J.G. Ballard in front of Paul Delvaux’s ‘The Violation’ (as reproduced by Brigid Marlin). Photographer unknown.

Interview by Andrew Bishop.

Ballardian presents Andrew Bishop’s previously unpublished interview with artist Brigid Marlin, who created for Ballard two of the more enduring symbols of his career: reproductions of lost paintings by Paul Delvaux, which adorned his Shepperton home and formed beguiling conversation pieces for many a visiting interviewer. Ballard was frequently photographed in front of Marlin’s Delvaux recreations, and Delvaux’s art was referenced in Ballard’s novels and short stories, representing for him the blasted environment of his boyhood Shanghai, ‘a bizarre external landscape propelled by large psychic forces’. In this interview, Marlin expounds on her work, on Delvaux and on the surrealist movement, and offers her impressions of Ballard’s life and work, thereby filling in the background behind one of the most persistent elements in Ballardian mythology: those ever-present Delvauxs.

The interview was conducted on 8/6/10 in Berkhamsted, shortly after Marlin had met with both Iain Sinclair, conducting research for his book Ghost Milk, which features an exegesis of Ballardian mythology, and John Baxter, researching his Ballard biography The Inner Man. Here, Marlin initially seems preoccupied with Ballard ‘the myth’, perhaps unsurprisingly after submitting to Sinclair’s method and the somewhat more controversial technique of Baxter. When The Inner Man was published in 2011, it drew widespread condemnation from reviewers and Ballard’s immediate family, principally for its distortion and exaggeration of the word of secondary sources.

Reading this interview after Baxter’s biography, it seems that Marlin’s reminiscences suffered that same fate. Rather than the sniping, gossipy tone generated by Baxter’s selective paraphrasing of her words, in fact her ambivalent feelings about Ballard’s legacy reveals genuine admiration for his writing and a touching fondness for Ballard ‘the man’, nonetheless tinged by her strict condemnation of his worldview, which stems from her deeply held spiritual beliefs.

For Ballard’s written appreciation of Marlin and Delvaux, see here. [SS]

From Andrew Bishop: thanks to David Pringle for help with the preparation of this interview.

The art of Brigid Marlin describes a visionary world of almost unlimited dimensions and self-sufficiency. Fifteen years ago, when I first saw The Rod, one of her most ambitious paintings, reproduced in a magazine, I was so impressed by its imaginative sweep that I sent an enthusiastic letter of appreciation to her, the only fan letter I have ever sent to a painter. The sense of a clearly realised poetic universe, in which every detail, however modest, was accorded equal attention, was what most gripped my imagination.

J.G. Ballard, Brigid Marlin: An Appreciation (2005).

LEFT: Brigid Marlin. Photo via the artist.

ANDREW BISHOP: There has been quite a lot of interest in Ballard in the past week or so.

BRIGID MARLIN: Since he died there’s been a huge amount written in the press and, to my surprise, two professional journalists requested me. John Baxter is a journalist and film critic who is actually writing a biography of J.G. Ballard [since published, controversially, as The Inner Man]. The other one, Iain Sinclair, writes poetry and other books and he is writing a sort of poetic version of Ballard.

Ballard wrote a testimonial piece praising your paintings.

Well, shall I just tell you how we met and do a chronological thing? Because it all evolved. The first thing that happened is I have a dwarf friend who actually just died, poor fellow. About four feet two inches, or something. He was called Richard [Jones] and in fact he was a film actor. He was the Mad Hatter in the Alice in Wonderland film [Dreamchild, 1985], and so on. Anyhow, he was an avid science fiction reader, and I never cared for science fiction. But I did a painting called The Rod, and when Richard saw that he said, ‘Listen, you’ve got to submit that to the Science Fiction Monthly competition. They’re having a huge competition of visions of the future.’ So I sent it off and Richard took a terrific interest.

The Rod (1973) by Brigid Marlin.

I started getting fan mail because I won the competition. I treated Richard to a Japanese dinner with a few other friends to celebrate the fact that I won. I would never have gotten the money if not for Richard. He said, ‘Have you got any fan letters?’ I showed him all these and he said, ‘My god, you’ve got one from J.G. Ballard!’ I said ‘Who?’ and he said, ‘He’s only the best science fiction writer there is. You write him back and thank him for his letter’ – which I hadn’t been doing. So I wrote him back and thanked him for his letter and said, ‘I believe you’re a wonderful science fiction writer.’ He then wrote a very nice thing about my work – a really nice appreciation, and then said, ‘If you ever have a show in London, please invite me. I’d like to see more of your work.’ I put the letter in a safe place and couldn’t find it for about ten years.

Then we were having a show in London and there was a bag of old correspondence. I sifted through it, and there was J.G. Ballard’s letter. I thought ‘What a fool I’ve been, I should have contacted him ages ago.’ So I wrote him and I said we’re having this show. He phoned me and asked when I’d be there. We liked each other right away. He wrote me afterwards asking if he could commission me to recreate a painting by Paul Delvaux that had been destroyed in the war ['The Violation', aka 'The Rape']. I’ve never liked Delvaux because he mixes black with other colours and makes a grey mess. His colours are terrible. He puts skeletons in his work. His women look like cows, they look like sex blow-up dollies. They look dreadful. But I didn’t like to say ‘no’.

‘The Conversation’ (1944) by Paul Delvaux.

His tastes leaned particularly towards the experimental and bizarre, and Kerans often wondered how far his personality and its strange internal perspectives had been carried forward into his granddaughter. Over the mantelpiece was a huge painting by the early 20th-century Surrealist, Delvaux, in which ashen-faced women danced naked to the waist with dandified skeletons in tuxedos against a spectral bonelike landscape.

Kerans threw her a mock salute and strolled over to look at the painting by Ernst at the far end of the lounge, while Bodkin gazed down at the jungle through the window. More and more the two scenes were coming to resemble each other, and in turn the third nightscape each of them carried within his mind. They never discussed their dreams, the common zone of twilight where they moved at night like the phantoms in the Delvaux painting.

J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World (1962).

I changed the colours because he only had a tiny little black and white thing, and he wanted it full size, so I had to enlarge from this to that. I did it all, because that was the one picture of Delvaux’s that I liked. It was just the nudes and the sky and fields. It was easy to guess the colours of those, and I left out the black. So it looked actually very nice. It’s a much nicer picture than Delvaux’s would have been. Then he wanted another done ['The Mirror'], and this was a particularly difficult one to do and boring with quite ugly wallpaper. The women weren’t well drawn. The clothes – the folds looked ridiculous, like corrugated paper. I suddenly had a brainwave. I said, ‘I’ll do this picture for you for the usual money, but you have to sit for me.’ He said, ‘What!’ ‘You have to agree to me doing your portrait.’ ‘No, I don’t sit for portraits.’ ‘Fine, I don’t do the picture.’ ‘You can have a lot more money!’ ‘No, you’ve got to sit.’ He finally rang me up and said, ‘Alright, when do I have to sit?’ I said ‘You sound like you have to go to the dentist,’ and he said, ‘Seems to me like it is going to the dentist. You don’t know what a recluse I am. I never go out, I never leave.’ I was very unsympathetic. He came over and sat down, and then got up and moved around.

Portrait of J.G. Ballard (1987) by Brigid Marlin.

It was like trying to paint a caged animal. All the time I was trying to paint him he was supposed to be sitting still. He wouldn’t stay in his chair, and his mind wouldn’t stay still. All the time he was sitting there and I was trying to paint, his mind was going all the time. ‘When did you start painting? How did you learn? Where did you start? Show me some work you’ve done!’ I was flattered, so I got the work from art school. He said, ‘That’s when you were older, show me some early work.’ I got these tiny little books I did when I was about six and showed them to him. They were not bad, you see. He looked at them and he gave up. He said, ‘You were born with it.’

In many ways, my novels and short stories are a series of described paintings. Had I had the technical ability, I would have become a painter. I had just enough skill, draughtsmanship, as a boy to lead me to think that I could become a painter. I never had the flair. I did have a certain flair for writing, so I became a writer. I very much see my novels and short stories as I write.

J.G. Ballard, as interviewed by Lynne Fox, from J.G. Ballard: Conversations (ed. V. Vale, RE/Search Publications, 2005).

Behind it all was this perfect wish. He really wanted to be a painter. It was very strong in him. I said I would give him lessons, I’m a good teacher. We sat together at the table with an apple and a glass of water. ‘Come on, here’s a pencil. Just draw it and I’ll help you. I’ll correct it, but you have to draw it.’ He was very funny, he did a ‘C’. That’s the only mark he made on that page. He did it like he was trying to steal something, or as if he was electrocuted by the page. He was so frightened. Then he said, ‘Listen, I have an idea. Why don’t you teach me by telephone?’ [Laughs] It was grotesque, the idea of teaching anyone by telephone.

Ballard in front of Delvaux’s ‘The Mirror’ (as reproduced by Brigid Marlin). Photo by David Levinson.

Ballard was a very strange man. He lived in this small house. He started writing downstairs first. And then in only one room. And finally in one half of the room. And then only in the corner of one half of the room. It was getting worse. And the didn’t clean his house, ever. He said, ‘After the first three years it doesn’t get any dirtier.’ It was really funny. He criticised the portrait all the time. He didn’t give much of himself, so it was extremely difficult to extract him. The fact was all the time I was trying to paint Ballard he was trying to write me. In other words, we were each trying to suck the other one into our own fantasy worlds. I was trying to do a surrealist one of him and he wouldn’t be sucked in. At the same time he was trying to write me in one of his bloody books, and I wouldn’t be sucked in. The two of us were at an impasse. It was very funny. The thing that really burned me up was he then published an article about the Delvaux pictures saying that he felt he’d done them [see quote at the end of the interview]. I thought, ‘Grr. You did not do it. I did it, and it was hard work!’

Ballard visited your studio as you painted the Delvaux reproductions.

There was quite a funny moment. The first one I didn’t mind doing because it was quite easy. It was just a landscape with these doll-like women in it. I enjoyed cheating Delvaux of his black, making beautiful colour instead.

What did he think of that?

He stood there. My heart was beating, because the £500 was important to me at the time. I wasn’t very rich. He started swearing. He said something like, ‘Jesus Christ!’ I thought, ‘Oh my god, he hates them.’ I looked at him in consternation, and he said, ‘How did you do it? It’s amazing!’

Ballard and Delvaux/Marlin’s ‘The Mirror’. Photographer unknown.

Did you ever visit his house?

No. People were never invited. Even people who really knew him well, like Iain Sinclair. He would always be at the door waiting if he couldn’t drive. They were never invited in. I never even attempted to be invited in. From his own admission, it was going to be quite dirty and unattractive.

He said that a house can be cleaned in ten minutes if you don’t make a fetish out of it.

From what he was saying to me he didn’t clean his house for ten minutes. He didn’t clean anything. But I’ve been told that’s a myth he liked to create. I remember something he wrote somewhere about how he and his little family would go and visit people with their beautiful houses and then they would flee back to their little dirty nest in wherever they were.

Ballard and Delvaux/Marlin’s ‘The Violation’. Photographer unknown.

Did he ever try to paint at home?

Yes, I heard this. Iain Sinclair said that it was very funny because he did some bad sculpture. He wanted to paint like Salvador Dali. He wanted the detail. This is why he was so enraged. He couldn’t get the detail. He used to lean over me when I was trying to paint and he’d say, ‘You’ve got this wrong’, and I’d say, ‘I’ve just started.’ He said, ‘I know I’m a Mr Buttinsky, my children are always complaining.’

One thing I noticed about his face as I was painting him: it was very feminine, because he had to be a mother. He was actually writing his next novel. He brought it for me so I could do a painting of the manuscript. He always wrote longhand, because he wasn’t inspired by machinery. A very funny man.

I asked him if he would help the society [Society for Art of Imagination], but he was a recluse. He said that if I produced a book of my work he’d write a foreword. That’s pretty nice.

Do you think he would have been a good painter?

That reminds me of Pride and Prejudice: ‘If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient.’ Ballard would not have been a good painter because he couldn’t even make himself draw an apple. As far as I’m concerned, he is not a painter. His skill was with words. Everything about him showed that. He had an enormous head full of thoughts. He wrote things almost before he could read. He was brilliant, and could express himself perfectly well in words. He didn’t need to paint, and he couldn’t do it. That maddened him.

I think Ballard had a sense of power. He was a sort of Napoleon. I used to dig at him a little. He would say that he was unaffected by his fame. And I’d say, ‘Oh yes, you’re completely humble, aren’t you!’

Ballard and Delvaux/Marlin’s ‘The Mirror’. Photographer unknown.

‘The Echo’ (1943) by Paul Delvaux.

In the students’ gallery hung the fading reproductions of a dozen schools of painting, for the most part images of worlds without meaning. However, grouped together in a small alcove Halliday found the surrealists Delvaux, Chirico and Ernst. These strange landscapes, inspired by dreams that his own could no longer echo, filled Halliday with a profound sense of nostalgia. One above all, Delvaux’s ‘The Echo’, which depicted a naked Junoesque woman walking among immaculate ruins under a midnight sky, reminded him of his own recurrent fantasy. The infinite longing contained in the picture, the synthetic time created by the receding images of the woman, belonged to the landscape of his unseen night.

J.G. Ballard, ‘The Day of Forever’ (1967).

Ballard said that he mistook you for a new generation surrealist.

What he didn’t know was The Rod wasn’t just a random painting. It’s about a spiritual journey, and Ballard wouldn’t know a spiritual journey if he fell over it in the dark.

You say on your website that The Rod can be interpreted as a prediction of the first Gulf war.

That’s true, it can. But that didn’t interest me so much. I’d come to a crossroads in life. I’d come to the end of ordinary living. My son had been diagnosed as schizophrenic and I couldn’t go on living at an ordinary level. There are times when you either have to go down or up. You can’t go on your ordinary way, because your son is dreadfully ill. In fact he died. I realised the only way out was upward.

I tried to find help. In the Catholic church everyone seemed to be reading out from the Catechism instead of offering me some real help. So I went around the world. That’s what my book [From East to West: Awakening to a Spiritual Search, 1989] is about, trying to find an answer to these questions. Why should my son be born to a life of suffering? That’s what The Rod is about.

There’s a person in a great stress, and there’s a desert of unknowing behind her. Beyond that, on a higher level, is a landscape with an ocean. Water means truth, but you won’t find it on an ordinary level. You have to make the journey and we can’t raise ourselves up; something higher than ourselves calls us. If we’re lucky we’re drawn up. It’s not our right, we have to earn it. You have to set out on the journey, and it’s the only worthwhile thing to do in your life.

I learned to cope, and I got through those seven dreadful years. Benny first attempted suicide when he was fourteen. He tried many times to kill himself, and at 21 he died. It was hard. When I met Ballard, Benny had just died. Ballard was full of unsorted-out complexes. He’d seen too much as a little boy, his parents gave him no direction, no feeling of anything. He escaped from this strange world we live in. He was a good father to his children, but I think he took refuge in having as many women as he could. Let’s say he grabbed at life’s pleasures greedily rather than trying to lift himself. It was one of the things we argued over. I was divorced but I wasn’t going to be promiscuous. He was a naughty man. We had a few ding-dong battles, but we were friends. I liked him, after all.

Paul Delvaux. Photographer unknown.

The aircraft had vanished, disappearing across the desert. Franklin drove along the Strip, turning in and out of the hotel forecourts. In an empty car park he saw one of the ghosts of the twilight, a middle-aged man in a shabby tuxedo, some retired croupier or cardiologist returning to these dreaming hulks. Caught in mid-thought, he stared sightlessly at a dead neon sign. Not far away, a strong-hipped young woman stood among the dusty pool-furniture, her statuesque figure transformed by the fugue into that of a Delvaux muse.

J.G. Ballard, ‘News from the Sun’ (1981).

‘The Sleeping City’ (1938) by Paul Delvaux.

During that week, Anne Godwin did her best to help Sheppard construct his ‘machine’. All day she submitted to the Polaroid camera, to the films of her body which Sheppard projected on to the wall above the bed, to the endless pornographic positions in which she arranged her thighs and pubis. Sheppard gazed for hours through his stop-frame focus, as if he would find among these images an anatomical door, one of the keys in a combination whose other tumblers were the Marey chronograms, the surrealist paintings and the drained swimming pool in the ever-brighter sunlight outside. In the evenings Sheppard would take her out into the dusk and pose her beside the empty pool, naked from the waist, a dream-woman in a Delvaux landscape.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (1982).

Do you see any link between your work and surrealism, as Ballard did?

What I became interested in above all is meaning. The whole point about surrealism is that they tried to abolish meaning. At the very root we differ. I’m not a surrealist. I’m hoping I developed something that hadn’t been developed before. Each bit of my life is expressed by a painting. Maybe it could be called ‘visionary’.

What are your influences?

Oh, that’s easy. I began with being taught at fifteen by the last druid in Ireland. Have you seen the Book of Kells? All the letters swirl, and all my deserts do this swirling. Secondly, Ernst Fuchs. He taught me this special technique, that was my next big influence. And when I was a very small girl the Victorian illustrations of Arthur Rackham. Brilliant guy. Those are my three painting gods.

‘The Tarot‘ by Brigid Marlin.

While we were searching for that misplaced painting in your studio I saw a big round painting, The Tarot.

Yes, that’s my son Desmond asking his fortune, and those are the tarot cards.

It reminded me of Central and South American mural art.

Yeah. There’s a certain thread there. I can see that.

Your paintings seem to focus on figures. Usually young people, young women.

Well, actually, I’m doing an old guy playing the harp right now. One of the reasons is you love your children and you want to paint them. Secondly, they tend to represent a stage which you already know. The painter in one is always a child. In that sense you never grow up as an artist, because your child is still alive.

You seem to have painted lots of distorted churches.

I wouldn’t call it ‘distorted’. They are distorted, of course, but the word sounds cruel. I painted transformed churches.

That’s better.

Watch your language, young man. I’ll give you a book [Visions of Venice, 1999] that explains exactly what The Flight of the Churches means, and how I did it. The Flight of the Churches was caused by me feeling a grief that the old order is changing, the old certainties are gone. Even though I myself experienced that I had to find my own spiritual path and that the Catholic church was not an answer. Nevertheless it was a grief to me to see the falling away of the old traditional beliefs. They gave a meaning, a kind of ceremony. ‘The ceremony of innocence is drowned’, as Yeats would say.

Now we live in a world with few graces. People are burned and put into little teapots. Weddings are in Las Vegas with god knows what. There’s no reverence. I’m not saying I ever revered the queen, but it was a rather lovely thing to see old men take off their hats and stand. Kind of beautiful. At schools the children reverenced and thanked the teachers. That’s gone, and instead everyone’s defiant.

‘The Flight of the Churches‘ by Brigid Marlin.

I think that television and so on has a lot to answer for. It comes like this: a young reporter or programmer wants to make his name. ‘How do I make my name? I shock people, then I’m in the headlines. Let’s shock people, it doesn’t matter how it affects children. The important thing is I get famous.’ So he shocks. The next one comes along: ‘He got famous, let me shock!’ They’re going on and on and they don’t see the damage. This sort of oily viscous pseudo-civilisation is seeping in, and the ceremony of innocence is drowned again. Then they say, ‘How can this be? Little children of ten are raping little girls. How on earth did they get the idea?’ They don’t even look at their own television set. What is it? Sex, sex, sex. And not loving sex. All the people who wanted to shock, they’ve all gone on television. I think it’s very sad. They don’t know what they’ve thrown out. Mary Whitehouse was very funny and we all made fun of her, but what’s the result? There’s absolutely no purpose or meaning in anything, because the people who believe in God and believe in meaning are all squashed down by these loud sophisticated non-believing people. So I actually don’t approve of Ballard. No, I don’t.

He said we should watch three or four hours of TV a day.

Well, look at the effect it had on him. I rest my case.

Your painting The Drowned Cathedral seems to be thematically close to one of Ballard’s novels.

Yes — The Drowned World. It’s quite funny, because it came from another source. There’s a symphony called The Drowned Cathedral by Debussy. Because of the wickedness of some people the cathedral was drowned, but every hundred years it comes up. You can hear the music coming up. That’s much more like it, because what I do always has a meaning. I’m not at all influenced by Ballard.

‘The Drowned Cathedral‘ by Brigid Marlin.

The Drowned World (1962) by J.G. Ballard. Dragon’s Dream edition (1981).

Have you read many of his books?

I happened on Crash, of all things. Ballard was so upset that I read that. For goodness sake, why did he write it if he didn’t want me to read it? He said, ‘Don’t read that, read The Unlimited Dream Company.’ I thought that was just as bad. A man eats a little girl for breakfast. I didn’t think that was wonderful, either. He seemed to think it was his great spiritual book. He had no judgement. I really loved his one great book, Empire of the Sun. That was magnificent, a classic. It’s an extraordinary book. It had poetry, realism. It was marvellous.

What did you think of Crash?

He told me that he wrote Crash because he wasn’t earning enough money with his ordinary science fiction and he had to feed the children. He deliberately wrote a pornographic novel. That’s a true story!

I haven’t heard it told like that before!

Well, that’s what he said. Whether he was lying or not I don’t know.

Was that side of him obvious to you?

One of the reporters [presumably - and revealingly! - John Baxter. SS] was a bit envious for his attraction for women. He said, ‘Was he attractive to women?’ Yes, curiously enough. He had the most marvellous voice. He could have been a great singer if he hadn’t been completely unmusical and tone deaf. This voice was like a barrel organ. It was mellifluous. He would be interested in you and this voice would wrap you round. It had a kind of caressing quality. I think women fell like ninepins. He had a curious animal magnetism. He wasn’t handsome – you wouldn’t rush towards him because he was so beautiful or alluring. But there was a profound animal magnetism. It was like being in the presence of a temporarily tame tiger.

He wrote a book called The Kindness of Women.

Yes he did. Another thing that was annoying was that he would take friend’s names and pop them in in the most nasty places. I know other people who were really annoyed to find their names used.

He did that to you!

He used my spelling of my name in The Kindness of Women. I thought, ‘the cruelty of men!’ Sod the kindness of women. I thought that was dreadful. People would assume all kinds of things. The nerve!

‘Prewar and wartime Shanghai was a huge Surrealist landscape,’ says Ballard, waving a hand at the Delvaux. ‘It was a time of sudden changes; regimes changed all the time. Atlanta was burning in a poster for Gone With the Wind, while just beyond, real fires tore through the city. There was a complete transformation of everything, complete unpredictability, while formal life went on, just as in Bunuel’s films or Delvaux’s paintings – a bizarre external landscape propelled by large psychic forces.’

J.G. Ballard, quoted in Luc Sante, ‘Tales From the Dark Side’. New York Times Review of Books, September 9 1990.

Ballard and Delvaux/Marlin’s ‘The Mirror’. Photographer unknown.

Ballard was often photographed standing in front of one of your Delvaux reproductions.

I was very touched by that, and even more touched when they had a show in Barcelona. They wanted the painting of the woman looking at herself in the mirror naked, the Delvaux I didn’t like. Ballard said it was the most precious possession he had, and he wouldn’t lend it. They asked me to recreate it again. That bloody wallpaper!

I said, ‘Okay, but you’ll have to pay me £2500.’ I didn’t charge Ballard that. I only charged £500, before I found out how rich he was. I thought writers were poor. I didn’t know he’d just sold the rights of his book to Steven Spielberg. If I’d known that I would have charged a hell of a lot more. The Spanish people didn’t want to spend that much, but they really wanted the picture, so they bought it. I had to do the bloody thing again.

You had a woman in clothes looking at herself in the mirror, but the reflection is naked. Beyond that there’s a garden. This woman in the house is surrounded by dingy wallpaper that’s peeling off. The house is so ugly. I was thinking it’s really Ballard himself. You remember, inside every man is a woman. This is inner spirit. He was living in this awful house that he said himself was ugly and dirty. Things peeling off. And he’s looking at himself in the mirror, as it were, and that’s the bit he can’t get at, because he can’t bear to bare himself. He’s always surrounded by his own complex nature. He looks in this mirror and there’s a woman calmly bared.

That’s the picture he liked most, but the other was better. He liked this one because this claustrophobic situation is him looking out at the world. He sees reflected back a hope of the fields beyond, and this woman who is able to bare herself. I feel there was some significance there.

Marlin’s second reproduction of Delvaux’s ‘The Mirror’, commissioned for An Autopsy of the New Millennium, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), 2008. Photo by Rick McGrath.

Did you go to Barcelona for the show?

I hated that picture and I wasn’t proud of doing it. I didn’t want to go and look at it again.

They still have it?

Don’t ask. They bought it. Whatever they do with it is their business.

Do you see your portraits as part of the same body as your visionary works?

This has been a dichotomy though my life. The tussle between realism and imaginative art. I’ll just do one, and then do the other, and not bother my head about whether they’re different or not. It gradually evolved that they come together. My visionary paintings get realistic, and my portraits get surrealistic. They’re joining up as I go on.

Ballard and Delvaux/Marlin’s ‘The Violation’. Photo by Richard Croft.

There was a rumour that Ballard was painted by Lucian Freud.

After I finished painting him he could have done anything and I wouldn’t know. But from the years that I painted him, he said he hated it and would never sit for anyone again. We were very good friends when we were doing the picture, but after that I didn’t see him. He was pretty occupied, and very involved with his own work. He was obsessional about his writing.

He was obsessed with all sorts of things.

He was a very obsessed man, yes. A very curious man. I’m glad I met him. I’ll tell you what, I knew Stanley Kubrick. Ballard and Kubrick had certain things in common. Obsessiveness is one. And also a touch of genius in both. They weren’t unlike. Ballard was fascinated by Kubrick, but I don’t think Kubrick knew of Ballard’s existence.

They never met, then?

I don’t think so.

You said Ballard was very unusual. Are there any other memories you want to share?

He said something very funny. Well, the first bit isn’t funny. He was grieving for his wife and then suddenly he went to a party. It was the sixties and he got laid, so to speak. He said he suddenly realised this rush of relief, and that had been part of the problem. After that he said the sky was the limit…

Ballard and Delvaux/Marlin’s ‘The Violation’. Photo by David Levinson.

J.G. BALLARD: I’ve always been a great admirer of the Belgium surrealist Paul Delvaux, and about six or seven years ago, thanks to Empire of the Sun [the film of Ballard's novel], I had a little spare cash. My first thought was to buy a Delvaux, but I discovered, sadly, that his prices had moved into the stratosphere. Anything up to a million pounds each.

So it then occurred to me that, rather than try to buy an existing Delvaux, what I would do was to pay an artist to reconstruct two Delvaux paintings which were destroyed during the Second World War, from the black-and-white photographs that exist of them. And that I did.

I heard of an American artist, Brigid Marlin, and I asked her, ‘Would you be prepared to accept a commission to paint these, to reconstruct these lost paintings?’ She agreed, and they’re now my proudest possession.

The originals of the two paintings were destroyed in London during the Blitz in 1940. Both were painted in 1936, and had obviously been brought to London by a British collector. Brigid, with a little interference from myself, had to choose the right colours for the paintings. Fortunately, Delvaux uses a limited palette – for instance, his buxom women tend to wear burgundy dresses – and we picked colours consonant with the colours in existing Delvaux paintings. So I think we’ve got it just about right.

One of the paintings is called The Violation and the other is called The Mirror. The Violation, I think, is my favourite. Its sort of a dream landscape populated by naked, or half-naked, women, who are beckoning towards the viewer, inviting him into their magical domain. Sitting in front of this painting, I feel that I am about to accept their invitation. I think that, in a way, I’ve already entered the painting and gone to live with these magnificent women.

Brigid Marlin was a very religious woman, and I think she thoroughly disapproved of the Surrealists and disapproved of my interest in them. I think she thought it was bad for my soul. So she offered to paint for me an exact copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Annunciation, which exists, of course, in the Uffizi art gallery in Florence. And Brigid said to me, ‘You could put it in your bedroom, Jim. You know, the first thing you see in the morning when you wake up.’

I was tempted. Then, a few years ago, I visited Florence and went to see the Annunciation. I found that the painting is about nine feet long by four feet deep. I thought, well, it might be a bit intimidating.

I’ve thought of having one or two more Delvauxs – lost Delvauxs – because I think it’s a nice idea to bring back to life paintings that have been destroyed. I would never sell my two Delvauxs, they’re much too precious. They’re probably more precious to me than a real Delvaux would be. In fact, I’m the sort of secondary creator of them. I mean, I almost feel that I painted them.

Ballard quoted in uncredited interview for the Independent, 29 January 1994.

‘Proposition Diurne (la Femme Au Miroi’; 1937) by Paul Delvaux.

Slideshow: The Art of Paul Delvaux (YouTube upload by shivabel). Music: ’1/2′ by Brian Eno.

Modelling and photography by Nicholas Cobb.

This was the first office building to be constructed at the business park, but after a bombastic overture the architecture that followed was late modernist in the most minimal and self-effacing way, a machine above all for thinking in.

J.G. Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Recently, London’s Royal Academy of Arts hosted the symposium Ballardian Architecture: Inner and Outer Space:

Acclaimed writer JG Ballard derived inspiration from aspects of the built environment that architectural convention and critics tend to overlook. His novels offer many insights into the flaws and consequences of the shopping centres, car parks, hotels, office towers and housing projects that make up so much of contemporary architectural endeavour. This forum traces several themes in Ballard’s literary analysis of the contemporary built environment, including the concept of spectacle and role of the media in contemporary society, and how “invisible literatures” such as scientific journals, technical manuals, pornography, advertising copy can be seen as a literary counterpart to pop art and the “brutalist” aesthetic of modernity.

Three longer papers are followed by a series of brief but powerful commentaries which each open up particular insights into Ballard’s work, and together explore how Ballard’s perceptions may challenge and inform contemporary architecture.

Film has now been posted online of each discussion, and we have reproduced the presentations below. You can also download mp3s of the talks.

The event was chaired by Jeremy Melvin. Speakers included John Gray, Nic Clear, David Cunningham, Nigel Coates, Matthew Taunton, Chris Hall, Joanne Murray, Dan Holdsworth, Tim Abrahams and Claire Walsh. Thank you to Static TV for supplying the footage.

..::: Previously on ballardian.com:

+ Re-Placing the Novel: Sinclair, Ballard and the Spaces of Literature, by David Cunningham
+ A Near Future: Nic Clear’s Tribute to JG Ballard
+ Stereoscopic Urbanism: JG Ballard and the Built Environment
+ ‘Architectures of the Near Future’: An Interview with Nic Clear
+ ‘Because we’re fucked’: Skinner vs Gray

Ballardian Architecture 1: John Gray

Ballardian Architecture 1 – John Gray from static tv on Vimeo.

John Gray, author and philosopher, identifies correspondences between Ballard’s work and Guy Debord’s notion of the spectacle, discussing certain ramifications for contemporary economic and social phenomena.

Ballardian Architecture 2: Nic Clear

Ballardian Architecture 2 – Nic Clear from static tv on Vimeo.

Nic Clear, architect and lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture, delivers a paper entitled ‘J.G. Ballard is an Enemy of the Architectural Profession’.

Ballardian Architecture 3: David Cunningham

Ballardian Architecture 3 – David Cunningham from static tv on Vimeo.

David Cunningham, University of Westminster, examines architectural aspects of Ballard’s prose, exploring corresponding tendencies in the writings of Iain Sinclair and W.G. Sebald.

Ballardian Architecture 4: Session 1 Discussion

Ballardian Architecture 4 – Session 1 Discussion from static tv on Vimeo.

Session 1 concludes with a discussion featuring speakers John Gray, David Cunningham and Nic Clear. The discussion is chaired by Jeremy Melvin, and features contributions from members of the audience.

Ballardian Architecture 5: Nigel Coates

Ballardian Architecture 5 – Nigel Coates from static tv on Vimeo.

Nigel Coates, architect and lecturer, discusses the influence of Ballard’s writings upon a number of his architectural projects, as well as reviewing work by some of his students at the Royal College of Art.

Ballardian Architecture 6: Matthew Taunton

Ballardian Architecture 6 – Matthew Taunton from static tv on Vimeo.

Matthew Taunton, author and academic, investigates Ballard’s 1960 short story ‘Chronopolis’, highlighting Ballard’s engagement with modernist urbanism and his response to Taylorism and Fordism.

Ballardian Architecture 7: Chris Hall

Ballardian Architecture 7 – Chris Hall from static tv on Vimeo.

Chris Hall, journalist and writer, analyses architectural aspects of Ballard’s short story ‘The Terminal Beach’.

Ballardian Architecture 8: Joanne Murray

Ballardian Architecture 8 – Joanne Murray from static tv on Vimeo.

Joanne Murray, lecturer and Birkbeck PhD candidate, discusses formal characteristics of Ballard’s art and writing in relation to New Brutalist architecture.

Ballardian Architecture 9: Dan Holdsworth

Ballardian Architecture 9 – Dan Holdsworth from static tv on Vimeo.

Dan Holdsworth, artist, discusses his photographs, highlighting architectural motifs and visual tendencies that reflect aspects in Ballard’s prose.

Ballardian Architecture 10: Tim Abrahams

Ballardian Architecture 10 – Tim Abrahams from static tv on Vimeo.

Tim Abrahams, journalist and Associate Editor of ‘Blueprint’ magazine, discusses Ballard’s Shanghai-set, semi-autobiographical novel ‘Empire of the Sun’ in relation to the Shanghai Expo 2010.

Ballardian Architecture 11: Session 2 Discussion

Ballardian Architecture 11 – Session 2 Discussion from static tv on Vimeo.

Session 2 concludes with a discussion featuring speakers Dan Holdsworth, Nigel Coates, Tim Abrahams, Chris Hall, Joanne Murray and Matthew Taunton. The discussion is chaired by Gavin Parkinson, and features contributions from members of the audience.

Ballardian Architecture 12: Claire Walsh

Ballardian Architecture 12 – Claire Walsh from static tv on Vimeo.

Claire Walsh, editor, researcher and J.G. Ballard’s partner, discusses Ballard’s life and interests in a presentation that closes the proceedings of the forum.

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

Rick McGrath’s Letter From London: The JG Ballard Memorial

All photography by Rick McGrath.

Sunday, November 15, 2009, 3:45pm, The Founders Pub, London.

Dear Simon,

Greetings from London! Hope all is well with you. I’ve just attended the long-anticipated JG Ballard Memorial celebration at the Tate Modern and now I’m catching my breath — and a few beers — at a nearby Thames-side pub with fellow Ballardians David Pringle, Mike Holliday, Vale, Marian Wallace and Gee Vaucher. We’re having a wonderful time — wish you were here.

Left: Toby Litt.

But let’s start at the beginning. We have time to order some Alsatian off the barbie. For the first two days in London I actually wondered if somebody’s god was sending us a message, as the elements did their best to batter us with the kind of weather that resembled a vicious blend of The Drowned World and The Wind From Nowhere. Running from doorway to doorway in search of a tube entrance, I kept stumbling through the usual detritus: soggy cigarette ends, broken umbrellas, empty condom packs. I kept wondering where JG might have visited to inspire The Drought. Certainly nowhere in the UK.

The day of the Memorial, however, broke bright and sunny and warm — a good sign and a fitting description of the events to follow.

The plan was for everyone to meet at the Tate Modern at 11am for an 11:30 start. I overtook a walking Toby Litt about a block away and together we made our way to the top floor of the Tate’s east wing where a substantial crowd had already gathered, spritzers in hand, strung out along a glass and steel corridor that emptied to a large anteroom with a commanding view of old London to the north and the high tech security guards of Canary Wharf to the east. I kept looking down to the Thames, though, hoping to see a bit of wing floating by from a light airplane. Not today. The venue might also have reminded some of Royal’s penthouse suite in High-Rise, but regardless of the number of people fighting their way up the stairs it was an appropriately Ballardian venue, made even more so by the Tate’s current show of “Pop Life: Art in a Material World”, featuring Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. Synchronicity? Perhaps.

Claire Walsh.

It was in this enormous space the 100 or so celebrants convened for the Memorial – tributes to The Man from JG’s family, friends, colleagues and admirers on what would have been his 79th birthday. The area was liquid with light and the format was a simple stage and microphone with flanking video screens. We sat in chairs that fanned in a wide arc along the length of the room. Our mistress of ceremonies was Bea Ballard, and after thanking the event’s organizers — her sister Fay, Claire Walsh and JG’s agent, Maggie Hanbury — away we went.

Our speakers — 13 in all, four reporting in by video — gave us a wonderfully Ballardian triad of facts, stories and myths about JG, and I couldn’t help thinking that once again Life is reflecting Art, unconsciously reproducing his Atrocity Exhibition structure of the public, the personal, and the symbolic. His work, his life, and his myth were the topics we wanted to hear about, and Simon, no one was disappointed.

Hold on. We’ve just had a discussion here at the pub, and Mike has suggested that this three-part structure may also be the most appropriate for this re-telling. Vale? Dave? You agree? OK. Planes do intersect.

THE PUBLIC

Will Self.

The celebration of JG’s work is also the celebration of his deep impact and the shock waves he sent through the literary community, emphasis on the later generations. And then there was that second wave of carpet bombing in the 1970s, the one that resonated with punk, with the abandoned, with RE/Search, with architecture, with the whole explosion of everyone’s quantification and eroticism of the “outer world of reality”. Unfortunately, Simon, the room held mostly literary types, so JG’s influence on the Ballardian arts was not addressed. Never mind. What was missing in breadth was made up in breath. “A touchstone of authentic genius,” Will Self intoned in his best British boom, “my single most important mentor and influence.” Will also commented about the length and consistency of JG’s oeuvre (pronounced as if it had 14 syllables), and how JG rarely left the road he most preferred, the one where he was caught in the wet headlights ironically waving a warning flag to a population already asleep at the wheel. He’s been at it, Will said, from his early changing planet stories to his last four novels of wacky westerners, that quartet or warnings about the dangers of boredom associated with living behind gated minds and programmed lives.

Not to be outdone, but still a tad cagey about it, Martin Amis beamed in on video to announce JG was “uniquely unique”, and spoke at length about JG’s art and his high place in the pantheon of imaginative writers. He was the only speaker who basically concentrated on JG the writer, rather than the man, and it was good to have him there even in video, although the final effect was a bit Intensive Care Unit, if you know what I mean.

JG’s life story has long been part of the public domain, and The Man did make an appearance, appearing onscreen in segments from the BBC documentary of his 1991 return to Shanghai. We see an obviously emotional JG standing in the yard of his family home on Amherst Avenue, wandering through the rooms, wondering about that second life he might have had if the war had not occurred and he stayed in the terrible city. Then the famous scene at Lunghua where he stands in the cramped room in G Block his family of four called home for three years. This is the closest thing to what I call home, JG told us, “I came close to an adult mind” here. We were treated to one other bit of Ballard before the day was over: the organizers had obtained a video of the What I Believe light display shown at Barcelona, and once again we were all reassured the power of the imagination can remake the world. In a way, that’s why we were there.

THE PERSONAL

Fay Ballard.

Here’s the heart of the matter. The angles between the walls. Let’s start with the daughters, Fay and Bea. Both talked exclusively about their relationship with ‘Daddy’ and their rather envious home life among the muck, movies and manuscripts. Fay, the artist, spoke first, and I was amazed and amused when she announced she would simply read out a series of thoughts, a verbal collage of unstructured memories. Perfect, I thought. It’ll be just like an Atrocity Exhibition list. And it was. Bea, also, offered up her remembrances, but took a more organized approach, mixing the humour with tales of darker times, such as the passing of her husband, and how she relied on JG’s help and experience from his own tragedy, and now even that support is gone. Sobering. And from Bea we have another inkling of JG’s self-deprecatory nature when he described himself as domestically “slattern”, when in reality the organisation level was probably at full Lunghua. “You can clean a house in five minutes if you don’t make a fetish of it”, JG once told her. I got the feeling the regimen was simply an extension of JG’s life: work hard, play hard.

Other Jimbits? JG never or rarely replaced or updated anything in the house. Nor did he throw much out, viz a peeled orange that had stood on the mantelpiece for 40 years. The daughters remember the clacking old typewriter and JG perched over it, speaking aloud the words he’s typing. Spending an entire summer naked in his back yard. Watching a tape of Double Indemnity together on TV, all the lights out, and talking about Civilization and Its Discontents. JG doing surrealist paintings! Constant encouragement for all their enthusiasms. Acceptance of a menagerie of pets, including Bea’s rat. Chinese dinners with — get this, Simon — lobster and noodles. A serious approach to education. Bear hugs. The unicycle. Trips to the movies after school. Ahh, memories.

Michael Moorcock.

Mike Moorcock stayed on this plane for his presentation, too, after he managed with some difficulty to negotiate passage to the stage with his crutches, and then actually alight it. Mike stayed Mike, fumbling thru masses of folded paper to find his notes, and then regaling us with stories of domesticity rather than literary appreciation and New Worlds gossip. It was very interesting to hear stories of JG’s early days, and nowadays Mike treasures most his memories of their times in restaurants, pubs and kitchens, wives at one end, Mike and Jim at the other, with all “forever arguing”. Mike had to put up with “cobblers” from his wife, JG with “you know that’s not true, Jim” from Mary. If you were eavesdropping you might think they were plotting the overthrow of SF, except nothing happened because no one could agree. Alpha males, no? When Mary died Mike was there for JG, not only helping him out of his “closed down” fugue, but ultimately introducing him to Claire — “the best possible choice for Jim” — and finally becoming each other’s editors — “logrolling”.

By far the most famous of the name-brand personalities to attend was Steven Spielberg — I got to sit right beside him! Ha, just kidding. Steve and the two Empire producers also attended, albeit in pixilated form, and gave an obviously glowing, but also somewhat underwhelming appreciation of their brief time together. They liked having JG around to help in the “dimensionalizing” of the book, whatever that means, and, of course, they had lots of fun shooting him in the Shanghai party scene, even if that clip was cut.

Steve’s warm memories of JG were also shared by Crash producer Jeremy Thomas, who recalled JG was unusually generous to his film adaptors. His memories involved food and cars, the former being a meal he enjoyed with JG in Cannes after Crash was panned, or should we say skewered? The latter involves a ride he gave JG in a Ferrari, and The Man reaching out to fondle the dashboard leather. A fellow “petrol-head” Jeremy called JG, a secret connoisseur of car magazines, “the equivalent of centerfolds in Penthouse”. I think he’s confusing the author and character here a wee bit, no?

Thomas made way for the enthusiastic and entertaining V Vale, who flew in from his RE/Search offices in San Francisco to breathlessly relate his stories of how he first became aware of JG and his immense appreciation for The Man: “He’s the Shakespeare of the Twentieth Century, the bard of Shepperton”, Vale pronounced, much to the glee of the audience. I’m toasting Vale right now, Simon, for that great line! Dressed in his trademark all black (as he still is), Vale began by confessing he started off as a Burroughs man, and first became aware of JG in 1974 when someone told him Bill had written a preface to a book called Love & Napalm: Export USA. He read it and experienced a life-changing moment. In 1978 Vale interviewed both Bs for the 10th issue of his seminal punkpaper, Search and Destroy. He then realized he had “spent his entire life preparing to meet JG Ballard”, and Burroughs slipped to second place. Cheers, Vale, and thanks for pointing out the obvious to the locals.

Left: V. Vale. Right: Bea Ballard.

After Vale the long, lean and lanky body of Will Self undulated itself to the microphone, and Will amused us all by reading out a handwritten letter –- actually, two of JG’s ubiquitous postcards — he received 16 years ago. Will had written JG, tentatively suggesting he might be the man to write a screenplay for Crash. The reply was short on encouragement, but long on suggestions: JG recommended Will immediately go out and buy a book called The Black Box, which featured the final recordings of crews involved in aircraft crashes. “I’m thinking of writing a novel based entirely on black box recordings,” JG enthusiastically wrote, then suggested it might be a technique Will might try. “He was always suggesting story ideas to me,” Will intoned in a lazy, eccentric drawl oddly reminiscent of JG’s dulcet tones. “I knew it was because he had already thought about it and had abandoned the concept”. Much laughter. Will also revealed a bit of JG’s horror of all things literary and fête. When JG won a PEN Award four months before his passing, it was Will who accepted on JG’s behalf. When he delivered the award, JG took pains to warn Will about the “tweedy” side of the literary world — “It’s very good of them to give me the award but we must always remember” (here, Will’s voice drops conspiratorially) “they are the enemy”.

Left: Jonathan Waxman. Centre: Chris Petit. Right: James Ballard, Jnr.

A very interesting speaker was Professor Jonathan Waxman, JG’s oncologist, who movingly re-emphasized JG’s stoicism and bravery, usually expressed as endless concern for others rather than himself. I kept wondering if this Doctor was anything at all like the endless Doctors who passed through JG’s fiction. He didn’t look like he’d ever been to Africa, though. We learned of the closeness between JG and Claire near the end, although even these emotional moments were subject to JG’s wicked one-liners, such as the time Jonathan called up to see how things were going. “Claire’s been absolutely magnificent,” JG replied, “but then I have to say that, as she’s sitting opposite me cradling a Luger in her lap”. Or his description of chemotherapy being akin to “continually eating bad oysters”.

THE PSYCHE

Left: Bill Spencer.

This is where these planes intersect, and images are born. Or, in this case, reinforced, as blending the public and private in JG is essentially the basis of his creative technique. JG has said himself his greatest story is his life, and the image I think we all will carry forward is of a bifurcated genius — generous family man on the one hand, hard-drinking shockwave rider of a writer on the other. Unique, to paraphrase Amis. My takeaway image was the vid of JG at Lunghua, white hat, white suit, looking suspiciously like someone who firmly expects to see their 14-year-old self appear around a corner. When I got home I patted my brick from G Block.

And that was basically it for the tributes, although they might have gone on all afternoon given the guest list, which included Iain Sinclair, Chris Petit, Toby Litt, Tom Sutcliffe, Maggie Hanbury, Marian Wallace, Joan Bakewell, Solveig Nordlund, Peter York, and JG’s friend from his Cambridge days at the Copper Kettle, Bill Spencer, looking sharp in a hot pink bow tie. Yowsers!

Direct family members who were in attendance but didn’t speak included James Ballard, Jr. — who shares many physical similarities with JG — and JG’s sister Margaret.

Absent or unable to attend were Brian Aldiss, Emma Tennant from Bananas, Hilary Bailey, Martin Bax and Michael Foreman from Ambit, and academics such as Roger Luckhurst, Jeanette Baxter and you.

Left: Iain Sinclair.

What else did I find out during the informal chit-chat afterwards? A few items you may find interesting. Remember all those stories about JG taking his manuscripts out to his back yard and burning them after the book was published? I asked Bea Ballard about this, and she looked at me like I had been in the care of Dr Nathan. No, they haven’t been burned — the girls have all that stuff. Good news. Toby Litt was saying he’s heard the ICA is negotiating with the CCCB in Barcelona in an attempt to get the Autopsy exhibition in London. Their space is quite a bit less than the 90,000 square feet the CCCB lavished, so we’ll see what transpires. I was also approached by Claire Walsh and Gee Vaucher regarding another proposed Ballard exhibition the ladies are planning for a subterranean exhibition at Waterloo. So, perhaps things are picking up in the UK after all.

The memorial ended as these events normally do, Simon, with a sort of time trickle of people down to the remaining few — us, of course — followed by a vote to repair to the nearest bar to discuss the experience, which we’re now doing. Interestingly enough, all of us at the table agree the event was also a sort of Rubicon, a boundary we have now crossed which marks the end of mourning JG’s passing to celebrating his extraordinary life, his loving and generous personality, and, of course, his amazing legacy of work.

It was a helluva day. I’m glad I was there.

Cheers,
Rick.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ ‘What exactly is he trying to sell?’: J.G. Ballard’s Adventures in Advertising
+ ‘Like Alice in Wonderland’: Solveig Nordlund on J.G. Ballard
+ Rick McGrath’s Letter from Barcelona: The Exquisite Corpse, An Autopsy of the New Millennium
+ Review: Grave New World
+ It’s An Ad, Ad, Ad World
+ ‘Woefully Underconceptualised’: Rick McGrath on J.G. Ballard’s Cover Art

Michael Butterworth in the Savoy office, 1998 (photo by Ben Blackall).

Interview by Mike Holliday.

This is the first of a proposed 3-interview series. Parts 2 and 3, featuring David Britton and John Coulthart, will discuss Savoy’s musical, spoken word and visual/comics/graphics output. To coincide with this series, please enter the Savoy Books Microfiction competition! Win super-rare Savoy books, comic books and CDs by writing a short story of 100 words or less on ‘Savoyesque’ or ‘Ballardian’ themes. Details here.

Savoy Books, which bills itself as “England’s only truly alternative and autotelic publishing company”, was started by David Britton and Michael Butterworth in 1976. For more than 30 years, Savoy have published books based on the sole criterion of admiration for the content or the author, and their roster includes many writers who appeared alongside Ballard in the heady days of New Worlds magazine — Michael Moorcock, Harlan Ellison, Charles Platt, Samuel R. Delany, Langdon Jones, and M. John Harrison.

By 1980, Savoy were publishing almost 20 titles a year and would surely have been a good match as a publisher of Ballard, but alas it was not to be. Savoy had the bad luck to be based in Manchester, whose Chief Constable — ‘God’s Cop’, James Anderton — had the looks of a biblical prophet and was prone to righteous denunciation of what he saw as good, old fashioned sin. Helping to fund Savoy’s publishing were a string of bookshops, and these quickly became a target for Manchester’s Vice Squad, suffering more than fifty raids over a period of 20 years, during which time David Britton served two sentences in Strangeways prison for selling obscene publications. By 1981 the combined effect of the police raids and the collapse of a distribution agreement had forced Savoy’s publishing business into liquidation, just as they were planning a U.K. paperback edition of William Burroughs’ Cities of the Red Night.

LEFT: David Britton.

Whilst Ballard was being embraced by the mainstream following Empire of the Sun, Savoy were moving in the opposite direction, becoming near-untouchable mavericks of the publishing world. By 1984, Britton and Butterworth had entered what they termed their ‘moral ambiguity’ phase, and Savoy had transmuted into a rather different creature, concentrating for the next ten years or so on records — many featuring vocals by P. J. Proby — and comics rather than books, although there was, of course, Lord Horror (1989), written by Britton with assistance from Butterworth, an extreme and deliberately distasteful novel about fascism and those aspects of the twentieth century that contributed to it. Lord Horror was the last novel to be successfully prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Acts as likely to corrupt and deprave those who read it (the decision was finally overturned on appeal). In addition, over the years Savoy have re-published the likes of A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay, Henry Treece’s Celtic fantasy novels, Ken Reid’s ‘Fudge and Speck’ cartoons from the Manchester Evening News and Maurice Richardson’s compendium of light-hearted surrealist tales The Exploits of Engelbrecht (one of Ballard’s favourite books)

The links between Savoy and Ballard are not immediately obvious, but run deep. In this interview, Michael Butterworth discusses Savoy’s adventures in book publishing, starting with the late 1960s, when both he and Ballard wrote for New Worlds. Later interviews will look at Savoy’s musical and spoken word recordings, and at their visual/comics/graphics output, especially the work of the illustrators Kris Guidio and John Coulthart, who joined forces with Britton and Butterworth during the 1980s.

Savoy’s books, comics and records/CDs are available directly from the publishers.

Mike Holliday.

J.G. Ballard, 1974. Photo from Corridor magazine (#5), published and edited by Michael Butterworth.

MIKE HOLLIDAY: Michael, several of your own short stories appeared in New Worlds between 1966 and 1970: to what extent did Ballard influence you at that early stage?

MICHAEL BUTTERWORTH: It’s more a question of how he didn’t influence me! Coming across his work for the first time in the mid-60’s, I remember thinking, ‘He’s saying what I didn’t know I wanted to say!’ I read ‘The Voices of Time’, and ‘Mr F is Mr F’ and other stories, which led me to discovering The Wind From Nowhere and The Drowned World, and later his ‘fractured’ narratives: ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’ and ‘The Terminal Beach’. These stories crossed the blood-brain barrier. They seemed to step right inside me, to be totally relevant to my experiences as an individual and what I was striving after as a writer. Between Ballard and Burroughs, and Moorcock (his Elric short stories), and small amounts of Borges, I was ‘catered’ for, and looking back it did lessen the imperative to find a vehicle of my own, perhaps inducing a kind of complacency.

The things in Ballard’s work with which I identify are the ‘psychological landscapes’ – the deserted swimming pools and lagoons – and the outgrowths of time in The Crystal World. But what makes him compelling is the fact that despite the cataclysms, people are still able to lead recognisable lives. His stories mirrored my own obsession with post-atomic fantasy landscapes, in which the narrator is freed from the humdrum world. The backdrop of nearly all my New Worlds stories, mostly written when I was seventeen or eighteen at a time when you went to sleep at night wondering whether you would wake up to World War Three, were concerned with just this kind of survival and the resulting creative possibilities. They were written very coolly, very detachedly, very sardonically – saying, well if this is what you, mankind want to do with the world, then this is how it will be.

As a writer I was strongly attracted to what I call ‘simplified emotional landscapes’, end-scenarios where there is the opportunity for clarity of feeling and thought and picaresque happenings; or, as in Ballard’s stories, where you can just sit and stare into the setting sun above a flooded basin, becoming increasingly internalised. Reading Ballard and Burroughs, and entering into these landscapes myself, was a way of freeing the mind of complexity.

I first heard about Burroughs’ cut-ups about the same time as Ballard’s ‘fragmented’ stories began appearing. Cut-up became terribly exciting for me: it was a new way of ‘breaking out’, a way of actually embracing complexity instead of fleeing it. There seemed to be a correlation with the emergence of South American concrete poetry, which I had also just discovered. As Jim pointed out, writing was now beginning to catch up with art. A post-Duchamp New Wave of conceptual art was happening in the late 60’s and early 70’s … and probably we were all running off the same energies and currents. But there was little conscious interaction between all these practices, and looking back the New Wave of SF could have had more of an influence on the mainstream at that point. Ballard’s advertisements and crashed car exhibition at the ICA in the late 60s pointed to it.

Letter from Ballard (1967), discussing the editing of Butterworth’s stories (click to enlarge).

I believe there was collaboration with Ballard whilst you were writing your ‘Concentrate’ stories. How did that come about?

I was Ambit’s Manchester and Salford distributor for quite a few years until I got fed up tramping round, and I knew Jim was the Prose Editor, and I sent some pieces to him. Through appearing in New Worlds I’d met him at least once, at one of the New Worlds parties, where he had urged me just to be ‘more prolific’. He responded very positively to my work. A correspondence began, and he took the time to edit some of the longer pieces I had sent him. He was generally very kind to me, showing how Burroughs ‘subbed down’ his work from much longer pieces. He went through my manuscripts with a pen, underlining the sentences he thought ‘worked’. No one of his competence had taken this time with me before, and we ended up with half a dozen pieces. Martin Bax, the editor of Ambit, didn’t like them enough to publish them, and they ended up appearing in New Worlds instead, in three parts.

By the early 1970s, both yourself and David Britton were publishing amateur or semi-professional magazines under a variety of titles — Corridor, Weird Fantasy, Crucified Toad, and so on. To what extent were you aiming to fill the gap left by the demise of New Worlds as a large-format magazine in 1970? Presumably it was a strong influence at this stage — you had written for the magazine, and several of the first books that Savoy published were by authors who had appeared in its pages – Charles Platt’s The Gas, Langdon Jones’ The Eye of the Lens, Delany’s Tides of Lust, and several titles by Michael Moorcock.

We weren’t consciously trying to fill a gap — some of the contributors were the same because I knew many of the New Worlds writers and artists. Rather, we were inspired by New Worlds, and had started the zines when it was still in its prime — I published Concentrate in 1968, and David published Weird Fantasy in 1969. Concentrate was distributed inside New Worlds and Ambit, as a give away. All things Moorcock were in our blood. I first encountered his work in Science Fantasy magazine in the early 1960s, but it was through Charles Platt (who I met at school) that I was introduced to him. David was a reader from even earlier, from Michael’s own amateur press days, and had met him to speak to at early science fiction conventions.

ABOVE: The first (and only) issue of Michael Butterworth’s magazine Concentrate (1968).

The second issue of David Britton’s ‘Weird Fantasy’ (1971).

What was it that brought yourself and David together as book publishers? Or did you start the bookshops before going into publishing?

The publishing came first. Then, around 1972 David started the House on the Borderland bookshop in Manchester. This was down a back street in central Manchester, and happened to be close to where I worked as a copywriter. I became in the habit of spending my lunch breaks in the shop, although we didn’t know each other personally until our printer, the printer-publisher John Muir, introduced us. When David moved to a busier location in 1974, changing the name of the shop to Orbit Books, turnover increased and more serious publishing became a possibility. For the fourth issue of Corridor, in 1972, I had got hold of an original Jerry Cornelius story from Michael Moorcock, ‘The Swastika Set-Up’, which David illustrated. David published #4 of his magazine and then became the Art Editor of Corridor. By Corridor #7, in 1976, we had become co-publishers. Around the same time, David published an oversized graphic work, Stormbringer. Adapted by James Cawthorn from Moorcock’s story, this was the first Savoy book, and led to us doing The Jewel in the Skull, the first UK graphic novel, in 1978.

Poster (1972) for David Britton’s first shop, House on the Borderland.

So we became full partners around 1976/77. David had the Stormbringer title under his belt, a very productive cash-generator in the form of a bookshop, and he had the beginnings of a publishing ideology worked out. I had a name, and knew Michael Moorcock and the New Worlds writers. As a single parent, having started a career as a freelance writer so I could work from home, I also had some experience of the mainstream publishing world, and had made a few business connections. From the outset we were both of one mind; we wanted to publish books, and wanted to see how far we could go.

The bookshops were a lot more than just books and magazines, weren’t they? You also stocked records, tapes, and videos, especially hard-to-find material. How did running the shops influence the way you went about the publishing business?

To pay for Savoy, the bookshop had to be expanded, and as Savoy grew, we opened more of them, until we had a string of bookshops across the North West of England, selling comics, science fiction, horror, rock books, back issues, rare books, adult mags, bootleg records and all the perennially cult works and authors like A Clockwork Orange, the Illuminatus trilogy, the NEL Richard Allen Skinhead books, and so on. David operated a ‘part-exchange’ policy as well as selling new titles, so across the counter came a very wide mixture of things. Seeing all this material gave us ideas, of course, especially in the way we packaged our books, but the shops’ main purpose was to provide for Savoy financially, which they did right up until the final one closed around 2005 in Leeds. They also acted as shop windows for our titles and for authors we admired.

Basement Books in Manchester, one of the shops which helped fund Savoy’s publishing.

What lessons had you taken from Savoy’s difficulties of the early 80s? And what drove the two of you to keep going?

Savoy went into liquidation in 1981. I was bankrupted the same year. David was jailed in 1982. With those events, the first phase of Savoy was over. After a period spent packaging books for other publishers, in the year of Orwell’s Big Brother we published Savoy Dreams, which unconsciously signposted the way forwards for us. Looking back, it is a watershed book, half catalogue, half anthology, that provided a résumé of what we had achieved and, at the same time, by reprinting Kris Guidio’s comic strips of the Cramps and introducing P J Proby, we sounded our intentions for the future. This was also the book that contained the last stand-alone piece of fiction I published.

The second Savoy anthology, Savoy Dreams (1984), which included a selection of the letters which Michael Moorcock wrote to J G Ballard from Los Angeles (later published as Letters from Hollywood), with the drug references left in.

David’s term of imprisonment had been for 21 days, but the real aim of the police raids was books such as Charles Platt’s The Gas, Samuel Delany’s The Tides of Lust and Jack Trevor Story’s Screwrape Lettuce, a satirical story about the police that Jack had written (and David had illustrated) following a terrible ordeal Jack had at the hands of the London police during the Christmas of 1968. The police used ‘back door’ tactics against us, so that while making it plain that it was Savoy material they were concerned about (by seizing it and eventually destroying it after due process of law), they actually prosecuted us for other material we had on sale in the shops, a series of Grove Press ‘readers’ that had long passed their sell-by date, which the police had seized from us on numerous different occasions and returned — but after we had published The Gas they needed to make something stick. These were American books, so could be made to look like clandestine imports. The police were convinced we were major publishers of erotica, that they had stumbled on an international distribution network of pornography.

Savoy erotica: The Gas by Charles Platt (1980).

The main lesson we took from David’s imprisonment was really taken by him. He used the opportunity to rein in and focus down on the people and things that really mattered to him. Before this, I think, the publishing direction had largely been left open, as I attempted to build something he wasn’t really happy with — a mainstream publishing house. We had assembled a raft of writers and genres, ranging from science fiction, historical fiction, erotica — even a Savoy cookery line — to my real interests, Burroughs and Gysin. But these all got lost in the reorganisation. In our insolvency we lost control of our published titles, and the main lesson we learned was to, in future, own the copyright on everything we did, even if it meant creating the books ourselves. We have always regarded ourselves as creative publishers, and the direction we then embarked on saw David’s blossoming as a writer. Being in prison had also helped; in some ways, the experience had done him a favour, as it made him realise he didn’t want to waste more of his life on ‘inconsequences’, as he saw it.

Hours passed.

A sickly light, errant and pellucid, thrilled above him. In a drama close to somnia turbula, ganglias of cables and wires, nerve fibres and raunchy buzzing lights radiated down at him from a ceiling, meshed together in a flue. His body felt tropical, infusing him with a chimerical dread.

He woke fitfully, his limbs heavy and somnambulant. He was back in his room. During the long night the hotel’s central heating had switched itself on. The heat was terrific. His head throbbed, full of virulent stuffs and old memories. He thought he could hear the sound of boiling broth close by. Sulphurous fumes filled the room, and a bittersweet almond taste prevailed in his mouth.

He peered from a single drained eye. His room at the Chelsea looked as though the mad hand of a god had transposed it into an everglade sarcophagus. He lay on his side, his head awkwardly positioned on a once-white pillow. Stuck next to him was a single hank of hair that pushed an umber stain into the cotton. He tried to lift his left hand to remove the hair. The hand moved slowly, as though pulling through treacle, then stopped. He raised his head slightly and peered over his naked white shoulders down the length of the bed. Despite an intense light, he could not see clearly. From his chest downwards he appeared to be encased inside a blackish nitrate crust similar to a moth’s chrysalis. Beneath this dark surface he could feel a moist second layer that pressed warmly against his skin, snugly cocooning him.

Futilely, Horror tried to rise up from his bed of excrement. The chrysalis skin broke, and the smell almost made him faint. From his neck he retched a yellow waxen glue. Defeated, he lapsed back in his warm prison.

During the night, monstrously huge poppies, torture-coloured roses and pain-white petunias had grown around him. At his feet, nettles had sprouted from the dark skein. Weeds muffled the metallic clicking of shite flies. Dung beetles scurried everywhere over the crust’s surface.

Neon tubes wrapped in bald flex pushed through the shite and added their burning light to the room. Myriad phalanxes of wasps had taken possession of the upper cornices. They swarmed about the ceiling like dense waves of black hair. For a moment, he thought he was mad, lying with fallen soldiers in the fields of Flanders, Ypres or the Somme.

The bed giggled and sighed. It heaved with an almost sentient life. It let off a series of swaggering farts that echoed ominously round the room in search of an exit.

The lights shook, and a swell of steam rose from the bed. Back it came to him. He remembered packing the enema bags tightly about his body before falling asleep. In the hothouse of the night, they had burst.

Excerpt from David Britton’s novel Lord Horror, published in 1989 by Savoy Books of Manchester, England.

The (somewhat) tongue-in-cheek map of influences leading up to Britton and Butterworth’s Lord Horror (click to enlarge)

Can I move on to Lord Horror, which in a way was a response to the police raids and David’s first spell in prison. This is a novel whose subject matter includes Nazism and racism, yet I was struck by the lack of any explicit moral position within the book. This reminded me of Ballard’s comment that Crash would have been meaningless if he had incorporated some sort of explicit moral justification: the whole point of Crash was to get the reader to consider for themselves tendencies that already exist within the world that we live in, and therefore any moral framework has to be provided by the reader. And in fact Crash appears in the map of influences for Lord Horror.

As soon as you define something, it becomes that thing. We wanted to write something that wasn’t definable, and in a weird way more true. Although, like Crash, Lord Horror is composed in conventional narrative, it is not what it seems; it is an intricate tableau, or rather a series of tableaux, a florescence from a central idea, which we expanded into picaresque forms that really make no overall narrative sense. It was also David’s first novel. He isn’t, any more than I am, a natural storyteller. He would hand me very dense pages of text, together with dislocated dialogue, actually descriptions of ‘pictures’ that he was seeing in his head. I had to open this up, and make it run in sequence. Lord Horror took four years and twelve rewrites on a portable manual typewriter to get it exactly as we wanted it.

The stories I wrote for New Worlds leave the reader to deduce how the post-disaster deserts came about. They are ironic metaphor, in the sense that the first person narrator accepts the devastation as a given, and by being so cool he is actually conveying the opposite of what he really feels. This ‘double distancing’ protects from the horror, but it also enables the reader to interpret what is really being said. In Lord Horror, morally, it’s crucial that what results from the actions of its characters is presented in a similar way, as a given — and on top of this to keep an ironic or sardonic tone. The characters themselves aren’t morally defined, as they are in a work like, say, Maus. Making it clear that Lord Horror is ‘bad’ would have lost the possibility of empathy, and therefore the point of the novel. It would have perpetuated the image of Hitler-as-universal-scapegoat. Of course, it might also have appeased the judges and prevented much angst for David and I.

The faith in reason and rationality that dominated post war thinking struck me as hopelessly idealistic, like the belief that the German people had been led astray by Hitler and the Nazis. I was sure that the countless atrocities in eastern Europe had taken place because the Germans involved had enjoyed the act of mass murder, just as the Japanese had enjoyed tormenting the Chinese. Reason and rationality failed to explain human behaviour. Human beings were often irrational and dangerous

J. G. Ballard, Miracles of Life (2008).

John Coulthart’s portrayal of the death camps in Hard Core Horror #5. The text panels are deliberately left blank … words are superfluous.

I’d like to mention here Brian Stableford’s suggestion that Lord Horror is actually designed ‘to excite revulsion and anxiety’. In effect, it’s an invitation to the reader to reflect on just what it is in the book that causes those feelings. For example, when I asked myself some months after first reading the novel what it was that I found repulsive about it, the thing I recalled was the use of racist epithets… Which is really rather strange, I mean here we have a book that looks at the reasons behind the deaths of millions in the Nazi concentration camps, a book which contains lengthy descriptions of people being abused, dismembered, murdered in the most foul ways, even eaten, yet what seems to cause me difficulty is the use of certain words. It’s an extreme reductio ad absurdum, but one in which the reader does not sit above what’s going on, nodding and smiling to himself, but actually inside the bloody thing, with all the stress and confusion that’s implied by being part of it. That is similar, it seems to me, to another of Ballard’s comments about Crash: ‘I wanted to write a book where the reader had nowhere to hide.’

In Lord Horror, not only does the reader have nowhere to hide, but also, if he or she perseveres with the book — which Colin Wilson famously wouldn’t — they find that they are at risk of becoming the character, which can be even more discomforting. The protection offered by the third person narrative breaks down in several places, with what seem to be very brief passing racist comments of the author casually inserted, a technique that is more refined in the third novel in the ‘Horror’ sequence, Baptised in the Blood of Millions. In Lord Horror they are so brief that you may at first miss them, or perhaps think they are typos. But it soon becomes apparent that this may be happening deliberately, and readers may find themselves in the uncomfortable dilemma of deciding whether they should continue reading the book, and if so how are they to read it? Is the author a racist, or isn’t he? Should I continue to be amused by his black-humoured jokes, or are his detractors right: is this just poor art, camouflaged by quasi-learning, as the magistrate decisively pronounced of the Hard Core Horror comics? A nihilistic, sadistic ‘playfulness’ operates at every level in the book, even in the narrative conventions. Further, the author seems not to care, to subvert whatever credibility the bravest readers and critics give to him.

Lord Horror broadcasts to the people (from Reverbstorm #6): art by John Coulthart (click to enlarge).

The novel is designed to be morally offensive, and also physically offensive. It is highly visceral, often repellent, as when the dried outer skin of the shit cocoon encasing Horror cracks open. When at work on the book, it was a common experience to feel queasy. With succeeding Lord Horror works, each one aims to out-do the preceding one in grossness. If you read one of David’s later books, Motherfuckers: The Auschwitz of Oz and Baptised in the Blood of Millions, and nod sagely, thinking that a clue may now be found that will dispel the cloud of ambiguity hanging about the author, you will not find it. Every chink has been firmly filled, hasn’t even been allowed to be open in the first place. There seems to be, at every turn, an imperative to escalate the crudity of the violence and racism — to avoid numbing the reader, to find ways of not allowing the writing the dread anathema of becoming safe.

Ballard’s work has always reflected his interest in surrealist art. And in a way, Lord Horror is a surrealist text, possibly more so than anything by Ballard, who’s always been concerned to ‘tell a story’. A penis that grows so large as to encompass the Earth; a person being devoured whole — that isn’t exactly fantasy, it seems to me … it’s surrealism. The same applies to the way in which the book is written, with rapid stylistic changes — from philosophical disquisition to horrific description — and paragraphs of text lifted from elsewhere and put into the mouths of the characters. To me, the book makes more sense considered as a surrealist novel; if it’s read as an alternative-history fantasy, or as a satire, then I think the reader misses much of what is in there.

Writing about Lord Horror in A Serious Life, Dave Mitchell compared the book to Bataille and Lautréamont and de Sade, and he may be right, but we see ourselves as belonging more in the absurdist camp, with nods to surrealism. Before we knew each other, two of our heroes were Alfred Jarry and P J Proby. I was also influenced by satirical writers like Rabelais, where key figures are exaggerated to ludicrous extremes. David’s ‘surrealism’ was more William Hope Hodgson and Frank Randle than the more formal manifestations in Max Ernst or Salvador Dali. Francis Bacon has always been a strong muse for him, and latterly Paula Rego has excited us both. Michael Moorcock threw in Maurice Richardson, while I also brought the sometimes existentialist bizarreness of the Beats. The ‘absurdism’ of ordinary life, and popular culture such as fifties rock’n’roll and Creole patois was another rich source for Lord Horror — you know, ‘Sleepin’ on his mugwump, playing on his Jew’s harp, music crawlin’ into your skin, Daddy in his Zoot suit, mammy playin’ skin flute, sister makes a swine-hair grin, Doin’ that crazy Cajun cakewalk dance!’ What could be more ‘surreal’ than that? The Mugwump character in Lord Horror is from P J Proby, not Burroughs.

David Britton’s first novel, Lord Horror (1989).

So Lord Horror could be seen a ‘surrealist’ novel, but it is a very personal surrealism, I think, with specifically working-class Manchester roots. William Hope Hodgson once rode a bicycle down the steepest steps in Blackburn. David once saw Roy Rogers riding Trigger through cobbled, terraced streets in North Manchester in 1951. These must have seemed like eruptions from a different universe. The ‘alternative history’ theme, as you have correctly seen, is not the book’s main point; for us it’s a purely theatrical device. And the book isn’t intended as satire. It is more Grand Guignol than satirical.

To our initial mystification, Ballard didn’t like Lord Horror. Possibly it had far too much gaudy end-of-the-pier working-class English ‘surrealism’ for him, rather than the purer, more polite surrealism he did like.

Reverbstorm #4. Cover art by John Coulthart (after Burne Hogarth).

What about Ballard’s use of unconventional narrative structure? I’m thinking particularly of The Atrocity Exhibition, and of Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius stories, where iconic personalities and historic events appear, bringing along their own narratives. There’s a lot of that, it seems, in Savoy’s work – especially in the Reverbstorm magazines, with the cultural references incorporated into John Coulthart’s artwork, and dialogue consisting largely of quotations … so that the reader is no longer spoon-fed a narrative but has to do most of what Ballard once referred to as ‘the hard work’.

If ‘fragmentation’, non-linear and cut-up writing are responses to complexity as I have suggested, then Reverbstorm is certainly this. The ‘story’ of Reverbstorm, like the ‘story’ of The Atrocity Exhibition or Naked Lunch or Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, is really its form. It is emblematic of a certain time in the 20th Century and in the mental processes of David, John and I. The use of such forms by Ballard and Burroughs was a way of dealing with personal trauma, but such new chaotic forms in literature and art seemed to suggest that by ‘breaking down reality’, more appropriate new ways of looking at it might be found.

John Coulthart’s artwork from the Reverbstorm magazines, of which Alan Moore wrote: ‘Like Baudelaire, Beardsley and Breughel meeting in a crack house, “Reverbstorm” presents, with diamond focus, a portrait of the incoherent, incandescent rot at the heart of the Twentieth Century. Highly recommended.’ (Click to enlarge.)

But there’s a difference here, isn’t there, to using a ‘cut-up’ technique? How would you characterize that distinction?

In Moorcock’s multiverse, fragmentation occurs during the mixing up of narrative threads, due to the way the threads appear and reappear in space-time from the perspective of an observer. But the results of this apparently random selection are very controlled. I don’t know how Ballard went about achieving non-linearity, but his experiments also seem very controlled. Even Burroughs’ cut-up techniques are controlled because, as Jim showed me, they are edited afterwards, and so they are narratives assembled from cut-ups. Much editorial control and direction is shown in works like Nova Express. Between cut-ups and Ballard’s non-linear experiments, or Moorcock’s multiverse stories, there are big differences in technique in the way material is gathered together, although the outcome can often be the same.

For almost a decade after first reading Burroughs, I could not read linear writing. But I did find that I got very adept at writing in cut-up; I could mimic the ‘unintelligibility’ of random cut-up, and produce text that had randomness to a varying degree. It was this ‘stream of consciousness’-kind of writing I was producing that Ballard helped me to edit, which became the Concentrate pieces.

The final ‘Concentrate’ piece: written by Butterworth, edited by Ballard and published in New Worlds #197 (click to enlarge).

David was originally the artist and yourself the writer, yet it’s Dave’s writings that have appeared in Savoy from Lord Horror onwards. How did that reversal come about?

To write well, you need to be driven by anger or some other strong emotion. What drove me in my earlier days was anger I felt at mankind’s failings, but this voice I’d found was already fading by the time David and I met. David’s anger is different — he has never given it up. He has always been angry per se, at existence. Though he is ultimately optimistic he feels a great frustration at life. His perception has always been of the glass half-empty variety. I am the opposite.

The turning point for me as a writer was Lord Horror. It was a collaborative book, and was to have been published under a joint byline, but at the last moment, I gave David the byline. At the end of my last published piece of fiction, written under my own name (‘A Hurricane in a Nightjar’, Savoy Dreams 1984), I wrote directly from the postatomic deserts to the reader: ‘For the time being, thank you’. I knew my voice had gone, although I hoped it wouldn’t go for good. But though it hasn’t returned, happily it has led me to other things.

The result of the publication of Lord Horror and the associated Hard Core Horror and Meng & Ecker comics was another series of police raids, and the prosecution of Savoy under the Obscene Publications Acts. The charge was justified in Court on the grounds of the anti-Semitism displayed in the publications, a rather strange claim since the racial hatred laws were designed specifically for such purposes but were ignored by the police and prosecutors. There was then yet another prosecution, for non-Savoy material kept in the shops, as a result of which David spent a second period in Strangeways prison. How did Savoy cope with this second ‘crisis’? The changes in the business seem to have been less dramatic than those in the early ’80s…

The second time David was jailed, it was his reward for writing Lord Horror. The book was seized and found to be obscene by the magistrates. I conducted the appeal with Geoffrey Robertson and this resulted in the charge against it being overturned. The local Vice Squad were very bitter about this. Early in the proceedings, two members were caught airing their views about Lord Horror in an ‘undercover’ interview for The Observer, saying there was an urgency to act against Lord Horror because they ‘might be the last generation with a moral viewpoint’ and therefore the last people with the capability to do it. They were officers, guys in their 30s, saying they had a moral sense that might be denied later generations, therefore they had a duty to act now to protect ‘common decency’ on behalf of the public. That was their reason for banning the book. They were hoping for the heaviest penalty. At about the same time as the Observer article we were hauled to the main police headquarters, Stretford House, and grilled separately about our publications, both books and comics. We were told we were racially and morally degenerate. We ran some of this interview in one of the Meng & Ecker comics. Later, we heard that Chief Constable Anderton himself had been listening in to the interview, overseeing it, in fact, in his office above where we had been sitting.

It was quite clear to us that the target was Savoy and not, as the police were continually maintaining, what we were selling in the shops – which was largely mainstream fiction, literary, fantasy, rock books, bootlegs and so on. Only a very small percentage of the shop stock was erotica, and none of this was what was called ‘hard’. But because of the unusual zero tolerance climate being generated in Manchester by police Chief ‘God’s Cop’ James Anderton, they could get away with doing us for it.

Anderton was a creature that could only have existed in the slightly surreal atmosphere of Thatcher Britain; repressively conservative, of dubious competence, and given to worrying statements about hearing God’s voice while Manchester filled up with guns and pushers. LORD HORROR was strong drink, to be sure: a hallucinated vision of Lord Haw-Haw, the English traitor who broadcast Nazi propaganda into Britain during World War 2. It was difficult, horrifying work, the Nazi atrocities made superreal with the tools of DeSade and Bataille, very much an extension of the “New Worlds school” and its intent to use fantasy as a way to present the real world in a new light for our consideration. Britton is neither a self-hating Jew nor a childish monster. He is clearly haunted by the pre-1945 world.

And they sent him to prison.

Warren Ellis.

‘God’s Cop’: Chief Constable James Anderton.

The police prosecuted us for Lord Horror on the grounds of obscenity because that was the decision taken by the local office of the DPP (Director of Publication Prosecutions). Many people thought it strange, but he thought the Crown stood a better chance of prosecuting us that way. The DPP only charged us under Section 3 of the obscenity laws, which allowed Lord Horror to be condemned by the magistrates but did not allow us the option of a jury trial. However, under Section 3, they could only destroy the book — we could not be jailed. The police used the same tactics as in 1981, trumping-up charges on non-Savoy material that was really very tame, and it was these which led to Dave’s second prison sentence. After the experiences of Lady Chatterley and Last Exit to Brooklyn, they knew that if they went after our more literary titles then the attack would backfire on them; as indeed proved to be the case when they went after Lord Horror and we won the appeal.

LEFT: Raided! One of the Savoy shops in the late 80s.

This time David’s imprisonment was for four months, and we coped less well. We were in the middle of an intensive phase of work rather than at a natural turning point as we had been on the previous occasion, and our fighting spirit wasn’t the same. I had managed to make publicity out of the Lord Horror case, but the victory we’d won felt hollow. On the previous occasion there had been genuine surprise by all parties, even by the prosecution, that the judge had thought to jail David — something rarely done — rather than fine him.

Prison terms are automatically reduced by a half; you only do the full term if you misbehave. Although David did not do the full four months, it was still a very long time. One hour is a long time in a place where anything can go wrong, and where few may know if it does. How best to survive, where survival is a moment-to-moment question? There were no changes to Savoy; when David was released we had a gathering of the clans in the local Pig and Porcupine, and then just carried on. If anything, it had the effect of firming our resolve, so possibly the one ‘change’ we made was — never to change!

Our final large court case directly involved Savoy titles — the Meng & Ecker and Hard Core Horror comics that the police seized when they seized the novel. The authorities felt themselves to be on much firmer ground with these, because of the ‘link’, as they saw it, with children. They even returned to conduct a second raid before the outcome of the first was known, and seized thousands more comics. I conducted the defence for this also, and took the case as high as I could. It dragged on for six years, but at its end, in the High Court in London, the local Manchester magistrate who had originally found the comics obscene was vindicated — even though a child has never read them and never will.

You’ve spoken out in previous interviews about the politically correct mindset of both left and right — and Savoy has suffered from both versions, rejected by Compendium Books and by Rough Trade Records at the same time as it was being raided again and again by the Manchester Police. Ballard labeled the growth of this type of reaction in the 1980s ‘the New Puritanism’. How do you see the position in 2009 — is there more timidity, more unthinking rejection, than there was 20 or 30 years ago?

We haven’t had a police raid in ten years — after twenty-five years of constant raids. On the last raid, in 1999, the police personally admitted that their game with us was over. Their concerns about Lord Horror and the Meng & Ecker comics had been eclipsed by the Internet and world events. Until Lord Horror, it was popularly believed that the successful Last Exit to Brooklyn appeal in 1968 was the final nail in the coffin of police repression of serious books, but it wasn’t. When the magistrate’s charge of obscenity against Lord Horror was overturned in the High Court in 1992, that genuinely was the end, in the UK.

You don’t see the same kind of heavy-handed repression happening here now. Rather than laws dealing with reading matter, there are laws restricting movement and access, something Iain Sinclair is documenting. There is also less inclination on the part of writers to go over the same ground. ‘Taboo’ books may not be progressive or relevant any more.

In his history of Savoy, A Serious Life, D. M. Mitchell suggests that the police raids and obscenity trials have directed attention away from your wider achievements, such as the publication of The Exploits of Engelbrecht, A Voyage to Arcturus, Henry Treece‘s Celtic Tetralogy, and the work of Ken Reid and of Langdon Jones. To what extent do you think this is true, and if so, are you bothered by it?

The court cases diverted attention away from our early intentions as publishers and writers, and I think they still colour public perception. I think the police raids stopped us in our tracks at a pivotal moment, and for me it was a great frustration. In 1981, when we went in liquidation, we were poised to become mainstream publishers. Up until this time I was still convinced that we could do so, but in the end our uncompromising, eclectic natures and the politically incorrect nature of the bookshops, meant we couldn’t. After the ‘Savoy Wars’, as we termed the skirmishes during the 80s, we found ourselves stuck in ‘a weird place, like one of those soldiers lost in a forest and still fighting the war after it’s over’, to quote Keith Seward).

Certain critics can’t get past the subject matter, or they don’t see the work as being part of a literary tradition. We’ve been defined at a very simple level as transgressors who got into trouble with the law — it’s much easier to understand us this way — or one-offs who shouldn’t be paid serious attention. In our earlier bookshop days, we were cast as pornographers and bootleggers who had fallen foul of the law. This can work for us, of course, and means we are at least assured of a lasting profile of a kind. We have a cultural trademark, like P J Proby’s split trousers or Fenella Fielding’s husky voice.

John Coulthart’s portrayal of the 20th-century city in Reverbstorm #6.

All along, you’ve published authors whom you admire, especially where their work is otherwise unavailable or unduly neglected. But is there, do you think, some element in common between the authors and artists that Savoy publish or with whom you collaborate? Is there something that links Michael Moorcock and P. J. Proby with Henry Treece and Fenella Fielding?

That ‘element’ is something we’ve tried hard to define in books like A Serious Life. As in anything, it is who and where — who you grow up with, and where you grow up. Being Mancunians, David and I were both exposed to the work of people like Ken Reid, whose 3-panel Fudge and Speck strips appeared nightly in the Manchester Evening News when we were kids. As we got older, we both became aware of Proby, a stricken star who had fallen to earth in the Northern workingmen’s club scene, who became an equally potent conductor for fantasies skewed from the mainstream. Ours has not been the normal ‘expression’ of growing up — our allegiance has been to too many ‘odd’ things for that. Savoy is a stitch of David and I. David’s obsession to preserve youthful influences and to put a different emphasis on the art and culture of his time to the one that has become the consensus; my desire for the radical and new — these link the various, on the surface, disparate Savoy writers, artists and artistes.

A Serious Life: D M Mitchell’s marvelous history of Savoy — the books, the records, the comics, plus interviews with Butterworth, Britton and Coulthart.

Did you have much in the way of dealings with Ballard after starting Savoy? You haven’t published anything by him, unlike Moorcock and other New Worlds writers, though I believe a limited edition of Crash was suggested at some point.

We began by publishing Michael Moorcock, and we just seemed to go along that axis. Plus the fact that Jim wasn’t in need of a publisher, so he didn’t fall into our other category of books at that time: he wasn’t a neglected giant of fantasy, as we saw it, like Henry Treece or Jack Trevor Story. Nor was he in the position of Burroughs, whose ‘lesser’ books like The Job or Dutch Schultz, I thought, were in need of greater exposure, or Brion Gysin, who was in need of documenting as an artist in his own right. David Pringle, and later Vale at Re/Search, were documenting Ballard’s work. And as time went by, our options ran out anyway. When I finally did figure out a way of publishing Burroughs and Gysin, the police raids on Savoy reached a crescendo, and I had to relinquish them.

We were disappointed when Jim turned down the Crash/Fenella Fielding package. 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.

We saw Crash as part of a new Savoy deluxe hardback fantasy reprint series we had started, with new editions of Maurice Richardson’s The Exploits of Engelbrecht (2000) and David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (2002). We sent Jim the finished reading, together with samples of these books, with a proposal to release it together with a special edition of Crash. But he claimed that he had always disliked ‘book worship’ in any form, and did not subscribe to the ‘industry of limited editions’; he thought books should be mass-produced and disposable. When I asked whether he would mind us releasing just the Fielding reading on its own, he said not, preferring that ‘a book should just be a book’. He was very courteous and kind, asking me not to take this the wrong way, but I did come away with the feeling that the Savoy chemistry was wrong for him and that we had misjudged him once again — he had reacted very similarly to Lord Horror. It sounds silly, but the incident increased my feeling that in some way I had not lived up to his expectation, after he had gone out of his way to encourage my early writing. I had not received such encouragement or understanding off my own father, and when Jimmy passed away it felt like a father had gone.

The Exploits of Engelbrecht, republished by Savoy in 2000, with this commendation on the cover from Ballard: ‘The Exploits of Engelbrecht is English surrealism at its greatest. Witty and fantastical, Maurice Richardson was light years ahead of his time. Unmissable.’

Mike Moorcock has said that one of his ambitions for New Worlds was to cross-fertilize the popular and literary traditions. I take it that’s an aim with which you’d concur?

Yes, but that’s something that was always going to come much more easily to Michael than to us! For a start, as a writer he is a natural storyteller. Audience is very important to him. In his publishing projects he took over existing magazines with ready audiences rather than attempt to start up something from scratch.

His charismatic personality had attracted to New Worlds already-established authors, Ballard, Aldiss, et cetera. When Savoy began, influenced by New Worlds or, more particularly, by Michael’s enthusiasm for certain writers — Jack Trevor Story, M John Harrison, Langdon Jones — these writers readily allowed us to do their books as paperbacks. As we developed, we became a more gaudy, cross-pollinating rock’n’roll publishing/recording outfit, top-and-tailing Ken Reid and T S Eliot, P J Proby and New Order, or joining up like-minded souls, Burne Hogarth and Cawthorn, Fielding and Colette, The Tides of Lust and The Gas. Gradually, we seemed to find an identity. It perhaps helped that we stayed in the North, away from the temptations of the London publishing scene. On the other hand, if we had carried the battle South we might perhaps have succeeded as a legitimate company. Who knows.

To consciously set out to marry the popular with the literate is beside the point, really. Did Dickens set out to do that? He just did it. A basic rule of adventurous writing is to leave in a certain amount of cliché, so you don’t lose the reader. I think that was something Michael Moorcock taught me: you should not take people too far too quickly or you will lose them. But I think if you are a truly great writer — or a great editor or publisher — you will naturally have popular appeal. Once Michael had ‘trained’ his initial SF readership and attracted new readers — each issue contained a reducing amount of traditional SF — New Worlds became a blend of the popular and literary quite naturally. It was second nature to everyone involved: editors, designers, artists and writers. By contrast, the much later Modern Review, say, which had a declared policy of mixing high and low, seemed contrived.

New Worlds was dependent on its editor’s vision and drive, and when he decided to move on it lost its direction. Charles Platt ran it well for a while, but then he also moved on, alas. Just think what could have been achieved had Michael been able to devote his time to keeping New Worlds going as a monthly magazine, acting as a kind of mainstream Counterblast to the various movements and groups that have come and gone since the sixties.

Only one alternate history series confronted Nazism with appropriate originality and passion. Published by the independent Manchester firm Savoy, David Britton’s surreal Lord Horror and its sequels entered the mind of a deranged surviving Hitler whose visions grew increasingly insane… Soon after they appeared, Hard Core Horror and Lord Horror were seized by Manchester’s vice squad. The books were destroyed and their author went to Strangeways, suggesting that successful Nazi alternate histories must take profound psychological, moral and physical risks.

Michael Moorcock, The Daily Telegraph.

What about the future? How much have Savoy got in the locker? There’s a collection of Mike Moorcock’s non-fiction due for publication, I believe. And what about the final issue of the Reverbstorm series — will that actually be published? It’s been ‘forthcoming’ for several years!

There is a lot left in the locker, but whether we produce it or not is a question of what financial resources we have left. Since losing the bookshops we have been forced to raise money in less exciting, more legitimate ways. As a result we are vulnerable to things like economic recessions, and this present one has hit us badly as it has hit others. David and I are both now in our sixties. But while we can, we will keep going. John Coulthart is designing Into the Media Web, the collection of Moorcock non-fiction, at the moment. We hope it will appear in 2010, together with the promised second Savoy edition of Engelbrecht. John is also at work re-mastering the Reverbstorm part-series as a graphic novel. This will contain the long promised final installment. A collection of articles about Savoy is underway, Tales From the Savoy, as is David’s newly completed Lord Horror novel, La Squab: The Black Rose of Auschwitz, which will be illustrated by Kris Guidio. He is also at work on a new novel, more a short coda to the other books, called Invictus Horror. Plus all the work we did with Fielding is still to be released: Fenella Fielding: The Savoy Sessions (a new album of songs, and companion album to P J Proby: The Savoy Sessions), a double album reading from Colette, as well as readings of Four Quartets and La Squab.

Finally, you’ve also been involved, outside of Savoy, with the launch of a new magazine, Corridor8, which revives the title of your early magazines but concentrating on contemporary visual art. How did the new magazine come about, and what are your hopes for it?

It grew out of an interest in conceptual art, and wanting to do a magazine again. I’d begun publishing a small line of print-on-demand books featuring work which didn’t fall into Savoy’s remit, but which I was in the habit of being offered from time to time by people who knew I was a publisher. One of these books was an interview with Colin Wilson by the writer and journalist Brad Spurgeon, about Wilson’s philosophy as an optimist. Another, which arrived anonymously one morning, was a surreal oddity — a full libretto for an imaginary musical about Jackson Pollock written by an artist friend, Roger McKinley. Although his libretto took the conventional form of a book, it worked as a piece of conceptual art, and it was seeing the possibilities of this that got me interested.

When my father died, my partner, Sarajane Inkster, who had once interviewed David and I after Burroughs’s death about our meeting with him in the Bunker in the early 80s, in a mood of mad creativity generously suggested I use part of my inheritance to produce a magazine. Corridor8 derives its name from the small-press magazines I started out doing, and the first issue is dedicated to J.G. Ballard and New Worlds, although I wouldn’t say it is recognisably in the Ballard/New Worlds or even Savoy moulds.

Michael Butterworth’s new magazine, ‘Corridor8′, launched in July 2009.

Corridor8 appears annually — the next issue comes out September 2010 — and the intention is to make its publication an event. The launch this year had a talk by Iain Sinclair, who used Issue 1 as a springboard for a new work set outside the capital, and also an art installation by the arte povera maverick Michelangelo Pistoletto. As subsequent issues appear, I can see the ‘launches’ growing and becoming more like mini-arts festivals. The magazine itself will continue to be North-of-England-based, on a speculative tip with an international outlook and still focusing on contemporary visual art and writing. Issue 1 focuses on art inside Will Alsop’s ‘SuperCity’ — Alsop’s concept of a linear city running raggedly across the neck of England from Liverpool to Hull and beyond. Sinclair’s work in the same issue explores the corridor in two long psychogeographical journeys, East-West by car and then West-East by bus pass, debunking Alsop’s concept. It was also the first time Alsop’s work as a canvas artist was featured in-depth, since when he has announced that he has retired from his architectural practice to devote his time to painting.

There are also interviews with Peter Saville about his new position as Creative Director of Manchester, and with Yorkshire artist and art catalyst Paul Bradley who produced the Pistoletto installation for us, an article by Jon Savage about the Haçienda nightclub, another article about the Danish art group Superflex’s project ‘tenantspin’ — a web-based television venture to empower residents in Liverpool tower blocks threatened with demolition — as well as, all importantly, profiles of eight artists who live and work in the SuperCity region. For Issue 2, we plan to move the geographical focus further north, towards Cumbria, Newcastle, and the Scottish borderlands — it will have a borderland theme — and on artists who work outside the centre. I am hoping one of the artists will be David Hockney, while the main writer for this issue I hope will be Jenny Diski, another favourite writer, who has some thematic similarities with Sinclair.

Thank you, Michael Butterworth.

Don’t forget the Savoy Books Microfiction competition! Win super-rare Savoy books, comic books and CDs by writing a short story of 100 words or less on ‘Savoyesque’ or ‘Ballardian’ themes. Details here.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ 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

Image: JG Ballard and Iain Sinclair in London Orbital (dirs. Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, 2002).

by David Cunningham

There are few concepts in contemporary social and cultural theory whose meaning is so apparently nebulous, and whose historical novelty (or even reality) is so disputed, as that of ‘globalisation’. Yet, for better or worse, the questions that it serves to frame are ones that increasingly work to define a trans-disciplinary problematic across all the humanities and social sciences, as attested to by a range of celebrated publications in the last few years. In the case of the critical analysis of cultural and artistic production, perhaps of utmost importance has been the issue of the historical transformations being undergone by ‘local’ forms and practices in the face of the global generalization of capitalist relations of production and exchange; an issue which, for literary theory and criticism, goes beyond, and in some sense historically sublates, the specific problematic of post-colonialism.[1] As such, what is customarily thought to be at stake here might, in its broadest terms, be summarised in the following questions: If there is, for the first time, now (tendentially at least) a ‘single spatial ground to the definition of the historical present’, what happens to place as a spatial variable in such a new global economy of a capitalist modernity? How is it inscribed ‘in the [new] spaces of culture?’[2] And what critical ‘role’ can cultural forms and practices, that have been historically associated with the specificities of place and localised traditions, realistically hope to play at such an historical moment?

While then its qualitative historical newness has undoubtedly been over-exaggerated in some quarters, the emergent spatial dominance of what Castells terms the ‘space of flows’ that traverses the planetary ground of contemporary capitalist modernity — ‘flows of capital, flows of information, flows of technology, flows of organisational interaction, flows of images, sounds and symbols’ — clearly does bring radically into question the ontological character of what has traditionally been understood as spaces of place, whether ethnologically or sociologically; that is, a ‘locale whose form, function and meaning are self-contained within the boundaries of physical contiguity’. It is the ‘concrete outcome’ of such an immanent negation that, famously, the French anthropologist Marc Augé, and, more recently, Hardt and Negri, have sought to articulate as new forms of non-place: the proliferation of spaces which ‘cannot be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity’, and which, indeed, resist all localised patterns of legibility. Materially, and most visibly, it is these spaces that are reproduced through the now familiar ‘glass phantasms’ of an ‘architectural Esperanto’ — the built form and ambiences of airports, motorways, corporate towers, and retail outlets — populating an ‘urban panorama’ across the planet, which progressively engenders an ‘inexorable sameness of…landscape that turns all travel into arrival at the same destination’.[3]

If such presently operative ideas — several of the most influential articulations of which I have rather bundled together here — provoke certain questions in relation to the specific concerns of this essay, it is, of course, because if there is one distinctive aspect of the work of Iain Sinclair — a formal and thematic principle that might seem to unify his entire oeuvre — it would relate to the intimate association it suggests between literary production and the particularities of place; in Sinclair’s own case the unique locale of East London. ‘The poet’, he claims in a 1979 interview, is distinguished by the way in which he or she is necessarily ‘drawn to a specific location; to activate a monologue that is already available there’: ‘Place needs the person to give it voice. Place activates the poet’.[4] Nearly twenty years on, such a poetics is re-iterated in Sinclair’s essay ‘The Shamanism of Intent’, in which the contemporary shaman’s ‘sickness-vocation’ is explicitly defined as the capacity to ‘re-enchant place’ through ‘working their own turf’. For the true artist as shaman: ‘The life-force of the city is measured in the candlepower of its keepers, the activators of place’. The writer is a chronographer, ‘hungry for place as expressively potent, place as experience…as a trigger to memory, imagination, and mythic presence’.[5]

Image: Iain Sinclair in London Orbital (dirs. Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, 2002).

In its literary origins, such a poetics of place is in fact most immediately traceable in Sinclair’s work, not to the present resuscitation of the politicised European avant-gardism of Surrealist re-mappings and Situationist psychogeography, with which it has been latterly associated, but rather to the largely occluded influence of a certain post-Poundian, mainly American poetry that played a crucial role within the so-called British poetry revival of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Perhaps most important, in this respect, would be Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, centred around his home town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and their poetic conception of a ‘new localism’; a modulation of Poundian epic ambitions in which writing, as the construction of spatio-temporal matrices capable of generating form, becomes what Eric Mottram describes as a ‘locationary action’.[6] Nonetheless, whatever the distinctive cultural roots of such an ‘action’, as it manifests itself within Sinclair’s writing, it is fair to say that its somewhat belated mainstream fashionablity has coincided with a far more culturally generalised ‘poetics of place’ which would seem to draw together a bewilderingly wide range of different artistic forms and practices of the last few decades, and which appears — if we are to judge by current academic discourses — to have reached a certain fever pitch in our own contemporary moment. To note this is not to diminish the singularity of Sinclair’s work. Rather it is, I want to suggest, to provide a necessary interpretative framework for the kind of critical reflection that may serve to bring forth this singularity all the more forcefully within its contemporary context.[7]

Potential examples of the contemporary ‘hunger’ for place are various: the proclaimed return in architectural theory, after the final disintegration of the Modern Movement, back towards what Christian Norberg-Schulz terms ‘the “vocation” of place’ and the regulative ideal of the genius loci;[8] the increasing dominance of site-specific works within post-conceptualist art practice of a type that would seek ‘to animate old sites … reoccupy lost cultural spaces, and propose historical counter-memories’;[9] the seductive melancholia of W. G Sebald’s books that conjure a ‘heartache…caused by the vortex of past time’ accumulated on the sites of Liverpool Street Station or the Sailors’ Reading Room in Southwold;[10] and what might best be described as the pseudo-Situationist and Benjaminian aspirations of much contemporary urban theory.[11] The desire for what the architectural theorist Kenneth Frampton calls a critical regionalism, whose ‘salient cultural precept’ would be that of ‘place creation’, is seemingly rampant in our time.[12]

Yet what cultural function does such an apparently ubiquitous ‘precept’ serve in a resurgent globalised capitalism? As one recent commentator on contemporary art has put it, it is certainly hard not to suspect, given the increasing ‘historical loss of distinctions of place’, that ‘the ideological function of site-specific work’ is ‘now to manufacture such distinctions artificially, in order to compensate and cover over the loss’. For if, in the words of Hal Foster, ‘the local and the everyday are [commonly] thought to resist economic development, they can also attract it, [insofar as] such development needs the local and the everyday even as it erodes these qualities, renders them siteless’. The renewed importance, within globalised capitalist development, of ‘monopoly rent’ — the ‘exclusive control over some directly or indirectly tradeable item which is in some respects unique and non-replicable’ — gives rise to a very contemporary form of what we might call the ‘capital of location’, and to new forms of financial speculation that follow from it. In a familiar pattern, the regeneration of the East End of London, with which Sinclair has long been concerned, might well be understood as exemplary in these terms, promoting itself on the basis of a collective symbolic capital deriving from its distinctive (spectacularised) history and myth (from the distant pathos of Huguenot and Jewish immigrants to the gothic frisson of Jack the Ripper and gangster chic). Yet, as David Harvey observes, this process rapidly heads ‘deep into contradiction’. For ‘as opportunities to pocket monopoly rents galore present themselves on the basis of [this] collective symbolic capital … so their irresistible lure draws more and more homogenising commodification in its wake’. It is the tension at work here that determines the cultural politics of globalization in general.[13]

Explicitly resistant, then, as his work may well be to the contemporary construction of literature’s latest ideological role as an effective branch of the heritage industry — fetishising the quirky and mildly exotic signs of ‘local colour’ for a global market — the marks of such a problematic complicity with the forces of investment capital cannot be entirely erased from Sinclair’s own works, as he is clearly aware. Indeed it is an alertness to the danger of such complicity which is increasingly, even obsessively, self-reflexively enunciated, in a familiar narratorial conceit, throughout the pages of a novel like Downriver. ‘Would it be ethical to make our discovery public?’, the narrator asks at one point. ‘To endanger this time-warped reservation?’. For to ‘make public’ is always to risk feeding those who need ‘a mythology to underwrite property values’; the ‘standard pre-development scenario’:

When artists walk through a wilderness in epiphanous ‘bliss-out’, fiddling with polaroids, grim estate agents dog their footsteps…The visionary reclaims the ground of his nightmares only to present it, framed in Perspex, to the Docklands Development Board .[14]

Such self-conscious marking out of the changing socio-economic processes which would culturally enframe and threaten his poetics of place — the reshaping of London by the ‘occult logic of “market forces”’ which serve to dictate ‘a new geography’ — is a persistent feature of the ironic distance apparent within the narrative voices of Sinclair’s recent prose; a specific modulation of the kind of reflexive commentary that ‘is so thoroughly interwoven with action that the distinction between the two disappears’.[15] Indeed, something of the distinctiveness of Sinclair’s recent works is precisely to be found — unlike in, say, the ultimately conservative pleasures of Sebald’s superficially similar writings — in the ways in which they immanently register a certain crisis within their own mode of literary production. For if it is indeed a certain ‘magnetism’ of place that activates the ‘poet’, the historical loss of distinctions of place clearly raises questions about the contemporary possibility of poetic experience in general, as Sinclair conceives it. Moreover, and as such, this problematic comes to constitute far more than a mere historical ‘backdrop’ or thematic ‘context’, but necessarily manifests itself as an immanent problem of form; rendering visible within its own formal structures, and stylistic constellations, the social contradictions that it engages.

If, therefore, the conception of literary production as ‘locationary action’ is evidently one that persists, in a certain continuous fashion, through all of Sinclair’s writings, up to the present day, it must also be thought of as subject to, and as immanently registering, an irresistible transformation. The stories and forms of poetic experience engendered by what Patrick Wright describes as ‘the precipitations of history, rumour and memory which were still clinging to the streets of Whitechapel as Sinclair knew them in the seventies’ — and which provide much of the material for Lud Heat, Suicide Bridge and White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings — are, by the early 1990s, presented as progressively fragile in the face of the ‘deregulated energies’ unleashed by Thatcherism. In the pages of Downriver and Radon Daughters, one previously ‘disregarded landscape’ after another is ‘dragged from cyclical time’ to the ‘pragmatic time’ of capital accumulation.[16]

Image: JG Ballard in London Orbital (dirs. Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, 2002).

What might be at stake in this for the politics of contemporary literature, more generally, is something that I want to consider here through the staging of a ‘confrontation’ between the very different — in some sense, opposed — manifestations of the contemporary novel’s spatial and formal possibilities to be found within the oeuvres of Sinclair and of J.G. Ballard. Such a confrontation is not one that is imposed from the outside. It is, crucially, internal to Sinclair’s writings of the last five years, and, I want to claim, serves, in part, to mediate their developing relations both to the history of the novel form and to the contemporary problematics of place and non-place, of spaces of places and spaces of flows. Yet, as such, this textual presence of Ballard is a rather more disturbing presence within Sinclair’s writing than are the familiar allusions to Blake, Dickens, Conrad, et al. For Ballard’s own style and concerns, in their tension with Sinclair’s, mark something like an introjected point of resistance (which cannot simply be digested or overcome) to the poetics of place upon which the latter continues to insist.

In London Orbital, Sinclair records an actual meeting with Ballard at his home in Shepperton — an act of ‘homage’, he suggests — but we find the first explicit staging of this confrontation a few years earlier in the short book on Crash, written for the BFI Modern Classics series, in which Sinclair addresses, at some length, his particular interest in Ballard’s definitive ‘fascination with a frozen aesthetic of motorways, business parks, airport hotels … A present tense world of swift, sharp sentences’. This is a fiction that ‘grows out of [an] undisclosed, over-familiar urban landscape. Ballard’s trick [is] to forge a poetic out of that which contains least poetry’ (Crash 77). In this way, Sinclair argues, Ballard’s writing conforms, in its own idiosyncratic manner, to a poetics of place. Like the areas of London that, in Lights Out For The Territory, Sinclair parcels out to the likes of Angela Carter, Allen Fisher and Aidan Dun, this fiction can be sited, insofar as it is a particular place, Sinclair claims—’the transitional landscape of gravel pits, reservoirs and slip-roads that surround Heathrow’ — that activates Ballard the poet. The ‘psychogeographical field’ of Crash ‘was posited entirely on the London perimeter, the Heathrow pentagram that Ballard knew so well’.[17]

Yet it is worth noting that there is — by contrast to Fisher or Dun, who fully subscribe to their own versions of an Olsonian poetics of place — a rather deliberate elision of certain key aspects of Ballard’s own self-understanding apparent in such a reading; an elision which is, for example, revealed in discussion with Sinclair’s sometime collaborator Chris Petit. As Sinclair relates the latter’s conversations with Ballard around the possibility of making a film of Crash, he recounts that a major problem for Petit concerned his difficulty in imagining it ‘being set anywhere except the isthmus between the Westway, Heathrow and Shepperton’. The implicit basis for such a view is re-iterated in Sinclair’s own judgement on the David Cronenberg film that was eventually made, where, he writes, ‘the strange particulars of London that Ballard pressed into a Blakean mapping of his own…dissolve into the netherworld of … Toronto’. Yet, as Sinclair is also compelled to acknowledge here, such disappointment was emphatically not shared by Ballard himself. Indeed Ballard would love Cronenberg’s film.[18]

Now, the dissensus at this point can, perhaps, precisely be conceptualised in terms of the dialectic of space and place at work, respectively, in Ballard’s novel and in Sinclair’s reading — or, rather, creative mis-reading — of it. As Petit relates, Ballard himself saw ‘Crash as much a Tokyo novel or a Toronto novel as a London novel’; the reasoning for which is made quite evident in Sinclair’s own interview with the writer:

The areas peripheral to great airports are identical all over the world. You can land at any airport these days and for the first twenty minutes, as you take your cab, you go through a landscape that is identical … Two-storey factories, flat housing, warehouses.[19]

Image: JG Ballard in London Orbital (dirs. Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, 2002).

In this sense, for Ballard himself, the ‘spatial field’ of Crash, and of the novels that followed, is not, in fact, related to a ‘place’, as Sinclair might like to imagine, but to a necessarily generalised non-place, in something like Augé’s terms. The spaces of Ballard’s fiction are those populated by ‘the same car-rental agencies and hotel rooms, with their adult movies and deodorized bathrooms’. As one of his characters says of the central ‘location’ in Cocaine Nights: ‘Estrella de Mar isn’t anywhere’.[20]

In exemplary ethnological fashion, such spaces of non-place are taxonomised by Augé himself as including ‘air, rail and motorway routes, the mobile cabins called “means of transport”…the airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks, and large retail outlets’, both ‘transit points and temporary abodes’, ‘holiday clubs and refugee camps’, as well as the spaces ‘where the habitué of supermarkets, slot machines and credit cards communicates wordlessly, through gestures, with an abstract, unmediated commerce’.[21] I will not be entirely the first to note that this check-list in fact reads like a thematic summary of Ballard’s own fiction, from the concrete dystopias of High-Rise and Crash through to the decadent, gated communities of Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes.[22] And the spaces of such fiction cast a considerable shadow over much of Sinclair’s recent work, most obviously London Orbital, obsessively returned to throughout its pages. Indeed, this latter book might well be read as a kind of self-conscious encroachment upon, and rewriting of, what Sinclair regards as Ballard’s own territory, from the Bluewater shopping centre — described as a ‘Ballardian resort’ — to the ‘enclaves with no memory’ that constitute the new housing estates ringing London, to, above all, the M25 itself.[23] The echoes of Ballard would thus seem entirely deliberate. Compare, for example, the following two fictional ‘spaces’, selected almost at random; the first from a recent Ballard novel, the second from London Orbital:

Despite its title, the Pangbourne Village estate was not built near the site of any former or existing village…[It] has no connections, social, historical or civic with Pangbourne itself…Secure behind their high walls and surveillance cameras, these estates in effect constitute a chain of closed communities whose lifelines run directly along the M4 to the offices and consulting rooms, restaurants and private clinics of central London.

A colony of the disenchanted in a panorama of disenchantment. Amnesiaville…Chafford Hundred thrives because it is not really there. It’s displaced, not placed: 2,000 (and rising) pristine, anti-vernacular units. Scimitar-shaped Draylon-grass carpets. Second cars. An empty-by-day enclave with no centres and no purpose.[24]

In this way, Ballard’s work provides something like the intertextual point of mediation for Sinclair’s own engagement with the contemporary dialectic of place and non-place; that is, with what is earlier figured by the ‘sorry meniscus’ of the Millenium Dome, Canary Wharf’s ‘crystal synthesis of capital’ — ‘Treeless, broad, focusing on nothing’ — or the ‘discreet tyranny of “now”’ established in the ‘money lake’ of the City of London’s archetypal space of flows. The British supermarket chain Sainsbury’s, Sinclair writes in London Orbital, ‘is universal…In supermarket heaven, you’re at home everywhere’. You are, in other words, lodging in Ballard’s home; a home which is, it might be said, no kind of home at all. Just as Sinclair seeks to re-read Crash through his own poetics of place, so we might say, more generally, that he thus seeks also to re-place the fictional spaces of Ballard’s novels through what is described as a tenuous act of re-enchantment. In doing so, the formal and conceptual dialogue between these two poles of contemporary British writing is rendered internal to the text, allowing the remorseless absences and solitudes of Ballard’s own spatial configurations to immanently inscribe the historical limitations of Sinclair’s poetics; a kind of dialogic imperative which, collapsing the distinction between form and reflection, allows the dialogue to debate the very basis of the work itself. Ballard’s stripped-down language of dislocation, with its unvarying stylistic register, comes to be dialectically entwined with Sinclair’s own characteristically dense prose style and its encyclopaedic accumulation of literary and cultural allusions, as if the lexical variety and richness of the latter might overcome the emptiness that it confronts; re-vivifying place through a Rimbaudian alchemy of the word. At the same time, if the imagistic intensity of Sinclair’s prose, with its dazzling expansiveness of diction, would seek, in an act of memory and ‘counter-magic’, to re-instate the image of place within the space of flows, the present-tense ‘images’ of Ballard’s writing, and of its ‘willed limbo’, provide its opposition and resistance. As Vidler writes of Martha Rossler’s (very Ballardian) photographs of American freeways and airport terminals, they ‘assert’ that ‘not only is no orientation possible in the technically determined scheme of road and vehicle [or passages and ramps], but that no amount of image proliferation will restore orientation’.[25]

Image: JG Ballard in London Orbital (dirs. Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, 2002).

At the structural heart of this tense conjunction is, of course, the endless dislocated space of the M25 itself. ‘Out here on the motorway rim’, Sinclair writes, ‘there were no memories’. ‘Back stories’ are ‘erased’; history is ‘revised on a daily basis’.[26] The great gambit of London Orbital is to try — against all odds — to re-form the images and paths of place and memory within this kind of non-place that Ballard’s texts so powerfully render; creating, through a familiar urban metaphorics of the body, the organic pump of blood that would circulate around the tourniquet which might otherwise kill the city.[27] For Augé, contemporary ‘traveller’s space’ is ‘the archetype of non-place’. The artist’s ‘counter-magic’, the ‘pedestrian circuit of London’s orbital motorway’, thus might be understood as a re-placing of the anthropological ‘route’ or ‘path’ — what, for Bakhtin famously, was the pivotal ‘space of encounter’ for one of the novel’s dominant historical chronotopes — in the exemplary non-place of the continuous motorway.[28] Although Sinclair claims, in his conversations with Kevin Jackson, that the ‘road is the river, the M25 is the equivalent of the Thames’, he must know that in fact an unbridgeable history divides them. (The trick is, if only for a moment, to bring them together). For if the rivers and roads, that are the sites of the journeys in Downriver, still (just) retain a liberatory passage to past and future — in the ‘posthumous brilliance’ of their history — the endless, circular ‘ribbon’ of the orbital allows for no such opening. Perhaps its most obvious prefiguring in the earlier novel is found in the central metonymic image of the nineteenth-century establishment of ‘railway time’ in chapter six, which, pressed forward by the capitalist ratio, already abstracts and negates the temporal nuances of place. Yet, even here, the train itself provides a novelistic space of encounter and narrative production — Strangers on a Train, Murder on the Orient Express, Woolf’s ‘Mrs Brown’ — that the ‘mobile cabins’ circulating the motorway cannot.

Following Bakhtin, in his 1998 ‘atlas’ of the nineteenth-century novel Franco Moretti asserts that ‘in modern European novels, what happens depends a lot on where it happens’; ‘without a certain kind of space, a certain kind of story is simply impossible’. Hence what he describes as the ‘place-bound nature’ of the novel (what Reiner Hawsherr calls Ortegebunden) — its ‘peculiar geometry, its boundaries, its spatial taboos and favourite routes’ — a ‘platial’ character which he traces through its relation to the formation of the modern spatial configurations of the nation state and the nineteenth-century metropolis. It is the changing ‘chronotopes’, formally constitutive of the novel, that serve, Moretti argues, to explain its historical development in complex relation to ‘an actual material reality’. Citing the exceptional moments of the late nineteenth-century Russian novel of ideas and post-war Latin American Magic Realism, ‘in both cases’, he asserts, ‘the new model is the product of a new space…A new space poses new problems — and so asks for new answers’.[29] Yet what new stories might the spaces of non-place and of flows provoke? What answers might be given to the problems that it poses? The M25, as Petit states in the London Orbital film, seemingly ‘resists any kind of story’. Without beginning or end — a kind of purgatorial eternity — no narrative or image can finally stick. ‘What other than a surveillance camera’, asks the soundtrack, ‘would want to record its ceaseless undramatic motion?’ In the absence of the orientations of place, the dynamics of story are displaced by the perpetual, un-editable loop.[30]

The power of Ballard’s writings — no doubt, in some sense, for Sinclair himself — come, then, from the ways in which they imply the irresistible submission of the novel’s narrative modes to the contemporary forms of a present-tense ‘information loop’ that characterise a globalised commodity culture. The attempt to locate a sub-Benjaminian agenda of redemption here in a kind of ‘technological uncanny’ — such as is apparent in, for example, Roger Luckhurst’s (otherwise very useful) book on Ballard — fails to engage what is most challenging in this work:[31] its absolute self-dissolution into a contemporary language of abstraction and dislocation, of advertising copy, technocratic jargon and cheap pornography. As Tafuri writes of Mies van der Rohe’s post-war sheets of reflective glass, Ballard’s texts ‘assume in themselves the ineluctability of absence that the contemporary world imposes on the language of forms’. They ‘negate dwelling as they reflect the metropolis’. For Ballard, in Adorno’s withering phrase, ‘dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible’. Against this, the danger inherent within the current obsessions with memoration, as supposed ‘act of resistance against the totality of spectacularisation’, is simply that, as Stewart Martin argues, it in fact becomes an art of forgetting; a forgetting of real historical movements and of the changed conditions of present. In a world of heritage, retro and Rough Guide-style ‘alternative’ tourism, to evoke the flâneur or the rag picker (or, even, the Situationist dérive) is, without qualification, to fail to understand the road historically travelled. Sinclair’s force as a writer comes from his (only rarely acknowledged) refusal to do so; re-asserting a poetics of place only through the textual introjection of that which would historically challenge it.[32]

It is not here a fatuous question of choosing between Sinclair and Ballard — as if such a thing were possible — but of tracing, through their immanent confrontation, the role of writing, and of cultural production more generally, at an historical moment marked by the particular spatial relations generated by the dialectic of places and flows; an historical moment in which ‘the relationships between the local and the global are all in flux’. If, as Adorno once suggested, it is part of the modern novel’s distinctive fate to incorporate its ongoing dissolution within its very form, then it is perhaps as a new stage in such a process that the (dialectically inseparable) novelistic forms of space and time inscribed within the singular prose styles of Sinclair and Ballard might best be understood.[33] What, in time, will come to re-place the novel remains, of course, an open question.

Image: JG Ballard in London Orbital (dirs. Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, 2002).

This essay was first published in Robert Bond and Jenny Bavidge (eds), City Visions: The Work of Iain Sinclair (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007), pp. 134-146. Reprinted with permission.

NOTES

[1] See David Cunningham, ‘Notes on Nuance: Rethinking a Philosophy of Modern Music’ in Radical Philosophy 125 (May/June 2004), 22-26.
[2] Peter Osborne, ‘Non-Places and the Spaces of Art’ in The Journal of Architecture 6, 2 (Summer 2001), 184; Saskia Sassen, ‘Analytic Borderlands: Economy and Culture in the Global City’ in D: Columbia Documents of Architecture and Theory, Volume Three (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 5.
[3] Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 442, 423. See also pp. 408-9; Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London & New York: Verso, 1995), pp. 77-8. See also Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 216-7; Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, Modern Architecture/2, trans. Robert Erich Wolf (New York: Rizzoli, 1976), p. 339; Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 173.
[4] Iain Sinclair, unbroadcast interview with Paul Green for BBC radio (1979).
[5] Lights, pp. 246-7, 252; Orbital, p. 101.
[6] See Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris (eds.), Poems for the Millenium Volume Two (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press 1998), p. 102; See Peter Barry, ‘Allen Fisher and “Content-Specific” Poetry’ in Robert Hampson & Peter Barry (eds.), New British Poetries: The Scope of the Possible (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1993), pp. 198-215. The Olsonian character of Sinclair’s early poetics of place is clearest in the opening piece of Suicide Bridge (1979), ‘Intimate Associations: Myth and Place’ (Lud/ Suicide pp. 147-154).
[7] For even if it is a question here of resisting the facile appropriation of Sinclair’s work in the name of some fairly dubious forms of cultural politics, then it must be in relation to such a context that this resistance is articulated.
[8] Christian Norberg-Schulz, ‘The Phenomenon of Place’ in Kate Nesbit (ed.), Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965-1995 (New York: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 426.
[9] Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1996), p. 197.
[10] W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Penguin, 2002), pp. 182-3. See also W. G. Sebald, Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Harvill Press, 1998).
[11] See, for example, Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Cambridge: Polity, 2002); Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (eds.), City A-Z: Urban Fragments (London & New York: Routledge, 2000); Iain Borden, Joe Kerr, Alicia Pivana and Jane Rendell (eds.), Strangely Familiar: Narratives of Architecture in the City (London & New York: Routledge, 1996).
[12] Kenneth Frampton, ‘Prospects for a Critical Regionalism’ in Nesbit (ed.), p. 482.
[13] Peter Osborne, ‘Installation, Performance or What?’ in Oxford Art Journal 24, 2 (2001), 151-2; Foster, Return of the Real, p. 197; David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), pp. 395, 406.
[14] Downriver, p. 397; Rodinsky, pp. 66-7; Downriver, pp. 16, 265.
[15] Theodor Adorno ‘The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel’ in Notes to Literature, Volume One, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 34;
[16] Patrick Wright, ‘Rodinsky’s Place’ in The London Review of Books 9, 19 (October 29 1987), 3-5. In his conversations with Kevin Jackson, Sinclair remarks that, in the 1970s, Brick Lane in London’s East End ‘still had the ambience of the Late Victorian era, a derelict area with the brewery as its focus’ (Verbals, p. 71). By the 1990s, of course, the brewery, in which Sinclair once worked, had stopped brewing, having been ‘redeveloped’ as a complex of bar, offices and studios; Downriver, pp. 158, 33.
[17] Crash, pp. 37, 77. Lights, pp. 145-6; Crash, p. 15.
[18] Ibid., pp. 87, 11.
[19] Ibid., pp. 87, 48.
[20] J. G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights (London: Flamingo, 1997), pp. 10, 17.
[21] Augé, pp. 79, 78.
[22] See Roger Luckhurst, The Angle Between the Walls: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997), pp. 129-31.
[23] Orbital, pp. 388, 136.
[24] J. G. Ballard, Running Wild (London: Flamingo, 1997), pp. 11-12; Orbital, p. 400.
[25] Downriver pp. 276-7; Lights pp. 91, 107; Orbital p. 262; Ballard, Cocaine Nights, p. 34; Vidler, Warped Space, p. 175.
[26] Orbital, pp. 141, 123-4.
[27] Given the organicist tendencies which always underlie the metaphor of city as body, Sinclair’s admiration for the liberal Christian account of the city to be found in the work of Richard Sennett is perhaps less surprising than it might otherwise seem. See Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (London: Faber & Faber, 1994), especially chapter eight on the anthropomorphic projections in urbanism derived from Harvey’s work on the circulation of blood (pp. 255-281).
[28] Augé, p. 86; See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 243-5; Verbals, p. 135; Downriver, pp. 6, 170-1.
[29] Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (London & New York: Verso, 1998), pp. 70, 100, 5, 196.
[30] Soundtrack to Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit, London Orbital (Illuminations Films/Channel 4, 2002).
[31] See Luckhurst, p. 135. Luckhurst’s argument for an uncanny return of the repressed at work in Ballard rests on the evidence of a fairly short passage in the novel Concrete Island — in which the central character stumbles upon the half-buried ‘grand-plans of Edwardian terraced houses’ — and draws (all-too-typically) on that conception of the ‘outmoded’ to be found in Benjamin’s 1929 essay on Surrealism. But there is, it seems to me, little ‘revolutionary nostalgia’ at work in Ballard’s fictional world, little sense of an alternative future figured within that which lies derelict and discarded in ‘the interstices of new economies’, only a rigorously non-nostalgic vision of a coming desert in which all ‘cultural accretions’ are finally erased.
[32] Tafuri & Dal Co, p. 312; Massimo Cacciari, ‘Eupalinos or Architecture’, trans. Stephen Sartarelli, in K. Michael Hays (ed.), Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), p. 400. See also David Cunningham, ‘The Phenomenology of Non-Dwelling: Massimo Cacciari, Modernism and the Philosophy of the Metropolis’ in Crossings: A Counter-Disciplinary Journal 7 (Fall 2004), 156-8; Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London & New York: Verso, 1978), p. 38. As Sinclair acknowledges in London Orbital, for Ballard the ‘“local” was finished as a concept’ (Orbital 177); Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Neo-Avant-Garde and Culture Industry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. xxv; See Stewart Martin, ‘W. G. Sebald and the Modern Art of Memory’ in David Cunningham, Andrew Fisher & Sas Mays (eds.), Photography and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005), pp. 180-201.
[33] Harvey, Spaces of Capital, p. 226; See Adorno, ‘Position of the Narrator’, pp. 30-36.

…:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ ‘When in doubt, quote Ballard’: An Interview with Iain Sinclair
+ ‘Obeying the surrealist formula’: Iain Sinclair & Hermione Lee on Ballard
+ ‘His personal horizon’: Sinclair and Self on Ballard

All photography by Simon Sellars.

Bizarrely, it has been almost a year since I posted the first part of this photo essay. There are so many loose ends dangling from this site, frayed and incomplete due to the mad scramble to complete my PhD in the latter half of 2008. Now it’s my mission to clear the backlog as best I can, beginning with this, the conclusion to ‘”Paradigm of Nowhere”: Shepperton, a photo essay’, my attempt to traverse the fantasy-film of Ballard’s Unlimited Dream Company playing in my head. As I wrote in Part 1, I had intended to take photographs of Shepperton, the arena that has supplied so much raw material for Ballard’s writing, but at the same time I had no intention of infringing on his privacy. What I was aiming for instead was the traversal of a distinct psychic terrain (studiously avoiding the dreaded “p*****geography” word): the blanket overlay of Shepperton with a mental template gleaned from so many Ballard novels and short stories, UDC in particular.

In Part 1, we set out from Shepperton train station, making a direct line for the fields and water meadows surrounding the motorway just past Ballard’s street. Crossing this metallized river by bridge, which Blake in The Unlimited Dream Company was unable to do, we made our way to the famous film studios, which feature prominently in the book (doubtless Blake made it by flying). Now in Part 2, we explore the reservoirs near the film studios before crossing back over the motorway and into town, finally alighting in Old Shepperton, where we attempt to locate the exact spot where Blake ditched his plane in the Thames.

I was struck by the fact, when I [first] came [to Shepperton], that I was living in a sort of marine landscape, most unusual. There are these enormous reservoirs, the nearest is only four or five hundred yards away, the Queen Mary Reservoir, which is a gigantic reservoir about a mile in diameter. The whole area in fact is infested with reservoirs and settling beds and conduits and little private canals. When you fly from London airport, when you look down while the plane circles around, you will see what looks like a huge expanse of water, with the Thames of course here too.

J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Alan Burns, 1974.

Above is the entrance to the reservoir that worked its magic on Ballard’s psyche. Although we were disappointed that the reservoir embankment was fenced-off and inaccessible, it must be remembered that for a man of Ballard’s imaginative powers, it would not be necessary to empirically observe a water body to imagine Shepperton — or London — submerged.

Rather, the reservoir is high above us; we are literally ‘under water’.

In fact, [in Shepperton] we’re living … on little causeways. There are huge gravel lakes as well; for a hundred years they’ve been digging sand out, and some of these old pits are damn big, ten times the size of the Serpentine. We’re living in these houses, these little quiet suburban streets, which are little causeways running between these reservoirs. Most of them are invisible because there are high embankments for obvious reasons; the Water Board doesn’t want people peeing in them, throwing cigarette ends in and so on. So they’re well screened off, but one is aware of a sort of invisible marine world, of living below the water line. It works on you imaginatively after a while.

JGB, interviewed by Burns, 1974.

It was plainly not by chance that I had crash-landed my burning aircraft into this riverside town. On all sides Shepperton was surrounded by water — gravel lakes and reservoirs, the settling beds, canals and conduits of the local water authority, the divided arms of the river fed by a maze of creeks and streams. The high embankments of the reservoirs formed a series of raised horizons, and I realized that I was wandering through a marine world. The dappled light below the trees fell upon an ocean floor. Unknown to themselves, these modest suburbanites were exotic marine creatures with the dream-filled minds of aquatic mammals. Around these placid housewives with their tamed appliances everything was suspended in a profound calm. Perhaps the glimmer of threatening light I had seen over Shepperton was a premonitory reflection of this drowned suburban town?

J.G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company.

I am a scholar of Ballard’s interviews, especially the ‘Golden Age’ spanning the late 60s to the mid-70s. I find them endlessly fascinating. Once you have a good knowledge of the many interviews he has given, you begin to unravel themes and motifs that he has discoursed on at length before committing to fiction. These interviews are laboratories in which Ballard unleashes thought experiments upon his unwitting interrogators, who sometimes are unable to keep up (see his 1974 conversation with Carol Orr, where Orr seems quite flustered, taken aback at the brutal clarity of Ballard’s futurology). Having taken his creations for a dry run, we then find them machine-tooled and recalibrated in his writing: compare the previous quotes from the Burns interview (‘I was living in a sort of marine landscape’), with the one above from UDC (‘I realized that I was wandering through a marine world’). It’s a fascinating, holographic process, and in some cases appears to work retrospectively. In the Burns interview, for example, Ballard is talking about when he first settled in Shepperton with his wife and kids in 1960. Now we know where the inspiration for The Drowned World, published in 1962, really came from…

Or is it all an elaborate metaphysical game — another version of Ballard’s maddening, yet emancipatory, version of circular time?

It was now late afternoon, and the bridge approaches were filled with traffic returning from London. Although Walton lay to the south of Shepperton, even further from the airport, at least it would spring me from this zone of danger.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

…back across the bridge and into town, crossing the always-flowing metal sea that seems to both energise and enervate the citizens in UDC’s version of Shepperton.

I … set off for the pedestrian bridge that spanned the motorway. Poppies and yellow broom brushed my legs, hopefully leaving their pollen on me. They flowered among the debris of worn tyres and abandoned mattresses. To my right was a furniture hypermarket, its open courtyard packed with three-piece suites, dining-tables and wardrobes, through which a few customers moved in an abstracted way, like spectators in a boring museum. Next to the hypermarket was an automobile repair yard, its forecourt filled with used cars. They sat in the sunlight with numerals on their windshields, the advance guard of a digital universe in which everything would be tagged and numbered, a doomsday catalogue listing each stone and grain of sand under my feet, each eager poppy.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

To my utter amazement, the virtual and the actual continued to merge down to the smallest detail: as we began walking back to Shepperton centre through the parkland just over the bridge, we noticed pollen from poppies and yellow broom dusted on the legs of my jeans. Suitably tagged with Ballardian seed, I dutifully followed the road back into town.

That evening I saw the faces of the three crippled children watching me through the damp light, small moons quietly circling each other. They squatted among the dead flowers and macaws, and played with the pennants of my blood. Rachel fondled them, her blind eyes flickering raptly, trying to read their mysterious codes, cryptic messages from another universe transmitted by the ticker-tape of my heart.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

When you observe Shepperton through a Ballardian lens, everything seems in code. I imagined Rachel had daubed the back of this sign with the glyphs of her psyche, marked out using the pennants of Blake’s blood.

Already I was convinced that there was no evil, and that even the most plainly evil impulses were merely crude attempts to accept the demands of a higher realm that existed within each of us. By accepting these perversions and obsessions I was opening the gates into the real world, where we would all fly together, transform ourselves at will into the fish and the birds, the flowers and the dust, unite ourselves once more within the great commonwealth of nature.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

In the book, Blake encourages all to slip the noose of consumerism, to rouse from the waking dream of late capitalism, to throw down whitegoods and gadgets and escape into the unfetettered realm of the imagination, passing through into a micronational realm, ‘the commonwealth of nature’, responsible to no master, least of all bored London admen selling lifestyles to the satellite towns. Pyramids of discarded goods line the streets, expanding upon the consumer bricolage of ‘The Ultimate City’ and presaging the razed shopscapes of Kingdom Come.

Here, the barbaric razor wire surrounding something as banal as the Shepperton Carpet & Flooring Centre triggered something suitably apocalyptic in my mind.

Over my head the sky brightened, bathing the placid roofs in an auroral light, transforming this suburban high street into an avenue of temples. I felt queasy and leaned against the chestnut tree outside the post office. I waited for this retinal illusion to pass, unsure whether to halt the passing traffic and warn these ruminating women that they and their offspring were about to be annihilated.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Above: Shepperton’s placid high street, over-ripe for transcendence and transformation…

There is an antiseptic quality about Pangbourne Village, as if these company directors, financiers and television tycoons have succeeded in ridding their private Parnassus of every strain of dirt and untidiness. Here, even the drifting leaves look as if they have too much freedom. Thirteen children once lived in these houses, but it is hard to visualize them at play.

J.G. Ballard, Running Wild.

I recalled the above quote from Running Wild when I came across this leaf that had been embedded in the tarmac. It seemed to be lacquered solid into the road surface, losing any semblance of nature, losing its ability to drift, its colours supervivid and oversaturated; the organic encased in concrete, the fusing of the animate with the inanimate: UDC in a nutshell.

Waiting for release…

Soon after dawn the river had disgorged this antique Pegasus on to the same beach where I had swum ashore. I approached the horse and pulled it on to the bank. The fresh paint silvered my hands, leaving a speckled trail across the sand. As I wiped the paint on to the grass, the pelicans watched me from the flowerbeds. The same vivid light flared from their plumage. The foliage of the willows and ornamental firs seemed to have been retouched by a psychedelic gardener with a taste for garish colours. A magpie swooped across the overlit lawn, feathers brilliant as a macaw’s.

Stimulated by this display of light, I stared into the stained water.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

The levels in this photograph have been messed with to give it a suitably lysergic feel — as much a cliche as it sounds, UDC feels like an acid trip; but the synaesthetic elements of tripping, rather than any notions of ‘cosmic consciousness’. Ballard’s work, after all, is relentlessly about reordering and recoding the senses to subvert dominant systems of control.

We were soon more than a mile above Shepperton, this jungle town surrounded by its palisade of forest bamboo, an Amazon enclave set down here in the quiet valley of the Thames.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Above: the jungle-like gateway to Old Shepperton, the third part of the town’s tripartite structure (high street/reservoir/old town)… and representing our best chance of locating the sunken Cessna.

Pinned to the wall were the X-ray plates of my head, deformed jewels through which a ghostly light still shone, like that corona of destruction I had first seen over Shepperton.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

In interviews, Ballard has often said that in the suburbs one needs to perform a deviant act almost daily — like kicking the dog — to get a charge out of one’s flaccid existence. This ‘report vandalism’ sign, itself vandalised by a blob of incoherent spray paint, amused me, as I imagined it to be the first bumbling stirrings of Blake’s legions awakening themselves from their perimeter-town stupor.

The sun hid itself behind my naked body, dazzled by the tropical vegetation that had invaded this modest suburban town. Pausing to rest, the crowd began to settle itself. Mothers and their infants sat on the appliances in the shopping mall, children perched on the branches of the banyan tree, elderly couples relaxed in the rear seats of the abandoned cars. There was a sense of intermission.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Intermission: lurking in the background, the invading chaotic rhizomes of supernature prepare to engulf the arboreal trap-cars and litter patrols of civic duty.

Father Wingate unlocked the doors of the church. ‘So it was a dream … ? I’m relieved to hear you say so, Blake.’ He stepped through the doors and beckoned me to follow him. ‘Right — we’ll get this over with.’

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

If I had known that only ten minutes after taking off from London Airport the burning machine was to crash into the Thames, would I still have climbed into its cock-pit? Perhaps even then I had a confused premonition of the strange events that would take place in the hours following my rescue.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

When Blake crashes into the Thames at Shepperton, I can’t help but think of Ballard hitting the town in 1960, wondering what he had got himself in for, but deciding after all, in a strange way, that his perverse talent could be explored to the hilt here. When Blake’s love interest, Miriam St Cloud, dies, I can’t help but think of Ballard’s wife, Mary (known as “Miriam” in The Kindness of Women, of course), and her sudden death in 1964. When Blake teaches the townspeople to not only fly but to explore the farthest reaches of their sexuality, I can’t help but think of the obsessed Ballard, stricken with grief at the death of his wife, hatching The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash on an unsuspecting world; what must the good people of Shepperton have thought of this ‘madman’ lurking in their midst? When Blake is shot down by Stark, I can’t help but think of the storms of outrage that greeted Crash on its publication — and perhaps of Ballard’s later, more cautious narrative approach, when he managed to touch the same veins of psychopathology in his work, but without flying as close to the sun himself.

The final pages of UDC are touching, as Blake yearns to once again merge with Miriam in the afterlife. Ballard has always stared with extraordinarily clear, unmisted eyes at the spectre of death, perhaps never more so than in this book. Ballard’s announcement that he has cancer is very sad, of course, but I can think of no other writer more prepared for whatever may follow.

I decide to visit J.G. Ballard at Shepperton. How does he feel about predicting, and thereby confirming, the psychogeography of Heathrow’s retail/recreation fallout zone? The river was my target… We drove to a riverside pub and, too hot to sit outside, lounged under an overhead fan in a comfortable, clubbish atmosphere. … He’s here, but he doesn’t belong. I think of him as a long-term sleeper, an intelligence operative forgotten by his paymasters.

Iain Sinclair, London Orbital.

The Cessna was almost submerged, its wings tipping below the sweeping tide. As I watched, the fuselage turned and slipped below the coverlet of the water. When the river had carried it away I walked across the beach to the bone-bed of the winged creature whose place I was about to take. I would lie down here, in this seam of ancient shingle, a couch prepared for me millions of years earlier.

There I would rest, certain now that one day Miriam would come for me. Then we would set off, with the inhabitants of all the other towns in the valley of the Thames, and in the world beyond.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Here it is: the exact spot where Blake crashed his plane into the river. How did we know? Call it instinct…

Ballard said that The Unlimited Dream Company was yet another preview of his, at the time, still-to-be-written autobiography; thus the book’s transformation of Shepperton is about ‘the writer’s imagination, and in particular my own imagination, transforming the humdrum reality that he occupies and turning it into an unlimited dream company’ (interview with David Pringle, 1996).

The book is a beautifully vivid evocation of Ballard’s love for Shepperton. He may playfully run it down in interviews, but it’s precisely Shepperton’s anonymity that has allowed Ballard to play out his own psychopathology in the pages of his books. He has lived there for almost 50 years now and virtually his entire ouevre has been composed within its boundaries. If, as Ballard has repeatedly claimed, the nature of fiction and reality has reversed in the post-war era, with the imagination the only true node of reality left in a world of endlessly mediated fictions, then The Unlimited Dream Company can be read as more autobiographical than either of Ballard’s so-called ‘semi-autobiographical’ works, Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women.

In this light, visiting the place is an enriching experience, as Iain Sinclair identifies from his own Shepperton sojourn:

“To be here, in bright sunshine, a small Thames-side town where nobody hurries, is to balance on a hinge. Specifics of the geography that inspired a writer seem, in their turn, to be responding to that ouevre.”

To take a trip to (or even in) Shepperton, ‘the everywhere of suburbia, the paradigm of nowhere’, as Blake declares, is to submit to a form of virtual reality that anyone admiring of Ballard’s work simply must experience.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ ‘Paradigm of nowhere’: Shepperton, a photo essay, part 1
+ JGB: a ‘billionaire’ in Shepperton?
+ J.G. Ballard: The Oracle of Shepperton
+ Sam Scoggins: ‘Unlimited Dream Company’ film
+ A Home and a Grave: Mike Holliday on The Unlimited Dream Company
+ Shepperton under water

ABOVE: Stills from ‘The Projectionst’ by ‘Alan Marker’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

In Melbourne a few months back, I had occasion to see John Foxx’s live soundtrack performance and presentation of Tiny Colour Movies, a selection of found-film fragments. Regular readers will recall that I interviewed Foxx in 2006, when the TCM album had just been released. At the time John was maintaining the line that the album was the soundtrack to a found-film collection owned by one Arnold Weizcs-Bryant, who, we were told, collects home movies and ‘repurposed movie fragments’, indeed any type of film produced outside of commercial considerations and not meant for public consumption. John, so the story goes, attended a private screening of Arnold’s collection and was compelled to create a soundtrack to accompany these resonant images, what he calls ‘tiny colour movies’.

According to the TCM liner notes:

Arnold stipulates that the movies he collects must be short — none is more than seven or eight minutes long, and some have a duration of only a few seconds. He insists that these represent a new kind of art. One which is only now becoming possible to recognise. Photography has recently become acknowledged as a new technological art form and commercial cinema is currently undergoing this kind of reassessment … these ideas cross over with Stanley Brakhage. Indeed Arnold was very excited when he discovered Brakhage’s work a few years ago, since he feels it confirms many of his long held views about the aesthetic beauty and cultural significance of film fragments.

John Foxx, TCM liner notes (2006).

ABOVE: ‘Stray Sinatra Neurone’ by ‘Max Forbert’, performed by John Foxx at the Leeds International Film Festival, 2007.

One of the filmmakers in Arnold’s collection is a certain Max Forbert, who makes what John terms ‘assemblage movies’. Forbert, supposedly a janitor in Hollywood, collected film scraps saved from the cutting-room floors he was sweeping for a living and later compiled them into his own sampled productions, a fragment of which was found by Arnold after Forbert’s death:

This is a section of a Forbert film that he identifies as using cutting room outtakes from a Sinatra movie, among others which remain unidentified. Shots are: Back view of a man in a suit looking through the window of a set interior (too tall for Sinatra — possibly an extra brought in to test-light a scene). Some brief outdoor shots of cars driving through a glittering downtown New York. Close-up of a woman applying deep red lipstick — again this appears to be a test shot of make-up and lighting. Location shots of Paris and Rome. Intricately cut together, these damaged fragments become an almost tactile essay on the sensual textures and enigmatic images that film can make available.

Foxx, TCM liner notes.

In the liner notes, John talks of the beauty of the imperfections in the films, the scratches and grain, the bleaching from wear and age, ‘elements which only add to the mystery, the emotional and intellectual resonance, and the sensual appreciation, of film’. Tiny Colour Movies, then, is not only an interesting document but also one that has overtly Ballardian overtones. For starters, there’s Ballard’s own interest in the subversive potential of home movies. But also, as I tried to tease out in the interview, The Atrocity Exhibition features many examples similar to what John identifies as a ‘sample film aesthetic’ in the Weizcs-Bryant collection, including therapeutic DIY film groups designed to aid the recovery of schizhophrenic patients:

Cine-films as group therapy. Patients were encouraged to form a film production unit, and were given full freedom as to choice of subject matter, cast and technique. In all cases explicitly pornographic films were made. Two films in particular were examined: (1) A montage sequence using portions of the faces of (a) Madame Ky, (b) Jeanne Moreau, (c) Jacqueline Kennedy (Johnson oath-taking). The use of a concealed stroboscopic device produced a major optical flutter in the audience, culminating in psychomotor disturbances and aggressive attacks directed against the still photographs of the subjects hung from the walls of the theatre. (2) A film of automobile accidents devised as a cinematic version of Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed. By chance it was found that slow-motion sequences of this film had a marked sedative effect, reducing blood pressure, respiration and pulse rates. Hypnagogic images were produced freely by patients. The film was also found to have a marked erotic content.

J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

Throughout Atrocity, T-, the book’s troubled protagonist, stitches and sutures together fragments from the media landscape — TV broadcasts, snatches of film, billboard representations of movie stars, the Zapruder film of JFK’s assassination (even the ‘time music of the quasars’, derived from a strange contraption on his roof, a sculpture consisting of ‘antennae of metal aerials’) — into a form that will make sense to his disordered psyche. This is most clearly expressed in Ballard’s dictum that politics today has become a branch of advertising that sells personalities rather than policies, and that as a result politicians involve us in their fantasies without our consent — fantasies of power, ego, domination, celebrity, lust, all disguised as governance but which are really designed to place us in peripheral roles as impotent bystanders in the major decisions affecting our lives. In Atrocity, then, Ballard’s schizophrenic patients involve politicians in their fantasies, notably the hapless figure of Ronald Reagan:

The conceptual role of Reagan. Fragments of Reagan’s cinetized postures were used in the construction of model psychodramas in which the Reagan-figure played the role of husband, doctor, insurance salesman, marriage counsellor, etc. The failure of these roles to express any meaning reveals the non-functional character of Reagan. Reagan’s success therefore indicates society’s periodic need to re-conceptualize its political leaders. Reagan thus appears as a series of posture concepts, basic equations which re-formulate the roles of aggression and anality… In assembly kit tests Reagan’s face was uniformly perceived as a penile erection. Patients were encouraged to devise the optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan.

ABOVE: T- devising the ‘optimum sex death of Ronald Reagan’ in Jonathan Weiss’s film of The Atrocity Exhibition.

Essentially, T- reclaims the inner space he feels has been invaded by media and advertising — the colonisation of the subconscious and the stealing of his memories — repopulating it with a collaged, open-ended landscape of images drawn from the free circulation of signs and signals of what we can now view, with hindsight, as Ballard’s own proto version of hyperreality.

As Ballard says,

The media landscape of the present day is a map in search of a territory. A huge volume of sensational and often toxic imagery inundates our minds, much of it fictional in content. How do we make sense of this ceaseless flow of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment, where presidential campaigns and moon voyages are presented in terms indistinguishable from the launch of a new candy bar or deodorant? What actually happens on the level of our unconscious minds when, within minutes on the same TV screen, a prime minister is assassinated, an actress makes love, an injured child is carried from a car crash? Faced with these charged events, prepackaged emotions already in place, we can only stitch together a set of emergency scenarios, just as our sleeping minds extemporize a narrative from the unrelated memories that veer through the cortical night. In the waking dream that now constitutes everyday reality, images of a blood-spattered widow, the chromium trim of a limousine windshield, the stylized glamour of a motorcade, fuse together to provide a secondary narrative with very different meanings.

J.G. Ballard, annotations (1994) to The Atrocity Exhibition.

This strategy of treating all media and perceptual inputs as equal, with no distinction between the inner world of fantasy and the outer world of reality, seems a clear precursor to the kind of culture-jamming hacktivism that would reach a peak in the 90s with the sound artists Negativland and their followers:

Negativland occupies itself with recontextualizing captured fragments to create something entirely new — a psychological impact based on a new juxtaposition of diverse elements, ripped from their usual context, chewed up, and spit out as a new form of hearing the world around us.

As audio artists, we pursue a uniquely contemporary and wholly appropriate creative process which inevitably emerges out of our electronic age of media saturation and the reproducing technologies available to all consumers.

Negativland, Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2 (1995).

ABOVE: JGB in London Orbital.

More explicitly, Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, in the film version of London Orbital, acknowledge a clear debt to Ballard, whose influence over the film looms large, both in the interview with him in the middle section and in the reading by Sinclair of JGB’s ‘What I Believe’ that frames it. Sinclair and Petit see the Bluewater shopping centre, ‘Ground Zero’ for the film’s aesthetic, as an architecture mediated by technology, specifically the omniscient CCTV cameras which in their endless, plastic and formless state create what the filmmakers call ‘a new nostalgia, a new boredom, a new kind of time’. If everything is filmable then, Petit and Sinclair’s method of resistance is to become like the surveillance camera, to always be open and to always be filming but to locate the degradations in the tape, the fraying at the edges, recovering and recycling elements of old technologies, what Esther Leslie calls an ‘aesthetic of refuse’, drawing on the double meaning of ‘refuse’: as both rubbish, in that if everything is filmable then everything is junk, valueless; and as resistance, ie refusing to be dissolved into the ‘electronic slums’, to use Petit’s term. Thus Sinclair inserts his home movies into the end of the film, recovering a memory that is in danger of being overwritten yet still framed in the logic of the image, both inside and outside at once — an aesthetic that instantly recalls Atrocity and many other Ballard stories.

Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies project seems a direct descendant of this lineage, especially given this statement of John’s from our interview:

Movies will be played with, just as sound was sampled, for fun and surrealism. Simply because it can be done. I remember positing this five years ago in a talk at the London College of Music and Media. Around that time, I made a movie called A Man Made of Shadows from several other movies. This made a new movie from existing films by collaging, repurposing, hommaging, stealing, sampling, appropriating. Whatever you like to call it. ‘Repurposing’ is my current fave term, along with ‘theft’. Watch out Hollywood. Movies had better get used to this because it will happen. Inevitable.
…
We’ll also need to develop new aesthetics of film, to regard elements formerly regarded as faults as intrinsic qualities inherent in film itself. The beauty of scratches, bleached out film ends, emulsion faults, grain, frameslip, etc. Just as we now value surface scratches in audio sampling.

ABOVE: Stills from ‘Lost New York’ by ‘George Wilkes’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

So, freighted with all of this intertextual baggage, I was therefore very excited to learn that John was bringing the Arnold collection to Melbourne; I knew he’d premiered it overseas with a live soundtrack, but that’s about all I knew. I hadn’t really done much research on John since we last communicated, but I still harboured the suspicion that, as I detailed in the afterword to the interview, Arnold and the filmmakers were fictitious personas and that the films were in fact John’s own inventions. I sensed various clues that gave the game away including the name of one of the filmmakers, ‘Alan Marker’. This seemed far too close to the aura of Chris Marker (but with an amusingly British first name), especially given John’s stated admiration for La Jetée, which of course is also about memory being overwritten and recovered.

I felt there were more clues, not least the fact that the synopses of the various filmmakers and their motivations in the liner notes to the album resembled John’s own very individualistic short stories, especially one he wrote a while back called ‘The Quiet Man’ (for even with the best of intentions the best of artists can find it hard to disguise their ‘voice’ when inhabiting alter egos):

The old newscasts affected him greatly, the Kennedy Assassination, the images of Christine Keeler, early Beatles footage, all in a slightly worn Black and White. He edited together a film containing all these images and more, and played it constantly. He found it profoundly moving, the images gaining even more emotive power with each viewing. All these characters of his past moving in old daylight, waving and smiling and moving on.

One of his favourite films was The Swimmer starring Burt Lancaster, and he often played this without the soundtrack, drowning in the crude beauty of its early technicolour.

At home, too, he kept a small 8mm projector for playing home movies that he came across in his exploration of the city’s deserted apartments. He was fascinated by all the tiny intimate details of these films, the jerky figures waving from seaside and garden at weddings and birthdays and baptisms, records of whole families and their pets growing and changing through the years.

John Foxx, ‘The Quiet Man’, 1978.

In fact, my musings sparked off quite a bit of debate in various forums about the nature of Arnold, with many people, including myself, initially believing the entire story of Mr Weizcs-Bryant and his amazing collection of found film.

But John remained tight-lipped… or so I thought. More on that later.

ABOVE: ‘Skyscraper’ by ‘Jerry Golden’, performed by John Foxx at the Leeds International Film Festival, 2007.

From the first film of the performance, I was drawn into the degraded beauty of the Super 8 footage and the blown-out and colour-saturated celluloid on display. And yes, this was clearly found footage, the genuine article. It appeared I was wrong — you can’t fake period details, hairstyles and cars, on John’s limited budget. But it had been assembled artfully, like the looped film of traffic on LA freeways drawing out the beauty of this perpetual motion sculpture. Or time-lapsed shadows and sunlight passing across buildings, slowed down or reversed, the motion of the elements becoming imperceptible, the buildings and backgrounds the same but not quite as shadows gently ripple across them as if the fabric of time and molecular space was slowly re-weaving itself. When a building became covered completely in shadow, the film was edited so that another building emerged from the black and into daylight, a slow modernist dance of compacted grace and proportion. It seemed a trick of the mind designed to evoke the passing of civilisation, like the classic Ballardian ideal that treats reality as just a stage set that can be pulled away at any moment.

At this point, I thought I might need to re-assess: if these films were genuine, maybe Arnold was, too.

There was much to enjoy throughout the program. Extraterrestrial, sun-soaked clouds magnified to massive proportions so that they seemed composed of nothing but pure colour and grain. Flickering film projected onto women’s faces, turning them into shapeshifting cats and dogs with whiskers and elongated ears. A naked woman underwater, swimming among the wrecks of submerged automobiles as the sunlight from above the surface turns her and everything it touches into a blue dream.

ABOVE: Stills from ‘Underwater Automobiles’ by ‘Robert Rouncefield’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

But then I began to imagine that John had made a very clever play: he’d inserted what I was sure were his own films into the found footage. The giveaway for me was twofold. First, the film ‘Smokescreen’ by ‘Unknown’ featuring a man walking into a series of smoke-filled rooms — we never see his face as it is either obscured by smoke, or he is filmed from the side or behind. In the liner notes, Arnold says this:

I saw these marvellously lit sequences which seemed to have a very definite story, yet there is no explanation or development or resolution. We can have no idea what the filmmaker had in mind. Because of this lack of resolution, they seem strangely suspended. You begin to make connections, you feel compelled to write a story. But there is none. There can be none. The effect is tantalising, like a damaged and incomplete fragment of memory.

But, I’m sure, both the film and this explanation is very obviously the voice of Foxx; this film, to me, is another iteration of Foxx’s ‘quiet man’ persona, the ghost moving through the streets of the city, his identity never quite coalescing, always escaping the gaze. As John has said, ‘The point of view I’ve always worked from is that of a ghost in the city — someone who is a sort of drifting, detached onlooker — but still vulnerable and trying against the odds to maintain a sort of dignity in the face of all the static.’

ABOVE: ‘Smokescreen’ by ‘Unknown’, performed by John Foxx at the Leeds International Film Festival, 2007.

There appeared to be more confirmation in the film ‘A Peripheral Character’ by ‘Evan Parker’, a montage of shots supposedly featuring a mysterious extra from Hollywood films:

He has appeared in dozens of major Hollywood movies and American television series, yet he is completely unknown to the public. He appears as a background character, a passer-by, often wearing a grey suit, or a raincoat. His calm unhurried walk, his spectacles, his lapel flower and his habit of turning his head briefly (seemingly so that his face will be momentarily on the film), are what eventually make him distinctive. The film was researched and assembled by the man who first discovered his existence, Evan Parker. Parker is an academic whose field is the evolution of Hollywood. In the course of his studies, Parker watched hundreds of films and had begun to speculate about making a study of the extras, those figures passing by in the background. That is when he began to notice one who appeared to be present in several movies. Intrigued, Parker began a search and was surprised to discover the presence of this figure in dozens of major and minor Hollywood movies. This is a slow-motion montage of all the clips of his appearances so far discovered. His identity remains unknown.

TCM liner notes.

Note the reference to the GREY suit!

‘A Peripheral Character’ is an intriguing concept and very well put together, but at times you could tell John had judiciously selected clips of not the same mysterious person, but of similar looking actors from dozens of films, always with their face half turned away, or shot from behind, or bending over — you might just be convinced if you weren’t paying close enough attention that you were viewing just the one ghost in the city.

By the program’s end, I felt as if I’d finally worked it out for sure: that ‘Arnold Weizcs-Bryant’ was merely another psuedonym for Dennis Leigh (Foxx’s real name), and that it was indeed John Foxx himself who is the passionate collector of found footage, the underground filmmaker inspired by what he has stumbled across to create his own ‘sample films’, his own ‘tiny colour movies’…

And the live music? Well, it was classic Foxx, yes, lovely electronic washes drifting as timelessly as the shadows and sunlight of the films. I do like John’s work, but even so I have to say I was disappointed that there didn’t seem to be much improvisation, given that this was ostensibly a live performance of the soundtrack. Tracks stopped and started exactly when the films did, and it all seemed a bit too perfectly sequenced, too faithful to the CD. I would have liked more of a continuous flow, more segues to sustain the atmosphere, more improv, more of the scratches, collages and squelches that John so admires in the films, for as good as the music is, it just seems far too clean, too digital in the live context to suit the conceptual conceit of the films themselves. As a standalone CD it’s great; as an audiovisual package, I’m not so sure.

And then it was question time, and John appeared from behind his bank of keyboards, dressed head to toe in black like a handsomer version of Lux Interior. Before the show I’d thought of sticking my hand up and asking him if Arnold really did exist, but as I was watching the films I decided it just didn’t matter at all to me anymore. Whatever the answer, either way, John’s assemblage of the results had become compelling — if John wanted to keep up the pretense, if indeed that’s what it was, I was happy to play along. Besides I’d already voiced my suspicions two years ago and I didn’t want to seem like a curmudgeon or a stalker by hounding him forever more about it. Also, I was curious to see if anyone else in the audience would broach the subject. Perhaps no-one even cares…

ABOVE: Stills from ‘A Peripheral Character’ by ‘Evan Parker’ (John Foxx; Tiny Colour Movies).

Questions were asked about Ultravox, about the soundtrack and always John’s answers were mystical, evasive, talking of dreams and flight. Then someone asked him about the Hollywood extra. ‘Did you ever ask Arnold if he had any info on the extra, or whether he’d tried to trace his identity?’ John fidgeted, looked a little uncomfortable. ‘Er… no’ he replied. The mere mention of Arnold appeared to be making him nervous.

Then someone else stuck up a hand. ‘John, I read the piece on Ballardian where you talk about the influence of J.G. Ballard on your work.’ Ah, he’d read my interview, meaning he’d know of the afterword where I first expressed my doubts! We were getting warm, no doubt about it, but would this guy pop the burning question? But ‘Which of his novels is your favourite?’ was the interrogation and the moment had passed again.

A few more questions and then someone asked John if he wanted a beer. He quickly said he’d love one, but then just as quickly said his goodbyes and hustled off the stage, always the enigma, always elusive, never to be seen again. The end.

And I couldn’t help but think of part 2 of our interview, for I was greatly surprised to see him in Melbourne in the first place.

Because when I asked him if he would ever tour Australia, this is what he said: ‘I’d like to. But it will most likely be as drifting molecules about twenty years from now…’

POSTSCRIPT: After the screening, my dormant interest in John Foxx was reignited and I went Googling for more information. As I mentioned, all I really knew of the background to this project was what had emerged in our interview. As far as I knew, for others, as it was for me, the mystery was still sustainable. Little did I know that John had recently come clean! In this post on John’s forum, for example, it’s claimed that ‘The footage that JF and Mike Barker use in TCM is bought at car boot sales, jumble sales and at market stalls. Sometimes people put their home movie collections up for grabs on ebay… this is then digitised and re-edited to produce TCM.’

And this is confirmed in an interview John did just before the Melbourne screening:

I used to buy reels of film (from Brick Lane and Portobello Road markets) and didn’t know what they were and view them to see if there was anything interesting on them. Eventually I amassed all this stuff and didn’t quite know what to do with it. Then I saw this collector’s reel of films one night and thought ‘Yeah — that’s exactly right! It is finite. It does have a place in history’. And some of it is unique and some of the stories behind the pieces are very interesting too. It’s like reading an obituary; which is something I like — it’s not morbid at all. It’s very interesting because you get a summation of someone’s life and their achievements…

So, is it actually John’s collection on display? It would appear that way, yes, judging by this interview. It would appear that Arnold is John, just as John is Dennis. And what of the filmmakers and their backstories? As I wrote in the afterword to the 2006 interview, after mulling over the ‘Frank Watts’ film:

Urban drift; walking through the city; submitting to psychic entry points … surely this is yet another brilliantly evocative John Foxx short story? Yes — the more I think about it, the more I think that’s the case … re-reading the liner notes, the parallels with these ‘filmmakers’, with their obsessions and aesthetics, to Foxx himself now seem all too obvious (let’s not forget that ‘John Foxx’ is a character that Dennis Leigh himself has said he inhabits because ‘John Foxx is smarter than me’).

Arnold’s ‘filmmakers’ are called Robert Rouncefield; Jerry Golden; Earnst Lubin — like ‘John Foxx’, these are humdrum yet fanciful names, mythical yet ordinary, dull names to the point of incandescence. Their bios and summaries exhibit all the traits of the condensed novels in The Atrocity Exhibition.

But there would be one final nail in the coffin…

ABOVE: John Foxx answering audience questions after the Sydney screening of TCM.

Something else I found in my latest research was this video of John’s Q&A after the Sydney performance of TCM. Note that this was filmed the day after the Melbourne gig. Now recall the Melbourne audience member who asked John if he wanted a beer. Finally, watch the Sydney video: as the uploader writes, ‘Note the beer in his hand. Someone from the audience was kind enough to rush off and get him one.’

Someone had obviously been taking notes in Melbourne, had flown up to Sydney, and wasn’t letting John rush off the stage without a drink this time!

Perhaps they thought the beer might loosen his tongue just a little. Indeed, it appears that way for in this Q&A John is far more expansive and revealing than in the session I attended, and even goes so far as to say that some of the TCM movies are outright fiction, ‘complete lies’ as he calls them, created by him under the guise of a fictitious filmmaker and inserted into the program to mess with the audience’s perception:

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Did you cut some of those movies up?

JOHN FOXX: Oh, some of them were invented. And some aren’t. And I want to use these films as a way of telling stories. And being dishonest. Because I think dishonesty’s really interesting. What do you call someone who tries to convince you that something is true when it’s not? You call them a liar, don’t you? So what do you call an author? And that’s the thing that really interests me, is that line between truth and fiction. So some things are true in the movies, and some are complete lies. And I think it’s very interesting to try and work out which is which. Some of them are totally fabricated and some aren’t. But they’re all made up of the real thing.

So what one of the filmmakers practices, in other words cutting Hollywood up into pieces and reassembling it, I’ve been doing as well. And I want to continue doing that, because I think film is raw material now, to be used in any way we want. We’ve all grown up with that stuff. And I even dream it. Because I went to the cinema when I was 7, 6, 5 years old in Lancashire. And Lancashire was so grey, in England, and the cinema was so grey, everything merged together. You know, I was usually covered in soot when I was a kid, and everything was in black and white, the factory chimneys and smoke and all that, and when I looked on the screen it was the same thing. So all my memories of it are mixed up in the movies, old science fiction movies and utter rubbish. None of which I could understand as a kid, so I had to make things up with a kit from my own mind. It became a part of my dream language. And I still dream it. So I think we all mix stuff in strange ways because it’s in our heads, isn’t it? We’ve grown up with it. So why not reassemble it in the way we want to? Because we own it, you know — we don’t have to be dominated by it. It’s ours for God’s sake, not theirs — we own it.

However, I’m glad I went into the screening not knowing about John’s admission. It meant there was still a bit of mystery and wonder about the project, it meant I could ‘script’ the story a little bit as I tried to link and crosslink various ideas and theories — using a ‘kit’ from my own mind.

Does John’s admission matter in the end? No — the project stands on its own merits. I was reminded of how many people still take Empire of the Sun to be Ballard’s autobiography, and how they are often greatly surprised and sometimes angry to discover the book is as ‘fictional’ as the rest of his novels. In this day and age, surely it is not too farfetched to suggest that authenticity is just another mask? I personally love the idea of creating a character and inhabiting it so that the boundaries become blurred, inhabiting the interzones and interstitial zones, ‘the yes or no of the borderzone’ to borrow a phrase from Atrocity, escaping definition and classification.

As does Ballard, for that matter, who has his own passion for the idea of faked newsreels, and the notion of fiction passed off as truth:

The fake war newsreel (and most war newsreels are faked to some extent, usually filmed on manoeuvres) has always intrigued me — my version of Platoon, Full Metal Jacket or All Quiet on the Western Front would be a newsreel compilation so artfully faked as to convince the audience that it was real, while at the same time reminding them that it might be wholly contrived. The great Italian neo-realist, Roberto Rossellini, drew close to this in Open City and Paisa.

J.G. Ballard, annotations to The Atrocity Exhibition, 1994.

For anyone interested in Ballard — especially Atrocity — and experimental film, John Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies performance is highly recommended. I’m not sure any of it is especially ‘cutting edge’ — Foxx’s liner notes, for example, state that the Alan Marker stuff (as commanding as it is, one of my favourites from the set) is ‘surely unique in the history of filmmaking’, yet I saw the exact same technique performed with skulls and ghost imagery last week in Melbourne by Australian artists who’d been practising it for some time. And overall, in terms of experimental and repurposed film, the phenomenal, unparalleled work of the likes of Guy Sherwin, the old master, and Ben Russell and Ben Rivers, the heirs, is certainly more of an assault in both audio and visual terms.

What Tiny Colour Movies undoubtedly is, however, is Foxxian: too cold by half for some, beautiful and sad for others, an industrial spiritualism and an unalloyed sensuality of machines.

Arnold Weizcs-Bryant: R.I.P.

..:: Previously:
+ John Foxx: A Whirlpool with Seductive Furniture, part 1
+ John Foxx: A Whirlpool with Seductive Furniture, part 2

..:: More information::
+ Metamatic: John Foxx’s official site
+ Tiny Colour Movies official site

When Iain Sinclair and Will Self appeared on stage together earlier this year to talk about psychogeography, chaired by Kevin Jackson, I wondered what mystical forces aligned for this event to come to pass, given that Sinclair on a couple of occasions has publicly expressed the view that Self has got ‘absolutely nothing to do with psychogeography’.

Enter Steve Barfield of the University of Westminster, who informs me, ‘Well, writers say all kinds of things …at different times … is probably the shortest answer. But why not look at the full transcript of the VAM conversation, that is now published in the Literary London Journal. I edited the transcript for the journal from the recording with little tidying up of grammar and footnoting for the reader and the Guardian review was a wee bit wayward to my mind. But it’s journalism, after all, they didn’t have the tape and Self and Sinclair spoke at breakneck speed. Nothing mystical about the event, I’m afraid, the intention was to bring them together to interrogate the term [psychogeography] and see what happened!’

Thanks Steve — you are absolutely correct to point out that writers say different things at different times. Let’s not forget that Ballard himself told the Guardian in 1999 that ‘Most television is remarkably good, bearing in mind that it is a popular entertainment medium, but Melvyn Bragg poses a problem of his own making. The South Bank Show is a classic example of dumbing down: most television trivialises the already trivial, but the South Bank Show trivialises the serious, which is far more dangerous.’

To which Bragg responded: ‘I find this snobbish, offensive and depressing, particularly as I admire Ballard’s work and thought better of him. It’s also wrong. I think that a programme on UB40 is every bit as serious as a programme on Harold Pinter. We did both last season and neither was trivial… I am genuinely interested to know if he can tell me how any of those programmes fit his lazy smear… Unless JG Ballard can prove his point, his comment stands as no more than a sad and sour little swipe.’

Yet seven years later, both men amiably faced off on the South Bank Show to celebrate Ballard’s life and latest novel, Kingdom Come.

But back to Self and Sinclair: the transcript does indeed make interesting reading, not least for the way in which Sinclair now seems to go out of his way to praise Self’s work! Also, there’s quite a bit of chat about Ballard as an inspiration to both:

Will Self: It’s interesting what you were saying Iain, about in Jim Ballard’s memoir, about this weird period where he would only walk for what he reckoned was his personal horizon …

Iain Sinclair: His personal horizon … for his own height and I don’t know how he calculated that. But in Shepperton you are on the flat I suppose. He’d seemed to work out that three-quarters of a mile would do him. So he went three quarters of a mile in every direction and he got to know the area intimately.

Will Self: Because he was on a driving ban.

Iain Sinclair: Yeah, for a year. But he said it completely changed his life, because he decided he just wasn’t going to use public transport, it was horrendous. To get into Notting Hill or Hampstead where he wanted to see people was just such a hassle, he wouldn’t do it. So he then became a recluse in some ways. The upside of it was that he wrote more and better — and presumably he was coming towards the period of writing Crash. And, secondly, I think because he now had to walk rather than just leaping into the car, he actually released different kind of energies and it was a wonderful thing. This notion of horizon, a personal horizon, is obviously very important. And the whole culture, the mainstream culture, has followed him into acknowledging the significance of the airport fringe. Ballard says that London is a suburb of Heathrow rather than the other way around, everything you need is out there. This does seem to be true and you walking there, Will, pays homage to this concept.

It’s a lengthy conversation, the anecdotes flow thick and fast, and I have to say that Sinclair and Self do seem to bounce off each other. The audience questions are good, too, and I especially liked the point made that the psychogeographical revival in England in the 1980s seemed to coincide with the rise of CCTV and surveillance culture, with the act of walking perceived as an act of resistance — disappearing from view in the age of perpetual telesurveillance.

There’s also a rambling Sinclair story about Orson Welles, widening the psychogeographical frame to include not only this Hollywood maverick, but also none other than Mr Lemmy Caution himself — Eddie Constantine — and the ubiquitous aura of Godard and Alphaville:

Iain Sinclair: I was telling you earlier about the figure of Orson Welles, the great American director, who pitched up in Hackney in the 1950s to make a play, he was rehearsing a play about Moby Dick — which, incidentally, was J. G. Ballard’s favourite novel. [Orson Welles, Moby Dick – Rehearsed (1955) –ed.] Welles came out of the theatre and found these old ladies who were living in an alms house, the Spurstowe alms houses, and he decided that he would shoot a documentary piece. So he shoots this interview with these old woman — of course the alms house is now gone, the only record of it is this fragmented film by Orson Wells. He put the film together as a series of little essays or home movies which were shot in Paris, Spain and London. [Orson Welles, Around the World with Orson Welles (1955) originally made for BBC television. –ed.]

So it was 1955, and he goes into a Paris bookshop and here are those psychogeographers and Lettrists [Lettrism is a French avant-garde movement, established in Paris in the 1940s by Isidore Isou, inspired by dada and surrealism –ed. ] and they are reciting incantatory poems, and it is just extraordinary that the date is ’55 — and from Welles moves into a nightclub where the American actor Eddie Constantine, who later emerges in Godard’s Alphaville, is sitting with a hat on, looking sinister and grinning and then there is Jean-Paul Sartre. So there’s a weird cultural stew that appropriates this term psychogeography, which is a way of thinking and dealing with how the city emerges. It didn’t mean a lot to me then, and looking back I find, in documentaries that I was involved with at that time, the term used with more frequency was psychopolitics. I’m not sure what it meant, but people like R. D. Lang and Ginsberg and Paul Goodman and Gregory Bateson were all using this term constantly …

Read the rest of the transcript at the Literary London site.

This post also gives me the opportunity to post a snippet from ‘The Gnome Zone’, another transcript featuring Sinclair taken from a program broadcast on BBC radio in 2006 about the warped nature of English suburbia, hosted by Richard Weight:

WEIGHT: Someone who imagines such events in his work is the novelist, J.G. Ballard, himself a suburbanite.

SINCLAIR: J.G. Ballard’s become the great sort of sage of the suburbs, living for years and years in Shepperton. And Ballard, sitting there and thinking about what the suburbs are, says that they are very interesting because whatever we’re taking on in terms of Ikea furniture, kind of Swedish design, modernism, the use of the Internet, making pornographic movies at home—whatever it is you do to kind of create some sort of shock to your imagination, get you out of boredom and inertia, will happen in the suburbs rather than in the centre. That’s his pitch. And to react against this inertia and boredom that is endemic to that place, you have to come up with solutions like acts of subversion.

Finally, for those wanting even more Sinclair, Greg emails to tell me of ‘Babylon Afterburn: Adventures in Iain Sinclair’s The Firewall’. This is Robert Bond’s 30-page, 12,000-word essay on Sinclair’s latest book of poems, posted over at Jacket magazine. I’ve not had the time to read this, although a quick glance tells me that although there’s no Ballard, at one point Bond compares Sinclair’s work with the post-punk sensibilities of early Fall and Public Image Ltd. (inevitably, Ian Curtis pops up, too), and uses the work of Simon Reynolds (previously interviewed here on ballardian.com) to make the point:

The affinity of Sinclair’s poetic to the post-punk ecology points to a general attempt, throughout the early 1980s, to renovate urban spiritual energies through the evolution of a post-lyric, visionary populism. A quick look at the titles of Simon Reynolds’s books of music history — such as Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock and Energy Flash — tells us that he is the archivist of youthful, energetic, supernaturalism in popular music. Post-punk is just the latest area within which he has delineated the radical transcendence offered by contemporary music’s spiritual energy, and found precisely that visionary populism which is lacking in so much contemporary poetry, the lyric category, and present-day Protestantism.

Intriguing, and I look forward to reading more.

PS: Speaking of psychogeography and music, Jude Rogers in the Guardian was recently spotted championing a so-called ‘psychogeographic rock’ movement, supposedly including the likes of Belbury Poly and the Ghost Box crew. But isn’t this music hauntological? Were Reynolds’ and Fisher’s efforts all in vain?

Rogers describes psychogeography as ‘the study of the spooky effects of the geographical environment on individuals’, which is quite the paraphrase…

‘Psychogeography is the study of the exact effects of the geographical environment, controlled or otherwise, on the affective behaviour of individuals’ — Guy Debord.

What was that Sinclair said about creating a monster?

..:: Previously on Ballardian…
+ Bluewater, Round 2
+ Your mission…
+ ‘Obeying the surrealist formula’: Iain Sinclair & Hermione Lee on Ballard’
+ Iain Sinclair’s Ballard biography
+ ‘When in doubt, quote Ballard’: An Interview with Iain Sinclair
+ ‘This most astonishing penumbra’: Will Self on J.G. Ballard
+ Random Ballard: Will Self/JGB mashup

Photograph: Eamonn McCabe.

There’s a new interview with JGB in the Guardian, conducted by James Campbell. It’s short, it lazily rehashes the same old stuff about Ballard’s house and (perhaps as a result) it is filled out with asides from M. John Harrison, Iain Sinclair and others.

James Graham Ballard is a large man with mischief in his eye and the social manner of a retired civil servant. At 77, he is portly, with grey hair curling on to his shirt collar. He has a full-on way with a good chablis – “More! More!” – but is considerate enough to inquire of his guest: “Do you have a motor car out there? We don’t want you to be killed.”

Ballard encountered Burroughs, whom he greatly admires as a writer, on a number of occasions. “A very strange chap.” Sinclair feels that “the two men, respectful and appreciative, never quite understood each other when they met. Both were set so deep in their visions. Other figures are aliens or rivals.”

He explains that his most recent novel, Kingdom Come (2006), “posed the question: could consumerism turn into fascism? The underlying psychologies aren’t all that far removed from one another. If you go into a huge shopping mall and you’re looking down the parade, it’s the same theatrical aspect: these disciplined ranks of merchandise, all glittering like fascist uniforms. When you enter a mall, you are taking part in a ceremony of affirmation, which you endorse just by your presence.” Consumerism “has to a large extent replaced art and culture in this country. The principal entertainment industry nowadays is soccer which, with its marching supporters’ groups, is not that far removed from fascism.”

Bluewater: photo by James Boardman.

Further to yesterday’s post on Bluewater shopping centre, Michael Collins in the Guardian reports on the construction of Ebbsfleet, “Britain’s first new town of the 21st century”, taking place in the shadow of Bluewater.

Seeking to answer the question, “How do you create a characteristically 21st-century town in the baby years of the 21st century?”, Collins looks at the utopian visions of Edward Bellamy, H.G. Wells and William Morris before concluding that “the concern over what might happen when the masses became acquainted with luxury and leisure was the bugbear that united all these utopianists.”

Unsurprisingly, Collins references Sinclair and Ballard:

But the very thing that makes Ebbsfleet a totally 21st-century British concept is that it will not become a “prairie” town or a dormitory suburb gazing hopefully to the big smoke for its labour, luxury and leisure. This new town is not a suburb of London, but a suburb of Bluewater.

Housed on reclaimed land, which should appease the less hysterical environmentalists, here is the first community to be built around a temple to turbo-consumerism. “Virtual water, glass fountains, had replaced the tired Kentish shore as a place of pilgrimage,” wrote Iain Sinclair in an essay on the site, for the London Review of Books. “Bluewater,” he said, “is a Ballardian resort (Vermilion Sands), shopping is secondary, punters come here to be part of the spectacle.” In the risible Kingdom Come, JG Ballard himself has a shopping mall, clearly based on Bluewater, transforming into, of course, “a fascist state” controlled by armies of plebs distinguished by, of course, their white faces and a flag of St George.

For Collins, Ballard is on a par with those misguided, middle-class 19th-century utopianists who want to “keep luxury, leisure and filthy lucre in the hands of the few who knew what to do with them.” Ebbsfleet, he argues, due to judicious forward planning, will be less like a fascist shopping republic and more like a community that will not repeat the neo-Brutalist mistakes of the 60s, instead adroitly addressing “the issue of what unites and focuses a neighbourhood” by concentrating on effective transport and industry: “By the end of 2009, commuters will be propelled into King’s Cross from Ebbsfleet station in 17 minutes. Also, the 20,000 jobs promised might yet be possible.”

The suggestion that Ballard in Kingdom Come is snobbing “the plebs” is an old argument. Just after the book’s publication we heard it by way of Rod Liddle’s eulogy for the “working class” game of football. For Liddle, Kingdom Come is a “deeply silly and patronising novel, but it does at least encapsulate the contempt and lack of understanding with which working-class pastimes are viewed by our political leaders and, in Ballard’s case, our intelligentsia.”

But how much of the argument actually stands up? As far as the “new town” concept is concerned, we have Ballard’s oft-stated admiration for the hermetically sealed “non spaces” of 21st-century life, about as anti the “prairie town”, “dormitory suburb” mentality as Collins could wish for:

The catchment area of Heathrow extends for at least 10 miles to its south and west, a zone of motorways, intersections, dual carriageways, science parks, marinas and industrial estates, watched by police CCTV speed-check cameras, a landscape which most people affect to loathe but which I regard as the most advanced and admirable in the British Isles, and paradigm of the best that the future offers us.

Ballard, “Airports”, The Observer, September 14, 1997.

And as for Ballard’s perceived classism, this is most obviously undercut by Millennium People, which savages the middle classes, along with their complaints and separatist claims, by suggesting they are entirely complicit in their own problems. But remarkably, given the Liddle/Collins backlash, it’s Kingdom Come itself that consciously mocks Ballard’s own “privileged” world view with a number of sly digs at the public persona he increasingly has to labour under. The infamous line, “This author is beyond psychiatric help — do not publish”, was of course aimed at the original manuscript of Crash by a publisher’s reader, but in Kingdom Come it’s recycled by Ballard himself and used against Pearson, the narrator of the book (and Ballard proxy):

“Tell her to watch my commercials for David Cruise.”
“I did. She says there’s a new one. Something about a man laughing in an abattoir.”
“What did she think of it?”
“She said you’re beyond psychiatric help.”
“Good. That shows she’s warming to me.”

Ballard, Kingdom Come.

But it also includes this aside from Pearson, even more telling:

He probably knew that I was hostile to the mall, another middle-class snob who hated glitter, confidence and opportunity when they were taken up too literally by the lower orders.

Ballard, Kingdom Come.

What I find amusing is that here Ballard has exactly pre-empted the arguments of Liddle and Collins, which makes it seem a bit strange that they would conveniently skip this line in favour of using the self-same argument against him, stripping the author’s sharp self-awareness and replacing it with an image of Ballard as a conservative old fuddy duddy. After all, it’s Pearson who displays the most disturbing, megalomaniac tendencies of all. The book’s world is seen through the eyes of this “middle class snob” with all his privileges and his insulation from reality. How could it be anything less than one-dimensional, then, in its depictions of the stratum of society that its narrator fails to fully understand? And is it not the case that Pearson actually repents by book’s end, sees the error of his ways, admits he was wrong?

I just wonder if Collins has actually read the book. But I also wonder if these kinds of attacks on Ballard are a consequence of the way he has been absorbed by the English media, which is determined to preserve him in aspic as an avuncular heritage figure by defanging the ambiguities and ambivalences that make all his work, even the less successful iterations such as Kingdom Come (which I admit is far from Ballard’s best book), so powerful.

As I’ve noted before, Ben Noys makes the excellent point in his recent writings on Ballard that “while [Ballard’s] work is recognized as provocative and controversial, this is neutralized through the construction of an ‘eccentric’ authorial persona”. Noys sees this reductive process as deriving from the success of Empire of the Sun and the way in which that book’s “biographical keys” and Ballard’s subsequent public image have nullified some of the more extreme conclusions reached in his other fiction, especially the disturbing — and unanswered questions — Ballard raises about “regression, sexual deviance and the role of violence and radicalism in the arts”.

In the end Noys sees this nullification as a result of the stifling “constriction of the terms of literary and cultural debate in Britain”, and ends by calling for critical re-engagement with Ballard’s most urgent concerns.

Unfortunately we are still waiting.

One of the country’s most acclaimed novelists has called for the Bluewater Centre, in Kent, to be obliterated. In London Orbital, a film inspired by Iain Sinclair’s book of the same title to be broadcast tonight on Channel 4, JG Ballard declares in conversation with Sinclair: “Iain, I want you to blow up Bluewater.” Sinclair then verbally batters the hapless shopping centre, a pimple just south of the M25. It is, he says, “a zone where only the fake is truly authentic, the retail swamp on the borders of everything, grandiloquent and meaningless as one of Saddam Hussein’s arches”. Staff at the centre seem surprised by the vitriol. “I don’t know if in the current climate inciting people to blow things up is such a good idea,” says a spokesman. “Anyhow, what’s all this about swamps? I thought we had some quite nice lakes.”

Sholto Byrnes, The Independent, 29 October, 2002.

Ralph Rugoff, writing in Frieze, called Bluewater a “diuretic slurry of pumped-up historical and decorative emblems”. “Citizens of England!” cried Hugh Pearman in the Sunday Times, “We do not need these places!” Contemplating the 20,000-person village, also designed by CivicArts, that will eventually adjoin the mall, Jonathan Glancey of The Guardian envisioned “a city with no gods other than Prada, Gucci and Starbucks, with no cathedral and temple beyond the naves and domes of the mall itself, and with no ultimate purpose beyond stupefying consumption.”

It is easy to adopt this sort of anti-materialist scorn towards Kuhne’s shopping centres. And since Kuhne himself described Bluewater as “a city rather than a retail destination,” it is safe to assume that his cities may resemble his malls. This possibility excites Kuhne; he has faith in retail. “Retail,” he tells the audience in Dubai, “is the only industry that can manage our city centres… We are the only ones who deal with experience. We are the only ones that understand how to customise and modify and release and replan and reorganise and administer a luscious experience for a group.”

Peter C. Baker quoting Bluewater’s architect, Eric Kuhne, The National, 1 May, 2008.

A former English teacher pleaded guilty yesterday to threatening criminal damage, having talked of a plan to blow up Europe’s largest shopping complex. Saeed Ghafoor made his threat to prison officers while serving a jail term in February this year. He claimed he would target the Bluewater centre using three limousines loaded with gas canister explosives.
…
When officers told him that the centre, the target of a previous fertiliser bomb plot by Islamic terrorists last year, was in fact in Kent, he said he had not yet fully “finalised” his scheme. Pierce Arnold, for the prosecution, told the Old Bailey: “Mr Ghafoor made the threat. We do not know if he could have carried it out. It was not a bomb hoax. It appeared on the face of it to be a serious threat by someone who was not happy.”
…
The first officer to hear his claim believed him a fantasist but took his remarks seriously. Ghafoor said he was protesting at the involvement of British and American troops in Afghanistan. He was also seen by the prison imam, who formed the impression that the prisoner was susceptible to brainwashing.

Jonathan Brown, The Independent, 24 May, 2008.

Teacher admits threatening to blow up Bluewater shopping centre.

I wonder if they’ll arrest Ballard next.

‘But when questioned about his plot, Ghafoor, 33, of Southampton, did not appear to know where the shopping centre was, the Old Bailey heard.’

Ah, but he was right, because Bluewater is everywhere, Bluewater is us. We must blow ourselves up. It’s the only solution.

Infinite Thought, 24 May, 2008.

J.G Ballard and Iain Sinclair’s threat to blow up Bluewater … taken rather more seriously when delivered by a (shock-horror) Muslim — who nonetheless had the impression that Bluewater was in Exeter, but that’s being let pass. Two quick points here: one, I was faintly intrigued to find that the threatener in question was not only from Southampton, but from the Flower Estate (so why he didn’t want to blow up West Quay is beyond me); and two, it makes this interview with the designer of Bluewater and its ilk (via) even more grimly compelling. The gist: Bluewater is what people want, when an industrial site is cleared – shops, lots of them, ‘contextual’ architecture, and many many parking spaces. If there’s a despot locally who can help the process along then that’s good too. In fact, Bluewater seen like this is reminiscent of ‘Most Wanted Paintings’ the Sots Art prank where the votes of a given area for what they most wanted to see in a painting get totted up, with the results appropriately ridiculous.

Owen Hatherley, Sit Down Man, You’re a Bloody Tragedy, 25 May, 2008.

..:: Previously on Ballardian…
+ When in Doubt, Quote Ballard: An Interview with Iain Sinclair

From outer space to inner…
LEFT: Gabrielle Drake in UFO. RIGHT: Ms Drake in Crash!.

Pringle: [In Crash!] you were playing opposite a professional actress, so it wasn’t as though it was purely a documentary.

Ballard: Yes, that was… oh, what was the name of the actress? A rather pretty actress, I suppose she’s now in her 50s. Gabrielle Drake! She briefly appeared as a mysterious woman that I drove around with. It was fun.

David Pringle, “The SFX Interview with J. G. Ballard”, 1996.

The film was based on my interest in the car crash — as it emerged through the pages of The Atrocity Exhibition. It was made in the early 70s. With Gabrielle Drake. She was quite a serious actress in her early days, but then she moved off into Crossroads or something. She was very sweet. I met her a few times on the set, as it were, chasing around multi-storey car-parks in Watford.

J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Iain Sinclair in Crash: David Cronenberg’s Post-mortem on J.G. Ballard’s “Trajectory of Fate”, 1999.

At the terminal risk of coming on like a refugee from io9, this post is in honour of the actor Gabrielle Drake, the most beautiful and stylish woman to ever appear in SF film or TV. How could so many American boys waste their sci-fi wet dreams on Carrie Fisher in Star Wars, especially given that Ms Drake, playing Lt. Gay Ellis in Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s UFO TV series, had much, much cooler hair and clothes than Princess Leia. Give me Gay’s sexy purple wig and slinky silver spandex catsuit over Leia’s ridiculous side-buns and risible toga-cum-kimono any day of the week.

As for technical ability, well, Ms Drake is a well-respected Shakespearean actress! But if that doesn’t impress, consider that in the role of Lt. Ellis she was required to not only portray a character who lacks confidence but to also invest that character with a determination to overcome her self-doubt and rebirth herself as a dynamic officer type. Plus she convincingly portrayed unrequited love for a fellow officer, unrequited love being a difficult task for any actor and a far cry from Leia’s cartoonish are-they-or-aren’t-they “bromance” with that pansy Luke Skywalker. Also, any glance at UFO can tell you that Ms Drake’s eyes say so much, a riot of organic semiology fluttering beneath the candy, subtlety beyond compare.

Ms Drake also had the enormous good taste, the good sense, during the UFO era (1970-71) to work with none other than the Sage of Shepperton himself, starring opposite JGB in Harley Cokliss’s short film, Crash! (1971). She performs admirably, playing the very first Ballardian woman-catalyst on film, beautiful but utterly doomed, stripped of identity in the face of an encroaching technological landscape, her coquettish sexuality reduced to literally nothing more than a hood ornament: Ms Drake makes us believe it all in Crash!. I very much doubt that Ms Fisher would be able to switch from space opera to inner space with such ease, skill and grace. And as for Ms Drake vs. either Rosanna Arquette or Holly Hunter in the other Crash, the Cronenberg version, well again there really is no contest, is there? It’s got to be Gabrielle all the way down the line, and then some. (Weiss’s cypher-woman looked the part but she clearly couldn’t act).

Ballard and Gabrielle Drake, sister of the mythologised singer/songwriter Nick Drake. Colonials all. Ex-pats, with memories of tropical splendour, marooned among the concrete atolls of Watford. The Drakes had grown up in Burma. Gabrielle’s parents had been evacuated from Rangoon to India when the Japanese invaded. She recalls her father composing “an entire comic operetta about an Englishman who was based out East”. (Ballard, paying his respects to the earlier film, used the name Gabrielle for the character in Crash who would be played by Rosanna Arquette.)

Iain Sinclair, David Cronenberg’s Post-mortem on J.G. Ballard’s “Trajectory of Fate”, 1999.

To further demonstrate Ms Drake’s versatility in that magical year of 1971, I have interpolated stills of her in the UFO series with screengrabs of her in Crash!. There are also YouTube clips of both works towards the end. And I must thank The Diary of a Mad Natural Historian for alerting me to the existence of Gabrielle on Flickr, from which the stills were lifted. For more, visit Poletti’s “The Ladies of UFO” set.

NOTE: See the Noise blog for a warm interview with Ms Drake, in which she remembers her brother and his music.

SIX DEGREES OF J.G. BALLARD: Ms Drake is connected to JGB in other ways. In 1970 Ballard received his first screen credit (misspelled as “J.B. Ballard”), providing the story for Val Guest’s prehistoric potboiler, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. In 1972, just one year after UFO and Crash!, Guest directed Au Pair Girls, starring none other than Ms Drake, who appeared, gulp, naked as the day she was born.

1971: YEAR OF THE DRAKE

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in UFO.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in Crash!.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in UFO.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in Crash!.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in UFO.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in Crash!.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in UFO.

ABOVE: Gabrielle Drake in Crash!.

YOUTUBE

ABOVE: a clip from UFO, featuring Ms Drake dubbed into German.

ABOVE: Crash! by Harley Cokliss, starring Ms Drake.

ABOVE: opening sequence of UFO.

ABOVE: a montage of clips from UFO.

Braun Headquarters, Melsungen 1986-92 by Stirling Wilford & Associates with Walter Nageli. Photo courtesy BD Online.

I’m supposed to be participating in a documentary on car parks. Right now I’ve no idea what I’ll be banging on about precisely, but I do know I’ll be following the Iain Sinclair guide to modern living, with its single rule: “When in doubt, quote Ballard.”

To prep myself I’ve compiled this Ballardian Primer to Car Parks, with photos lifted from Simon Henley’s The Architecture of Parking, a book Ballard said he wanted for Christmas. I’ve only looked at the novels, which was exhausting enough. I might get to the short stories at a later date.

Note how Atrocity and Crash feature the most examples (and even at that, I haven’t listed them all), almost an unhealthy obsession for JGB at the time, and how 20 years later in Super-Cannes he actively ridicules his obsessed former self, with not one put two choice put-downs directed at Super-Cannes’ narrator: “‘We’ve all noticed. You’re the Ben Gunn of our treasure island. I thought you were writing a social history of the car park.’” and “‘He thinks you need a lobotomy. He told me you’re obsessed by car parks.’”

Of course Ballard was to do the same thing in Kingdom Come, in which a character describes that book’s narrator as ‘beyond psychiatric help’, a little in-joke directed at his former self and the novel Crash, which was famously rejected by a publisher’s reader with the words: “This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish.”

“Thousands of inverted buildings hung from street level — car parks, underground cinemas, sub-basements and sub-sub-basements — which now provided tolerable shelter, sealed off from the ravaging wind by the collapsing structures above.”

JGB, The Wind from Nowhere (1961).

“Talbot looked up at his own face mediated from the billboard beside the car park. Overhead the glass curtain-walls of the apartment block presided over this first interval of neural calm.”

JGB, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

“From the window of his office, Dr Nathan watched Talbert standing on the roof of the multi-storey car park. The deserted deck was a favourite perch. The inclined floors seemed a model of Talbert’s oblique personality, forever meeting the events of time and space at an invisible angle.”

JGB, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

“Already, without touching her, he knew intimately the repertory of her body, its anthology of junctions. His eyes turned to the multi-storey car park beside the apartment blocks above the beach. Its inclined floors contained an operating formula for their passage through consciousness.”

JGB, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

“He remembered these pleasures: the conjunction of her exposed pubis with the polished contours of the bidet; the white cube of the bathroom quantifying her left breast as she bent over the handbasin; the mysterious eroticism of the multi-storey car park, a Krafft-Ebing of geometry and posture…”

JGB, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

“As they left the cubicle beside the kiosk he followed them towards the car park. The angular floors rose through the fading light, the concrete flanks lit by the neon signs of the bars across the street.”

JGB, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

“Deliberately he had allowed Vaughan to take command, curious to see where they would go, what junction points they would cross on the spinal causeways. Together they set off on a grotesque itinerary: a radio-observatory, stock car races, war graves, multi-storey car parks.”

JGB, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

Parking Facility No 1, Chicago 1955 by Shaw, Metz & Dolio. Photo courtesy BD Online.

“Travers had become more and more withdrawn, driving her along the motorway to pointless destinations, setting up private experiments whose purpose was totally abstract: making love to soundless images of war newsreels, swerving at speed through multi-storey car parks (their canted floors appeared to be a model of her own anatomy), leading on the mysterious film crew who followed them everywhere.”

JGB, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

“As she sauntered along the verge he became aware of a sudden erotic conjunction, the module formed by Vaughan, the inclined concrete decks and Karen’s body. Above all, the multi-storey car park was a model for her rape.;

JGB, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

“Vaughan followed them everywhere with his camera, zoom lens watching from the observation platform of the Oceanic Terminal at the airport, from hotel mezzanine balconies and studio car-parks.”

JGB, Crash (1973).

“I remember my first minor collision in a deserted hotel car-park. Disturbed by a police patrol, we had forced ourselves through a hurried sex-act. Reversing out of the park, I struck an unmarked tree. Catherine vomited over my seat. This pool of vomit with its clots of blood like liquid rubies, as viscous and discreet as everything produced by Catherine, still contains for me the essence of the erotic delirium of the car-crash, more exciting than her own rectal and vaginal mucus, as refined as the excrement of a fairy queen, or the minuscule globes of liquid that formed beside the bubbles of her contact lenses.”

JGB, Crash (1973).

Marine Parade, Worthing. Photograph: Sue Barr/Thames & Hudson.

“An immense peace seemed to preside over the shabby concrete and untended grass. The glass curtain-walling of the terminal buildings and the multi-storey car-parks behind them belonged to an enchanted domain.”

JGB, Crash (1973).

“All the hopes and fancies of this placid suburban enclave, drenched in a thousand infidelities, faltered before the solid reality of the motorway embankments, with their constant and unswerving geometry, and before the finite areas of the car-park aprons.”

JGB, Crash (1973).

“Vaughan was staring at the terraced cliff of the car-park, his eyes following the canted floors, as if trying to recognize everything that had passed between himself and the dark-haired girl.”

JGB, Crash (1973).

“At the time he had found himself wishing that Catherine were with him — she would have liked the ziggurat hotels and apartment houses, and the vast, empty parking lots laid down by the planners years before any tourist would arrive to park their cars, like a city abandoned In advance of itself.”

JGB, Concrete Island (1974).

“Wilder pressed on. “I know Charlotte has reservations about life here — the trouble with these places is that they’re not designed for children. The only open space turns out to be someone else’s car-park.”

JGB, High-Rise (1975).

“The town centre consisted of little more than a supermarket and shopping mall, a multi-storey car-park and filling station. Shepperton, known to me only for its film studios, seemed to be the everywhere of suburbia, the paradigm of nowhere.”

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company (1979).

“The street lamps shone down on the empty car parks, yet there were no cars or people about, no one was playing the countless slot-machines in the stores and arcades.”

JGB, Hello America (1981).

Parkhaus am Bollwerksturm, Heilbronn 1997-98 by Mahler, Gunster, Fuchs. Photo courtesy BD Online.

“Two vehicles occupied opposite corners of the car-park, breaking that companionable rule by which drivers arriving at an empty car-park place themselves alongside each other.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“I circled the artificial lakes, with their eerily calm surfaces, or roamed around the vast car parks. The lines of silent vehicles might have belonged to a race who had migrated to the stars.”

JGB, Super-Cannes (2000).

“‘I’m on holiday. It’s lasted a little longer than I planned.’

‘We’ve all noticed. You’re the Ben Gunn of our treasure island. I thought you were writing a social history of the car park.’”

JGB, Super-Cannes (2000).

“‘He thinks you need a lobotomy. He told me you’re obsessed by car parks.’”

JGB, Super-Cannes (2000).

“‘Too many car parks – always a sign of a troubled mind.”

JGB, Super-Cannes (2000).

“‘They like that. They like the alienation.’ Gould took my arm, a teacher relieved to find an intelligent pupil. ‘There’s no past and no future. If they can, they opt for zones without meaning — airports, shopping malls, motorways, car parks. They’re in flight from the real.”

JGB, Millennium People (2003).

“Acres of car parks stretched around me, areas for airline crews, security personnel, business travellers, an almost planetary expanse of waiting vehicles. They sat patiently in the caged pens as their drivers circled the world. Days lost for ever would expire until they dismounted from the courtesy buses and reclaimed their cars.”

JGB, Millennium People (2003).

“This was his real terrain, a zone without past or future, civic duties or responsibilities, its empty car parks roamed by off-duty air hostesses and betting—shop managers, a realm that never remembered itself.”

JGB, Millennium People (2003).

Pydar Street, Truro. Photograph: Sue Barr/Thames & Hudson.

“There was a forest of signs helpfully guiding the visiting motorist to the car parks, though it was unclear why the town should have so many visitors or why they would want to park there.”

JGB, Millennium People (2003).

“‘His job was to wait here.’

‘Job? What exactly? Taking communion in a car park?’”

JGB, Millennium People (2003).

“He stopped when he reached my Range Rover and glanced at his reflection in the black doors, the pale nimbus of a head floating behind the cellulose as it had haunted the trees in Bishop’s Park, Munch’s Scream resited to some long-term car park of the soul.”

JGB, Millennium People (2003).

“I had left the Jensen in the multi-storey car park that dominated the town, a massive concrete edifice of ten canted floors more mysterious in its way than the Minotaur’s labyrinth at Knossos — where, a little perversely, my wife suggested we should spend our honeymoon.”

JGB, Kingdom Come (2006).

“‘A bad actor howls from the roof of a multi-storey car park and we think he’s a seer.’”

JGB, Kingdom Come (2006).

“‘David Cruise was your tailor’s dummy, a shrink-proof shaman of the multi-storey car parks, Kafka in a tired trenchcoat, a psychopath with genuine moral integrity.’”

JGB, Kingdom Come (2006).

Calderwood Street, Woolwich. Photograph: Sue Barr/Thames & Hudson.

Towards the end of his new memoir, Miracles of Life, JG Ballard singles out two literary soulmates: Iain Sinclair, “the Odysseus of the M25″; and Will Self, “a remarkable writer, almost seven feet in height with a tall man’s constant surprise at the mundane world far below him”. So it was right and proper that Ballard was himself name-checked more than once when Sinclair and Self met at the V&A to discuss psychogeography.

I suppose there is a superficial point of convergence with the writing of these three — Self with his interest in bizarre sex and distended suburbia, Sinclair with his haunted urban archaeology, both circumnavigating the M25 of literature back to Ballard — while the influence of Ballard’s outsider status and perspective on both is undeniable.

But to bring Sinclair and Self together to talk about psychogeography seems bizarre. I wonder what mystical forces aligned for this to happen? Consider what Sinclair had to say in Tim Chapman’s interview with him:

TC: Psychogeography is quite a buzzword now; Will Self’s got his column in the Independent…

IS: Which to me has absolutely no connection whatsoever to whatever psychogeography was originally, or in its second incarnation. It was something very specific in Paris in the 50s and 60s — the Lettrists and Situationists had this politicised conceptual movement called Psychogeography. Then it was reinvented into London with people like Stewart Home and the London Psychogeographical Association, who mixed those ideas with ideas of ley lines and Earth mysteries and cobbled it together as a provocation, and I took it on from that point. Now it’s just become this brand name for more or less anything that’s vaguely to do with walking or vaguely to do with the city. It’s a new form of tourism.

TC: Is there any mileage left in it?

IS: No, I don’t think so, other than if someone can brand it and promote it, which they are doing. Once these little pocket books appear with an easy readers’ guide which can take you back to Ballard or de Quincey or Debord or wherever you want to go, it’s a route map where everything’s laid out for you. It’s very strange. I’m not quite sure why that happened.

And this from Sinclair, in an interview over at Classic Cafes:

Psychogeography is a talismanic term that Sinclair understands to have been cannibalised from French situationism. [Sinclair says:] “For me, it’s a way of psychoanalysing the psychosis of the place in which I happen to live. I’m just exploiting it because I think it’s a canny way to write about London. Now it’s become the name of a column by Will Self, in which he seems to walk the South Downs with a pipe, which has got absolutely nothing to do with psychogeography. There’s this awful sense that you’ve created a monster.”

Being stranded in Oz, I wasn’t there, so I wonder if the V&A talk thrashed this out? Doubt it; I’m sure the Guardian review would have noted it. So, a missed opportunity on Iain’s part?

Perhaps the publication of Miracles brought them together…as the review says, the talk saw both Sinclair and Self pay tribute to Ballard in the end:

Sinclair, the godfather of modern psychogeographers, talked of the method’s early practitioners — De Quincey, Baudelaire, the situationists — as well as his own reverence for outsider figures, from Blake to Ballard…

Before long the conversation got back to ley lines, shopping centres and Ballard, hailed by Self as “the purest psychogeographer of us all”.

Well, that’s all very well and good, but I’m going to leave the last word to JGB, lifted from my own interview with him:

SS: There’s a recent book that has co-opted you into the psychogeographical literary movement.

JGB: I’ve seen that book. It doesn’t apply to me. No, that’s Iain Sinclair’s terrain.

Photo by Jennie Middlemiss.

Here’s a transcription of the BBC Radio Front Row review of Miracles, presented by Mark Lawson and featuring Iain Sinclair and Hermione Lee.

Mike Bonsall

Mark Lawson: The work of the novelist JG Ballard divides fairly neatly into two sets, there are the novels which draw clearly on his own experience of the world, including the Booker prize-winning Empire of the Sun, which describes his internment in a Chinese prisoner of war camp during World War Two, and The Kindness of Women which fictionalises his experience post-war of being widowed with three young children. And then there are stories which take place in a distorted, warped, surreal version of the modern world, such as The Unlimited Dream Company and Crash — about sexual fantasists involved in car wrecks, which became one of the few modern movies to be widely banned. But confusingly, books of both kinds are likely to include central characters called Jim Ballard. Readers and critics though, who are policing the line between Ballard’s life and writing, are now helped with their enquiries by the author himself with the publication of his latest book, Miracles of Life: From Shanghai to Shepperton, an autobiography. To discuss it, I’m joined in the studio by the writer Iain Sinclair, whose books include Downriver, and from Oxford by the writer and critic Professor Hermione Lee. Iain Sinclair, we have to get this out of the way really, for any readers of Ballard, or admirers, the book contains a shock. In that calm voice that he’s used about so many terrible things, he explains he’s been diagnosed with terminal cancer, his oncologist has made it possible for him to write this book. It’s another example of the unflinching way in which he can describe what happens to him.

Iain Sinclair: Yes, and he holds that revelation back until the end of the book, although in some senses it underwrites it, because this is a very generous book, it’s amazingly warm hearted, and although it is very similar to Empire of the Sun in some ways, and other books, there are these little glancing details that give you more of himself than he’s offered before. The parents appear in the prison camp, the sister appears. It’s very subtly done, I think it’s wonderfully crafted and in the classic Ballard way; it’s also a tremendous page turner.

ML: Hermione Lee, he’s always played, as we’ve said, with the boundaries between fact and fiction — Jim Ballard — in books which seemed autobiographical, and ones which almost certainly can’t be. He does, as Iain says, he does provide useful footnotes here.

Hermione Lee: Yes, it’s terribly interesting to set it against Empire of the Sun, which came out in 1984, when he was in his 50s, and which, as you say, drew on that childhood experience of being, you know, the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, and being in the internment camp. And what Ballard fans remarked on then, when that novel came out, was how close the images of that experience were to the fantasy novels, novels like The Drowned World. And now he goes over that time again and shows how haunted he’s always been by that mental furniture — as how could he not be — but also what’s gripping about it is that he shows what actually he made up in Empire the Sun, you know, which people said — oh, it’s much autobiographical than the other novels — and here, now you can see from, as Iain says, the extra things he tells us, how much he actually invented and imagined in Empire of the Sun. So it’s really fascinating to hold the two together

ML: Iain, having discussed that, give me an example of something that you learned from this that you hadn’t known about him… Or which changes the way…

IS: Um… the figure of his sister for example; I didn’t know about. And then there’s this extraordinary surreal image of the sister — when he’s a child — he builds a plywood barrier that goes onto the dinner table so that he doesn’t have to look at his sister, it as a peep-hole in it — this is like something out of Dali. And underwriting everything Ballard does, goes back to a remark he made many many years ago, which was that he tries to obey the surrealist formula, which is — to place the visible at the service of the invisible. And this is a very visible book, but beneath it are these shadows of the invisible that he’s releasing for the first time, and I find that quite moving.

ML: Hermione, on that point of surrealism…

HL: Yes, I was just going to say, that’s such a brilliant image to pick up, because that little spy-hole, which is so weird, is actually like Ballard’s eye, because elsewhere there are little tiny places that he crawls into, like the cockpit of a disused plane, and he’s looking out, he says, as if through a small window into a dream, and he talks very fascinatingly about the influence of dissecting corpses when he’s a medical student and Francis Bacon and Kafka and film noir. And he talks about Freud and surrealism as the key influences on his work and he calls them: ‘a secret corridor into a more real and more meaningful world’, so he’s really giving you a kind of interpretation of his whole work here.

ML: And Iain, he’s one of the few writers to have become an adjective — Ballardian — lots of writers used that after the death of Princess Diana, in that week. The artist Marc Quinn, on Front Row the other day, who’d made these impossible flowers, he said: ‘I think of them as Ballardian’. And he has — it’s apparent throughout this book, and the others, as Hermione was saying — that way of looking at the world and describing it.

IS: Yes, he says, often, he wanted to be a painter. He was a great friend of Paolozzi, Eduardo Paolozzi, a sculptor, and I think the dominant figures in his influence over the years were Paolozzi and Chris Evans, who was the kind of rogue scientist who provided him with outprints of scientific matters and who is the figure behind Vaughan, to some extent, in his novel Crash. Ballard really is like a kind of Delvaux — famously he has an imitation Delvaux in his house — and here, I think that there are key images that come back repeatedly in his fiction, as with the famous drained swimming pool. There’s also the figure of a Chinese man who’s strangled with wire on a railway station, who comes back in this book and comes back in the fictions. There’s, as Hermione said, there’s this moment when the boy gets onto an airfield and climbs into the cockpit of a plane. There is the bicycle ride through the streets of Shanghai — these things just come back again and again and again…

ML: Also, Hermione, the amazing revelation that he almost died in a car crash after writing Crash, and he reflects on what would have been made of that, in his life, if it’d happened.

HL: Absolutely extraordinary, he writes his own obituary — as in a sense he’s doing here, I feel. I mean, there is a kind of — benign benediction — going on in this book, but that, what I’m left with is this sense that, when he was a little boy, the mothers of his friends used to complain that he was always rearranging the furniture in their in their houses, and this is what he does, he rearranges the furniture.

‘the narcissism of things’, by infinite thØught.

infinite thØught is a blog of critical theory that’s not afraid to use ‘mock’ tactics, ie, it can have a laugh and be unforced, hilarious and poignant about it. It also has a pig fixation that I don’t really get (Is it after Orwell? Or is it a Chris Marker-style intervention from the non-human world?) and that lately has manifested itself in the creation of a lolpig farm.

In fact, i.t. herself (also of the rad-film collective, kino fist) seems to have abandoned writing of late, but it’s not solely down to all that hyperporcine activity. She has been posting a series of photo essays, some captioned, some not, almost one a week for the last month or so.

This one, ‘the narcissism of things’, is outstanding, with its ‘pictures of Thames wasteland’ refracted through rusty industrial puddles.

And the latest is this one, ‘the suburbs dream of violence: a trip to bluewater’, based around the Bluewater shopping centre, one of the inspirations for the Metro-Centre in Ballard’s Kingdom Come. Included with each photo is a judiciously selected quote from K.C.

‘the suburbs dream of violence: a trip to bluewater’, by infinite thØught.

Death had no place in the Metro-Centre, which had abolished time and the seasons, past and future.

Ballard, Kingdom Come.

Of course, Bluewater inspired Ballard to implore Iain Sinclair to blow it up in the London Orbital film, and i.t. is not above a spot of Ballard-style urban anarchy herself, having previously used K.C. as a kind of instruction manual for the all-or-nothing destruction of the Millennium Dome.

Chapter 11: Re-Placing the Novel: Sinclair, Ballard and the Spaces of Literature — David Cunningham

David Cunningham organizes his essay around a contemporary pairing: Sinclair and J. G. Ballard. Sinclair, of course, has repeatedly acknowledged his debt to and interest in Ballard’s work, not least through his BFI book on Crash. Cunningham however, displays the same distrust of maps of writerly influence as Robert Sheppard does in his essay for this volume. Rather than emphasizing the similarities between the two, Cunningham suggests that their meeting point in Sinclair’s work is marked by a tension: the “textual presence of Ballard is a rather more disturbing presence within Sinclair’s writing than are the familiar allusions to Blake, Dickens, Conrad, et al.” For Cunningham, this tension is created by the two writers’ differing apprehensions of contemporary space and place. While Ballard writes a London characterized by the “non-places” of undifferentiated spaces of global capital (Castell’s “space of flows”), Sinclair continually asserts the specificity of place (and place-myth, as Brian Baker points out) and seeks its reenchantment.

The Sinclair-Ballard connection, in Cunningham’s reading, is not a straightforward question of influence, still less a decision readers must make between persuasive versions of the same city, but an opportunity to trace, “through their immanent confrontation, the role of writing, and of cultural production more generally, at an historical moment marked by the particular spatial relations generated by the dialectic of places and flows.”

Has anyone read the book, and this chapter in particular? I’m curious to know if David Cunningham refers to the Sinclair interview that Tim conducted for this site, but of course I’m also keen to read what sounds like a very interesting piece. Unfortunately, the book appears to be only available in hardcover — a little beyond my budget for the time being.

Damme, Ackroyd just keeps pumping them out doesn’t he? He must have a whole crew of cheeky culture vulture mudlarks and fey, fettlesome and febrile Oxonians slaving away in the secret cellars of his Limehouse Penthouse. He makes James Michener look like some lollygaggin’ Yankee.

I always liked what the real magus of secret London, Iain Sinclair, said about Peter Ackroyd. “He’s Colonel Mustard and he did it in the library with a research assistant.” And Ackroyd does look a lot like the good Colonel Moutard.

Yes, Ackroyd’s written some brilliant books. Hawksmoor, The House of Dr Dee, Chatterton, are all superbly written and psychically charged tales about the hidden human bones of London. And Albion: History of English Imagination is the best book ever about a subject no one realised existed until he wrote about it.

But both Ackroyd and the other strange geomancy warlock of English letters, JG Ballard, are now in their own deadpan, sly and slightly bitchy english way, sorta coughing and nudging their audiences towards Iain Sinclair.

It’s like a quincunx (cue Durrell, Fowles and Golding. Fellow magicians but self-imposed exiles from Old Lud). Currently you have Ackroyd, Ballard, Amis fils (although his batteries are ebbing a bit) and Alan Moore setting up the four points of blokish energy (This is a male incantation thing. I’m sure you chicks are up to equally weird shit with the London Energy. Looking at you in particular Miss Angela Carter. Death is no excuse) and in the centre is Iain Sinclair assome kind of lightening rod cum Leyden Jar for it all.

Fuck it. FDB, just read Downriver for starters. Imagine if Burroughs was a Londoner with Blake’s gift of transcendental vision. Whether you love it or hate it, you’ll know you’ll have read something by someone really plugged into that big grim green secretly exuberantly and dourly surrealistic metropolis spawning ever outwards from a river named after time.

A city where a statue of a (Darkest) Peruvian bear greets you at the Heathrow train terminus at Paddington Station while it’s biggest folk hero is a mass murderer.

The Menzies Building, Monash University: Conference HQ. Photo: Simon Sellars.

I recently gave a paper on Ballard at Demanding the Impossible: the Third Australian Conference on Utopia, Dystopia and Science Fiction at Monash University. The conference, spread over three days, was intensive and impossible to digest in its entirety (of the 76 papers, I attended just 15 including my own), but various themes emerged. Terry Eagleton was a keynote speaker, meaning that, as another attendee (who goes by the very academic name of ‘Superdave’) has noted, ‘A lot of the people at the conference were Marxist theorists, which is natural considering the theme. Marx may have condemned utopianism, but Marxism is essentially utopian nonetheless–as its repeated failure attests.’

DAY 1: Welcome, Catastrophe

The work of Kim Stanley Robinson seemed to be a focal point, from what I gathered from some of the papers and from many of the conversations I engaged in. On the first day, keynote speaker Tom Moylan, in his talk entitled ‘Making the Present Impossible: On the Vocation of Utopian Science Fiction’, took up Fredric Jameson’s assertion that Robinson’s Mars trilogy is the ideal expression of utopian literature, in that it presents multiple possibilities for utopian expression and moves between them in a state of flux. As Moylan said, this type of work ‘nominates and explores new alternatives, not to find immediate answers, but to alleviate and enlighten political strategy.’ As I tried to tease out in my own paper, I see Ballard’s Rushing to Paradise as fulfilling a not-too-dissimilar function, my conclusion being that this book (and, to a lesser extent, the rest of what I term Ballard’s ‘Pacific fictions’) is both uniquely Ballardian and exquisitely Jamesonian.

Moylan’s presentation basically served as an introduction to current utopian thought in literature. Again echoing Jameson, it concluded that the form, rather than being associated with the nasty stench of various dictatorships that have co-opted utopianism in the name of genocide, should be reclaimed and thought of as ‘a device to cut through quotidian reality and open up a gap through which we can see a better world.’ There was an interesting question from the audience, in which Moylan was asked, ‘If utopian writing should be conceived as a disruption, an alternative, should it therefore embody disruptive, ie, experimental, form?’ Moylan’s answer was, ‘Perhaps, but the virtue of SF is that it’s both immediate and accessible’, and this exchange immediately made me think of recent conversations in which people have wondered why Ballard abandoned the experimental form of The Atrocity Exhibition for more conventional structures and narratives. My feeling is along similar lines to Moylan, that the subversive value of Ballard’s later work lies precisely in the fact that it is ‘immediate and accessible’.

As Iain Sinclair has said, Ballard ‘has shifted from something that’s manufactured or tooled to fit in magazines where there was a market for these short sharp pieces, to something that now sits and pretends to be a mainstream literary novel. It comes out looking like a literary novel — Cocaine Nights has almost the form of an Agatha Christie novel, it’s comfortable — except that they’re doing stranger things. There’s a much darker kick in it.’

My paper, ‘Zones of Transit: J.G. Ballard’s Pacific Fictions’, was in the early afternoon and I was pleased that it was well received. Thinking back I wish I’d included footage or slides of A-bomb tests and perhaps some photos of the WWII aircraft I found abandoned in the North Pacific jungles. Still, my paper seemed accessible enough, even though, disappointingly, I was asked just half a question (directed to me and the other speaker on my panel, who also referenced Ballard). That paucity would normally be a sign of audience incomprehension, but to my relief a few people told me in the break that they enjoyed my presentation. And to also tell me that they love Ballard but can’t stand Rushing to Paradise. Well, I don’t think it’s Ballard’s best work at all but the ideas are most intriguing and underexplored compared to the rest of his canon. I’ll refrain from further comment as I think I’ll post my paper here in the New Year.

The question asked of myself and the other speaker was, ‘If Ballard is essentially writing the same story over and over again, does that therefore spell the end of the concept of utopia as a historical concern?’ The audience member used Ballard’s ‘Ronald Reagan’ piece from Atrocity (as prefiguring anti-celebrity culture) and Crash (as prefiguring cyber- and virtual sex) and their temporal location in the late 60s and early 70s as examples of the writer mining a prophetic wave of inspiration and then revising and refining that template to the present day. I wasn’t entirely sure of the point of this question, so my rambled and thoroughly non-academic answer was that Ballard, of course, is out of time (or ahead of his time, if anything), and if he has been writing the same thing since the 1960s, that simply means to me that the rest of us are still yet to catch up. As to the utopian angle, to my understanding Ballard has never been especially concerned with the past or the future, or any sense of historicity, focusing instead on a collapsed present, and that in any case it’s arguable as to whether his work is utopian (or rather, dystopian) at all. Instead, as I tried to make clear in the paper, the notion of an ‘affirmative dystopia’ is the key to his work, an oscillation between the poles that is neither one nor the other, but that plays on the elements of both. Actually I was a little surprised that Ballard was so under-represented in the rest of the conference: like I say I don’t classify him as a straight utopian or dystopian writer, but his work very definitely plays with the conventions in an innovative and provocative fashion.

With my paper out of the way, I made it to an afternoon panel featuring Kate Rigby, whose paper, ‘Apocalypse Now: Whither Utopianism in the Midst of Catastrophe?’, was rooted in reality, in an acceptance of the parlous state of climate change and the notion that things are only going to get worse. What role, asked Kate, can utopianism serve in the face of such a dire state of affairs? Looking to the biblical narrative of Noah’s Ark, she examined ‘non-human’ life and called for a ‘radical extension of hospitality towards more than only human others’ as a means to mobilise action in a world in which the utopian impulse seems to be well and truly exhausted as we slide downwards into eco-disaster.

Now this was a very stimulating presentation, with issues you could really sink your teeth into. Of course, what I wanted to ask Kate was, informed by Ballard’s early eco-disaster novels, how does one account for the fact that there actually might be a certain strata of the populace that would welcome the catastrophe for whatever reasons: psychological, psychopathological, aesthetic, evolutionary, etc. But I was beaten to the punch by another attendee. In response to Kate’s assertion that ‘If we see the apocalypse as a purifying event, that almost legitimises inaction’, he said (and I’m paraphrasing from memory), ‘There’s an unwarranted belief that eco-disaster can be averted. The world will run down of its own accord anyway, so why bother prolonging the inevitable for our children and grandchildren, who may only grasp a habitable world for just a few generations’.

Kate’s response was that for her it’s an ethical question, it’s ‘about allowing life to flourish, for however long that may be’. I wish I’d had the insight to follow this up along Ballardian lines, but I was still mulling all of this over as this exchange was talking place. Unfortunately I’m a bit slow like that. Interestingly, Geoff Manaugh asked something similar of Kim Stanley Robinson in their recent BLDGBLOG interview, and Robinson’s answer is perhaps similar to how Kate may have responded:

Robinson: The crash scenario that people think of … as an escape to freedom would actually be so damaging that it wouldn’t be fun. It wouldn’t be an adventure. It would merely be a struggle for food and security, and a permanent high risk of being robbed, beaten, or killed; your ability to feel confident about your own – and your family’s and your children’s – safety would be gone. People who fail to realize that… I’d say their imaginations haven’t fully gotten into this scenario.

After Kate’s presentation I sat in on the Comparative Utopias workshop (overheard before I went in: ‘What on earth is a utopias workshop? Lessons in how to build a utopia?’). This was useful in that it extrapolated the utopian impulse beyond Western culture, although, as Jacqueline Dutton asserted, ‘There’s no real tradition of utopias outside the West’. But for me, Roberto Gonzalez-Casanovas‘s paper, ‘Utopian and Dystopian Typologies of Arawaks vs. Caribs: Relativising Cannibals in Colonial Myth and Postcolonial Critique’ was the standout, with its fascinating account of the role cannibal cultures have played in the Western mythos, as a composite cut-out, symbolising and embodying the insecurities and ambitions of the West.

And that was it for me for the first day. On the train home, I sat next to a retired chap who’d been at the conference. Funnily enough, he wasn’t even remotely involved in academia — instead, he was your archetypal sci fi ‘fanboy’ who told me he has worn Star Trek outfits at conventions. He’s a smart and engaged chap who came along to gain a different perspective on science fiction, and this to me was a sign of the conference’s success.

DAY 2: The Eagle(ton) Has Landed

The Menzies Building, Monash University: Conference HQ. Photo: Simon Sellars.

I missed Day 2 as I had to work, but I was informed that Eagleton’s presentation, ‘Utopia and the New Testament’, was like stand-up comedy. See Superdave’s blog for info on Day 2 and for some Eagleton hot gossip… (he calls it ‘Day 3′ on his blog but he’s actually talking about Day 2).

DAY 3: This Argument Did Not Take Place

The Menzies Building, Monash University: Conference HQ. Photo: Simon Sellars.

Australian SF and fantasy author Lucy Sussex was the keynote speaker for the third day. As Andrew Milner noted when introducing her, ‘Lucy, unlike those of us in academia with our tenure, actually lives off her writing’. And she’s very good at it, too. Lucy’s presentation, ‘A Tour Guide in Utopia’, for me was the highlight of the conference. Her style was witty and imaginative, taking the time to explore the absurdities of her subject matter.

Lucy took us through the history of utopian literature in Australia, from 100 years ago to now. The early account was fascinating as I had no idea there was such a strong utopian tradition in Australian writing — it’s something ‘official’ histories never discuss. Early Australian utopias, as Lucy explained, were propelled by a stew of influences, including the threat of Western Australia seceding, the advent of Federation, the prospect of New Zealand becoming a state of Australia, and from elsewhere, the advent of Freud, electricity, Einstein, Marconi, Wells, suffragettes, you name it.

For Lucy, Australian politics today cries out for the form to be revived and she pointed to some examples that take up the call, with the caveat that dystopian literature has replaced the utopian mode in Australian writing, fuelled by the Howard government and Australia’s involvement in the ‘War on Terror’. She referred to an Australian novel that sounded most intriguing (unfortunately I’ve lost the author’s name), with its vision of terrorists beheading their victims, and via some weird technology, forcing them to live on in a kind of half-life as headless slaves. I can’t quite get that image out of my head and I must seek out that book. If anyone knows of it, let me know. Lucy also mentioned Andrew McGahan’s novel Underground, which depicts Canberra wiped out in a jihad attack. Imprisoned in Parliament House, the protagonist has nothing to read but Hansard — a vision of hell if ever there was one.

Lucy finished up by relating the answers she was given when she asked some prominent writers about the need for utopian writing today. Ursula Le Guin said (and, again, excuse my paraphrasing from memory), ‘How can anyone draw up a blueprint for utopia when science and technology today are changing so rapidly?’ While for Dorothy Porter, ‘The Howard Government’s years were a literal dystopia. I didn’t need to write about it.’

That was a wonderful note to end on.

At lunchtime I got chatting to a chap who informed me that he identified as a Marxist but that his university department was all Derridean; the way he told it, it was like he was a black man who had wandered into a Klu Klux Klan meeting. When he asked what I identified as, I was stumped and eventually answered, ‘a Ballardian?’, which was very lame, I know. Then he was stumped too. And then we had some more wine and talked about something else.

In the afternoon I chaired a panel on utopian themes in film. Both papers were uniformly excellent. Julia Vassileva’s paper, ‘On Imagination, Energy and Excess: the Lasting Legacy of Eisenstein’s Utopias’, was a deep examination of the manner in which Eisenstein, like Freud, sought to ‘represent the non-representational’. Julia made the excellent point that for Eisenstein, the use of montage generates a parallel narrative that makes ambiguous comment on the main narrative, a stimulating concept with vast utopian potential. As Julia explained, for Eisenstein who ‘dreamed of a classless society’, utopian ideals were simply not able to be realised in the time in which he lived. However ‘it is the very insistence on utopian ideals despite a knowledge of their impossibility that creates the inner spring’ — or an energy that can be realised — a similar conclusion reached by other speakers examining other writers and artists at the conference.

Rachel Torbett’s paper, ‘The Silence Afterwards: Lyotard with Haneke’s “Le Temps du Loup”‘ focused on Haneke’s film “Le Temps du Loup”, with its post-apocalyptic world in which the catastrophe is never explained and which is alluded to only in the most oblique of terms. Rachel played an edited copy of the film behind her, timed to finish when her paper finished, a fabulous touch that really enhanced her presentation. For Rachel, ‘Speculating on the human opens up a space of indeterminacy’ and she noted that this film accomplishes that, with its vision of ‘gross inhumanity’ and the barbarism that people descend into when their technological safety nets are stripped away (a Ballardian theme too, as it happens; earlier Rachel had told me she had originally considered a paper on Ballard’s High-Rise). Weaving Lyotard into this argument, she explored the concept of the ‘sublime’ and how the film presents ‘the threat that something will happen in this void; that it’s not over’. I hadn’t seen the film, but with the video behind her I clearly saw how Haneke, with his use of darkness and snatched, whispered dialogue fully explores this idea, as characters lose themselves in the landscape which is shot in fading, natural light.

For Rachel, the problems raised in the film ‘linger because they go unresolved’. Withholding vital information from the audience, then presenting a final scene in which a train passes through a countryside that is beautiful once again, Haneke promises pleasure emerging from the terror only for it to be deferred as we realise that we don’t know who is on the train, where they are going or what they intend to do. The endpoint, I believe, was that we ultimately come to question the notion of ‘humanity’ itself and whether it is to be desired at all. This paper made me want to explore Haneke’s work in more detail, and watching the extracts from the film, I couldn’t help but compare that ending with Children of Men’s, in which the humanity is virtually rammed down your throat.

After this I caught Andrew Milner‘s paper, which he co-wrote with Robert Savage. The paper derived from a great central conceit: what would happen if the German philosopher Ernst Bloch had included the Golden Age of science fiction in his ‘magnum opus’ The Principle of Hope? (Originally Milner and Savage had planned to write a short story exploring this idea; that would have made a great paper.) Bloch wrote of ‘the colportage novel, the circus and the fairy tale’, but ignored the SF pulps, which were being produced at the same time he was working. Milner then took us through an examination of utopian themes in the pulps. All in all an engaging paper. Andrew is a hyperactive speaker, almost tripping over his own words in his enthusiasm for his subject matter, an infectiousness transmitted to the audience.

And then the conference, for me, was over (there was another workshop but I had to leave).

That night I was having drinks with some friends when someone I didn’t know wandered into the group and heard me talking about Ballard, Baudrillard and the conference. Immediately he began attacking me, saying that Baudrillard (and Ballard) believe that nothing is real, and that they are wrong and irresponsible. He kept saying that the body is real, that if someone attacks you on the street then you will bleed, you may even die, and you will then know that your corporeal self is very very real, and not part of some fantasy virtual reality theory. None of which I’ve ever argued against. Weary from too many beers and suddenly being put on the spot and forced to defend theory in the middle of a packed and noisy pub filled with steroid heads and Paris Hilton clones, I tried to explain that my interest in media landscapes, informed by Ba(udri)llard, lies in the way advertising and media has changed to become nomadic, fluid and omnidirectional, rather than top-down, hierarchical and sticky, and that because the so-called spectacle is so complete and so enveloping, this renders traditional notions of ‘authentic’ behaviour obsolete. (Behind me, as if to emphasise my point, one of the Paris clones threw up on the pavement). But this doesn’t mean I believe that nothing is real, even though I may feel overwhelming ennui and deflation, even something approximating fear, from time to time because of it. It’s purely a mode of enquiry into something that’s basically unanswerable, but still worth questioning for anyone remotely interested in the forces of cultural production in the early 21st century. In fact, the idea of the mediated ‘spectacle’ is so ingrained now in popular culture that it — in and of itself — has become a tedious marketing cliche in films and advertising (cf. the Matrix, with its pop-cult take on Baudrillard, and hyperware and self-reflexive ads that consistently ‘break’ the frame), so it was somewhat surprising to hear someone argue that there was no such thing.

Even more shocking, I couldn’t believe this guy was dredging up a stock argument against Baudrillard, an argument over 10 years old in fact, regurgitating the whole ‘Gulf War Did Not Happen’ gambit and using that to discredit him. I mean, honestly, this is such an old and tired argument. After all these years I don’t think you need me to explain that Baudrillard was not claiming that the physical event of war didn’t happen, but that the war was the first to be almost entirely mediated by technology and therefore was not ‘real’ according to traditional theatres of warfare. And that that notion is very applicable to today, in the midst of our pervasive and all-invasive FaceSpace culture. But this just didn’t wash with this fellow, and he kept pushing and pushing until I finally asked him what he studied at university. Surely nothing French?

And he said: ‘Derrida. I’m a Derridean, of course. A realist’.

Derrida? A realist? That’s a new one on me.

(By the way, see the blog Obscene Desserts, in which Anja relates a similar scenario — only in reverse, and in Germany).

..:: Previously on Ballardian
+ ‘If I had a pound for every time someone mentioned psychopathology’: A Review of the First International Conference on the Work of J.G. Ballard

In the Observer, his best books of the year:

The most enjoyable book was St Peter’s by Keith Miller (Profile), a witty and entertaining account of the most famous church in the world, still standing firm against the tides of tourism that swirl around it. As Miller makes clear, St Peter’s has always been far more than a church. The most disturbing book of the year was Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia by John Gray (Allen Lane). This is Gray’s most powerful argument yet against the scientific idealists who think they can blueprint a benevolent end-state utopia. Their attempt, Gray argues, has led to the ruined utopias we see around us, and the return of repressed religious belief in its most frightening form. A brilliant polemic, probably best read on the steps of St Peter’s.

J.G. Ballard

And in the Guardian, his Chrissie picks:

London: City of Disappearances, edited by Iain Sinclair (Penguin), was last year’s Christmas treat in hardback, a wonderful compendium put together by our psychogeographer-in-chief, and now out in paperback. Strange dreams of a vanishing London die and are reborn on every page. Ghosts haunt the alleys of Sinclair’s maze-like mind, and I couldn’t help thinking of the Warsaw ghetto as he paced Whitechapel and Spitalfields.

This Christmas I will read The Hubris Syndrome: Bush, Blair and the Intoxication of Power by David Owen (Politico’s). Our former foreign secretary launches a scathing attack on the organ-grinder and his eager monkey for their conduct of the Iraq war, a combination of arrogance and incompetence.

For next Christmas, God willing, I have already reserved The Architecture of Parking by Simon Henley (Thames & Hudson), a hymn to the true temples of the automobile age, multistorey car parks. Those canted decks are trying to lead us to another dimension . . .

J.G. Ballard.

Beautiful. Ballard’s the master of the pithy review, condensed into a paragraph or two. (And thanks to Mike Bonsall, we know he honed the style very early on…) ‘Reading John Gray on the steps of St Peters’ is genius. And fabulous to see him mention Henley’s car park book, which I also want. Satisfying, too, as I always knew Ballard would like the book.

Note how there’s no ‘literature’ in these picks. No doubt the novel, for Ballard, is still rooted in the 19th century…

A-bomb explosion, Bikini Atoll, 25 July, 1946.

I’m a scholar, I teach Brit.Lit. professionally at the University of Warsaw. My PhD (1999) was on Angela Carter and it got me a job there as assistant professor. But in my country, to be a scholar you need one more degree — you need to write something like a post-doctoral thesis — and you have about ten years to write it. To cut a long story short, one day in 2000 I said to myself: ‘J.G. Ballard’.

Which brings us to the introduction from Grave New World, presented here as a sampler of my work.

Dominika Oramus, 2007.

For more information on the book, please contact Dominika at dominika dot oramus at neostrada dot pl.

NOTE: Part Two is now available.

Are we living in the happy times of a social utopia where everybody can participate equally in the blessings of advanced technology, modern science and sophisticated communications systems? Are we witness to the true ‘Brave New World’ the human race has dreamt of for generations? Or is our contemporary reality yet another ‘Grave New World’ [1] — a dystopian land of social manipulation and hegemonic mass media? Is ours a world that denies free will, breeds psychopathologies and supplants first-hand experience with simulacra? In 1932 Aldous Huxley published his Brave New World as a warning against what the future might bring. And indeed, throughout the last century numerous philosophers, historians, sociologists, and fiction writers repeated similar concerns and fears. In that same year, 1932, the first one-volume English translation of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West was published, thereby introducing to English literary culture the idea of an inevitable end to every civilization, ours included. His study prompted Arnold Toynbee to begin work on his monumental opus A Study of History, wherein he discusses a host of past human civilizations and points to the causes of their fall, indirectly suggesting that our own Western culture is well advanced on its own way to disintegration. Arnold Toynbee writes:

The self-inflicted wounds from which civilizations die are not these of a material order. In the past, at any rate, it has been the spiritual wounds that have proved incurable (Toynbee 1949: 135).

It seems appropriate to me to start the present study of J.G. Ballard by quoting the above passage from Toynbee’s lecture ‘The International Outlook’; coming in the wake of World War II, it reveals the sad truth about civilizations in general: they are universally threatened with decline and demise. Whatever may precipitate the West’s fall will involve external factors (waves of immigration, dangerous weapons in irresponsible foreign hands, terrorism, alien cultures and religions filling in the spiritual vacuum, etc.), but these matters will be allowed in only because of the internal spiritual damage that is already underway. In both his fiction and non-fiction J.G. Ballard describes the dire spiritual changes that have been taking place since the war and have transformed the West. Though Western civilization has apparently succeeded in perpetuating itself to the new millennium in having overcome communism and avoided the threat of a Third World War, nuclear catastrophe and internal collapse, for Ballard Huxley’s [2] vision remains uncanny in the way it is coming true. At least in some of its key aspects.

In this book I read Ballard’s fiction (and some of his non-fiction) as a record of the gradual internal degeneration of Western civilization in the second half of the twentieth century. In sundry ways and styles Ballard’s ostensibly very heterogeneous oeuvre depicts the same intangible catastrophe that has happened to the world. Contemporary reality is thus presented in his late prose as ‘post-apocalyptic’: though we are not literally living amidst the ruins, the golden age is far behind us and we are witnessing the twilight of the West. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment in the past when things went wrong [3], but that fateful turn has undeniably taken place and wrought grave spiritual change. Thus do we hear the death knells of our civilization, one growing increasingly hostile to individuals and erecting a cult of violence.

I hope to achieve two aims in this study. Firstly, I hope to show ‘Grave New World’, the imaginary territory Ballard describes in his books, which is a combination of the turn-of-the-millennium world, intertextual allusions to both fiction and non-fiction, and Ballard’s projections for the near future with its sociological idiosyncrasies. I would like to prove that irrespectively of the literary conventions Ballard applies in a given text (science fiction, speculative fiction, detective story, thriller, war novel or any other), he charts the very same territory and remains throughout primarily interested in the reaction of the human mind to the post-World War II reality which is the common denominator of his diverse obsessions. Secondly, I would like to shed some light on the spiritual condition and social problems of contemporary Western civilization as seen by its ever so inquisitive member. [4]

‘Continuously creating his own image’: J.G. Ballard self-portrait, double exposure, 1950 (photo via RE/Search Publications).

My technique in approaching Ballard is mostly that of textual analysis and close readings of passages of his texts that best show his exuberant stylistics; sometimes I also point out his references to literary and cultural theories. As far as said theories are concerned, I shall follow Ballard’s own readings. He very often alludes to critical schools and makes his characters discuss fashionable notions and ideas. Therefore, I will refer to the same sources: mostly psychoanalysts (many Ballardian characters are psychiatrists), but also historians and recent cultural theorists.

There are two problems with discussing Ballard’s fiction, and they need be dealt with at the very beginning. The first concerns the generic classification of his books — the second is posed by Ballard’s continuous attempts at auto-creation. As far as classification goes, the critics in different decades have described Ballard as a science fiction writer, a mainstream writer, a surrealist, a representative of the avant-garde, and an author who defies any classifications. To portray these controversies, in the next part of this Introduction (‘The Critical Response to J.G. Ballard’) I will briefly present the most important critical approaches to Ballard, at the same time showing how his oeuvre alludes to many different literary conventions. As for myself, I am not going to deal with this problem and give my opinion about, for example, the precise moment when Ballard left science fiction behind and started writing ‘serious’ books. Rather, I will discuss all his works on the same plane: moreover, I will not follow the chronology of Ballard’s long and generically diverse literary career, opting instead to treat all of his oeuvre synchronically, as descriptions of different vistas of his ‘Grave New World’. To provide the reader with relevant dates and the order of Ballard’s works I have included a calendar of his life and career at the end of this thesis (Appendix II).

In the last part of this Introduction (‘J.G. Ballard’s Auto-creation) I will deal with the second problem the Ballardian critic has to face. Over the fifty years of his career Ballard was continuously creating his own image. His quasi-autobiographies, numerous articles and memories present a persona or rather a number of personas that he constructed in different moments of his life. Such a self-fashioning should not be mistaken with any kind of ‘historical truth’ and in a study concerned with the intellectual history of the twentieth century it is important not to take the fictitious ‘James Ballard’ for a person who really witnessed the war in Asia and the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Therefore, I will briefly discuss the images Ballard constructed in different decades of the last century and later, in the main body of my thesis, I will, to quote D.H. Lawrence, ‘trust the tale not the teller’ and try to avoid the auto-creation fallacies.

In my first chapter, before the focused discussion of Ballard’s own oeuvre, I will succinctly present those thinkers who are most important to the understanding of his works. Such a spiritual map of the (mainly) twentieth century as sketched by following Ballard’s favourite philosophers and scientists will help to place his fiction in the proper intellectual perspective, as his works are deeply informed by theories that, from differing points of view, discuss the alarming state of our civilization. This chapter does not aim to present on its but few pages a grand critique of the century and the path our world is taking (as that, of course, lies far beyond the scope of the present study). Rather, I will confine myself to pointing out those books and essays that Ballard directly refers to. This chapter will therefore give a theoretical frame to the subsequent discussion and will allow me to avoid repetitive summaries of cultural theories in the rest of the study. Thus, in the following chapters I will refer back to this theoretical frame numerous times, owing to the fact that Ballard often alludes to the very same set of critical essays and enters into intertextual discussions with their authors from changing vantage points.

J.G. Ballard: photo via RE/Search publications.

As far as my own approach to his fiction is concerned, I will start by discussing, in Chapter II, the war narratives: Empire of the Sun, The Kindness of Women and some short stories devoted to both World War II and imaginary military conflicts of the future. These texts describe events which for Ballard are the very beginning of cultural decline, as it is after the war that Western civilization turned into ‘Grave New World’. Though these books play with the reader by giving the origins of events from Ballard’s other fictional works and might be treated as a conscious mythologizing of his life and career, they nevertheless do reveal the crux of Ballard’s historiosophy.

In the following chapters I try to map ‘Grave New World’ and chart its diverse territories. In Chapter III I show cityscapes in Ballard’s books and discuss contemporary urban civilization — the cause of psychological traumas. Chapter IV is devoted to mediascapes and the influence of modern communication technology on the way people live, think and dream. Life in a world full of highly developed technologies makes people indulge in escapist fantasies and thus Chapter V describes the mindscapes of contemporary Man: the end of the world fantasies, death-drive utopias, and wish-fulfilment catastrophic scenarios. Chapter VI, the final one, deals with the plexus of the contemporary world and the near future, picturing the decadent decline of Western wastelands: life in gated communities, secluded enclaves and luxurious resorts home to psychopathologies, deviations and terminal boredom enlivened only by acts of pointless violence.

In the autumn 2006, long after the first draft of this thesis had been completed, the newest of Ballard’s books, Kingdom Come, was published. Though it was too late to incorporate analysis of that novel into the main body of my work, I do discuss the novel in Appendix I and examine how it adds to the description of ‘Grave New World’. Therefore, September 2006 marks the close of my research and no books published later are discussed.

INTRODUCTION. 1 THE CRITICAL RESPONSE TO J.G. BALLARD

J.G. Ballard’s literary career started in the nineteen-fifties. His early stories were published in the popular magazines promoting a new, unique type of science fiction, one that differed from the pulp space fiction from America, which after the war flooded the British market. In the early sixties the need to reform the genre of science fiction and start a new thoroughly British artistic movement was all-pervasive. A small group of young writers, who later were dubbed the ‘New Wave’, looked for a periodical that would publish intellectual SF, or ‘speculative fiction’, as they insisted on calling it. Speculative fiction was to be a medium to discuss current social and cultural issues in an experimental, and often dramatic way.

Cover: New Worlds #179, Feb. 1968.

The periodical they finally found was New Worlds, a magazine published since 1946, but which in its long history had many times changed publishing houses and its artistic profile. In 1967 the post of editor-in-chief was given to Michael Moorcock, an ambitious young writer and a friend of Ballard — together they prepared a number of artistic manifestos defining speculative fiction and setting the goals for British avant-garde science fiction. The term ‘speculative fiction’ was soon abandoned, as the critics and columnists preferred to call the New Worlds group the ‘New Wave’, which is a literal translation of the French nouvelle vague. [5] Christopher Priest, a writer and a journalist, and Judith Merril, an influential US-born anthologist and columnist, popularized the phrase ‘New Wave’ among readers in Britain and the US.

Although the avant-garde tendencies in British science fiction are in fact older than the late-1960s term, and stories written by Ballard, Moorcock and Brian Aldiss a few years earlier are now subsumed under the ‘New Wave’ label. Peter Nicholls writes in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993):

By 1965, then, science fiction was ripe for change. In fact many of the so-called experiments of the period were not experiments at all, but merely an adoption of narrative strategies, and sometimes ironies that had long been familiar in the mainstream novel. In the event, some of the science fiction writers who felt they now had the freedom to experiment, especially Ballard, were to add something new to the protocols of prose fiction generally (Clute and Nicholls 1993: 866).

Therefore, from the very beginning of his literary career Ballard is considered an in-between writer oscillating between ‘low-brow’ and ‘high-brow’ literature. Sometimes he is called a postmodernist, sometimes an avant-garde author. [6] The critic who as early as the nineteen-sixties writes about him passionately and is partly responsible for his being dubbed an experimental ‘New Wave’ writer is Judith Merril. Merril is an author of a number of well-known disaster stories describing nuclear catastrophes, but only in the nineteen-fifties when she began editing anthologies did she become one of the most influential figures in American science fiction. Always experimental and eager to revise the clichéd standards of American pulp magazines, she swiftly became an advocate of the ‘New Wave’, and especially of Ballard. As a columnist in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction she presented speculative fiction to American readers and discussed the books of the New Worlds writers.

New Worlds today is an altogether unique publication: and the astonishment of some of the stuffier intellectual circles in London when the Art Council announced an annual grant of 1800 pounds for a science fiction magazine… was probably no greater than the shock experienced by American fans attending the 1967 World Science Fiction Convention in New York when they had their first look at the transformed magazine of Speculative Fiction… The new magazine is quarto size, non-glossy… with cover art, interior illustrations and (increasingly) page design to match the most experimental of the fiction, and to suit the sophistication of Chris Finch’s articles on avant-garde art and graphics (Merril 1968: 344-345).

In 1968 Merril edited an anthology of the ‘New Wave’ writers: England Swings SF. Stories of Speculative Fiction. Apart from stories and poems Merril presents in this book her opinion on every writer in original fashion. England Swings SF tries to match the ‘New Wave’ fiction in graphic experiments and narrative strategies. The very beginning of the anthology resembles an avant-garde poem:

You have never read a book like this before, and the next time you read one anything like it, it won’t be much like it at all.

It’s an action-photo, a record of process-in-change,
a look through the perspex porthole at the
momentarily stilled bodies in a scout ship boosting
fast, and heading out of sight into the multiplex mystery of inner/outer space.

I can’t tell you where they are going, but
maybe that’s why I keep wanting to read what they write. The next time someone assembles the work of the writers in this … well, ‘school’ is too formal
and ‘movement’ sounds pretentious… (ibid.: 9-10).

The anthology contains works of over twenty young and ambitious writers — Ballard is the only one who has three of his stories reprinted: the other authors boast but one. Given the prominent position of ‘guru of British avant-garde’, he is presented to American readers (the anthology was meant to introduce the new literary fashion in America) as an often misunderstood, intellectually challenging writer. Merril chooses the newest stories, ones which are written is the present tense and use the collage technique: images, bits and pieces of commercials, psychiatric studies and TV newsreels are juxtaposed to show the prevailing violence of the contemporary mediascape.

Merril also decides to characterize Ballard (and other writers) in collages. Her introductions to stories are combinations of different texts cut into pieces and glued together. According to Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974), collage technique challenges the readers expectation of a synthetic, singular meaning. Diverse passages, graphically rearranged quotes of interviews, reviews and Merril’s own opinions do not give a unified picture but rather show, at least in the case of Ballard, discussions and quarrels concerning his person and his place in the British literary world.

One can only hope that for Ballard too the worst misunderstanding is over, so that he will be free to create in a more intelligent atmosphere.

And so it was … in England, where the earlier work had finally been digested.

Freud pointed out that one has to distinguish between the manifest content of the inner world of the psyche and its latent content; and I think in exactly the same way, today, when the fictional elements have overwhelmed reality, one has to distinguish between the manifest content of reality and its latent contents.

And his sponsorship of the Ambit contest for the best prose or poetry written under the influence of drugs (ibid: 104-105).

Though Merril’s style is far from critical exactness [7] (she does not give the sources of the texts used in her collages, not all sentences are complete), it very well reflects the atmosphere of the 1960s discussions of the ‘New Wave’ and Ballard’s place in it. Juxtaposed with other experimental writers he is discussed within the science fiction movement, with the strong suggestion that his literary goal was to uplift, renew and meliorate science fiction. Ballard at that time was praised not only by science fiction critics [8] — and the general tone of his reviewers is similar to Merril’s: this writer is the best and the most interesting of the speculative fiction writers.

Gradually, speculative fiction writers were either absorbed by the literary mainstream or stopped writing experimental prose and turned to pulp fiction. Harlan Ellison, the editor of an influential American anthology of speculative fiction, Dangerous Visions, complains in his Introduction that: ‘despite the new interest in speculative fiction by the mainstream, despite the enlarged and variant styles of the new writers, despite the enormity and expansion of topics open to these writers, despite what is outwardly a booming, healthy market, there is a constricting narrowness of mind on the part of many editors in the field!’ (Ellison 1983: XXIII). In his attempt to revive this ambitious kind of popular fiction, Ellison decided to create an anthology ‘intended as a canvas for new writing styles, bold departures, unpopular thoughts’ (ibid., XXVIII). And although he did not manage to ‘save’ speculative fiction, his Dangerous Visions remain an important book in the history of science fiction.

Ellison is a very intrusive anthologist: to every one of the thirty-two stories in the book he writes a separate introduction and epilogue, wherein he gives his opinions, suggestions and remarks concerning both the meaning of the story and its author. It is interesting to see how he describes J.G. Ballard, whom he presents to his American readers as a leader of the young English writers. Indeed, it is Ballard’s Englishness, his upper-middle-class origins and colonial past that appeal to Ellison the most, while he in fact cannot define Ballard’s literary style:

Yet in totality [Ballard's books] present a kind of enriched literacy, a darker yet somehow clearer — perhaps the word is ‘poignant’ — approach to the materials of speculative writing. There is a flavour of surrealism to Ballard’s writing. No, it’s not that, either. It is, in some ways, serene, as oriental philosophy is serene. Resigned yet vital. There appears to be a superimposed reality that covers the underlying pure fantasy of Ballardian conception (ibid., 459).

I am quoting Ellison to show how Ballard was received in the United States, for the American market is the most important (if not hegemonic) as far as science fiction goes. Ellison completed his anthology in the late 1960s, in the last days of the British ‘New Wave’ in science fiction. James Gunn, the editor of probably the most important single anthology/history of science fiction ever written, the multi-volumed The Road to Science Fiction, produced his book in the following decade. At that time in the US nobody well remembered what the ‘New Wave’ was about. So, while presenting Ballard and his story ‘The Terminal Beach’ to his readers, Gunn had to lecture on this movement. He discusses it from the perspective of America in the late 1970s, treating it as a very remote phenomenon. He calls Ballard the leader and guru of the New Worlds group, compares his enigmatic symbolic style to James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake and John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. and explains the nihilism of his writing by claiming that Ballard wrote against Americans in Vietnam, about drugs, the Beatles, pop-art, pop-music, political assassinations and terrorism. And this is probably how Ballard is read by fans of science fiction to this day.

Although Ballard’s career stretched well beyond the ‘New Wave’ movement, which ended by the early nineteen-seventies, his early fiction is often discussed in the context of its poetics. The ambitious artistic programme of the movement and the fact that many of its representatives became well-known and important writers [9] attracted the attention of literary critics. One of the first scholars to study the output of the group was Colin Greenland, who in the late 1970s was a postgraduate student at Oxford. A great fan of New Worlds and science fiction in general, he dreamt of writing serious criticism about this literary genre, which at the time was considered too ‘low-brow’ to study. [10] Tom Shippey [11], then Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, an author of criticism about J.R.R. Tolkien and a contributor to Patric Parrinder’s critical anthology Science Fiction. A Critical Guide agreed to supervise Greenland’s work.

Finally, in 1980 a thesis entitled The Entropy Exhibition. Michael Moorcock and the British ‘New Wave’ in Science Fiction was accepted for a doctorate in English Literature at the University of Oxford. Greenland, thanks to a grant from the Arts Council of Great Britain, reworked his thesis and in 1983 a book of the same title was publish. The Entropy Exhibition is a superb criticism of science fiction, as Greenland shows the literary output of the ‘New Wave’ in the context of cultural and artistic life in the nineteen-sixties. And although only one chapter is devoted exclusively to Ballard, it remains to this day an important item in Ballardian criticism.

Greenland describes the social situation in the sixties, the emergence of youth culture, the influence of the Space Race [12] on popular imagination, the Vietnam War and the stormy history of New Worlds — a magazine that tried to reflect current cultural phenomena. Additionally, he inserts in his book three monographic essay-chapters presenting the works of Ballard, Aldiss and Moorcock.

As far as Ballard’s output is concerned, Greenland discusses his early disaster novels and some of the stories he wrote in the fifties and sixties. The books High-Rise and Concrete Island (written in the seventies) are but mentioned, and Ballard’s later works are of course absent from the study. His general approach to both Ballard and the ‘New Wave’ is to read their output as a new kind of fiction growing out of traditional science fiction and characterized by its fascination with entropy: the universal and irreversible decline of energy into disorder. This fiction is in intimate connection with other cultural experiments of the epoch. Ballard, according to Greenland, is first of all a masterful stylist whose metaphors and allusions recreate the pessimistic attitude of the times and show a Universe doomed to death, one already frozen in its final stage. Ballard’s early prose is described as pictorial and portrayed in the context of visual arts — Pablo Picasso, Paul Delvaux, Salvador Dali, René Magritte — Greenland points to colours, shades and figures borrowed by Ballard from concrete paintings.

Greenland also proves to what extent Ballard is indebted to Surrealism as far as his language is concerned, the poetic character of his early prose being an effect of a highly associative style:

The Surrealist techniques that Ballard has used involve deliberate dissociations and mystifications. The object is taken from its usual context and dismantled, or put in a new context, or confused with other objects. But the result of the process is not mere nonsense, but a revaluation. The elements acquire new significance from the reorganisation, so that we sense more about the object than we knew or felt before. Surrealism can thus be said to have both a synthetic and an analytic aspect; it consists not only of inspiration, but also of inquiry. This duality Ballard has inherited (Greenland 1983: 104).

LEFT: J.G. Ballard: Illustration by Carol Gregory, from J.G. Ballard: The First Twenty Years (eds. James Goddard & David Pringle).

Such a characterization of Ballard’s early style strikes as being very apt, as it accounts for Ballard’s fascinations with Lautréamont, Alfred Jarry and André Breton, numerous visual intertextual allusions in his stories, as well as for Ballard’s obsessive returns to the same or similar figures of speech. What Ballard and the Surrealists surely have in common is the belief that an apocalypse had already taken place, both in the intellectual sphere and in daily life. Ballard’s prose shows the contemporary world abundant in fictions whose only connotations are the fantasies of their authors. Our environment is fragmented and coded, the popular imagery of posters and commercials needs deciphering — hence, Ballard’s indebtedness to semiology and Roland Barthes. In other words, we live in the nightmarish world of the Surrealists.

Greenland describes Ballard’s style and his specific figures of speech in an attempt to show why Ballardian prose is immediately recognizable and ‘unmistakable’. He analyzes Ballard’s habit of introducing a story with a stylized tableau and his conscious use of what he calls ‘pseudo-simile, one in which there is no discoverable parity between the terms. Ballard’s version of it employs a literary sleight commonly used by ironists: he keeps the relation but blurs the distinction, so that the two halves of the simile, the actual and the virtual, can be swapped over’ (ibid.: 103).

Greenland’s book is still, after over twenty years, the best critical analysis of the ‘New Wave’ movement, for among other reasons because it allows us to look at Ballard’s early works from the perspective of the literary life in England at that time. It shows Ballard’s involvement in the editing of New Worlds, his views on art and civilization in the 1960s, and his ambiguous position on the literary scene. Greenland (just like Merril) is very much interested in categories such as science fiction, mainstream literature, modernist writing, and the avant-garde. He shows the difficulties in pigeonholing Ballard and presents diverse opinions about how to classify his works. His major achievement as far as critical appraisal of Ballard’s fiction goes is the discussion of his style in the context of the Surrealists: painters and poets alike.

In the nineteen-seventies many writers and critics discovered Ballard and came to highly prize his unique style and remarkable literary achievements. Among them were Kingsley Amis (a great advocate of ‘New Wave’ prose), Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess, Susan Sontag and William S. Burroughs. They wrote reviews and introductions, but no monograph was published till the end of the decade [13]. Ultimately, David Pringle decided to work on a serious study of Ballard and in 1979 he published Earth is the Alien Planet. J.G. Ballard’s Four-Dimensional Nightmare, a brief (sixty-one page) but important monograph. His ambition in the book is to present Ballard’s literary output to both science fiction fans and the general reading public. Moreover, Pringle offers them a key to Ballard: he defines the place Ballard has on the market, divides his career into periods and classifies Ballardian characters and motifs.

Pringle starts by comparing Ballard to Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, who also started their careers as science fiction writers, but subsequently transcended that category. Pringle describes Ballard as being less acclaimed, but equally worthy of being published ‘without the SF label’ (Pringle 1979: 3). He pins Ballard’s lack of popularity on the fact that, unlike Bradbury and Vonnegut, he does not write for big and glossy magazines such as Playboy, but for the ambitious low-circulation press. This ‘courting of the avant-garde’ (ibid.: 3) wins him a new but limited audience. Nevertheless, Pringle is sure that in the future Ballard will be fully appreciated and the book ends in a prophesy:

Nevertheless, Ballard’s reputation will grow in the decades to come, and he is likely to become recognized as by far and away the most important literary figure associated with the field of science fiction. More than that: he will be seen as one of the major imaginative writers of the second half of the 20th century — an author for our times, and for the future (ibid.: 61).

J.G. Ballard: photo by Eamonn McCabe.

The division of Ballard’s career into periods is also based on the genre of criticism. Here Pringle distinguished an early ‘romantic’ stage, when Ballard published in the science fiction press stories concerned with the inner landscapes of characters’ minds, and the post-science fiction period. It was then that Ballard shifted his interests to outer landscapes, abandoned science fiction conventions and embraced the avant-garde and literary periodicals. This is a ‘dark’ period of formal experiments and of bitter criticism of the violence intrinsic to contemporary life. Pringle also suggests that Ballard is at the beginning of yet another period, one of writing present-oriented fiction describing technological environments: ‘he has also made larger concession to social realism — he is trying to become more of a novelist‘ (ibid.: 50).

Pringle explains that last statement by saying that Ballard is trying to construct rounded characters, while in his early prose his characters are symbolic ‘figures in an inner landscape’ (ibid.: 51). He classifies these symbolic figures according to Jungian archetypes as the lamia, the jester and the king — and most Ballardian characters are demonstrated to belong to one of the categories. A similar symbolic key is used to deal with Ballardian themes (the categories are: Imprisonment [14], Flight, Time Must Have A Stop And Superannuation) and to classify his obsessively recurrent images [15]. Ballardian mythology is four-fold: Pringle distinguishes four groups of symbols representing mythical meanings of water, sand, concrete and crystal. Water stands for the past and the return to previous stages of evolution, sand and dryness are in the future of the human race when only the exhausted shell of the planet will remain. Further, concrete is the world of the present day — the urban culture, while crystal, like a Jungian mandala represents oneness with the Universe.

Generally speaking, Pringle’s book represents Jungian criticism (though once he very rightly remarks, albeit in passing, that Ballard’s references to Jung and Freud are mixed), and as such is it usually quoted. Pringle is also the first critic to mention Ballard’s biography in the context of his fiction and to announce Ballard’s affiliation to the avant-garde. In the following years Pringle remained Ballard’s major critic, but more and more scholars interested in both science fiction and mainstream literature began to approach Ballard’s books, often trying to ascribe his writing to some larger cultural frame. In The Hidden Script (1985), for example, David Punter discusses Ballard’s fiction in the section ‘Narratives and the Unconscious’, showing (in reference to psychoanalytic theories) the interrelation of the internal and the external spheres in his fiction.

The short chapter ‘J.G. Ballard: alone among the murder machines’ is an excellent analysis of the metaphoric space Ballardian characters inhabit (e.g., in Atrocity Exhibition, High-Rise, Concrete Island, Hello America and The Unlimited Dream Company). This territory is nightmarish and ruled by man-made machines, ‘the lurking engines of destruction which keep us pinned down’ (Punter 1985: 11), and people strive to regain a spiritual hold on objects, but they are in fact helpless victims of their own psychopathologies. Surrounded by technology and advanced communication systems, Man loses the ability of expression: ‘the areas of language already colonised by the public media too developed to allow for more than the slightest insertion of a discourse of individual desire’ (ibid.: 10). Punter goes on to define Ballard’s oeuvre in relation to contemporary culture and, although his analysis was written a quarter of a century ago, it is still very illuminating:

Where character is concerned, Ballard is one of the few writers who can be sensibly termed post-structuralist: the long tradition of enclosed and unitary subjectivity comes to mean less and less to him as he explores the ways in which a person is increasingly controlled by landscape and machine; increasingly becomes a point of intersection for overloaded scripts and processes which have effectively concealed their distant origins in human agency (ibid.: 9).

In Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers (1981), edited by Curtis C. Smith, a lexicon of those authors whose work goes beyond realism (even if they usually are not referred to as science fiction writers), the entry ‘J.G. Ballard’ presents him as an original and distinctive writer whose style is described as idiosyncratic ‘as a signature’ and shaped by the painter’s eye of the author. [16] The stress falls on Ballard’s intellectual fascinations: ‘masterpieces of literature (from Homer and the Bible through Shakespeare to Coleridge and Melville) and the arts (from Bosch to Dali and Leonor Fini)’ (Smith 1981: 31). His early fiction is called romantic and exuberant science fiction rich in intertextual allusions, where bizarre landscapes ‘reflect and amplify the inner and mutual conflicts of glamorous lamias and their suicidal wooers, in a baroque symphony of art, love, and death’ (ibid.: 31). 1966 is given as the turning point after which Ballard abandons science fiction and starts to describe the contemporary world and to criticize its technology, violence and perverted entertainment. Such a present is just a fossil of the future, and his interest in science fiction gives Ballard an ability to look at social life in a detached, scientific way. Beyond that, Ballard’s style changes abruptly: all exuberance is gone and instead we read about people like us, with popular names, living in real cities and made to cope with an inhuman urban existence.

It is interesting to juxtapose this entry with a later one hailing from the prestigious The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993, revised 1999), edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls. ‘J.G. Ballard’ by David Pringle is a long entry and, for the first time, the author is presented not primarily as a science fiction writer (despite the very character of this Encyclopedia). Indeed, stress falls on those aspects of Ballard’s output which transgress the standards of the genre. Even the earliest stories are shown as eschewing traditional science fiction themes and instead concentrating on ‘near-future decadence and disaster’. We learn that Ballard was severely criticized by fans as a pessimist and a life-hater, that the science fiction world wrote him off, and that he never won a single science fiction award. Pringle also describes the hostility with which editors treated his later prose (the entire Doubleday edition of Atrocity Exhibition was printed only to be pulped just before publication) because he used people such as Ronald Reagan, the Kennedys and Marilyn Monroe as characters. Pringle ends by presenting Ballard’s psychological war novels and by briefly characterizing his biography — these are the beginnings of the legend of J.G. Ballard, his war and the impact it had on his imagination. Pringle concludes:

J.G. Ballard: photo by David Levenson.

Although most of his longer work of the past decade has been outside the field, the originality and appropriateness of his vision continue to ensure JGB’s standing as one of the most important writers ever to have emerged from sf (Clute and Nicholls 1993: 85).

When in 1994 Simulacra and Simulations (1981) by Jean Baudrillard was translated into English, the prose of J.G. Ballard found a new and influential advocate. In a chapter devoted to Ballard’s Crash (which had previously been translated and reprinted in Science Fiction Studies) Baudrillard calls Ballard’s book one of the masterpieces of contemporary literature, one which shows the world of today as it really is, the simulated, unreal projection of mass culture and sophisticated hi-tech. Science fictionalizes reality, the world of cyber-technology is by nature fictitious and Ballard’s prose is a rare example of the conscious exposure of the simulacra-ridden mediascape.

Generally, in the late nineteen-eighties [17] the status of ambitious science fiction changed. On the one hand some of the very good science fiction writers elevated the genre to the status of intellectually provoking, erudite reading, yet on the other hand many postmodernist writers began to apply science fiction conventions. Used as sophisticated literary trope, science fiction was no longer associated solely with an adolescent male audience and acquired the ambiguous status of ‘a game with the reader’ or ‘a play with a convention’. ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’ The Fiction of J.G. Ballard (1997) by Roger Luckhurst, the best critical book on Ballard to date, is devoted to