic detritus – to drown out Gioconda singing like an ‘insane banshee’. Effectively, Mangon manipulates the sounds of the city to assuage his psychological turmoil.

Ballard’s story anticipates R Murray Schafer’s World Soundscape project, which aimed to reduce the noise pollution of industrial environments in favour of an ‘acoustic ecology’, eliminating so-called ‘bad’ sounds in favour of prescribed ‘good’ sounds, returning to ‘the Ursound’ supposedly found in nature, where, Schafer rhapsodises, ‘listening blindly to our ancestors and the wild creatures, we will feel it surge within us again, in our speaking and in our music’.[3] But as Geoff Manaugh notes: ‘Where the Project went wrong … was when it thought it had a kind of sonic monopoly over what sounded good. Industrial noises would be scrubbed from the city … and a nostalgic calm … infused in its place. Think church bells, not automobiles. But where would such sensory cleansing leave those … who enjoy the sounds of factories?’[4]

‘Halloway had the distinct impression that this solitary young mute was a prisoner here, high above this museum of cars in the centre of the abandoned airport.’

JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’, 1976.

For Ballard, too, neither full reliance on technology (represented by the sterile, calming aesthetic of ultrasonic music) nor the reactionary turn to nostalgia and a safe retreat into the past (ie Mangon’s initial deification of the opera singer) is posited as an adequate solution. Instead, a middle ground is sought, a strategy found throughout his career, grounded in the sense that the built environment must be met on its own terms.

In the novella ‘The Ultimate City’,[5] Ballard moves beyond Mangon’s half-aware thumbnail sketch and into a three-dimensionality: a full-scale cognitive remapping. A future ecotopia, Garden City, has developed wind power and alternative technologies after New York has fallen into ruins from the exhaustion of fossil fuels. The central character, Halloway, dissatisfied with what he sees as the dulling of the imagination in Garden City, with its organic conformity, makes his way back to the abandoned New York, where he attempts to restart the metropolis and its power supplies. Significantly, it is the noise of the city that he misses and that he is inescapably drawn to. With the help of Olds (another mute), Halloway manages to restart the generators and power supplies of a small sector of the city, bringing to life neon and traffic lights, while broadcasting sound- effects records of automobile and aircraft noise:

Halloway moved from one apartment to the next, flicking lights on and off, working the appliances in the kitchens. Mixers chattered, toasters and refrigerators hummed, warning lights glowed in control panels … Television sets came on, radios emitted a ghostly tonelessness interrupted now and then by static from the remote-controlled switching units of the tidal pumps twenty miles away.

It was only now, in this raucous light and noise, that the city was being its true self, only in this flood of cheap neon that it was really alive …[6]

Like Mangon, but on a grander scale, Halloway tunes the city rather than shutting it out, rejecting the sterile, affectless Garden City for a complete reimagining and re-envisaging of the city’s technological grid, including the acoustic footprint that so disturbed the inventors of ultrasonic music. This time, the story anticipates the Positive Soundscapes research project, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and comprising five British universities, which aims to convince architects and town planners to think beyond the traditional focus on reducing noise levels and to pay attention instead to ‘the many possibilities for creating positive environments in the soundscapes in which we live. People can completely change their perception of a sound once they have identified it. In the laboratory, many listeners prefer distant motorway noise to rushing water, until they are told what the sounds are.’[7]

I have cited these examples of urban sound in Ballard because they represent the key components of a framework he uses to critique the psychological and perceptual dimensions that are saturated in the built environment, but that seem lacking in the discourse that generates architectural practice. In a sense, Ballard’s work is about nothing but the built environment. It is often said that technology and the liminal zones of suburbia and non- place urban fields are his main characters, and indeed the buildings and zones he erects – the motorway system in Crash,[8] the apartment block in High-Rise (‘an environment built, not for man, but for man’s absence’),[9] the secessionist shopping centre in Kingdom Come[10] – all seem imbued with an artificial intelligence determined to eradicate human life as if it were a disease.

This is a gambit that brings sociologist Ron Smith’s observation into stark relief: ‘If you want to see what’s wrong with architecture today, pick up the latest issue of almost any architectural design magazine. They’re filled with pictures of interesting architecture, but you rarely see any people actually using those buildings.’[11] In Ballard, trends (and flaws) in architectural design are pursued to their logical extremes, and then bent backwards or forwards through time to go completely beyond logic. In the real world, people might complain about an escalator too far away from a baggage chute in an airport or a concourse in a mall that heats up too quickly, or overly processed floors that make far too much noise when walked upon. In Ballard, the unspoken tension and psychopathology engendered by such scenarios is recycled, reheated and allowed free rein to play itself out to the bitterest of ends.

‘Buckmaster tried to point out to Halloway how the Twentieth Century had met its self-made death. They stood on the shores of artificial lagoons filled with chemical wastes, drove along canals silvered by metallic scum, across landscapes covered by thousands of tons of untreated garbage, fields piled high with cans, broken glass and derelict machinery.’

JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’, 1976.

In High-Rise, which charts the breakdown of the social order in a neo-Corbusian residential building, at first it is the little things that niggle. These then overlay and overlap, each new escalation of hostilities a clear and logical progression from the previous strata, however bizarre each incident might seem in isolation. Parents find that the building hasn’t been designed for children: there is no free, open space, only ‘someone else’s car park’. Shared garbage disposal causes anxiety and division between residents. Raucous parties occur on the upper floors, and residents in ‘better-sited apartments’ are unsympathetic to those living below them. Dog owners are attacked for allowing their pets to urinate and defecate in the elevators, culminating in the fateful moment when one resident’s Afghan hound is drowned in the swimming pool.

Thereafter, things really take off: incidents of violent aggression morph into tribal skirmishes and warring groups cut off escalator access, barricading their apartments and ‘Balkanising’ the middle section of flats to form a buffer zone. Yet, after the system has collapsed and failed, what we are left with is more than a mere glimmer of hope, and clearly akin to a programme of resistance based on emergent psychologies and a radical new approach to the built environment: ‘Even the run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or, more ambiguously, recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways.’[12]

Yet just as Positive Soundscapes has encountered resistance in persuading architects and engineers to re- evaluate environmental sound, ‘perhaps because of barriers to communication across different disciplines’[13], chances are you will not find Ballard on the syllabus. According to Nic Clear, who has used Ballard’s work as an aid in architectural learning: ‘Within academia and architectural criticism, if such a thing still exists, there is a general disdain for “popular” fiction – writing on, and about, architecture is still very elitist – and I have met quite a bit of resistance when discussing Ballard as a serious subject.’[14]

Yet architects have no compunction about appropriating critical theory to their own ends. Peter Eisenman drew heavily on Deleuze and Baudrillard for his conception of ‘interstitial’ architecture and ‘blurred zones’, where the aim was to examine the way the virtual has invaded the actual, displacing architecture’s traditional role as an anchor for the real. Eisenman’s ‘philosophy lite’ sought to invite architecture to explore conceptual spaces located within the ‘folds’ of the built environment, with the aim of ‘refram[ing] existing urbanism, to set it off in a new direction’.[15] But surely the theory of Deleuze (which has more than a few correspondences with the work of Ballard) is designed to inspire affirmation in the reader, the user, the inhabitant; surely it must be tangible and must work in practice, in real-world terms, in that it must inspire thought and positive action to affirm its validity.

‘Halloway was fascinated by the glimmering sheen of the metal- scummed canals, by the strange submarine melancholy of drowned cars looming up at him from abandoned lakes, by the brilliant colours of the garbage hills, by the glitter of a million cans embedded in a matrix of detergent packs and tinfoil, a kaleidoscope of everything they could wear, eat and drink.’

JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’, 1976.

That to me seems the Deleuzian ideal – the Ballardian ideal. It would seem apposite to say the majority of criticism of Eisenman’s buildings implies that not only are most users unaware of the inner workings of the ‘process of the interstitial’ that built the thing, but that in the final product antagonism and negation is placed before affirmation and interaction. As Roger Kimball writes: ‘When we encounter a stairway that leads nowhere … we need [Eisenman's] help to understand that we are being given a lesson in linguistic futility. Otherwise we might foolishly conclude that it was just a stairway that led nowhere and wonder about the sanity of the chap who paid the architect’s bill.’[16]

Ballard is interested in urbanism and spatial dynamics as a way to understand the city as narrative. The psychological dimension of urban life plays an important part, ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ the city on a sensory level. He should be required reading for anyone seriously interested in making architecture more ‘user friendly’, or to anyone who thinks that architecture should be more than a series of shiny icons designed by remote starchitects. In this, he is ideally matched with the aims of Smith, who believes that ‘to become truly great architects [architecture students] also have to be great social psychologists, community sociologists, and organizational theorists’,[17] and also those of Michael Kroelinger, who teaches a course in ‘Architectural Sociology’ at the University of Nevada that ‘underscores the importance of understanding people’s values, needs, and attitudes, from an individual level to an organizational one’.[18]

Architects: read, study and learn from Ballard’s writing. Because it should not be the job of the architect to build worlds and indulge the luxury of allowing them to fail at our expense, but that of the writer, the constructor of virtual worlds that live, breathe and die in virtuality so that we, in the actual, do not have to expire to prove a point. Only then should we overlay the virtual with the actual to create a stereoscopic representation, a truly interstitial process that places the user at the centre with the power to inform, direct, stage and manage the terms of his or her movement through time and space, perhaps nudging us one step closer to a read/write city in which we are free to ‘tune’ the built environment, [19] free to contribute to the conditions of our cohabitation.

In fact, an interdisciplinary, specifically Ballardian approach may be exactly what is required to shake architecture out of its ‘business as usual’ mentality, forcing it to confront the global economic and environmental crises just over the horizon. Ask the question: is another ‘shiny, happy’ building really what we want or need to see or inhabit?

‘He knew now that he would never return to Garden City, with its pastoral calm … he would set off on foot, … following the memorials westwards across the continent, until he found the old man again and could help him raise his pyramids of washing machines, radiator-grilles and typewriters.’

JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’, 1976.

Notes
[1] JG Ballard, ‘The Sound-Sweep’ [1960], in The Complete Short Stories, Flamingo (London), 2001.
[2] Ibid, p 106.
[3] Quoted in Brandon LaBelle, Perspectives on Sound Art, Continuum (New York and London), 2006, p 204.
[4] Geoff Manaugh, ‘Audio Architecture’, BLDGBLOG, 10 August 2007. See http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/audio-architecture.html, accessed 26 January 2008.
[5] JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’ [1976], in The Complete Short Stories, Flamingo (London), 2001.
[6] Ibid, pp 902, 907.
[7] Positive Soundscapes, ‘Project Overview’, Positive Soundscapes: A Re- evaluation of Environmental Sound. See www.positivesoundscapes.org/project_overview, accessed 26 January 2009.
[8] JG Ballard, Crash [1973], Vintage (London), 1995.
[9] JG Ballard, High-Rise [1975], Flamingo (London), 1993.
[10] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, Fourth Estate (London), 2006.
[11] Quoted in Gian Galassi, ‘Community by Design’, UNLV Magazine, Fall 2004. See http://magazine.unlv.edu/Issues/Fall04/community.html>, accessed 26 January 2009.
[12] JG Ballard, High Rise, op cit, p 147.
[13] Positive Soundscapes, op cit.
[14] Simon Sellars, ‘Architectures of the Near Future: An Interview with Nic
Clear’, Ballardian, 24 December 2008. See www.ballardian.com/near-future-nic-clear- interview, accessed 26 January 2009.
[15] Peter Eisenman (ed), Blurred Zones: Investigations of the Interstitial: Eisenman Architects 1988–1998, Monacelli Press (New York), 2002, p 132.
[16] Roger Kimball, ‘Architecture and ideology’, New Criterion, December 2002. See http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3345/is_4_21/ai_n28962509>, accessed 26 January 2009.
[17] Quoted in Gian Galassi, op cit.
[18] Ibid.
[19] I’ve borrowed the concept of the ‘read/write’ city from Steve Lambert of the Anti- Advertising Agency who, writing about the visual environment and street art, states: ‘Why is read/write better? Because you can consume, process, and respond. This is how we think critically. This is how we learn. You can talk back. You can express yourself. You don’t just consume expression, you create expression. Read/write is how democracy works. There’s a reason kids want to write their names on walls. There’s a reason why people take graffiti seriously. Granted, graffiti writers don’t always know how to direct this energy, but I’d argue there’s some overlap with the reasons one writes their name on a wall and the reasons one runs for the school board. Being able to write means being able to affect your environment. To change it. You exist in the world not as a consumer, but an active citizen. Read only culture creates apathy.’ From Steve Lambert, ‘Demand a Read/Write City’, The Anti-Advertising Agency, 3 October, 2008. See http://antiadvertisingagency.com/news/demand-a-readwrite-city, accessed 26 January 2009.

Text © 2009 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Michelle Lord.

…:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ ‘Architectures of the Near Future’: An Interview with Nic Clear

Information on Architectures of the Near Future: Architectural Design.

In this highly pertinent issue, guest-editor Nic Clear questions received notions of the future. Are the accepted norms of economic growth and expansion the only means by which society can develop and prosper? Should the current economic crisis be making us call into question a future of unlimited growth? Can this moment of crisis – economic, environmental and technological – enable us to make more informed choices about the type of future that we want and can actually achieve? Architectures of the Near Future offers a series of alternative voices, developing some of the neglected areas of contemporary urban life and original visions of what might be to come. Rather than providing simplistic and seductive images of an intangible shiny future, it rocks the cosy world of architecture with polemical blasts.

* Draws on topics as diverse as synthetic space, psychoanalysis, Postmodern geography, post-economics, cybernetics and developments in neurology.
* Includes an exploration of the work of JG Ballard.
* Features the work of Ben Nicholson.

Editorial (Helen Castle ).
Introduction: A Near Future (Nic Clear).
Urban Flux (Matthew Gandy).
Postindividualism: Fata Morgana and the Swindon Gout Clinic (Michael Aling).
Urban Otaku: Electric Lighting and the Noctambulist (John Culmer Bell).
The Groom’s Gospel (Bastian Glassner).
Hong Kong Labyrinths (Soki So).
Distructuring Utopias (Rubedo: Laurent-Paul Robert and Vesna Petresin Robert).
The Carbon Casino (Richard Bevan).
Cities Gone Wild (Geoff Manaugh).
London After the Rain (Nic Clear).
L.A.W.u.N. Project #21: Cybucolia (Samantha Hardingham and David Greene).
Cortical Plasticity (Dan Farmer).
The Ridiculous and the Sublime (Ben Nicholson).
Stereoscopic Urbanism: JG Ballard and the Built Environment (Simon Sellars).
The Sound Stage (George Thomson).
Recent History – Art In Ruins (Hannah Vowles and Glyn Banks/Art in Ruins and Nic Clear)

Practice Profile.
Snøhetta (Jayne Merkel).
Interior Eye.
Biochemistry Department, University of Oxford (Howard Watson).
Building Profile.
St Benedict’s School, West London (David Littlefield).
Unit Factor.
Migration Pattern Process (Simon Beames and Kenneth Fraser).
Spiller’s Bits.
Mathematics of the Ideal Pavilion (Neil Spiller).
Yeang’s Eco-Files.
Computational Building Performance Modelling and Ecodesign (Khee Poh Lam and Ken Yeang).
McLean’s Nuggets (Will McLean).
Userscape
Scaleable Technology for Smart Spaces (Valentina Croci).

Soundwalk by MELANIE CHILIANIS; photography by Simon Sellars.

“The consumer society is a kind of soft police state. We think we have choice, but everything is compulsory. We have to keep buying or we fail as citizens. Consumerism creates huge unconscious needs that only fascism can satisfy. If anything, fascism is the form that consumerism takes when it opts for elective madness.”

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come (2006).

We took a recent jaunt to Melbourne’s Crown Casino, prime Ballardian space, in order to map the coordinates of this micronational zone, this city state — consumer-driven control space. We took photos on a Nokia 6288 — photography disguised as furtive texting — while Mel Chil performed a secret sound walk. Her head bowed and her eyes averted (for soundwalkers must not allow the other senses to interfere with the keen art of listening), she strode silently behind us through the Zone, her super-powered, omidirectional microphone and optimal recording unit stuffed into her bag to note the results.

Her sound file* is below — play it loud while reading for maximum effect, for clearly the audiospatial disorientation engendered by Casino space plays a critical role in maintaining the illusion of languid disconnectedness.

* Note: you won’t see the audio player in Google Reader.

Crown Casino increases people’s perception of frequency of winning not only by having big visual displays and advertisements but also by having announcements over a loudspeaker of a poker machine jackpot winner. If every gambler who has lost everything is announced over the loudspeaker in the same way, problem gambling would be greatly reduced. Moreover, the promotion of the illusion of winning is also built into a poker machine in which a winning pay out is made with a loud noise as coins come crashing into the metal pay out tray to remind nearby players that winning is a real possibility.

Public Gambling Enquiry, Australian Vietnamese Women’s Welfare Association.

It’s a unique phenomenon… [a] metropolis … utterly devoted to leisure, something close to suspended animation. And it’s very inviting. But people lying on their backs are very vulnerable to predators.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Live in London’, 1996.

The signage declares, ‘We’re creating a new world at Crown’, a come-on none can resist. But even before entering the Casino, we were aware that we were no longer in the world of quotidian politeness. The first task was to pass through the borderzone, out on the concrete apron surrounding the complex, where brutal expediency in combat with pornographic greed meant that even bag ladies had to secure their shopping trolleys if left unattended.

But this isn’t reality, it’s not even a dream. It’s sort of a halfway house between the two.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Live in London’, 1996.

Opposite the Crown Entertainment Complex, bordering the west side, is the Melbourne Exhibition Centre. Its constructivist lines slice the sky like an obsolete, forward-thinking city of the immediate retro-future to come, a take-off ramp into the ozone that seems to suggest the only way out is through an ascent to heaven, or … this way, down, deep into the east, into Crown — into half-life.

He stared at the silent aisles, working out his challenge to this eventless world. We left the liquor store and paused by a Thai restaurant, whose empty tables receded through a shadow world of flock wallpaper and gilded elephants. Next to it was an untenanted retail unit, a concrete vault like an abandoned segment of space-time.

J.G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights, 1996.

We enter, ‘wearing the Crown‘, instantly absorbed by the otherworldliness of the Casino. The effect is total — there are no clocks anywhere to be seen, creating a timeless zone in which the breakdown of the biological clock (the legend of old ladies urinating at poker tables, rather than missing a hand, for example) is the only indication of chronometry. Perhaps the only remaining link to temporality is the schedule of the televised horse racing. A horse — horses? — seem to haunt the interior…

There is no natural light of any kind, no windows. Mirrors take up entire walls, distending the innards of the place into infinity. The long walk between the mid-section of poker machines and blackjack tables seems to never end. Hovering alien ectoplasm, the sickly UV of Giger-style nightmares, falls into view. Magic mushrooms hang from the ceiling, glowing lysergically. We are in a bunker, are we in a bunker? Miles below the Earth’s surface, below the Earth’s surface? Drinking, gambling and watching spooling sports. Palms itchy.

The first shrines had begun to appear, wayside altars for passing shoppers, places of pause and reflection for those making endless journeys within the universe of the dome.

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come, 2006.

Hanging from the ceiling, a plaster-cast altar of motorcycle fascism, its strident coat of arms larger than the machine itself. Lest the devotees become too overwhelmed and seize the handlebars, a sign warns: “Display Model Only”. Trinkets pile up on the carpet around the altar, burnt offerings of cigarette butts, an unused condom packet, coins, keys. No passing cleaner makes an effort to clean this up and it seems arranged in a perfect concentric ring. Skin hurts.

The resilient carpet is custom designed and can soak up blood, vomit and semen without leaving visible trace. A crazy man says he knows the man who made it and he makes a fortune, too. He also designs bodybags for prom queens addicted to cocaine and ultraviolent bondage. Did a crazy man really say that he knew a man? (Bringing new meaning to the game of ‘craps’, another urban legend tells of sliding compartments in the toilets that can quickly open to dispose of suicidal high-rollers who lost everything without bringing the corpse back through the main arena.) Very near by, another man looks over suspiciously at our furtive photographic activity, but then he seems distracted by what would appear to be an insect buzzing around his head. He bats at it but there is no insect anywhere to be seen. As we walk away, he seems to be madly shaking invisible bugs out of his hair. Is he shaking invisible bugs out of his hair?

The people no longer wish to be freed from their chains, preferring to use them to accessorise their designer handbags instead. Eyes pop.

The neon façades of the casinos and hotels were now so many cataracts of white lava, walls of incadescent pink and purple that seemed to set alight the surrounding jungle, turning the Strip and the downtown casino centre into an inflamed, shadowless realm through which the occasional armoured car would appear like a spectral dragon on the floor of a furnace.

J.G. Ballard, Hello America (1981).

This green-skinned hepcat appeared to us as if in a dream, doffing his cap with sleazy grace. ‘Come with me to the Food Court’, he moaned in our already twitching ears. ‘I know a mystical place — a snack bar — where they spike the Alcoholic Super Slushies with Viagra, and where cyborg men with vat-grown muscle can inflate their pecs with a bicycle pump to 150psi. It’s called Food & Booze Express City and it’s open 24/7, natch, because you know it, don’t you, man, that Dreamland never sleeps. Oh, and dig: the women are unFUCKINGbelievable’.

Crawford gazed across the peninsula at the gutted shell of the Hollinger house.
‘A year from now some hotel or casino complex will stand there. On this coast the past isn’t allowed to exist.’
‘Why not keep the house as it is?’
‘As a tribal totem? A warning to all those time-share salesmen and nightclub touts? That’s not a bad idea…’

J.G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights.

The final sane act of Nietzsche, that great admirer of self-serving individualism, was one of pity — to collapse to the floor and cradle a beaten horse. In this one compassionate act, he disavowed a lifetime of celebrating self-interest. At Crown, they have decapitated the horse and mounted its suffering head as a totem of gambling law: ‘Let he who is strong fill his pockets, and he who is weak empty his’.

This glowing tube filled with inanimate coin is in actuality a super-computer that runs on pure cash. Pulsing throughout that pile of super-compacted currency is a liquid charged with megawatts of electricity and data, a new breed of viscous fibre optics that draws upon the inordinate strength of abstract social wealth to create simulated neurological pathways with highly complex processing power greater than military mainframes. This super-computer runs the whole operation here at Crown Casino and it is called ‘Mr Severin’. Mr Severin’s word is law and he will not tolerate any deviance from that law at any time.

A lake of neon signs formed a shimmering corona, miles of strip-lighting raced along the porticos of the casinos, zipped up the illuminated curtain-walling of the hotels and spilled over into mushy cascades. Under the ultramarine sky, so dark now that the tone had left their faces, the spectacle of this sometime gambling capital seemed as unreal as an electrographic dream.

J.G. Ballard, Hello America.

We became touched by a presence that was almost entirely indescribable except in rhyming couplets of ever-increasing incredulity, ridiculous-sounding as we mouthed them aloud, like cod Shakespeare. An alien intelligence reaching deep into our souls to finger our pathetic humanity with a cold machinic rationalism that was actually a little bit naughty and a little bit nice. A mystical vision appeared — for we were in the circuit, now — a monolith slowly, slowly descending from the ceiling. White light grew and grew. In the zone.

‘Remember, Richard, consumerism is a redemptive ideology. At its best, it tries to aestheticize violence, though sadly it doesn’t always succeed.’
…
‘Every shopping mall and retail park turning into a local soviet. A popular uprising that starts at the nearest Tesco. It’s possible. There’s a hunger for violence, that’s why sport obsesses the whole country. Everyone’s suffocating — too many barcode readers, too many CCTV cameras and double yellow lines. That second bomb really got them going.’

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come.

While their wives indulged in the more passive pursuits of bingo and fruit machines, the mankind gathered in their pit to drink, watch high-volume, biff-and-bash contact sports and back their armchair punditry with hard cash. The more they drank, the more they lost. The more they lost, the more they drank. A gloom began to permeate the air, so much so that condensation seemed to drip from the walls like Amityville house blood, and one sensed that sporadic, remorseless violence might break out at any moment. On the sport screen, some rugby players tore off their clothes and compared biceps and for a moment it seemed the crowd might follow suit. Only one measure could prevent this — a variety show. Mr Severin: call on Elvissey!

Completely Elvis: The Elvises are in the building! Their uncanny sound and appearance will make you feel as if you are watching the King himself. Amazing musicianship elevates the entertaining and genuine portrayals of the famous songs we all know and love. The incredible authenticity of the show takes you on a ride that is unprecedented. Costumes, charisma and charm are coupled with the songs that made Elvis the undisputed ‘King of Rock and Roll’. This combination of artists is not like any ever seen in Australia before.

Crown Casino, 2009.

This man, this fat, tubular, tubercular man – his impersonation was no longer of Elvis, but of a thousand other Elvis impersonators. A discount simulacrum. His women had feathers up their bums and on their heads, and these vixens liked to conga-line to within an inch of some men’s lives. Beer boiling in the glass.

“The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the Sixth Reich”

Hunter S. Thompson.

Projected above our heads, 20 feet high, on the big sports screen: the manifestation of schizoid hyperactivity.

Fleeting impressions, an illusion of meaning floating over a sea of undefined emotions. We’re talking about a virtual politics unconnected to any reality, one which redefines reality as itself. The public willingly colludes in its own deception.

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come.

The horse equine reporter man reads the racehorse results, stutters in vertical hold, image flickers and splits straight down the middle to finally reveal the really real reality underneath. A snarling, digitised mutilation. Mr Severin has had a breakdown — someone, somewhere in here has won far too much cash. The system cannot cope, gets stuck in an infinity loop, cracks and breaks. The noise of clinking coin and tolling fruit-machine bells seems to increase to unbearable levels. But that is the great release, for we have pierced the veil, seen beyond, out into the desertified Racecourse of the Real. No gears and pulleys behind the mask, Phil K Dick-style, but a roiling, raging black void of utter nothingness.

Headaches and a necessary evacuation followed.

One day there would be another Metro-Centre and another desperate and deranged dream. Marchers would drill and wheel while another cable announcer sang out the beat. In time, unless the sane woke and rallied themselves, an even fiercer republic would open the doors and spin the turnstiles of its beckoning paradise.

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come.

This first installment begins with a snippet from Can’s suitably decadent/enervated track ‘Future Days’, and later on drops PiL’s ‘Phenagen’ and another Can track, ‘Soup’, into the soundscape. Someone’s been doing their research into ‘Ballardian’ music!

>

Ballardian muxtape accompanying this post.

This will be the last post related to the CCCB’s J.G. Ballard exhibition for a while. Next week normal service will resume, including a slew of archival Ballard interviews and articles as well as some newly commissioned posts.

For the CCCB exhibition, I curated a selection of Ballardian inspired sound art and music: 46 tracks in all. I tried to cover everything: the early 80s postpunk era, when Ballard’s influence was at its zenith; the found-sound sound art that echoes themes of urban degradation in Ballard’s work; recent Ballardian stuff such as Burial and kode9; the mid-90s world music strain; title and incidental music from Ballard film and TV adaptations, including all the obscure productions; the late 90s indie homages … even JGB’s Desert Island Disc selections.

Reproduced below is the brief synopsis and the annotated playlist I wrote for the exhibition catalogue. I’ve also compiled a Muxtape to accompany this post. It features 12 of the 46 tracks — for now, a representative sample that tries to at least touch on all the areas mentioned above.

‘NEGATIVE ACOUSTIC SPACE’: BALLARDIAN SOUND ART
by Simon Sellars

J.G. Ballard says he has a ‘tin ear’: that he has no taste for music, barely a feel for it, borne out by his Desert Island Disc selection for BBC radio which included ‘The Teddy Bear’s Picnic’. There’s no music in his writing either, he insists – ‘I don’t know why. It’s just some gene that skipped me.’ He says with a Futurist flourish that ‘the most beautiful music in the world is the sound of machine guns’. Yet his work has influenced a whole range of musicians. In the 80s he was consistently name-checked by influential postpunk and industrial artists: Ian Curtis, John Foxx, Steve Severin, Cabaret Voltaire, SPK. The word ‘Ballardian’ became shorthand for speed and violence, sex and death, but as with The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, the postpunk Ballard bibles, the ultimate aim was to transcend the post-industrial murk, not wallow in the malaise.

Then in the 1990s a curious strain of Ballardian world music began to emerge (notably from Finnish band Mo Boma, who explored Ballardian themes across a three-album cycle). This was lush, steamy and otherworldly, but not in the realm of clichéd exotica common to the genre, rather in the sense of vague unease, borderzones of the mind, the imagination rather than the third world as the last nature reserve. The aesthetic was wholly appropriate to the cycle of novels Ballard was writing – The Unlimited Dream Company, The Day of Creation, Rushing to Paradise – degraded, lysergic visions of mythical lands rusting and undermining the structural integrity of the urban West.

In recent times, Ballard’s influence on music seems to have waned although there is convergence with a cadre of sound artists who have magnified and critiqued the sonic footprint of the world’s cities and conurbations. Interact with any aspect of the Big City today, virtual or actual, and you will be enveloped with noise. When you pick up the handle of a petrol pump, an ad jingle plays. When you prowl the supermarket aisles, blaring adult rock replaces the sedative Muzak of yore. When you click on MySpace, smileys with artificial intelligence shout at you and autoplay music sutures the gaps. When you are put on hold for customer service, recorded voices puncture your calm inner space at regular intervals. In Ballard’s short story, ‘The Sound Sweep’ (1960), he warns of the virtual reality of artificially generated, negative acoustic space. Sixteen years later, in the novella ‘The Ultimate City’, he posits the chaotic sounds of the city as a beacon of vitality, an invigorating counterpoint to the enervating utopianism of hysterical eco-activists.

So, while it would appear to be true that there is no music in Ballard, there certainly is sound. Acoustic space is the last frontier to be colonised by late capitalism and Ballard records the process, but as always in his work, it can be as alienating or as invigorating as you care to make it.

– Simon Sellars, ballardian.com, 2008.

More info: see ballardian.com’s interview with Mike Ryan of RE/Search Publications.

PLAYLIST

‘Thirteen to Centaurus: Main Titles’ – Norman Kay (1964)
From the BBC TV adaptation of the Ballard short story.

‘Hello?’ – J.G. Ballard (2006)
JGB’s voice taken from ‘Rattling Other People’s Cages’, Simon Sellars’s interview with Ballard.

‘Teddy Bear’s Picnic’ – Val Rosen (1932)
From Ballard’s Desert Island Discs selection, a sinister choice in light of the evil mechanical bears in Kingdom Come.

‘Affirmative Dystopias’ – J.G. Ballard (2006)
JGB’s voice taken from ‘Rattling Other People’s Cages’, Simon Sellars’s 2006 interview with Ballard. Soundscape by Melanie Chilianis.

‘Cairo’ – The Future (1977)
Contains a spoken-word passage from The Atrocity Exhibition’s ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’:

‘This Venus of the dunes, virgin of the time-slopes, rose above Tallis into the meridian sky. The porous sand, reminiscent of the eroded walls of the apartment, and of the dead film star with her breasts of carved pumice and thighs of ash, diffused along its crests into the wind’.

‘I Want to Be A Machine’ – Ultravox! (1977)
Lyrics influenced by Ballard.

‘Always Crashing in the Same Car’ – David Bowie (1977)
Mines the same ambivalent man-machine aesthetic as Ballard.

‘Warm Leatherette’ – The Normal (1978)
Lyrics based on Crash.

‘High Rise’ – Hawkwind (1979)
Lyrics based on High-Rise and the Ballard short, ‘The Man on the 99th Floor’.

‘Plaza’ – John Foxx (1980)
Lyrics influenced by Ballard.

‘Atrocity Exhibition’ – Joy Division (1980)
Title lifted from The Atrocity Exhibition.

‘The Him’ – New Order (1981)
Title taken from a passage in ‘You and Me and the Continuum’.

‘Let’s Do It’ – Noel Coward (1955)
From Ballard’s Desert Island Discs selection. According to David Pringle, this choice ‘betrays a certain leaning towards clever lyrics’ but maybe Ballard just likes Coward’s image of machines having sex.

‘The Girl from Ipanema’ – Antonio Carlos Jobim (1962)
From Ballard’s Desert Island Discs selection. This choice represents JGB’s attraction to ‘sizzling sex’, according to Pringle.

‘The Dead Astronaut’ (excerpt) – Vanishing Point (1988)
Taken from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s series of Ballard radio plays.

‘The Final Strand’ – Michael Briel (1993)
From the album Crash: A Tribute to James Graham Ballard. According to Briel, it’s based on the JGB short, ‘The Final Strand’, but the story he’s actually referencing is ‘The Terminal Beach’ – Ballard’s title was lost in translation (Briel is German).

‘Golden Skans’ – Klaxons (2006)
Lyric inspired by Ballard’s ‘Myths of the Near Future’.

‘Mausoleum’ – Manic Street Preachers (1994)
Contains a sample from a Ballard interview: ‘I wanted to rub the human race in its own vomit, and then force it to look in the mirror.’

‘Me and J.G. Ballard’ – Dan Melchior (2002)
Shepperton resident Dan Melchior describes seeing Ballard in the supermarket, but they never actually meet.

‘Dr Penrose Has the Solution’ – Super-Cannes (2004)
This band is named after Ballard’s Super-Cannes, and the song after a character in the book.

‘Home: End Titles’ – Andrew Phillips (2003)
Soundtrack from the BBC TV adaptation of the Ballard short story, ‘The Enormous Space’.

‘Low-Flying Aircraft: Main Titles’ – Johan Zachrisson (2002)
From the Solveig Nordlund film adaptation of the Ballard short story.

‘The Pheasant Hunt’ – John Williams (1987)
From the soundtrack to Spielberg’s film of Empire of the Sun.

‘Superchannel’ – Janek Schaefer (2002)
Inspired by Concrete Island, plus it’s musique concrete – get it?

‘Primal Image’ (excerpt) – Alan Lamb (1988)
Sounds produced entirely by wind through telegraph wires picked up by contact mics, with no processing or effects involved except for minor EQ. It is reminiscent of Ballard’s ‘The Sound Sweep’ and other early JGB shorts in which urban sound is trapped and magnified. A sample from this (or something very similar to it) is featured on the soundtrack to Jonathan Weiss’s film of The Atrocity Exhibition.

‘The Swedish Rhapsody’ – Unknown (1997)
A recording of a ‘numbers station’ on short-wave radio. With their origin and purpose unknown, numbers stations are the audio equivalent of Ballard’s ‘invisible literature’. The idea of recording numbers stations, of trapping and recording arcane transmissions, is also reminiscent of T- building his strange radio receiver in Atrocity so he can tune in to pirate radio and ‘the time-music of the quasars’.

‘Don’t Fence Me In’ – Bing Crosby (1944)
From Ballard’s Desert Island Discs selection. Again, David Pringle reckons this choice betrays JGB’s ‘leaning towards clever lyrics’.

‘The Marriage of Figaro (Highlights): Act IV Scene 11: Finale’ – Hungarian State Opera Orchestra (1786)
From Ballard’s Desert Island Discs selection. The echoes of opera in ‘The Sound Sweep’ are inescapable. David Pringle muses: ‘The influence of Ballard working in Covent Garden flower market, outside the opera house, perhaps?’

‘Pace E Gioia Sia Con Voi (from the Barber of Seville)’ – Lang, Maloy, Modenas, Stilke, w/ Hamburg Radio Symphony Orch (1886)
From Ballard’s Desert Island Discs selection. The opera references apply here, also.

‘Nested’ – Coti K (1993)
From the album Crash: A Tribute to James Graham Ballard.

‘More Songs About Factories: Part 4 (Itchy)’ – Camilla Hannan (2005)
Composed entirely of factory sounds, recorded in a similar manner to the Alan Lamb piece and freighted with the same Ballardian allusions.

‘Crash!’ – composer unknown; probably library sounds from the BBC audio archives (1971)
A montage stitched together by Simon Sellars of ambient sounds and music from the soundtrack to the Harley Cokliss short film, ‘Crash!’, which stars Ballard. Parts of this soundtrack appear remarkably similar to the Alan Lamb and Camilla Hannan pieces.

‘World War III As a Conceptual Act: The Atrocity Exhibition Main Titles’ – J.G. Thirlwell, aka Foetus (2001)
From the soundtrack to Jonathan Weiss’s film of Ballard’s book.

‘Road Research Laboratory’ – Howard Shore (1996)
From the soundtrack to David Cronenberg’s film of Crash.

‘Wind from Nowhere’ – Uzect Plaush (1994)
Patterned after Ballard’s first, disowned novel, a rare inspiration to say the least!

‘The Kindness of Women’ – Mo Boma (1994)
Inspired by the Ballard novel.

‘Matinkaari Bridge, Helsinki, Finland’ – Jodi Rose (2004)
Composed entirely of sounds made by the Matinkaari Bridge in Finland as it bends under the load of traffic, twisting and turning due to heat and cold. Recorded in a similar fashion as the Alan Lamb and Camilla Hannan pieces, with the same sonic/conceptual allusions to Ballard’s work.

‘Forgive’ – Burial (2006)
For better or worse, the music of Burial has been branded ‘Ballardian’ by all and sundry. But is Ballard as downbeat as this?

‘Track 12 (The Kiss)’ – Cousin Silas (2006)
Inspired by the Ballard short story.

‘Lime’ – kode9 (2006)
kode9 is Steve Goodman, a lecturer and theorist who has written on what he terms Ballard’s ‘sonic fiction’, including ‘The Sound Sweep’. The urban influence of Ballard’s music unavoidably seeps into the music.

‘Falling in Love Again’ – Marlene Dietrich (1964)
From Ballard’s Desert Island Discs selection. Marlene’s frigid yet sexy film persona is surely very close to JGB’s cold and impenetrable women characters.

‘Put the Blame on Mame’ – Rita Hayworth (1946)
From Ballard’s Desert Island Discs selection. More ‘sizzling sex’, says Pringle.

‘The Ballad of J.G. Ballard’ – Kevin Mahoney (2006)
Mahoney’s self-styled ‘iconoclastic tribute’ to Ballard.

..:: Related:
+ Tribute to J.G. Ballard & Brian Eno
+ A Ballardian Burial
+ ‘Magisterial, Precise, Unsettling’: Simon Reynolds on the Ballard Connection
+ A Whirlpool with Seductive Furniture: The John Foxx Interview
+ Critical Mass: Sound, Story and Music in David Cronenberg’s Crash
+ ‘No-One Dances in Ballard’: An Interview with Mike Ryan
+ Cousin Silas: Another Flask of Ballard

…:: More info on the exhibition:

+ More exhibition photography from Rick McGrath
+ J.G. Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium
+ Ballard at Kosmopolis
+ Official exhibition blog

…:: Exhibition-related posts on Ballardian:

+ Postcards from Barcelona
+ Rick McGrath’s Letter from Barcelona: The Exquisite Corpse, An Autopsy of the New Millennium
+ Ballardoscope: some attempts at approaching the writer as a visionary
+ J.G. Ballard: In the Raw
+ JGB exhibition opens tomorrow in Barcelona

Here are the opening paragraphs:

On Midsummer’s Eve a small circus visited the town in the West Country where I was spending my holiday. Three days earlier the large travelling fair which always came to the town in the summer, equipped with a ferris wheel, merry-go-rounds and dozens of booths and shooting galleries, had taken up its usual site on the open common in the centre of the town, and this second arrival was forced to pitch its camp on the waste ground beyond the warehouses along the river.

At dusk, when I strolled through the town, the ferris wheel was revolving above the coloured lights, and people were riding the carousels and walking arm in arm along the cobbled roads that surrounded the common. Away from this hubbub of noise the streets down to the river were almost deserted, and I was glad to walk alone through the shadows past the boarded shopfronts. Midsummer’s Eve seemed to me a time for reflection as much as for celebration, for a careful watch on the shifting movements of nature.

J.G. Ballard, ‘The Recognition’ (1967).

Martin Amis and JG Ballard
Wednesday 30 January 2008 21:45-22:30 (Radio 3)

Philip Dodd meets two of the most important voices in contemporary British writing: Martin Amis and JG Ballard, who are both publishing new works of non-fiction. Philip talks to Amis about his collection The Second Plane which brings together his controversial and outspoken essays on 9/11 and the geopolitics of the War on Terror. JG Ballard discusses his new exploration of his own life and times – starting in pre-war Shanghai, where he was born.

Next Sunday 4pm on BBC Radio 4 ‘Open Book’:

“Will Self offers a guide to the work of one of his favourite writers, visionary novelist JG Ballard.” (quote taken from radiotimes.com)

Ballardian fave Cousin Silas mentioned in our recent interview that he had a new CD on the way:

SS: As far as your compositional style goes, were you inspired in any way by Ballard’s experimental techniques, for example, the cut-up nature of Atrocity, or the collages and fake ads he produced around the same time?

CS: I have done the odd cut up, using a variety of sounds. I must be honest, though, I was probably thinking of Burroughs rather than Ballard, although I’ve never been too happy with the results. My new CD on Earthrid is a collaboration with Kevin Busby, recorded under the name Abominations of Yondo, named after a short story by Clark Ashton Smith. I used isolated and combined phrases from that story as inspiration when recording, and I guess that could be classed as a kind of cut up (although I left the ‘cutting up’ to Kevin!). However, I have often been accused of writing pieces which are too short. In my defence I have always maintained that these pieces say it all — any longer and it would lose its way. I guess the same could be said for the pieces in The Atrocity Exhibition: any longer and they wouldn’t be condensed novels. It wouldn’t be The Atrocity Exhibition!

The CD has just been released on Earthrid. You can download it as a free archive, or buy the CD and support the artist and label.

It’s divided into six channels: (1) J.G. Ballard Interviews; (2) J.G. Ballard Documentaries; (3) J.G. Ballard Adaptations; (4) J.G. Ballard’s Top Ten Science Fiction Films; (5) Ballardiana; and (6) Ballardian Sound Art/Music. Access them via these links or the players below.

For now I’ve been adding clips uploaded by other users that fall under the ‘Ballardian’ rubric. There are interviews with J.G. Ballard and most of the adaptations of his work, plus other objects like Chris Marker’s La Jetee and bits and pieces from Sinclair, Moorcock, Tarkovsky, Foxx, Burroughs and others in the orbit. I’ll soon be uploading artefacts of my own: more rare Ballard interviews, maybe some car crash test footage, cadavers, airports, news from the sun, architectural geegaws, etc. If anyone has suggestions for what to include, please be in touch. The only rule is that the subject of the artefact (or creator of the artefact) has to have been mentioned in a reasonably significant fashion on this site, or at least have been significantly overlooked. If you’d like to be notified of further updates and additions, please subscribe to the playlist of your choice.

Thanks to the YouTube community for the uploads.

J.G. BALLARD INTERVIEWS
Ballard interviews.

J.G. BALLARD DOCUMENTARIES
Ballard docos.

J.G. BALLARD ADAPTATIONS
Ballard adaptations including ‘making of’ docos.

J.G. BALLARD’S TOP TEN SCIENCE FICTION FILMS
JGB’s ten, as reported in the Independent newspaper, 2005.

BALLARDIANA
Filmic artefacts inspired by, sharing similar concerns with, or pointing to memes in Ballard’s work.

SOUND ART/MUSIC
Music and sound art artefacts inspired by or sharing similar concerns with Ballard’s work.

Speaking of thatspace, Cousin Silas, who recently unleashed volume 2 of his masterful, dark-ambient Ballard Landscape series, emails to inform me he has several unreleased and remixed bits from that and other projects over at his Myspace. There should be an interview with Cousin over here at Ballardian in the very near future.

Biography
Question: What is Super-Cannes?

+ Answer 1: A sexy town located in the South of France.
+ Answer 2: The name of a novel by J.G. Ballard about Western society’s ever increasing appetite for thrills.
+ Answer 3: A rock band in Boston playing music that involves hip-hop grooves colliding with space, lots of textures, live improvisation and looping to create a musical mix of rawness and lushness — something that swings your hips while your head might be tripping.”

Ballardiana, Part 1
Via Podcast Pickle, I found a rendition of ‘The Ballad of J.G. Ballard’, Kevin Patrick Mahoney’s ‘iconoclastic homage to the great author’:

Oh Jim,
We can’t get enough of him
In Empire of the Sun
He was on the run
Captured by the Japanese
For far more than a year and a day.

Oh Jim,
Please tell me your secret:
How did you become the pet
Of so many women?
Was it their kindness?
Or just sheer blindness?

Oh Jim,
Please invite me to your next bash.
We could have a car crash
Together. (I’ve always seen the erotic potential of that).

Jim,
Please let me visit your Concrete Island
It’s much better than Thailand
At this time of year.
Please let me be the one
To share your Empire of the Sun.”

—————————————————————————-
Kevin Patrick Mahoney, ‘The Ballad of J.G. Ballard’.
—————————————————————————-

Cheeky bugger… Here’s the audio version, and here’s the ‘video’ version with suitably dodgy, compressed graphics.

Mahoney’s half pisstake/half tribute highlights the cliches of Ballard’s public image, the hypercompressed Shanghai-Shepperton-Empire-Crash timeline perpetuated by the media in every single JGB profile, a profile that, as I’ve argued before, erects a serious barrier to a deeper understanding of the man’s work. But Mahoney’s good for mild laughs, too: the delivery puts me in mind of the sketch in (the largely mediocre) Little Britain where Ray McCooney is loath to divulge the secret of his tomato soup to his guests.

Ballardiana, Part 2
Playing a straighter bat, Rick McGrath reports that in 1988, “Canada’s national radio corporation broadcast a series of 30-minute radio dramas, based on seven short stories of JG Ballard, for its long-running program, “The Vanishing Point”. The series was produced by Bill Lane in the CBC’s Toronto studios. … Lauded at the time, these forgotten gems explore the dramatic aspects of JGB’s early short stories within an auditory medium.”

Now, the indefatigable Rick has encoded all seven into mp3 format: ‘A Question of Re-entry’, ‘The Dead Astronaut’, ‘The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D’, ‘Low Flying Aircraft’, ‘News From The Sun’, ‘Having A Wonderful Time’ and ‘Escapement’.

These are perfect for whacking into the iPod and cruising your local shopping mall, airport terminal, satellite array, local high street, or motorway underpass (or prisoner-of-war internment camp, Mr Mahoney) for true heightened consciousness and unpeeling of the layers of deep time buried under the surface. There’s some interesting, dark-ambient sound design there, too. I still reckon it would be interesting to hear a British voice utter Ballard’s dialogue, not because I’m an Anglophile, but for reasons I’ve already banged on about elsewhere: there’s a statement buried somewhere that Ballard’s making about Britain, however obliquely. It’s a bit like hearing Barry Nelson, the first man to play James Bond, threaten Peter Lorre’s Le Chiffre in his American voice. But to be fair, as Ballard’s career progressed, his characters and situations became more and more ‘placeless’, flattened cyphers able to be slotted into Western society interchangeably. Still, I reckon Chris Petit would argue the toss on this one, but that entire argument is for another post…

Ballardiana, Part 3
Finally, I previously posted about ‘Shepperton’s Oracle’, the film that French filmmaker Thomas Cazals was making about Ballard, and about Shepperton. It sounded a hybrid doco/faction type deal, but from this latest news appears to be mostly fiction/faction. It sounds intriguing, and should be online around February.

This is highly recommended, and goes a long way towards answering the questions, Paul, Mike and I posed at the end of the Mike Ryan interview…I hope to post a more indepth review when I’ve had a more indepth listen, but right now I can tell you I’m reminded of Alan Lamb’s telegraph-wire field recordings crossed with Edward Artemiev’s re-recorded Tarkovsky soundtracks…allied to the Ballardian imagery evoked by the track listings and it’s a powerful brew.

BALLARD LANDSCAPES
Empty Airport
Reservoir Outlet Shaft
Manhole 66
The Crystal Jungle
The Death Of Marilyn Monroe
Submarine Pens
Observation (Day 7) – Dealey Plaza
Abandoned Paddy Fields
Inland Lagoon
High Rise Isolation
Process Of Subliminal Decay
Track 12 (The Kiss)
Bikini Atoll
Isolation In Suburbia
Flight Over Abandoned Village