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

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

Every now and then I get sent links to articles about Ian Curtis that mention Ballard. While I find Curtis interesting I try to refrain from posting about him as I don’t really think there’s much to be said about the Ballard connection that hasn’t been said before. Curtis nicked the title to the Joy Division song ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ from Ballard but wrote the lyrics before he’d read the book. An early New Order song called ‘The Him’ takes its title from a passage in The Atrocity Exhibition (the book, not the Curtis lyric) but is supposedly a tribute to Curtis, not Ballard. Crash is on Curtis’s bookshelf in Anton Corbijn’s recent biopic. I accept that for Curtis, Ballard was more of a portal than a direct influence so really what else is there left to say?

But Curtis and Burroughs seems a different story, perhaps more substantial, certainly less well worn. Over at Reality Studio a fat dossier has been compiled to flesh this out, drawing on previously published documents as well as new research and email questionnaires with the likes of David Britton of Savoy Books and Richard Kirk of Cabaret Voltaire.

The dossier pays special attention to the infamous moment when Joy Division and Burroughs found themselves on the same bill at a gig in Belgium. Curtis approached Burroughs, who, so the story goes, told him to ‘get lost’. As RealityStudio notes (and subsequently interrogates):

To anyone familiar with Burroughs, the thought of him telling a fan to get lost is perplexing. Burroughs tended to be unfailingly courteous, even a touch “old world” in his manners. Typically he was generous with fans and admirers, particularly with young men as handsome as Ian Curtis. What could have prompted such an exchange? Was Curtis insulting? Burroughs in a bad mood? Were there mitigating circumstances?

Take note, too, of Britton’s snarky dismissal of the Curtis legend:

I’m afraid Joy Division never meant anything to me… My cronies and I thought it was “crying shit in your underpants” music. Student angst. A glib dismissal, I knew at the time, but it was a comfort to think like that. Despite what [Jon] Savage says I’m pretty sure that Ian wasn’t much of a reader. A skimmer at best, but with the ability to read the right stuff and quote from it. For a Macclesfield lad, quite an achievement, I suppose… [But] JD have stood the test of time and have proved to be something far more substantial than I at first perceived. But can one be wrong, and also be right? Is it “Transmission” or “Papa Oom Mow Mow“? But at least it’s better to have JD representing Manchester music than Freddie and the Dreamers.

Also on offer at RS are the interviews Burroughs and Joy Division gave just before the gig to En Attendant magazine, available in both French (JD; WSB) and English (WSB; JD) versions.

All of this, as usual, is well worth checking out. The RealityStudio empire has really been cranking up the volume of late.

The other night at the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF), I saw Control, Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis biopic. In the first part of the film, before Curtis has met the rest of Joy Division, he’s in his bedroom and the camera focuses on his bookshelf. The shot lingers for a few seconds on the spine of Ballard’s Crash, the 1973 Farrar, Straus & Giroux edition with the ridiculous cartoon font and bulbous bat-car. Well, I got my jollies from that of course although it would have made more sense if it was a copy of The Atrocity Exhibition. After all, people keep banging on about the Joy Division song ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ and how it’s been influenced by Ballard. But even that’s a pretty tenuous connection. Sure, Curtis lifted the title but the lyrics are from another world. Curtis wrote them before he’d read the book.

There’s another Ballard/Atrocity/Joy Division connection. New Order have a track called ‘The Him’ on their first album, Movement. Of course there’s a section called ‘The Him’ in The Atrocity Exhibition, in the ‘You and Me and the Continuum’ chapter. It features the immortal lines:

The noise from the beat group rehearsing in the ballroom drummed at his head like a fist, driving away the half-formed equations that seemed to swim at him from the gilt mirrors in the corridor… Then his knees began to kick, his pelvis sliding and rocking. ‘Ye …yeah, yeah, yeah!’ he began, voice rising above the amplified guitars.

J.G. Ballard. ‘You, Me and the Continuum’ (1966).

‘Beat group’! How quaint. (In fact Ballard seems to be referencing a popular ‘beat combo’ known as the Beatles: ‘She loves you yeah yeah yeah’ … ?)

The lyrics to New Order’s ‘The Him’ go like this:

Some days you waste your life away / These times I find no words to say / A crime I once committed filled me / Too much of heaven’s eyes I saw through / Only when meanings have no reason / They’re taken beyond your sense of right.

So what’s the connection between Ballard and New Order? Maybe Barney and company simply liked the ‘amplified guitars’ bit. But apparently the lyrics are about Curtis. So as a memorial the title is fitting, given Curtis’s prior flirtation with Ballard. The martial drum beat is also very similar to Joy Division’s ‘Atrocity’.

My conclusion is that the Ballard/Joy Division comparison is pretty thin and worn, at least with regards to the actual songs. There’s not a lot to go on except a couple of titles, but ever since Curtis died that hasn’t stopped the reams of discourse that strain to find Ballardian undertones in his lyrics.

an image from John Foxx’s Cathedral Oceans project

John Foxx, the former lead singer of Ultravox, is an undisputed electronic music pioneer. Before Midge Ure came along, the band’s three Foxx-driven albums, Ultravox! (1977), Ha! Ha! Ha! (1978) and Systems of Romance (1978), fused near-future melancholy with icy man-machine interfaces and the remake/remodel aesthetic of Eno-era Roxy Music, betraying a demonstrable Ballardian outlook — all crumbling cities, random genders and the ‘music that machines make’.

Foxx left Ultravox after Systems of Romance, tired of the group mentality. In 1980 he was back with his first solo album, Metamatic, which birthed the all-synthetic ‘metal beat’ sound. As Foxx says, he was ‘reading way too much J.G. Ballard’ when he made this album, and it’s obvious: JGB is etched into every groove, from the car-crash scenarios in the lyrics to the glimpses of shattered glass, plazas, underpasses and urban sites of psychological degradation. If you know a bit about Ballard, you’ve probably heard of Metamatic, even if Foxx’s work is less familiar: it’s the one that always gets namechecked as the archetypal Ballardian album.

Foxx’s channelling and championing of Arnold’s media-interruptus aesthetic would do Talbot/Travis/Travers in The Atrocity Exhibition proud. I spoke to him about the continuing influence of JG Ballard in his work.

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– Simon Sellars
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NOTE: Part 2 of this interview can be found here.
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Still from the ‘No One Driving’ video, 1980

I was in retreat from bands, mightily convinced that electronics were the future, and reading too much J.G. Ballard. I lived alone in Finsbury Park, spent my spare time walking the disused train lines, cycled to the studio every day and wobbled back at dawn, imagining I was the Marcel Duchamp of electropop. Metamatic was the result. It was the first British electronic pop album. It was minimal, primitive technopunk. Car-crash music tailored by Burtons”.

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– John Foxx, Assembly sleevenotes, 1992.
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SIMON SELLARS: During the Metamatic era, which Ballard books were you reading and how exactly did Ballard’s writing influence you?

JOHN FOXX: I was reading Crash and High-Rise. And Burroughs — The Wild Boys. These were all making a sort of continuous landscape I recognised which intersected perfectly with living in London in the mid-to-late 70s. Grey, grainy, exhausted. Yet a constant tantalising feeling of some kind of event or entity always about to manifest itself. A whirlpool with seductive furniture. That’s why you stay. You get edges of the same kind of involvement with the place as I understand hostages can develop for their captors.

The car-crash scenarios were particularly resonant for me, for three reasons. First, a perfect metaphor for my own life and what was happening with technology: an enjoyable journey interrupted by a couple of crashes. Second, I love and fear cars, how they’ve changed cities, landscapes, economies, our apprehension of time and our view of our own bodies – and the way they have made new and terrible crimes possible. Three, because I’d been involved in two car crashes and so had some good friends. The beautiful Hiang Kee (who played synth on the TV performance of ‘No One Driving’) was, by complete coincidence, just emerging from surgery to remedy severe facial damage caused by a windscreen in a crash. The TV appearance helped her regain some confidence.

The Burton’s bit was to ensure the landscape was British – not confusable with America, which I love but I’m always trying to eliminate from some aspects of my work.

The geometry of the plaza exercised a unique fascination upon Talbot’s mind.

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– J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, 1970
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Across the Plaza
A giant hoarding of Italian cars
Across the Plaza
The lounge is occupied by seminars

Down escalators, come to the sea view
Behind all the smoked glass no-one sees you
A familiar figure comes to meet you
I remember your face
From some shattered windscreen…

From the Plaza
The highways curve in over reservoirs
On the Plaza
A queue is forming for the cinema…

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– John Foxx, ‘Plaza’, from Metamatic, 1979
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How do you think your relationship to Ballard’s writing has changed over the years? In 2006 would you still count him as an influence?

Of course, it alters over time. Just as memory does. I think he’s now part of the beginning of a collective understanding of aspects of the ways technology can affect us, and how human desires intertwine with all that. So, I feel many of his ideas can only continue to gather resonance.

From the late 70s to the early 80s, it seemed that most “post-punk” artists were happy to claim Ballard as an influence: Numan, Siouxsie, Ian Curtis, Cabaret Voltaire, yourself… Why did Ballard have resonance for such a particular group of musicians back then?

I think some of this may have been an attraction to the new modes of physical and intellectual violence on offer and to the uncompromising outer edge stance. This attraction naturally alters as the ‘mode of the music’ changes. Many other writers have since begun to colonise what JGB established, and elaborated that grammar to deal with new technological events, but it’s still essentially the same stance.

He was the first radical and relevant novelist of this technological age in Britain. You had Burroughs and Philip K Dick in America but they were connected to the beat movement, using drugs as a lens, reflecting an American landscape. I always enjoyed JGB’s Englishness, living in a middle-class suburb writing about a new landscape we’d only just come to live in – more akin to McLuhan’s academic/romantic take on the unrecognised present.

I think what Ballard maps out so well is that moment of surrender to the terrible. A total, inevitable, final embrace. After Hiroshima we really had no choice. It was impossible to pretend that the world would ever be the same again. We all sleep there every night, now. Ballard blueprinted all that like no one else I’ve ever read.

UltraFoxx: John in 1977

As far as musical subcultures go, why doesn’t Ballard get namechecked today?

Ballard has much more competition for attention now: a flood of engaging, contemporary writers. There is also the moment of contemporary recognition, where a generation recognises and comes to trust an author. After a while the writer becomes part of that generational landscape and succeeding generations need to find their own. It takes a while for the contemporaneity to fall away, so a writer’s relevance can be more accurately assessed. It’s too early to view Ballard like that yet. Sometimes it’s enough to be relevant to that generation only.

As a marginal digression, I have a theory that we can’t truly understand anything without a direct sensual involvement. Sensuality is an intellectual device, which allows understanding, and I include eroticism with all that. So we have this terrible need to become entangled in order to comprehend.

I suppose another part of this compound is a wild and often forlorn hope of somehow being able to absorb and dominate the thing eventually. As irrational and recognisable as the urge to jump from a high place in order to surmount the fear.

Just as EL Doctorow was the first to use real historical characters in a fictional matrix, then a stream of others began to do the same: Ackroyd, Winterson, Rushdie, etc. Doctorow receives little credit for this and is not as well known as the others here, yet he did it first. Ballard is in a similar position. A writer who invented a territory that was colonised swiftly and efficiently by many others. Happens all over.

All day the derelict walls and ceiling of the sound stage had reverberated with the endless din of traffic accelerating across the mid-town flyover which arched fifty feet above the studio’s roof, a frenzied hypermanic babel of jostling horns, shrilling tyres, plunging brakes and engines that hammered down the empty corridors and stairways to the sound stage on the second floor, making the leaden air feel leaden and angry”.

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– J.G. Ballard, ‘The Sound Sweep’, 1960
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Architectural Music. The music is … made of layers of echoes and reverberations. The form of chant now known as Early Music was allowed by large-scale architecture – through harmonies which occur when a human voice responds to its own delayed reflections from the walls of churches and cathedrals … Through new reverberation technology, we can now sing into digital architecture of infinite dimensions. Layers of music and image can interconnect seamlessly and in the same ways for the first time, since they have recently become part of the same digital continuum.

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– John Foxx, ‘About Cathedral Oceans’, 2005
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I read that you pick up ideas for music by “listening to ambiences”. Do you respond to the “ambient” nature of Ballard’s work, to the sonic/architectural elements in his writing? It seems to me that Ballard’s work records the ambient hum of the technological landscape, which is then reflected in inner space.

Yes. There’s a lot in how we respond to cities — and how we use them to build ourselves — that we are just beginning to get to. I like the idea of architecture and the city as an extension of the human body. This springs also from McLuhan, but Ballard elaborated the idea and explored it in literature. I also like his ruminations on time and on memory. These are both subjects that preoccupy me more and more.

I feel that cities and organisations of all kinds are built on this same unconscious matrix. We keep elaborating outwards on our own internal structures — libraries are an extension of memory — rooms can represent compartmented thoughts and feelings, even fears and moods. Television is an extension of the eye, radio of the ear, etc.

John Foxx’s ‘Motorway Demolition/Public Memory Project’
(From the Cathedral Oceans website)

I also feel that streets and avenues are neural pathways we re-use to reprogram ourselves with layers of memory and association. I think all this is amoebic in origin and we’ve replicated it outward since then, as an evolutionary survival and colonisation mechanism. We’re all still hard at it, building the old coral reef. Ballard has used many of these kinds of thought experiments beautifully as components of his writing, manifesting them in landscape and detail.

An intimate knowledge of urban ambiences is a joy as deep as anything in Green Nature. I have a fascination with Grey Nature, or Technicolor Nature – ecologies are emerging which are as subtle as anything Green. In cities, you have to walk and experience and try not to allow your knowledge or present understanding prejudice your reception of the experience. Requires a trance like state and concentration combined with suspension of disbelief. Watch out for traffic.

He sank to his knees in the soft loam which covered the floor, and steadied himself against a barnacled lamp-post. In a relaxed, graceful moon-stride he loped slowly through the deep sludge … On his right were the dim flanks of the buildings lining the sidewalks, the silt piled in soft dunes up to their first-floor windows … Most of the windows were choked with debris, fragments of furniture and metal cabinets, sections of floorboards, matted together by the fucus and cephalopods”.

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– J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World, 1962
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Down Oxford Street the buildings were festooned with ivy and Virginia creeper. Trees grew from the windows of Selfridges, the pavements and Tarmac were split by plane trees spreading across Marble Arch from Hyde Park, purple loostrife waved in the breeze scattering its white, floating seeds, glowing in the late afternoon light.
…
Above him the sky was bright blue now, and the light was going golden across the top edges of the crumbling buildings. At the bottom of Oxford Street stood the tall Centrepoint tower, its remaining upper windows glinting, while most of the base was covered in vines. (mile-a-minute vine especially had grown out from many of the gardens, and living up to its name, had swamped quite a number of roads and buildings in the city)”.

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– John Foxx, ‘The Quiet Man’, 1982
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The “car-crash” element in Metamatic is often used to identify Crash as Ballard’s major influence on your career. But is JGB’s The Drowned World another kind of “ur-text” for you? Were your visions of a verdant London (and, by extension, Cathedral Oceans) inspired or at least informed by Ballard’s imagining of a devolved Earth, with its urban areas overgrown by jungle and swamps?

image from Cathedral Oceans

This began long before I came across The Drowned World. I was relieved when I read it because, at first, I feared it might have taken the territory I was developing. But I do think it had an effect of defining more closely what I was doing with Cathedral Oceans, if in a negative way.

The visions of an overgrown London also began earlier and there is some correspondence there. I’d seen a painting of an aerial view of woodland, which on closer scrutiny turned out to be a view of a ruined overgrown London from the top of Centrepoint. I also remembered a Daumier engraving of a view of a deserted London being sketched by a future tourist.

Such images are part of a long tradition of contemplation of ruins, being useful devices for meditations on the works of humankind. Shelley’s poem ‘Ozymandias’; the end scene of the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes; Quatermass and The Pit; and Celebrity Surgery being other useful ones that immediately spring to mind.

Your myspace bio says that when you gave up music and worked as a visual artist, you illustrated a Ballard book cover. What book was that and can you tell me a little about the process by which you arrived at a suitable aesthetic?

Sadly, I never made an image for a Ballard cover. I worked on new books by lots of authors I enjoyed — Anthony Burgess, Jeanette Winterson, Shakespeare, Doris Lessing among many others. I would have been more than pleased to do something for Ballard, along with Burroughs, Ishiguro, Auster, Byatt, Doctorow, Pulman, Calvino… Ballard’s would certainly have been derived from video or Super 8mm — found, damaged footage. Books may move in future, so a flickering film loop is perfect.

The images of surrealism are the iconography of inner space. Popularly regarded as a lurid manifestation of fantastic art concerned with states of dream and hallucination, surrealism is the first movement, in the words of Odilon Redon, to place ‘the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible’. This calculated submission to the impulses and fantasies of our inner lives to the rigours of time and space … produces a heightened or alternate reality beyond that familiar to our sight or senses … To move through these landscapes is a journey of return to one’s innermost being”.

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– J.G. Ballard, ‘The Coming of the Unconscious’, 1966
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Your work seems to have the logic of dreams, of Surrealist art, where externally illogical worlds function perfectly well according to their own internal logic – Redilon’s “logic of the visible at the service of the invisible”.

I’ve always felt dreams are important and a number of coincidences — and waking experiences involving dreams — and memories of dreams as a component — continue to bear this out. There’s a neat intersection here with cinema. I think cinema can be a sort of public dreaming — the same time shifts, flashbacks, and so on. It seems that the language of cinema is being drawn almost entirely from dreams and we are witnessing an externalisation, an extension of this process, through technology. Of course, cinema is a compound — made of ingredients from theatre and literature as well, and those bear separate attention.

Songs are an interesting compound of music and words as chant — a hypnotic process, where the operator attempts to slip a piece of dream cinema under the door while the recipient is distracted. An attempt to persuade the listener to suspend disbelief long enough to watch the movie. But it’s an internal movie. One composed of the listener’s own experience. All you do is allow a space big enough for the listener to walk inside and construct their own movie, while believing that it is all someone else’s work.

This strange and poetic film … is a fusion of science fiction, psychological fable and photomontage, and creates … a series of potent images of the inner landscapes of time … this succession of disconnected images is a perfect means of projecting the quantified memories and movements through time that are the film’s subject matter”.

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– J.G. Ballard, ‘La Jetee’, 1966
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Your lyrics freeze moments in time — while also suggesting a kind of neurological time travel. Maybe in the same way that memories work. Or photographs. We know that Last Year in Marienbad is one of your favourite films, but is Chris Marker’s La Jetee another influence?

Yes — I really enjoy La Jetee. One of the first flashback movies. After this it gradually became part of the language but its taken around forty years to get fully assimilated — an incredible and singular act of originality on Chris Marker’s part, since film is such a fast moving medium. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the latest version. It’s taken that long for everyone else to catch up.

You can only find this place by drifting. It is impossible to walk directly here. You must first surrender yourself to the tides of the city. Takes years to do it. Slowly the tides will take you here”.

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– John Foxx, ‘The Grey Suit’, 1997
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Do you see your philosophy and ideas as embodying a “psychogeographical” aspect, echoing Guy Debord? I’m especially thinking of your notions of “drift music” and “drifting through the city”.

Yes — I was Debording before I came across his ideas. Everyone does it to some extent. It’s just that their attention is on other things, allowing the really important aspects to slip by. What’s in this slipstream deeply interests me.

… Petit remains the most Ballardian of British film essayists. There’s an element of shared background – colonial childhood, public school, suburbs – but it goes deeper than that. The fascination with a frozen aesthetic of motorways, business parks, airport hotels: franchised Surrealism. A present tense world of swift, spare sentences; a controlled surface disguising a sense of loss, a damaged past that can only be annealed through the rearrangement of images.

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– Iain Sinclair, Crash, 1999
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John Foxx today

It seems a similar approach to the London Orbital book and film by Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit. What do you think of their project — which, of course, is refracted through Ballard — to reclaim London as a narrative space for drifting?

It’s about time – London was neglected as a mythland before Ballard. I used to wonder why, when it was so gloriously filthy and sprawling and magical and repetitious and various and shifting. Richer than Los Angeles or New York, bleaker than Beijing. More concealed than a convent. Driftland in Excelsis – or at least in Albion.

First Ballard, then Ackroyd came along from a completely different angle — now Sinclair is on the case. It’s good to see this happening. Chris Petit’s film was a brave early attempt to weave all these elements together and stands as a sort of historico-fictal documentary fragment. It blueprints a lot of British film possibilities that haven’t been taken up yet.

I was excited by this at the time, because it looked like the beginnings of a sort of New British Cinema Verite which has been hinted at but hasn’t quite happened. Kes is another example, in a different genre. An interesting evolution through three directors. He began life as Antoine Doinel in Truffaut’s 400 Blows and ended up filleted as Billy Elliot in a ballet frock. How we kill our finest.

We always need these accounts so we know who we are and where we live, as directly opposed to the generic readymades available through most media. These mostly have sinister subtexts anyway and so are best ignored. I remember not watching TV for two years and discovering I lived in a different country. Get out there and walk.

What do you think Ballard’s greatest contribution to late-20th-century/early-21st-century art has been?

Making new images of where we currently live. Positing terrifying new aesthetics, then evolving it all to a fully realised state.

Each afternoon in the deserted cinema Tallis was increasingly distressed by the images of colliding motor cars. Celebrations of his wife’s death, the slow-motion newsreels recapitulated all his memories of childhood, the realization of dreams which even during the safe immobility of sleep would develop into nightmares of anxiety.

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– J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, 1970
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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”.

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– John Foxx, ‘The Quiet Man’, 1982
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The Atrocity Exhibition reads like an instruction manual in how to disrupt mass media and recontextualise technology — a manual you would appear to have digested, judging from the above quote. Now, what strikes me most about your liner notes to Tiny Colour Movies is the sense they give of a continuous history of people working in the margins to break down this notion of filmmaking as a monolithic, mysterious, endless process — it really did put me in mind of the ‘T’ figure in Atrocity reconfiguring the media landscape ‘in a way that makes sense’ (as did your ‘Quiet Man’ story). Is there a line we can draw that connects The Atrocity Exhibition to “The Quiet Man” to Arnold Weizcs-Bryant to Tiny Colour Movies?

Sure. We can easily draw several dozen lines in and out. Some ideas are cumulative.

Will Arnold’s collection ever be made available for public screenings?

There are plans.

Clearly the time is right for a proper real-world revolution in filmmaking — we have the tools and the new technology — and, as Arnold’s collection demonstrates, the precedent.

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. A financial legal structure already exists to deal with ownership and payment from sampling in music, but this hasn’t been investigated yet because lawyers and laws don’t cross pollinate easily, but it will happen.

Everyone can now make films and this wasn’t possible until three years ago. But like music, film is a swarm activity. Solo filmmakers and commercial cinema will increasingly arrive at Tarnation-type scenarios, and I expect some obsessive genius to make solo high-grade commercial animations in the near future.

Entirely new forms will evolve. Documentary is in for a huge revival. We will now get to know how everything works — from the inside. There will be a great deal of government counter information and myth planting. Virals, Flashmovies, phones, Epaper, and Ebooks will generate new and hybrid purposes, some unguessable, some too sordid to contemplate, and others a sheer delight.

Old media will get cannibalised all along the way. There will soon be a swift download – the Napster equivalent for movies. Pornography will become a mainstream Hollywood genre. Everyone will film everyone else doing everything. Virals will be endemic and there will be much inverted subversive hijacking of these new forms by crafty commerce. There will always be a grubby subcurrent. We’ve already had snuff movies and happy slapping. God help us. Some of it will get worse as surveillance increases in efficiency.

What’s the next step, then?

New folk tales will evolve. For example, from people filming infidelity with other people’s wives then emailing it to them. Awareness of this will force modifications in behaviour and new etiquettes. Office parties will become more guarded from now on. Mobile phone cameras are the next device for urban dramas of all kinds.

I was fortunate to be able to view some of the Weizcs-Bryant collection recently … They were like flickering transmissions from another world. Here you see old sunlight from other times and other lives. Juxtapositions of underwater automobiles, the highways of Los Angeles, movies made from smoke and light, discarded surveillance footage from 1964 New York hotel rooms. After the viewing, I began to understand what Arnold meant when he spoke so passionately about the intrinsic beauty of the medium — how the scratches, the grain, the bleached out sections, all once regarded as imperfections, can now be appreciated as qualities — elements which only add to the mystery, the emotional and intellectual resonance, and the sensual appreciation, of film”.

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– John Foxx, liner notes, Tiny Colour Movies, 2006
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illustration by Dennis Leigh

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.

Scale will also be a vital component. New projection technologies are emerging. I want to see a 24-hour showing of a single close up from a selected Hollywood movie. Let’s bathe in it. Project it 500 feet high. Onto smoke. Onto clouds. Into oceans and lakes. Project vast slow-motion home movies so we can dissolve into a glorious buzz of glowing grain. Let’s have a sunset at each end of the sky — or all night. Project people as buildings and buildings as skies.

The possibilities of projection and digitisation are multiplying as we speak. LCD shirts showing SloMo pornography. Naked GlowClothing. Invisibility suits which display the background at any viewing angle, picked up by woven nanocams. Steadycam projectable faces — change your face every two hours.

It will drive us all crazy when SpamVision rogue projection advertisers get started.

So, will simplicity be the crucial thing (systemically, of course)?

Only if you have to operate a damn computer.

Or will the angle between two walls have a happy ending?

Now you’re kidding me.

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– Simon Sellars
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AFTERWORD: A thought occurred to me within hours of posting this interview: are the ‘found movies’ of Arnold Weizcs-Bryant fictitious? Something had been nagging at me about the aphorisms attributed to Arnold in the Tiny Colour Movies liner notes: they ‘sound’ exactly like John Foxx. Also, Arnold’s nowhere to be found on Google, which is no indication of anything, really, but all the same I can’t help wondering: do the filmmakers in Arnold’s collection — indeed, does Arnold himself — even exist? The liner notes are brilliantly evocative, full of urban explorations, such as the burnt footprints on sidewalks that ‘Frank Watts’ is supposed to have captured on video.

Apparently, this is a still from a ‘Frank Watts’ film.

Foxx writes: “On his habitual walks through London, Watts gradually came to notice something strange. He often came across odd, burnt patches on pathways and more secluded pavements. These were always small and often contained the charred remains of items of clothing or shoes. Watts conjectures that these places appeared as a result of a person at such a location being subject to some intense discharge of energy such as a lightning strike, or possibly an unknown method of transportation or vaporisation”.

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…

One of them’s even called ‘Alan Marker’: surely a nod and a wink to Chris Marker! But infused with a ‘suburban English’ first name… the section on ‘Alan Marker’ even reads like a precis of Chris Marker’s career, with particular reference to La Jetee (which, of course, we discussed in the interview). Foxx writes: “For the past four years Alan Marker has made a fascinating series of short films …. the images are carefully framed and sequenced moving film clips and loops as well as photographic stills … The result is a strange merging of the subject with the projections. A sort of modern mediumistic transference appears to take place. The faces seem to melt and reform into each other as the initial subject dissolves into a series of hybrid identities, nebulae of remembered and incorporated personalities. These films … are surely unique in the history of filmmaking”.

It all seems so obvious now. I’ll go so far as to say that I’ve been had…but I can’t say I wasn’t warned. Rereading the interview, I can now see that John was scattering clues throughout, dropping hints which I blatantly failed to tune into: the Marker exchange; the Ballard book cover that never was, with its ‘found, damaged’ Super-8 aesthetic; his admiration of ‘the beauty of scratches and bleached out film ends’, identical to the elements that have so engaged ‘Arnold’ (and which I quoted); his belief in cinema as ‘public dreaming’; his cryptic answer to my Atrocity/TCM comparison… I feel like I’ve been the unsuspecting guinea pig in a very clever thought experiment conducted by Dr Foxx.

These people do not exist.

When I asked ‘John’ if ‘Arnold’ would make his collection available to the public, he said ‘there are plans’. Maybe I’ll be proved wrong and a real person named Arnold Weizcs-Bryant, with his precious cargo of ‘found films’, will one day emerge from the shadows. But maybe more likely, it will be John himself who will step into the spotlight, with a collection of moving pictures that represent the first tangible fruits of his own oft-stated ambition to make ‘samplefilms’…

Of course, it doesn’t matter either way: fictitious or not, the results will be incredible. And inspiring. And Ballardian to the max.

– Simon

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..:: LINKS
+ John Foxx: Seductive Whirlpools, Part 2 More in the Key of John
+ Metamatic: Official John Foxx Site
+ Official Cathedral Oceans Site
+ Rockwrok UltraFoxx tribute site
+ ‘old sunlight from other times and other lives’: John Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies patented ‘k-punk’ analysis
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I think I’m the only person I know who doesn’t own a record player or a single record. I’ve never understood why, because my maternal grandparents were lifelong teachers of music, and my father as a choirboy once sang solo in Manchester Cathedral. But that gene seems to have skipped me.”
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- JG Ballard, Paris Review (1984)
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In 2005 V. Vale and RE/Search Publications launched the JG Ballard: Conversations book with a party featuring ‘Ballardian music’ from DJ Mike Ryan. Mike (who’s also the co-editor of RE/Search’s JG Ballard: Quotes volume) was channelling post punk and industrial music, dropping tunes by the likes of Brian Eno and David Byrne, Throbbing Gristle, Devo, Wire, Gang of Four and Cabaret Voltaire (see the appendix for the full playlist).

It was a timely selection, covering some of the musical and conceptual territory Simon Reynolds outlines in his recent book Rip It Up and Start Again. According to Reynolds, Ballard fused ‘amoral and clinically described avant-porn with Marshall McLuhan-like insights into the mass media…[probing] with forensic precision the grotesque (de)formations of desire stimulated by media overload and celebrity worship… Tapping into this Ballardian vision…Cabaret Voltaire pioneered what would eventually become an industrial music hallmark, the use of vocal snippets stolen from movies and TV’.

I’ve a tin ear, I’m afraid… If my girlfriend’s playing Mozart or Serge Gainsbourg’s lovely songs, I enjoy them tremendously. But on my own I’ve never felt the need — I don’t know why. It’s just some gene that skipped me.”
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– JG Ballard, New Musical Express (1996)
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But what could we have expected if RE/Search had asked Ballard himself to DJ? JGB’s Desert Island Disc selection for BBC Radio in 1992 provides some clues — he lists ‘The Teddy Bear’s Picnic’ as a fave rave, along with hit picks by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, Noel Coward and Marlene Dietrich (see the appendix). It’s safe to say that the vibe would have been completely different if DJ Jim was behind the decks. So, how exactly did we arrive at Cabaret Voltaire from the Andrews Sisters?

There’s no music in my work. The most beautiful music in the world is the sound of machine guns.”
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– JG Ballard, The Face (1987)
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Ballard may claim there’s no music in his work, but there certainly is an attitude, a postpunk, posthuman sensibility – a cool irony providing the backdrop for an ambiguous, detached protagonist, a cipher who may or may not be seduced by the unleashing of technology’s dark side.

Really, it’s technology – the media landscape; the urban sprawl; the self-regulating, self-sufficient cityscape – that’s the main character in much of Ballard’s work, so it’s not that hard to see the appeal of his world view to a bunch of callow, early 80s non-musicians living in the shadow of the urban wasteland with just their synthesizers and reel-to-reel tape decks for company.

I spoke to Mike Ryan about all this and more.
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– Simon Sellars
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Mike, your RE/Search set was publicised as ‘Ballardian music’. Do you want to have a go at defining that?

I’m going to dodge that question, because that was Vale’s label. It was a good idea. I think people saw ‘Ballardian music’ and they thought, ‘What the hell does that mean?’, regardless of whether or not they knew who Ballard is. Of course, I then got stuck with people coming up to me asking that very question, but it was a good way to pique people’s interest.

The idea of ‘Ballardian music’ is ironic or maybe an oxymoron. Ballard does not listen to music. My favourite anecdote about Ballard and music is that he doesn’t understand why anyone would listen to music when they are trying to have a conversation at the same time. He said that if he’s visiting someone and they put something on the stereo, he’ll just sit there and won’t talk until the song is over. I don’t think he’s trying to be funny, but I think that’s hilarious! It’s such an obvious, logical thing to do. If you’re going to listen to music, you should just listen to it and pay attention to it.

I don’t listen to music. It’s a blind spot.”
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– JG Ballard, Search & Destroy (1978)
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I like that Futurist statement of his, that the most beautiful music in the world is the sound of machine guns. But where does that leave us with defining Ballardian music? You can use obvious referential songs like Joy Division’s ‘Atrocity Exhibition’, but is the music itself — that chattery guitar noise — Ballardian? You can use recordings of factories, highways, the Columbine massacre, corporate campuses — but then is that music?

Good point. Given that dilemma, how did your selection evolve?

I was just pulling songs that I thought were somehow loosely connected with Ballard, either referentially or thematically. I think some people thought that Ballardian music would be music directly influenced by Ballard. But I don’t have the musical knowledge or the library to encompass that. Ballard said of the many musicians who have been influenced by his work, ‘It’s a pity: they all seem to be dead’. And I don’t think I ended up covering that group. The only person I thought of who fit that description was Ian Curtis. My criterion was: ‘What music would you play at a Ballard launch party?’ Not ‘Is the music I’m choosing ‘Ballardian’? I think there’s a difference. It’s a party! Who wants to listen to half an hour of Metal Machine Music or machine-gun fire?

I wouldn’t mind. I love Metal Machine Music, quite possibly Lou Reed’s finest hour. How was the set received by your audience?

I had to shift over to songs with a lot more low-end so you could at least tell some music was playing. The acoustics were horrible. It was a great space for hanging art. It used to be this indoor shopping market near downtown San Francisco that our very progressive former City Supervisor, Matt Gonzalez, helped turn into an art space. Nice, huge space; poor acoustics. When I was playing ‘Ha Ha Ha’ by Flipper, this one guy was singing along to it with his ear right up against the speaker. I guess some songs were recognisable. When Graeme Revell came in, ‘Hamburger Lady’ by Throbbing Gristle was playing and he said, ‘I recognise this!’ He also said that Ballard’s influence on his music was inconclusive. Ballard’s influence on Revell himself, of course, is indisputable.

Not knowing anything about [punk] music, I saw it as a purely political movement – the powerful political and social resentment of an under-caste who reacted to the values of bourgeois society with pure destructiveness and hate. Bourgeois society offered them the mortgage, they offered back psychosis.”
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– JG Ballard, New Musical Express (1985)
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How do you explain the influence Ballard’s had on a range of musicians?

It has to do with making music that is influenced by the same things Ballard is influenced by: media, architecture, painting, highways, business parks, fashion, obsessiveness, psychopathology, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, suburbs, etc. That is, being influenced by those things and being a maverick about it. That’s my favourite Ballardian concept: the maverick. The maverick is in all of his stories, and he is the maverick of literature as Burroughs was. I always think of Devo embodying all of these things.

I remember reading a Rolling Stone article back in the early 90′s. Kim Thayil, the Soundgarden guitarist, said the best music is influenced by books…or was it movies? I don’t remember which. But it put the idea in my head that it would make sense that literature, movies and music make up a really good holy trinity where the best artists in each category are mostly influenced by the other two. Wouldn’t you come up with something much more interesting from a band that has never heard a note other than film soundtracks and is immersed only in books and movies, and vice vice versa versa (or however you would put that)? I feel like that’s the kind of band Devo is.

Ballard’s ideas are attractive and subversive and original. He’s a great source to tap into when you’re sick of singing love songs, I guess.

Punk was so interesting. I still haven’t recovered from it.”
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JG Ballard, New Musical Express (1985)
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I’ve never quite made up my mind about Devo. I always think of the Lester Bangs quote: ‘Sounds like tinkertoy music to me’. But what do you think of the three soundtracks to Ballard feature films: Howard Shore’s Crash, John Williams’ Empire of the Sun, and Jim ‘Foetus’ Thirlwell’s Atrocity Exhibition? (I’ve not seen nor heard the film of Low-Flying Aircraft, very unfortunately). Do you feel they succeeded or failed at conveying their respective Ballardian moods?

The only soundtrack of the three I’ve heard is Crash. I love it. My girlfriend hates it because she says it’s so cold and unemotional. EXACTLY! That seems appropriate considering Ballard’s comments about looking at things like car crashes with the eye of a test engineer or any other scientist, where you may get obsessed — but not emotionally involved — with your subject. Then again, in The Kindness of Women, Ballard writes about how the first woman he loved was the cadaver he had to dissect in medical school. But that’s another great thing about Ballard: you can’t pin him down, which is why you can’t say what Ballardian music is.

One reason I don’t like this whole ‘Ballardian music’ thing is that it seems to imply that someone is not Ballardian unless they’re singing about a car crash. Instead I think it’s about being a maverick and commenting on contemporary topics and having a forward vision, which I think Thirlwell possesses or is possessed by. And if that’s my criteria I guess I’d add Alan Vega of Suicide as well. But whatever anyone thinks about what is or isn’t Ballardian music, it seems to really get people thinking and everyone seems to have an opinion on it. At the very least I think it’s an entry point into thinking about Ballard’s writing.

In the current edition of The Wire, Chris Bohn, along with referencing some of the artists you do, asks why Ballard ‘no longer excites the imagination of musical subcultures the way he used to’. He wonders if it might be to do with Ballard’s mainstream profile after the success of the film versions of Empire of the Sun and Crash. Any thoughts on that?

I basically agree. I think Ballard’s direct influence on music has waned, probably due to less people actually reading books. I have a hard time believing he attained some damning ‘mainstream’ exposure, though. When I mention Ballard to regular people they have no idea who I’m talking about. I mention the film version of Crash, which they will probably now mistake for that piece of crap that came out last year, and there is this foggy recognition, and then a sort of uneasiness that expresses a latent disapproval (‘Oh…THAT film.’). I mention Empire of the Sun and then I have to mention Steven Spielberg, and there’s the same sense of dredging up a hazy memory. I have a really hard time believing the new wave of underground artists keeps Ballard at a distance because they think he is too mainstream. I think most of them still don’t know who he is, and if they do they think his stories are just about cutting yourself and having an orgasm.

The modern airport defuses…tensions, and offers its passengers the pleasures and social reassurance of the boarding lounge … The concourses are the ramblas and agoras of the future city, time-freeze zones where all the clocks of the world are displayed, an atlas of arrivals and destinations forever updating itself, where briefly we become true world citizens.”
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– JG Ballard, The Observer (1987)
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How successful do you think Brian Eno’s Music for Airports was in providing a soundtrack to Ballard’s ‘future cities’? Eno wanted – in part — to reassure travellers who might be contemplating their death in a possible air crash, although Ballard seems to see the modern airport as a self-sufficient organism that already possesses this inbuilt function.

If no airport is using his music, then I guess it was not successful. I own that CD, but I’ve never sat through the whole thing. I just get bored with it. If I want to contemplate death, I want complete silence, which of course we never can achieve. John Cage once recounted his experience in an anechoic soundproof chamber. When he was in there he asked the sound engineer what all that whooshing and thumping was that he could hear. Turned out that it was the blood rushing through his veins and his heart beating.

In regards to ‘future cities’, judging by recent articles by Nick Tosches and Mike Davis, it sounds like Dubai is the city of the future. Eno should do ‘Music for Dubai’ and see if it catches on. Maybe he could be the first Dubai superstar in the post-Las-Vegas world.

Of course, pressure groups have been very successful in getting piped music banned from airports, so the question’s rather academic.

I’d rather have no music at all at airports. There is so much there to listen to already. I think music would simply be an obstruction to those sounds; it would add to the chaotic environment. Although, maybe circus music or Nino Rota soundtracks for Fellini films would capture the absurdity that we have to experience going through security checkpoints.

On the other hand, if I wanted to run an experiment or practice some sort of acoustic terrorism, I would play Albert Ayler at deafening or even moderate levels. Imagine the psychological climate that could create. People would run for cover. Or maybe it would just empty the airport. But there is this sense that once you are in, you don’t leave until you reach your destination.

Amplified 100,000 times animal cell division sounds like a lot of girders and steel sheets being ripped apart…a car smash in slow motion. On the other hand, plant cell division is an electronic poem, all soft chords and bubbling tones.”
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– JG Ballard, ‘Track 12′ (1967)
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Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

In a recent discussion about Ballardian music, Paul Williams said that field recordings are more complementary to Ballard’s work than people singing about fucking an exhaust pipe. One of Paul’s example is ‘The Crackling’, a work by John Duncan, composed of treated field recordings made at Stanford Linear Accelerator, like ‘being in a vast space filled with the hum of a serious particle accelerator permeated by the distant voices of research technicians.’ In sound art, there are plenty of other people mining similar territory, so my question to you is: what could be more Ballardian than the sonic exploration of built environments and their psychological and social effects? After all, Ballard’s writing ‘records’ the spaces ‘in between’: the hum of traffic, of sodium lamps in business parks, of the technological exoskeleton. And – at least in one important strand of his work – that’s often explicitly mirrored in inner space, reflected in the magnified, interior sound of blood and arteries pumping…

‘Ballardian sound’ does makes a lot more sense than ‘Ballardian music’ as far as being applicable to Ballard. On the other hand, even if an exploration of ‘Ballardian music’ means we’re on the wrong track, ‘Ballardian sound’ does seem to lack the sense of mystery that ‘Ballardian music’ has (even if it’s only mystery due to an incompatibility that defies any sort of rational definition). And besides who wants to dance to factory sounds! Although there is Einsturzende Neubauten or Savage Aural Hotbed.

I know – no one dances in Ballard.

As I gazed at these immense pagodas stranded on the floor of this fossil sea, I heard music coming from a sand-reef two hundred yards away. Swinging on my crutches across the sliding sand, I found a shallow basin among the dunes where sonic statues had run to seed beside a ruined studio.”
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– JG Ballard, Vermilion Sands (1971)
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..:: LINKS
>> Premeditated
>> RE/Search
>> Mike Ryan interview

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APPENDIX I: JG Ballard’s ‘Desert Island Discs’
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Rita Hayworth

::: ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ (Bratton/Kennedy) 1932
::: ‘Don’t Fence Me In’ (Cole Porter) performed by Bing Crosby & The Andrews Sisters 1944
::: ‘Put the Blame on Mame’ (Fisher/Roberts) performed by Rita Hayworth 1946
::: ‘Falling in Love Again’ (Hollander/Connelly) performed by Marlene Dietrich 1931
::: An extract from ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ (Mozart) 1786
::: ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ (Antonio Carlos Jobim) 1962
::: An extract from ‘The Barber of Seville’ (Rossini) 1816
::: ‘Let’s Do It’ (Cole Porter/Peter Matz) performed by Noel Coward 1955

Ballard scholar David Pringle notes that the Mozart and Rossini selections were both opera. David muses, ‘The influence of working in Covent Garden flower market, outside the opera house, perhaps?’ There’s no Puccini, says David, although ‘we know from elsewhere JGB has expressed a guilty liking for Puccini — romantic and over-the-top’.

David explains that ‘the rest of Ballard’s Desert Island choices were mid-century popular music, unexceptionable for someone born in 1930. His liking for Cole Porter and Noel Coward betrays a certain leaning towards clever lyrics – the primacy of the word, rather than melody, unsurprising in a writer. Rita Hayworth singing ‘Put the Blame on Mame’ and ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ both represent sizzling sex…’

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APPENDIX II: Mike Ryan’s Ballardian playlist
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Mike’s comments below are excerpted from his follow-up post on Premeditated…

::: ‘Are You Afraid To Die’ — The Louvin Brothers 1960
“The Louvin Brothers sing the title without fear or dread but with a sense of resignation, as can be found for example in the final pages of Super-Cannes“.

::: ‘The Voice Of America’ — Cabaret Voltaire 1981
“White supremacy isn’t a theme in Ballard’s work, but the underlying danger to society it represents is”.

::: ‘Evil & Good’ — Splinter Test 1997
“Ballard has said that institutions such as religion and government are slinking away into the abyss, and this touches on that”.

::: ‘The Jezebel Spirit’ — Brian Eno & David Byrne 1981
“The voice of the preacher in this song is reminiscent of the unstable characters that Ballard creates…”

::: ‘You And I’ — Silver Apples 1944
“The sound of an airplane taking off… Enough said.”

::: ‘The American Astronaut’ — Billy Nayer Show 2001
“The title and the delivery are in line with Ballard’s approach to space travel, akin to John Carpenter’s Dark Star.”

::: ‘Boredom’ — The Buzzcocks 1977
“…the problem that many of Ballard’s antagonists attempt to confront”.

::: ‘Everyday Routine’ — Splinter Test 1997
“Another collage of found footage…”

::: ‘Ha Ha Ha’ — Flipper 1981
“We go downtown to do our shopping / and we … work in sub-urb-ia …”

::: ‘Atrocity Exhibition’ — Joy Division 1980
“One of the few tracks in the list directly influenced by one of Ballard’s books”.

::: ‘Baby’s On Fire’ — Brian Eno 1973
“One of the reasons that Ballard wrote Crash is that he started to observe people viewing atrocities as mere spectacles…”

::: ‘Warm Leatherette’ — Grace Jones 1980
“The one-time Helmut Newton model…Newton is one of Ballard’s favorite photographers.”

::: ‘Why Don’t We Do It In The Road’ — Lydia Lunch 1991
“…sultry dirty voice, the sounds of cars, industrial slide guitar, sexual lyrics…an obvious allusion to Crash.”

::: ‘Jayne Is Dead’ — unknown newsflash
“Within The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash there is an obsession with fame and death. In this newsflash we hear the demise of ‘Hollywood’s smartest dumb-blond’, Jayne Mansfield…”

::: ‘Hamburger Lady’ — Throbbing Gristle 1978
“Further emphasis on the crash-mutilation obsession by what seems to be the description of a crash victim, drowned in a vibrato-filter and noise…”

::: ‘Contort Yourself’ — James Chance & The Contortions 1979
“In Crash characters are contorted by their cars and they contort themselves into crash positions…”

::: ‘The Spirit Of JFK’ — Devo 1996
“This sampled mix…invokes the vision of the Zapruder film, constantly referred to in Ballard’s writing”.

::: ‘Uranium Willy’ (Rewrite) — William S. Burroughs 1995
“The writer that Ballard holds in highest esteem”.

::: ‘The Battle of Algiers’ — Ennio Morricone 1966
“The terrorism and rebellion within the film that this is the main theme for…represents the anti-authoritarian and maverick mindset of both [Ballard and Burroughs]“.

::: ‘Yuppie Cadillac’ — Jello Biafra With The Melvins 2004

::: ‘She Watch Channel Zero?!’ — Public Enemy 1995

::: ‘Explosions’ — Devo 1982

::: ‘Reuters’ — Wire 1977

::: ’5.45′ — Gang Of Four 1979

::: ‘AK-47′ — Weird War 2004

::: ‘Caught At Midnight’ — Peter Thomas Sound Orchestra 1998

::: ‘Jungle Madness’ — Martin Denny 1958

::: ‘We Have Explosive’ — The Future Sound Of London 1997
“…this was more an homage to Ballard’s Millenium People, where terrorist actions take place in unexpected places like art museums and are carried out by the middle class…”.

::: ‘Shortwave Transmission On ‘Up To The Minuteman Nine’ — Pop Will Eat Itself 1989

::: ‘Neuron Factory’ — Cabaret Voltaire 1993

::: ‘Teenage Lust’ (Desdemaona Mix) — The Jesus & Mary Chain 1992
“Seemed like a good way to inject some sex into the set.”

::: ‘Mmmmm Skyscraper I Love You’ Underworld 1994
“The title alone, and its repetition within the track…is a nod to…High Rise“.

::: ‘The Model’ — Kraftwerk 1978
“…makes me think of Helmut Newton, one of Ballard’s favorite photographers and an admirer of the David Cronenberg film interpretation of Crash“.

::: ‘Future Sex’ — Alan Vega 1990
“This song epitomizes the Ballard equation: The Future = Sex x Technology.”

::: ‘Fall Fashion’ — The Prima Donnas 2001

::: ‘I’m Seein’ Robots’ — Kool Keith 1999

::: ‘Water’ — Christoph De Babalon 1998
“The Drowned World is the obvious reference”.

::: ‘Days Passed’ — Scorn 1994
“When you play a song called ‘Days Passed’ right after ‘Water’ the immediate reference, for me, was New Orleans — our real-life drowned world”.

“J.G. Ballard: Conversations (San Francisco, 2005) is the latest dispatch from the hell-raising subculture documentarians at RE/Search Publications. Between its covers, J.G. Ballard engages in exactly what the title promises with RE/Search’s taste-making head honcho V. Vale and a few other well-informed fans.”

I’m very interested in JGB’s influence on Hawkwind and Bob Calvert (another area we’ll soon be covering on Ballardian), so I found it interesting that the reviewer, Damien Weaver, mentions the following:

“Musically, Ballard’s heyday of influence was 25 years ago, when gloom cookie Ian Curtis borrowed a Ballard title (Atrocity Exhibition) to give an unrelated Joy Division song intellectual burnish, and Robert Calvert of the immortal Hawkwind read the Ballard thriller High-Rise, distilled it to its thematic essence, and righteously rocked it out”.