Outpost 13: The Atrocity Exhibition from Ballardian on Vimeo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The author of Lord Horror.

Interview by Simon Sellars.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image from PJ Proby promotional booklet, Savoy 1984.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fenella Fielding at Strongroom Studios. Photo courtesy Savoy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fenella Fielding on the Morecambe and Wise show, 1969.

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

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

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

SS: But her reading of Crash will be released?

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

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

Michael Butterworth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview by Simon Sellars.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DB: They only whispered it. We shouted it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Classic Northern Soul dancing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+ Savoy Books.
+ Savoy Records.

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

interview by Simon Sellars.

In the wake of J.G. Ballard’s passing, Berlin’s 032c magazine asked me to rework my 2007 Simon Reynolds interview. I put some new questions to Simon, and here is the result…

“‘Magisterial, precise, unsettling’: Simon Reynolds on JG Ballard”, originally published in 032c, no. 18, winter 2009/10, pp. 126-9.

Simon Reynolds is one of the most recognizable music critics around. He possesses a willingness to tackle pop music as an art form worthy of intellectual discourse rather than a fleeting moment of adolescent flash. Reynolds breaks new ground, melding unchecked enthusiasm with a robust theoretical foundation in a body of work that is exciting for its eclecticism alone: he’s just as compelling writing on hip hop, Britney, and rave, as he is on grunge, prog rock, and grime.

Reynolds’s work reached a peak with the publication of Rip It Up and Start Again, a timely excavation of post-punk: Cabaret Voltaire, PiL, Magazine, and so on. What’s more, J.G. Ballard was a thread throughout the book, as Reynolds charted the influence of JGB — and especially his experimental novel, The Atrocity Exhibition — on the era.

Simon Sellars: For you, what’s the relationship between J.G. Ballard and music?

Simon Reynolds: Obviously I always loved music, but it was things my parents had introduced me to — Beethoven, or Hollywood musicals, plus stray things I’d heard on the radio like the Beatles. And then when I was around fifteen, I was inducted into that whole rock apparatus of taking music -pop culture, youth culture, rock criticism — seriously. And what I was into on a fanatical level immediately before entering rock culture was science fiction, and particularly Ballard. The new fanaticism simply replaced the old one, and I stuck to music journalism!

SS: Do you still return to his work?

SR: It’s only in the last decade or so that I rediscovered science fiction, and particularly Ballard. I’ve also started reading more of his critical work, his interviews and journalism, and become more impressed by him — he was clearly the most advanced writer and thinker in his field.

SS: Which of his books have impacted you the most?

SR: In some ways the one that grabbed me most, and has yet to relinquish its hold, was the first one I read, The Drowned World. Penguin used to do these great science fiction paperback editions, and they had one series with really evocative paintings — glossy, garish, almost hyperrealist — on the covers. The Drowned World, The Drought, and The Wind From Nowhere were all in that series and looked particularly good. But in The Drowned World, the severity of Ballard’s imagination was what hooked me, and just the idea of the protagonist who — as in all Ballard’s cataclysm novels — is perversely drawn towards the heart of catastrophe, and finds his true self in the transformed landscape. That really grabbed me.

Also, the idea of the world you know being drastically transformed … I lived near London, in a commuter town 30 miles north of the capital, and went down to the city quite frequently; so imagining it submerged was exciting.

Two David Pelham-illustrated ’softcover classics’ (both Penguin, London, 1974).

SS: Has he influenced your work in any way, either as a critic of popular culture, or stylistically?

SR: Actually, the influences on my writing and thinking come from a totally different place, although there are certain affinities — a sense of the power of the irrational, these atavistic drives pulsing inside culture. I’ve long felt that pop music is driven by ambivalent, sometimes outright malevolent energies. But I’ve probably derived that more from various French thinkers, and Nietzsche; or certain rock writers. Still, you can see the connection between music and the Ballardian worldview, which sees human culture as fundamentally perverse. And the self-reflexivity in science fiction is very similar to music criticism, because neither genre gets respect from the literary establishment, give or take a Kingsley Amis or an Anthony Burgess in science fiction. Both science fiction and rock writing have an inferiority and superiority complex. Science fiction writers love to think of what they’re doing as one really crucial, contemporary form of literature — a literature of ideas with elements of speculation and an estrangement effect.

Rock critics are just the same: they crave that validation from mainstream art criticism, but they also like being the renegade form. Ballard exemplifies this meta aspect of science fiction, although he goes beyond it as a great cultural critic.

SS: His work can also be read as philosophical inquiry, an approach that seems to sum up a particular late-capitalist mode of being. What makes the Ballardian worldview so prescient?

SR: He was dealing with similar things as Marshall McLuhan, and, later, as Jean Baudrillard. But he was doing it with far greater clarity, sharper perceptions, and more style and wit than either. All the obscenity of mass communication, simulation, and social implosion in Baudrillard’s books was being explored earlier, and more effectively, in Ballard’s fiction. He was dealing with the pornification of everything very early.

SS: You’ve remarked elsewhere that Ballard’s short stories have more appeal to you than his novels.

SR: After the disaster novels, the mid-1970s urban breakdown ones like Concrete Island and High-Rise, I think that, as a critic, Ballard’s shorts are his supreme achievement — so magisterial, so distilled and precise, atmospheric and unsettling. I recently re-read “The Ultimate City,” which is about a young man who lives in a near future that’s very green-conscious and placid and dull. So he goes to the deserted city and starts up urban life again — gets generators going, and then misfits start to flock in from the eco-communes and garden towns. But of course the whole thing goes haywire.

It was only a few years ago that I finally read Crash all the way through. I was writing Rip It Up and Start Again, and I wanted to understand why it had such a big influence on post-punk. In away, I prefer the side of Ballard that relates to someone like John Wyndham over the side that relates to William S. Burroughs. I like that dour, flat Britishness confronted by something alien or catastrophic.

SS: I was surprised by your Ballard tribute in Salon, in which you wrote: “While his novels of the late 1980s and thereafter, such as Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, have admirers, few would argue they’ve contributed a jot to his enduring cult.” For me, Super-Cannes seems to be one of his very best, a hyper-aware distillation of the “pornification” you were talking about earlier, a sense of entrapment within a system that only recognizes exchange values as authentic modes of being.

SR: It’s not about the relative merits of his books, but about what his cult is based on. It’s a bit like with rock stars. Morrissey put out a number of solo albums, ranging from dire to mediocre to excellent. But the basis of his cult will always be the Smiths. The same goes for the Rolling Stones — their last album, A Bigger Bang, was actually a really fine album, but “Stones-iness” was defined by the 1960s albums, plus Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street. It’s hard to imagine many people starting their Stones fandom with A Bigger Bang, just as it’s hard to imagine many people becoming obsessed with Morrissey on account of You are the Quarry. I think the same thing applies to Ballard’s work. Not to say you’re wrong about Super-Cannes.

SS: You’ve mentioned Ballard’s influence on post-punk. Growing up on this music, Ballard was always a vague referent, glimpsed through obscure Cabaret Voltaire or Ultravox interviews. So I appreciated the way Rip It Up and Start Again unpacked the connection. But what about today’s crop? Is there a continuum from then to now? For example, the dubstep musicians Kode9 and Burial — every second review of their albums seems to invoke the dreaded word “Ballardian,” possibly becoming as much a cliché as it was during the post-punk period.

SR: That relates more to the Spaceape’s contribution to the Kode9 album Memories of the Future. His lyrics and delivery are a bit like Linton Kwesi Johnson reading excerpts from The Atrocity Exhibition. With Burial, the connection is that his album is supposed to be a concept record about South London becoming flooded when the Thames Barrier breaks in the global-warmed near future. I think Katrina and New Orleans is more likely to be the inspiration, but there’s an obvious parallel there with The Drowned World.

There is also an urban psychogeography thing going on in Burial’s music that recalls Ballard in Crash. The album draws a lot from South London, this inter-zone of semi-suburbia between Brixton, where the tube line stops, and Croydon, which is on the city’s periphery. So it’s a hinterland similar to the outer London areas near Heathrow where Ballard situated Crash. A real anomie zone, but possessed with a certain desolate beauty. Burial has also talked of putting his tunes through the “Car Test,” driving around South London playing music from his car to see if it has the atmosphere he wants, the “distance” he’s looking for.

People have also compared Burial to Joy Division in terms of bleak urbanism. And Martin Hannett, their producer, used to do a similar thing: drive around Manchester’s most brutally industrialized zones in his car, stoned, listening to Joy Division, PiL, or Pere Ubu.

SS: Does “Ballardian” mean anything substantial to you, or do you think Ballard’s work is too complex to be contained in this way?

SR: It has become something of a cliché, and that’s perhaps the inevitable result of having an impact and becoming famous — that your ideas become simplified, reduced to a caption. So Ballardian equals “picturesque, postindustrial decay,” “kinky technophilia,” and “perverted obsessions with celebrities.”

When the Diana and Dodi crash happened, people in TV newsrooms were apparently like, “Let’s get Ballard on the phone.”

SS: You’ve casually mentioned that Ballard and Brian Eno are “the two greatest British thinkers of the second half of the 20th century.”

SR: That’s slightly over the top, isn’t it? I wonder if it really stands up. Then again, as thinkers specifically on culture, in the British context, I can’t honestly think of too many rivals, especially for the generation who came out of the 1960s and developed during the 1970s.

One of the fantasy projects that I’ve toyed with for a while is a book on Ballard and Eno. They feel like the patron saints of post-punk to an extent. But it’s difficult, because they’ve said it all better than anyone else. I suppose you could historicize or contextualize them – Ballard with the ICA milieu and Eno with the UK art schools. In some ways the affinity seems as much temperamental as anything conceptual. They have this wonderful Englishness — you imagine they would get on like a house on fire, trading ideas over whisky in a Shepperton living room. One thing they both do is take ideas from science and set them loose in culture, find applications.

Ballard is like a British McLuhan, except better because he’s a far better writer and thinker — more original, more convincing. In some ways, Eno is almost like a British Barthes.

SS: While explaining his collage method in The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard said he wanted to produce “crossovers and linkages between unexpected and previously totally unrelated things, events, elements of the narration, ideas that begin to generate new matter.” Could you draw parallels to Eno’s formulation of “generative” music?

SR: I’m not sure about that. It seems more related to Burroughs, and perhaps also to Ballard’s debt to surrealism.

Eno’s generative music is much more cybernetics-meets-Zen, emptying out the authorial ego, setting up a process and then withdrawing. I don’t think Ballard has that Eastern mystical aspect. With Ballard, there’s always more of a violence bubbling up from below, even though the writing is cold and controlled. If Eno is a British Barthes, a languid sensualist, Ballard would be a British Bataille. I can also imagine Ballard enjoying Camille Paglia’s writing, which I can’t imagine Eno doing — it would be too passionate for him.

SS: Both Ballard and Eno inverted, retooled, and then abandoned the genre they started out in. As Richard Sutherland writes, “To call Ballard’s work science fiction is a bit like describing Brian Eno’s music as rock ‘n’ roll.”

SR: Yes and no. Eno is like the culmination or extension of certain ideas within rock to the point where they verge on un-rock. But when he started he owed a lot to Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, a certain English kind of psychedelia. And he could do the “idiot energy” thing with “Third Uncle.” As for Ballard, to divorce him from his genre is unnecessary. The methodology in his disaster stories and in the bulk of his short stories is totally science fiction.

SS: As someone who has successfully integrated critical theory into writing about music, what do you think of the growing incursion of theory into music criticism?

SR: I’d make a distinction here between theorizing about music and applying critical theory to music. The former happens a lot, obviously — and you could argue that any critical position is at some level theoretical. What I don’t see a lot of is people using ideas from critical theory or philosophy to explicate pop music. Even I don’t do nearly as much as I used to. But I certainly still generate theorems and analytical ideas that go beyond the thumbs up/thumbs down consumer guidance aspect.

SS: To return to Ballard, is it possible to imagine, after his death, what his enduring legacy might be?

SR: That’s too big a question really. But I guess his legacy is due to his invention of a completely original way of perceiving reality, which merges reality with the unreality of the entertainment-scape. He did this to the point where it seems almost obvious, even cliché, as we discussed earlier. You see that a lot in music. I’ve argued that coming up with a cliché is the highest achievement in dance music, a sound or a beat or a riff pattern that everyone wants to copy. Becoming a cliché is, in lots of ways, a triumphant success for any artist.

www.ballardian.com
www.blissout.blogspot.com

..:: Previously on Ballardian:

+ Crash! Full-tilt Autogeddon
+ Negative Acoustic Space: Ballardian Sound Art
+ A Ballardian Burial
+ Tribute to J.G. Ballard & Brian Eno
+ Escaping the Gaze: A Review of John Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies
+ A Whirlpool with Seductive Furniture: the John Foxx Interview
+ ‘Magisterial, Precise, Unsettling’: Simon Reynolds on the Ballard Connection
+ Cousin Silas: Another Flask of Ballard
+ ‘No One Dances in Ballard’: An Interview with Mike Ryan
+ A Premeditated Ballard Playlist
+ Crash: A Tribute to James Graham Ballard
+ Critical Mass: Sound, Story and Music in David Cronenberg’s Crash

The first question from journalist Martin Conrads about J.G. Ballard’s short story The Sound-Sweep put [Bill] Drummond immediately on the defensive (”I don’ know it”), where he stayed for the next half an hour deftly deflecting all questions with charm if not aplomb.

This is a bizarre match up: Mike Skinner of the Streets in conversation with the philosopher John Gray:

It seemed a good idea to put the pop star and the professor together, and so they met for a wide-ranging conversation — covering the art of storytelling and the imminent collapse of Western capitalism — in a north London pub hours before Skinner’s performance at the BBC Electric Proms.
…
MS: Isn’t it dangerous to say evil is natural?

JG: It’s the opposite. I’m a big fan of JG Ballard…

MS: I’m halfway through High-rise

JG: The very book I was going to mention! Ballard says that people from Catholic countries are less shocked by his books than people from Protestant countries, because they still believe in original sin – there are murderers and psychopaths inside us. It doesn’t mean you accept that state of affairs, it means you have rules and conventions which stand in the way. That’s what used to be called civilisation – though, of course, there’s nowhere that’s more than half-civilised. In general, I’m interested in looking at what’s happening now and trying to deal with it. For instance, climate change is not fully solvable…

MS: Because it’s natural or… because we’re fucked?

JG: [Laughs] Well, my best understanding is that the planet is not like a clock that we can wind back. Once the carbon is in the system, there are inexorable results. Also, there’s global dimming – the darkening of the skies by pollution, which also makes the world cooler than it would otherwise be. Getting rid of pollution too quickly could accelerate global warming.

Most greens are horrified by the thought that we can’t stop climate change, but that’s childish. Am I telling people to give up? No. In Holland, for instance, they’re giving back land to the sea and building more on stilts because they expect sea levels to rise… and I find that uplifting, even though it’s a very sober approach.

I don’t know about Skinner, but Gray’s had a lot of interesting things to say about Ballard in the past, often when he’s applying this particular world view that he’s explaining here to Skinner: that is, an acceptance of a certain level of chaos is necessary in order to survive. It’s therefore not hard to see why Gray admires Ballard. In the New Statesman in 1999, for example, he summed up JGB’s career somewhat more perceptively than most recent commentators: ‘Ballard’s achievement is not to have staked out any kind of political position. Rather it is to have communicated a vision of what individual fulfilment might mean in a time of nihilism’.

In 2000, on BBC Radio Four, he interviewed Ballard to promote Super-Cannes and again managed to diagnose the dark heart powering JGB’s work:

Super-Cannes seems to be … about the way that this individual need to … descend into the parts of ourselves that are not fully sane, that even contain a certain element of real madness, that this kind of … individual self-exploration can be co-opted by business, by government, so that types of behaviour and fantasy that in the past were forbidden become almost light entertainment, part of a new industry where we’re fed with brilliant, violent, strange, surreal imagery, but with the goal not of emancipating us, but of keeping us at the job, keeping us working… the liberation that comes with wealth, affluence, freedom of choice can be used as a tool of social control.

More recently, in his book, Black Mass, while not specifically referencing Ballard, Gray formulated a position that could equally apply to the peculiar character of Ballard’s dystopias, in which the characters create meaning from chaos, forging an alliance with the forces of darkness. Black Mass notes how utopian values specifically fuelled by religion and government have created human misery on a massive scale, up to and including the War on Terror. For Gray, what is needed instead is a realist perspective that rejects utopianism and instead accepts the fact that politics is meaningless and that conflict is inherent in human relationships:

A private realm protected from intrusion is part of civilized life, but some incursion into privacy may be unavoidable if other freedoms are to be secure. It is better to accept these conflicts and deal with them than deny them, as liberals do when they look to theories of human rights to resolve dilemmas of war and security.

Sound familiar?

Further to Mike Moorcock, Frendz and Hawkwind all turning up in Mike Bonsall’s brilliant excavation of Ballard’s neural motorway, and then the passing away of Jim Cawthorn, let’s return to John Coulthart.

John, who has designed a few Hawkwind record covers in his time, has unearthed a comic strip from the November 29th, 1971 edition of Frendz. It’s written by Moorcock and illustrated by Cawthorn, and features Hawkwind as sonic supermen.

See John’s post for more detail, and also the next page of the strip.

SONIC ATTACK
by Hawkwind
lyrics by Michael Moorcock
sung by Bob Calvert (with Lemmy)

In case of Sonic Attack on your district, follow these rules:
If you are making love it is imperative to bring all bodies to orgasm
simultaneously.
Do not waste time blocking your ears.
Do not waste time seeking a soundproof shelter.
Try to get as far away from the sonic source as possible,
but do not panic…

Use your wheels. It is what they are for.
Small babies may be placed inside the special cocoons,
which should be left, if possible, in a shelter.
Do not attempt to use your own limbs.
If no wheels are available, metal, not organic, limbs
should be employed whenever possible.

Remember, in the case of Sonic Attack, Survival means every man for himself.
Statistically more people survive if they think only of themselves.
Do not attempt to rescue friends, relatives, loved ones.
You have only a few seconds to escape.
Use those seconds sensibly or you will inevitably die.
Do not panic.
Think only of yourself…

These are the first signs of Sonic Attack:
You will notice small objects, such as ornaments, oscillating.
You will notice a vibration in your diaphragm.
You will hear a distant hissing in your ears.
You will feel dizzy.
You will feel the need to vomit.
There will be bleeding from orifices.
There will be an ache in the pelvic region.
You may be subject to fits of hysterical shouting, or even laughter.

These are all signs of imminent Sonic destruction.
Your only real protection is flight.
If you are less than ten years old, then remain in your shelter and use
your cocoon.

But remember:
You can help no-one else, No-one else, No-one else…

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

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

According to the TCM liner notes:

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

John Foxx, TCM liner notes (2006).

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

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

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

Foxx, TCM liner notes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Ballard says,

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

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

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

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

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

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

ABOVE: JGB in London Orbital.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Foxx, ‘The Quiet Man’, 1978.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TCM liner notes.

Note the reference to the GREY suit!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But there would be one final nail in the coffin…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arnold Weizcs-Bryant: R.I.P.

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

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

>

Ballardian muxtape accompanying this post.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– Simon Sellars, ballardian.com, 2008.

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

PLAYLIST

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…:: More info on the exhibition:

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

…:: Exhibition-related posts on Ballardian:

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

ABOVE: Ballard, late 60s. Photo via The Terminal Collection.

Vermilion Sands is a kind of cross between Palm Springs and Juan-les-Pins, a version of the leisure society we were about to enter, though for some reason we stopped and turned away at the door. Music by Brian Eno, metal foil architecture by Frank Gehry, dreams by Sigmund Freud, decor by Paul Delvaux.

J.G. Ballard, Literary Review, 2001.

Vermilion Sands is a synthetic and synaesthetic landscape of psychotropic houses that respond to their inhabitants’ desires and fears, singing sculptures, and a place where everything in sight seems to glitter, to take on the qualities of crystal, a flickering chromaticism suffusing everything from stairways to hair colour and eye pigments… could there be here a sort of affirmative retort to the insistence that all Modernist or utopian communities inevitably end up in dystopia?

Owen Hatherley, ‘Ballard’s Banlieue Radieuse’.

It is a great injustice that Eno tends to be best known for either the “invention” of ambient music or for putting a slightly avant-garde gloss on sundry rock superstars. His records, and attendant theories, in the decade from 1972 to 1982 exhibit an astonishing range of modes and ideas, from the preening glam rock of Here Come the Warm Jets to the opiated drift of Discreet Music, the apocalyptic My Life in the Bush of Ghosts to the deliberate blankness of Music for Airports. Without Eno as catalyst and protagonist, the landscape of popular music would be a far less interesting place: he popularised, through his own records and work with Bowie, Talking Heads and others, noise, sampling, studio-as-instrument, surface over “depth” and manifold other strategies against what was, by the early 1970s, a form in danger of becoming a hidebound arena of proper songs played on real instruments.

Owen Hatherley, ‘Father of Invention’.

ABOVE: Dionysian Eno. Photo via Kontrapunkt.

In another corner of his mind [Eno] was inventing ambient music. Recuperating from an accident, he asked a friend to leave a harp record on, and the one working speaker let its faint strings blend with wind and bird-song. Subliminally, he recognised that this was music. Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978) announced a theory with, as the title suggested, much in common with JG Ballard’s eerie mundane modernity.

Nick Hasted, ‘Brian Eno, the professor of rock’.

SIMON SELLARS: You casually injected something interesting into our correspondence — that you see Ballard and Brian Eno as ‘the two greatest British thinkers of the second half of the 20th Century.’ I’m now going to pin you down and ask you to elaborate.

SIMON REYNOLDS: That’s slightly over the top, isn’t it? I wonder if it really stands up. Then again, as thinkers specifically about culture, in the British context, I can’t honestly think of too many rivals. Certainly as people who came out of the Sixties but came into their prime – as artists and as influences – in the Seventies, they are these towering figures, I think.

One of my fantasy projects that I toyed with for a while was a book on Ballard and Eno. They do seem of a type in some ways and they are patron saints of postpunk to an extent. But the project founders immediately owing to the fact that they are so eloquent about what they do and such brilliant writers, that there’d be zero role for any critic or commentator. There’d be very little to mediate or interpret, as they’ve said it all, so much better. They know what they are doing. I suppose you could historicize them, contextualise them. Ballard with the milieu he emerged out of in the Sixties, which was based around the ICA, right? And Eno with the UK art schools.

In some ways the affinity seems as much temperamental as anything ideas-based. There’s this wonderful Englishness. You imagine they would get on like a house on fire, trading ideas over whisky and soda in the Shepperton living room. One thing they both do is take ideas from science and set them loose in culture, find applications. Ballard is like a British McLuhan, except much better because he’s a far better writer, and a better thinker too – more original, more convincing. Eno is almost like a British Barthes, in some ways.

‘”Magisterial, Precise, Unsettling”: Simon Reynolds on the Ballard connection’.

ABOVE: Ballard, mid-70s. Photo via The Terminal Collection.

SIMON SELLARS: When I interviewed Simon Reynolds, he said that Ballard and Brian Eno are ‘the two greatest British thinkers of the second half of the 20th Century.’ Given that Ballard and Eno are two of your major influences, do you agree with him?

COUSIN SILAS: I’ve never really considered Ballard or Eno as thinkers. To me one writes incredibly atmospheric music, the other writes incredibly atmospheric fiction. Both Ballard and Eno are probably my strongest influences, but their influence is very tenuous, difficult to explain. They both invoke that certain mood of isolation. Isolation is a funny thing: it can be forced upon one, or be self-invoked. It seems in today’s world, the last thing you’d really expect is isolation, and yet even in the busiest of places, there are attributes and situations where one can feel it totally. Self-invoked isolation is where the person chooses to step back, away from all the social interaction and so on, to become, in some respects, a suburban exile. I can relate to a lot of Ballard’s fiction and it’s much the same with Eno’s music, although to a lesser extent — Eno isn’t as consistent, and his vocal albums are something else. I don’t mind them, but for me it’s stuff like Music for Films, Apollo, Another Green World, plus a couple of his ambient albums and the two he did with Harold Budd that contain some of the most moody and atmospheric music there is.

‘Cousin Silas: Another Flask of Ballard’.

ABOVE: Eno in 1975. Photo via Creative Technology.

SIMON SELLARS: 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.

MIKE RYAN: 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.

‘”No-one Dances in Ballard”: An Interview with Mike Ryan.’

ABOVE: Ballard in 1991. Photo by Craig McDean.

ABOVE: Appollonian Eno. Photo by Tom Pilston.

ABOVE: kode9. Photo by Georgie Cook.

Last Wednesday DJ Rupture hosted DJ and dubstep producer kode9 (Steve Goodman) on WFMU 91.1 fm 90.1 fm (you can listen to the show via the embedded playlist above). Goodman played a live set of typically tasteful and deliriously immersive beats, of which I am reluctant to assign any genre tags to as these things change so quickly and often (plus I’ve been out of the loop for quite some time). Goodman has been associated with the dubstep form in recent times, although as he clarifies in the interview following the Rupture set, he is no longer excited by dubstep or grime and instead has been listening to instrumental hip hop from LA and percussive pirate music coming out of the house scene (‘not straight 4/4′, though). I wonder what this melange will bring forth in Goodman’s future music? I have been more than inspired and impressed with kode9′s broken, tangential and swampy beats, and the other acquisitions to Goodman’s Hyperdub stable, like the ubiquitous (and anonymous) Burial, have only added to the aura of a true original forging his own conventions to build a convincing new scene.

Goodman is a lecturer in Music Culture in the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of East London, and is currently writing a book about ‘sonic warfare’ due for release by MIT Press in 2009. I’m very intrigued by Goodman’s ideas in this capacity, specifically about ‘the role of sound in an ‘echology of fear’. Is it similar to the way piped music has been used as an instrument of control, I wonder? I’m thinking of an example like this:

All unwanted noise raises the blood pressure and depresses the immune system. A survey of 215 blood donors at Nottingham University Medical School in January 1995 found that playing piped music made donors more nervous before giving blood and more depressed afterwards than silence. In February 2005 piped television was introduced on some trains in Essex. Passengers hated it so much that they barricaded themselves in the toilets in protest.

The question is, then: besides locking themselves in the toilet (or replicating Mangon’s sonovac in Ballard’s ‘The Sound-Sweep’), what other guerrilla tactics can embittered consumers employ to fight back? I hope Steve’s book will provide an answer.

Also, Goodman’s theoretical examples puts me in mind of Noriega when he was coaxed from his hideout by the high-volume blasting of Billy Idol and Guns ‘n’ Roses by American troops; more recently, American forces have tortured prisoners with the repeated playing of Metallica’s ‘Enter Sandman’. Out of today’s crop of rock and pop stars, I wonder, whose music would be the most appropriate for breaking the iron will of a hated and feared dictator deep in the bowels of a hideous place that most likely resembles Abu Ghraib, and why?

Goodman’s book includes, so I’m told, a chapter on Ballard, which is appropriate given that in the guise of kode9 he has acknowledged Ballard as an influence on his music. In 2006 Goodman gave a talk on ‘J.G. Ballard’s Sonic Fictions’ and at one stage I was going to interview him about all of this, but it never happened due to his busy schedule (here, though, is an earlier interview I did with Steve in 2003; there wasn’t much on the net about kode9 at that stage, so it was all very mysterious and exciting).

Rupture, however, did manage to pin Goodman down on Ballard, and here’s the relevant transcript from their interview:

DJ RUPTURE: This is a totally left-field question, but I was reading about your influences: J.G. Ballard. What books do you like? And does that manifest in your music in any way?

KODE9: Well, I’ve read a little about musicians who’ve been influenced by Ballard, and it always seems to be Crash, that’s the one. I think that’s an amazing book, but it wasn’t the one that got me. In the mid-90s, when jungle was just coming through and early drum ‘n’ bass, I read The Drowned World, set in London underwater, a kind of tropical London, most of the city’s flooded. The creatures undergo this sort of weird negative evolution, so that there are pterodactyls flying down what used to be streets but are now lagoons. And the humidity and clamminess of that idea of London, I was kind of hearing it in jungle.

DJ RUPTURE: Interesting. A swampy sub-bass?

KODE9: Yeah. But also just the atmospherics of jungle. And also there’s a short story by Ballard that I love called ‘The Sound-Sweep’, which is set in a city in which sound doesn’t dissipate, it just builds up. And there’s a guy who’s like a refuge collector for sound, and he drives around with this truck, with this machine called the Sonovac, and he basically goes around cleaning up spaces, sucking sound. And it’s like, this was written in the early 60s, so it’s like musique concrete or just sampling, generally, in this story. It’s just an amazing, prophetic story about noisy cities — and sampling. So, they’re the two Ballard things I’m influenced by most, I think.

In 2007, Burial’s last album was a hot topic in certain areas of the blog world, with Burial, as an entity, often bracketed with kode9, many thinking the two producers were one and the same — hence the photo heading this post. People really were straining to find the appropriate terms to describe this strange, otherworldly music, and often the conclusion reached was: it’s Ballardian. I became interested in tracking this meme because, as Steve suggests, Crash would invariably be the book that got referenced, yet I couldn’t really hear Crash’s themes in the music of either kode9 or Burial. It seemed that Crash was beginning to function as a default Ballardian reference, like 1984 standing in for ‘Orwellian’.

But as I was hunting this meme down, I came across an interview kode9 did with k-punk, in which k-punk asserts that the ‘strangely lulling, hydroponic humidity’ of Ballard’s Drowned World is etched in kode9′s work. This book does feel like a good fit, and its theme of overlapping time tracks appears especially relevant to the kode9 and Spaceape album Memories of the Future. The Drowned World, at its core, features a devolutionary time-loop, the ancient/modern city rising up to take its place among the prehistoric/future London, and this seems similar to Goodman’s claim that his music is about the ‘ominous anticipation of the future in the present’.

Regarding ‘The Sound-Sweep’, I too have been very influenced by the musique concrete aspects of this story, and I have to thank Paul Williams for turning me onto the noise in Ballard’s work. Once I looked for it I found it was everywhere in his writing, and Goodman’s views on this have inspired me also. Given Goodman’s interest in this story of Ballard’s, and the fact that in the Rupture interview he said he is also listening to lots of non-dance music, I also wonder if one day he will produce work in beatless, psychoacoustic, macrocosmic, musique concrete idioms. I think those results would be very interesting indeed.

Also related to ‘The Sound-Sweep’, I can’t help but think that when Steve said he wanted to work with the vocals of Spaceape because he wanted to ‘problematize the too-easy drift towards a purely instrumental, colourless, technoid aesthetic in the [dubstep] scene,’ that this is in fact a mission to reinvigorate the potential of vocals, similar to Mangon’s attempt to fight the flattened influence of ‘ultrasonic music’ in ‘The Sound-Sweep’. In Ballard’s story Mangon was, after all, trying to revive the career of the opera singer Madame Giaconda, with the telling statement that ‘Ultrasonic music is great for atmosphere, but it has no content. It can’t express ideas, only emotion.’ Substitute ‘ultrasonic’ with ‘dubstep’ and that could almost be a kode9ism!

Brought about through no fault of her own, Madame Gioconda’s decline was all the harder to bear. Since the introduction a few years earlier of ultrasonic music, the human voice — indeed, audible music of any type — had gone completely out of fashion.

Ultrasonic music, employing a vastly greater range of octaves, chords and chromatic scales than are audible by the human ear, provided a direct neural link between the sound stream and the auditory lobes, generating an apparently sourceless sensation of harmony, rhythm, cadence and melody uncontaminated by the noise and vibration of audible music.

Ballard, ‘The Sound-Sweep’ (1960).

But back to the broken beats: I thought I would do a tour of some of the more interesting Ballardianisms that were floating around the kode9/Burial orbit in recent times.

ABOVE: kode9 & the Spaceape. Photo via Zoopersound.

First up, Jonathan Fletcher at Playlouder brings the occult into it:

For ‘Memories of the Future’ then, we can assert that Kode 9 is the music machine while Spaceape invokes modernist viral ‘fictions’ as a Ballardian stoned mystical preacher. His words continually repeat and rematerialise across each of these 12 songs, as well as the Burial album and Dubstep Allstars Volume 3 (a defiantly studio-bound DJ mix) inducing an occult-like mantra.

…while Warren Ellis nails the Drowned World connection:

[Burial's] GHOST HARDWARE EP was as Ballardian a record as I’ve ever heard: the sound of a drowned London. “Ghost Hardware” is on UNTRUE, but UNTRUE is an attempt to turn away from the watery cemetery of the EP, to make a “glowing, buzzing” record. I’m not so sure that he achieved that. Like his eponymous debut, like GHOST HARDWARE EP too, it’s head music, it’s contemplative. The textures of the thing are incredible. The beats come from under the road, the breaks come from three rooms away, and some of the vocals come from over your shoulder and thirty years ago. People sing with the crackle of dusty old vinyl. The ghosts of old musics.

Loki @ An Idiot’s Guide to Dreaming reiterates the motorway scenario, and scores points for the accompanying image, a reproduction of Ballard’s favoured Ernst, ‘Europe After the Rain’:

I keep hearing Cranes, especially Cranes as heard under hash and bio-yogurt; Cranes as de Clerambault syndrome. The same smeared vocals, child-like echoes, the sound of calpol sliding onto a spoon in the middle of the night…

Which then led me to the image of the cranes flying overhead at the beginning of Lautreamont’s Maldoror – Burial inhabits the same kind of world as Maldoror; half-real, half-imagined, schematic and partly skewed, sidereal. The same world transposed to a resolutely urban environment (one thing with Burial, it’s impossible to imagine greenery when listening to it, the colours that are synaesthically beamed in are almost all shades of blue and grey and black – like some vaguely Ballardian motorway junction or conference centre that never ends).

Tom at Sparks House scores for the most original conflation, bringing together Dominika Oramus’s writings on JGB with the music of Burial:

Late night listening to the new Burial release Untrue on the Hyperdub label, reading the introduction to a book by Dominika Oramus on the slow decline of Western Civilization viewed through the literature of J.G. Ballard… Burial’s release Untrue is a small masterpiece of the ethereal electronic post reggae dub know as DubStep. It makes an appropriate sound track to the ideas of Oramus. Quoting Arnold Toynbee from his book A Study of History, Oramus sets the stage for a brilliant introduction to the dystopian world view of J.G.Ballard;

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

Ballard and Burial make for a well matched pair. I recommend Untrue and the writing of Dominika Oramus, maybe have a glass of Calvados as you listen and read.;)

Appropriately, given that Dominika Oramus is from Poland, here is a Polish perspective… I get the hauntological connection; can anyone translate the rest, please?

polecam ostatnie wymiany tekstów w blogosferze na temat Joy Division n(fascynujaca lektura chwilami). czy o Burial, “hauntology” i “Ballardian connection” (nie próbuję nawet tego tłumaczyć). nie chce mi sie szukac linków ale jest to naprawde kawał mięsa dla każdego kto tęskni za pisaniem rozintelektualizowanym

Elsewhere, k-punk explains it uniquely well, engaging John Foxx, Joy Division and architectonics to support the comparison:

One of the reasons that I and others found the comparison between Burial and Martin Hannett’s productions for Joy Division so irresistible is that both producers’ sounds are architectural… This brings out the point I was trying to make in my Fact piece on Metamatic about the Ballardian being essentially architectural… Whereas Foxx — and the virtual populations that Metamatic projected — found a new kind of jouissance in brutalism’s angular arcades and the disassembling of the self into neo-Surrealist collages (‘he’s an angle/ she’s a tangent’), it was as if Joy Division were seeing Ballard’s high-rise Britain through the eyes of a neurasthenic Romantic. At the same time, they foreheard — and were a forehearing of — the No Future that would ensue once rock ran aground on the terminal beaches at the End of History, where depression amongst the young is normal…

ABOVE: ‘J. Mourinho, kode9 and Burial in a press briefing. Not pictured: Burial’ (according to Deeptime).

Richard Kovitch chooses to weave in another Ballardian luminary, Chris Petit, into the orbit in a review of Petit’s film Radio On:

It is interesting to note that the anomie that haunts every frame of ‘Radio On’ can currently be detected in the pioneering sounds emulating from London’s Dubstep scene, particularly the music of producers such as Burial and Kode 9. Despite thirty years segregated, they share the same Ballardian vision of Britain – a perverse romance for the urban and disconnected. Thanks to Plexifilm in the US, Petit’s film has finally been restored and reissued on DVD, so a whole new generation can catch up with his dark, Post Punk vision. It has been a long time coming.

…while Dorian Lynskey at the Guardian, in a post on Ballard’s influence on musicians, disavows the attention-grabbing antics of the Klaxons and instead defers to the subterranean beats of our subjects under discussion:

Perhaps Klaxons are trying to revive post-punk’s ostentatious I-read-books-you-know intellectualism, but it’s hard to discern Ballard’s DNA in their glowsticks-aloft optimism. His true disciples can be found on the dubstep scene. Burial’s “underwater-London” conceit might have been based on 1962′s The Drowned World, a once-outlandish prophecy made disturbingly credible by climate change, and Kode9′s Memories of the Future album is up to its eyeballs in JG.

ABOVE: Burial. Photo via The Wire.

And for balance, here is John Mulvey at Uncut:

My … hunch is that dance music, thanks to its notional futurism and its frequent lack of subtext, often attracts writers who are interested in constructing a progressive agenda which can accommodate a bunch of records they like at the time. This seems particularly true of dubstep, which is something I’ve never quite developed a taste for, in spite of many friends proselytising about stuff like the Burial album. It strikes me that this is music which is gagging to be theorised about: lots of urban dystopia, grimy Ballardian futurism, a potentially intriguing mixture of dancefloor codes and morbid alienation etc. But to be honest, it all seems a bit corny and obvious to me, reminiscent of those studiously bleak “Isolationist” comps from the early ’90s, when someone (Kevin Martin from Techno Animal, if memory serves) worked out that the paranoia-inducing aspects of dopesmoking could be aligned to dub.

…while Fire in the Mind expresses similar, though more temperate, views:

They may, as I have written in the past, remind me of certain Ballardian landscapes, but I will never go as far as to call Kode9 or Burial Ballardian artists. Nor will I call Will Self a Ballardian writer because he writes about a submerged island. Maybe it does sound impossible/improbable but every day again I try to be a blank sheet, a tabula rasa. To quote The Spaceape, I try to let music “stimulate the audio nerve directly”. This is not to say that this approach will always work out as I intend it, but I have to try or most of the true meaning will escape me.

As for me, I enjoy all of these perspectives, and I probably sympathise a little with John Mulvey, too (although he clearly doesn’t like the music, whereas I do), but more so with Fire in the Mind. I enjoy reading about Steve’s influences very much and I am very interested in how that filters into the creation of sound and music, but I am not sure it is directly possible to discern Ballardian themes as such in the music of kode9 and especially Burial without knowing the context of its creation (as far as I know, in the few interviews Burial has done he has never declared Ballard as an influence). That said, I throughly enjoy basking in (and, ultimately, can’t live without, despite my sympathy for the tabula rasa gambit) the grid of context surrounding the work: the theory inspires me and expands the listening experience. Someone like k-punk, for example, who can explain the architectural similarities between Burial and Ballard is therefore invaluable; this provides infinite levels of meaning, wormholes to undifferentiated matter, as does Tom @ Sparks House, with his reminder of the delicious possibilities inherent in a marriage of Burial and Oramus. To someone interested in the theory and the influence informing a piece of music, should it matter whether that raw material is clearly ‘audible’? Or is it important, rather, that there is simply an end product, of whatever shape and form, derived from the raw material (in the case of kode9) or that there is a mass of raw material, omnidirectional flows, informing the end product, the body, intentionally or not (in the ambiguous case of Burial). Whatever the case, all the above quotes I’ve cited clearly indicate that the Ballardianisms of kode9 and Burial, however they are generated, are far preferable to an endless parade of Crash-influenced songs featuring metallic car-crash sounds and groaning sex noises!

Still, in my un-interview with Steve Goodman, there was one burning question I wanted to ask. In a previous kode9 chat, Steve said, ‘While a lot of what has been said about grime and dubstep being influenced by its place of origin is real, I think that it can also become a tedious cliche.’ By cliche, he means ‘Croydon’, a borough of London, supposedly where dubstep originated, but also another label that keeps popping up around the genre (Paul from the deeptime blog wrote that ‘people act like there are dubstep spores in the Croydon water supply.’)

Given this and also taking into account Goodman’s Ballard influence, I was reminded of this quote from Ballard’s story ‘The Enormous Space’:

Crusoe wished to bring the Croydons of his own day to life again on this island. I want to expel them, and find in their place a far richer realm formed from the elements of light, time and space.

Therefore, my burning question to Steve Goodman is this: ‘You have DJed extensively overseas, seen how dubstep translates beyond Croydon and London, yet people still keep tagging it as a London thing. Therefore, after having to explain the Croydon connection in a thousand interviews, do you now also want to expel Croydon, as Ballard did, in favour of something more universal?’

ABOVE: kode 9 and Spaceape. Photo via kode9.

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.

by the Crashman.

ABOVE: ‘White Bird’ by the Crashman. ‘XB-70, Tu-144: White Bird Must Fly, or she will crash’.

From the moment Blake crashes his stolen aircraft into the Thames, the unlimited dream company takes over and the town of Shepperton is transformed into an apocalyptic kingdom of desire and stunning imagination ruled over by Blake’s messianic figure. Tropical flora and fauna appear; pan-sexual celebrations occur regularly; and in a final climax of liberation, the townspeople learn to fly.

From the cover blurb to The Unlimited Dream Company, J.G. Ballard, 1979 (Triad/Panther edition, 1985).

Perreau: You once said “Nothing has any sense except in terms of ephemeral airplane culture”. Motorways, airplanes, shopping centres… What is the link between these things? What do humans do?

Ballard: They take planes and fly around, like the great soaring birds who endlessly cross and recross the ocean. Like the albatross, we are looking for our soul. Tourism is a rehearsal for death.

From Yann Perreau’s interview with J.G. Ballard.

As a stripling, I had the immense good fortune to stumble across the short stories of J.G. Ballard in the pulp science fiction magazines of the day: IF, F&SF, Analog. These prompted me to get hold of his early novels: The Wind From Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Crystal World. I was seduced by the subtle brilliance of Ballard’s work, by the total absence of worked-to-death SF themes, by the air of detached sophistication, overwhelming to a callow adolescent like me.

When Mr Ballard turned his back on “conventional SF” and pioneered the British New Wave with Michael Moorcock, I was as excited as anyone. His work opened up a relentless, terrifyingly limitless voyage into the libido, the id, the savage psychopathology that lies hidden in every ordinary man and woman, the possibility of any strange thing. Reading Ballard as an adolescent changed my entire view of the world, certainly of what was called “Science Fiction”.

In the early 70s a fellow fan handed me a copy of Crash. It was an utterly stunning experience. Crash ruined my taste for anything but the finest SF, and I was haunted for years by visions of Vaughan’s peculiar hobbies, those bizarrely twisted, almost unheard-of modes of human sexuality spelled out inexorably by the book. Now nothing could satisfy me as fully as Mr Ballard’s experiments with what the human psyche was really capable of, laying out unthinkable sexual and psychological grotesqueries in his trademark elegant, gentlemanly, spare and penetrating prose. His writing remade my intellectual world.

I gulped down his later novels, each more thought-provoking than the last, reveling in the astounding but visibly true events reported in the daily news as much as in his work. I found little to criticize, least of all his unflinching view of the profound yet subtle changes imposed by modern civilization on a thinking organism many millions of years old, an organism evolved under very different conditions than prevail today.

I searched for similar oracles, those who could further light the shattered-glass-strewn, arc-lit motorways we would soon be endlessly traveling. The Cronenberg movie was devastatingly, beautifully faithful to Ballard and after I saw it I realized that all of Ballard’s work could be read as a screenplay, a script for a movie about the storms of change enveloping the world.

ABOVE: ‘Helicopter Opera’ by the Crashman. ‘Helicopters crash to soaring opera by Kimera’.

I developed a desire to put forth my own tribute to Ballard’s work and somehow to carry forward the concepts that had so fascinated and changed me. I am no writer of any skill, and the idea of writing something “derivative of” or “inspired by” the genius of the Oracle of Shepperton was repellent to me. It could not fail to be anything but the crudest of imitations. So, to contribute to the Ballardian universe and its inhabitants, I latched onto the themes expressed in Crash, and since Mr Ballard’s novels acknowledged little or no boundaries, neither would I. I felt I could somehow take the themes of Crash even further, in different media if necessary. I thought about the event that had more or less inspired Crash: Mr Ballard’s exhibition of crashed cars as art, with the death and destruction latent in these twisted, crashed vehicles unleashing something that had always been hidden in the minds of their viewers. I wanted to do that.

In my teens I acquired a pilot’s licence, for sport and for the opportunity to master dangerous technology. But I was also drawn to plane crashes, to air crashes of any type, crashes at air exhibitions, transport accidents, airliners, sport planes, military fighters. They attracted me in the same way as Vaughan, who could not pass a motor accident without slowing to view and, if possible, photograph the result. From childhood I collected every book, press clipping and photograph I could find that dealt with aviation accidents and their strange and often grotesque aftermaths. To this day I have valises bulging with old magazine and newspaper clippings of long-forgotten air crashes.

Famous air tragedies have become iconic for me: so much human anguish dealt out by a crack in a pressurized Comet window joint, by the decision of the KLM captain at Tenerife to advance the throttles of his huge 747 while another loaded 747 on the same runway ahead of him lay hidden in the fog. By the peculiarly unforgiving nature of mechanical flight, midair collisions against all odds, the inexplicable crash deaths of highly experienced pilots from unexpected causes, of men and women who had spent thousands of hours at the controls. As Ballard’s work implies, we are at the mercy of our own technology.

I began to understand what it was that never fails to fascinate the public about aviation: the CRASH. A massive, newsworthy and completely public display of flying vehicular violence always raises the psychological stakes on the table, and is faithful to the essential Ballardian spirit. In the film The Great Waldo Pepper the barnstorming protagonist asks, “Why do people come to airshows?” The answer he is given is: “People don’t come to airshows to watch planes fly. They come to watch a man die.” Few psychoanalysts would disagree.

But I have also never met a pilot who can resist reading a crash report or viewing a film of one. We learn from them, “there but for the grace of God go I” — but like a car accident on the motorways that now define our civilization, no one can look away. We are all spectators at this destructive end-stage of our grotesquely dehumanizing civilization. Eventually it will become boring, as Mr Ballard has predicted our future as a civilization to be.

ABOVE: ‘Kraftwerk Crashes’ by the Crashman. ‘Topnotch crashing, all technical styles’.

Added to that, I was also fascinated by Ballard’s stint in the RAF and the flying symbolism in his books. Again and again he has teased us with aviation and its dangers, so akin to the dangers of the motorway. There’s the protagonist aviator in Super-Cannes with his crash-injured knee and his banner-towing girlfriend. There are the accounts in The Kindness of Women of military training in powerful RAF Harvards in Saskatchewan; of the ceaseless activity at the huge airports that always seem to be at the nexus of those fascinating and deadly motorways; of the forever-lost Turkish aviator trainee and his crashed Harvard, inverted for eternity in an unnamed Canadian lake, its form just visible, slowly disappearing under green algae as Ballard flew over it. And of the bold and virile American Mustang over Shanghai, herald of liberation and of a change in Ballard’s life as profound as that triggered by the Japanese occupation, itself announced by graceful formations of Zeros and Mitsubishi bombers over the soon-to-be-destroyed Shanghai of the 1930s.

So here was my chance to sit at the Ballardian table and place my own dish on its menu. Given my aviation background, and my desire to evoke the spirit of Crash, what could be more appropriate than the sight of a sudden and unexpected crash, preferably of a large airliner, its great silver phallus shattering in an ultra-high-speed orgasm of violent, spasmodic disintegration, uncontrollably spewing the shocked, wandering gametes of its ambulatory survivors and the ragged chunks of human flesh still full of their own unique DNA? This is epistemology, the very question of identity itself: “Who are we?” “Who were you?”. And what could be more Ballardian? No one ever emerges from an air crash unchanged at the deepest levels, even if they do survive.

ABOVE: ‘Crash Right In’ by the Crashman. ‘Baby let your hair hang down…’

The raw materials for the experiment were already available. I found numerous websites devoted solely to air accidents, those rare films where a motion-picture camera has recorded the unfolding of the crash, the cries and shouts of the survivors and onlookers, the stunned silence of the injured and the unending silent rage of the dead, lives with a whole trajectory changed forever in the intersection with violent arcs of shatteringly powerful, aluminium turbine-powered technology. Right away these suggested TV commercials of traveling death and terrifying impacts rather than beaches and sun, films of agonizingly public yet intensely personal disasters of which the Zapruder Kennedy motorcade film was an early harbinger.

I collected these films, poring over dread experiences frozen forever in time. Again, I recalled Ballard’s exhibition, where the mere presence of the crashed vehicles in a public art-space had touched and unleashed the id of the viewers, to the point where the audience began to interact unpredictably and destructively with these static displays of demolished technology. Somehow, Ballard’s work had touched something that was always there, but rarely expressed in public.

I began to edit the films to music, making my own choices and juxtapositions, the goal being to emerge with a collection of short videos that had been extracted from reality, yet would evoke in the viewer the same types of emotions and insights unleashed in Mr Ballard’s work. I used a neo-Ballardian pastiche technique to edit them: no plot, no dialogue with the viewer, nothing but crash after crash, and the result emerged as a video collage of horror, dismay, and death, Ballardianism expressed in an entirely new set of technological media.

ABOVE: ‘Turning Japanese’ by the Crashman. ‘I think I’m turning Japanese…’

The films in their original state were often silent, sometimes monochromatic and flickering with age, and sometimes modern color video, the soundtrack replete with the noise of impact and the cries of onlookers. But music dictated an important “feel” to the videos, echoing and amplifying the visual crash itself, lending it layers of additional meaning (although I often left in the cries of spectators and survivors, the better to immerse the viewer in the event). I found that the visual material of crashing aircraft lent itself readily to many kinds of musical background. Repeated slow-motion test crashes of old airliners called for music evoking the eventual futility of life. Exciting airshow passes and flaming collisions called for equally exciting, pounding rock ‘n’ roll. Surviving, parachuting pilots had their luck accompanied with notes of musical grace. Antique crashes evoked songs from their own black-and-white era. Uniquely elegant aircraft crashes called for matching beauty in the music.

At first I kept these short videos to myself. I felt the general public would see them as merely morbid, while the aviation community, of which I remained a part, would probably react even more negatively. Then I began to post them on websites devoted to bizarre and unpleasant events. After I had made a few of the videos public, a collective audience began to slowly emerge. I began to receive feedback and criticism, sometimes constructive, often laudatory, and sometimes merely abusive. But these people were accustomed to horrible sights and events already, like a doctor or air crash investigator. How would a random, general audience feel and what would they say? I took the next step: in 2006 I uploaded most of the videos to YouTube.

I expected to be excoriated by this wider, larger general public as a ghoul, an exploiter of the suffering of others, and as it happened the word ‘sick’ was freely applied to the videos as well as to myself. I considered this a compliment, as it mirrored the initial response to Crash (‘This author is beyond psychiatric help: do not publish’, according to the publisher’s reader). But, and I had expected this too, neo-Ballardians began to show themselves, finding subtle excitements and even strange beauty in the videos, that uneasy, disquieting splendour inherent in the slow-motion breakup of a speeding aircraft. Negative commenters, meanwhile, would often complain that the music was not to their taste, ignorant of the maxim “de gustibus non est disputandum”.

While I got my share of abuse as a psychopathic air crash ghoul and poor chooser of soundtrack music, I noticed an interesting phenomenon: not one of the persons commenting who had an authentic aviation background found them less than fascinating, and the vast majority of them found the videos praiseworthy. They admitted they were fascinated and horrified at the same time, feelings made familiar by the very real possibility of such crashes happening to them. They had been fatally intrigued. As one of my sharpest critics admitted, even he couldn’t look away from the screen. The material was simply too visually powerful. I had touched something, and I hoped it was close to what Mr Ballard had touched in the readers of his novels and in the viewers of his crashed-car art installation.

I continued to expose my unpromoted, unadvertised work, with all its unfettered techno-pornography of aviation violence. Within a little more than a year my videos had been seen by well over a million people on YouTube alone. The experiment was working on a large stage now.

ABOVE: ‘Proud and Glorious’ by the Crashman. ‘Death and glory in the air…’

The viewers seemed to get the intended spirit of these odd video creations right away. Others had already begun making fascinating crash-collage videos of auto accidents, and my work was seen as kicking the violence stakes up a notch, because, I suppose, of the relative rarity of plane crash films and the indisputably brutal violence inherent in their nature. Famous airliner crashes, the air conflicts of WWII, the pathetic mishaps of general aviation and the unintended accidents at public airshows and aerial exhibitions interested the vast majority of viewers.

I found that nationalism played a large part in most of the negative reactions. Russians, for example, would complain about videos devoted to their own airshow crashes. My video of the incomparably horrible Lviv airshow accident in 2002 showed shredded bodies on the runways, yet how could a video faithfully recording the original event ever be justifiably censored? No one can even see these videos unless they seek them out…

Once a contingent of Britons forced YouTube to take my collage of helicopter crash films offline, by bombarding them with complaints that it showed a completely non-explicit but fatal crash of one of their own country’s helicopters. Again I adopted a Ballardian stance: here it is, make of it what you will. View the videos or not, as you choose. To the extent I needed one, I pleaded the aesthetic defense of reality, of psychological and factual truth-telling — and a strong one it is.

It’s interesting to note that since I began posting in 2005, quite a few others have begun to do the same, editing various aviation-accident and plane crash videos to music and posting the result. The experiment has gone “viral” — a novel subgenre is emerging on YouTube and many other sites devoted to odd videos.

On a personal level, I consider this experiment an enormous success, comparable to the feelings of an author or filmmaker who knows that literally millions of people have chosen to view their work. On the Ballardian level, as a public psychological experiment in Applied Ballardianism, it merely proves what we already knew: that Mr Ballard’s unique visions are as powerful when translated into other media as they are in his work itself.

We know that Mr Ballard does not use the internet, but his partner, Claire, does. If by chance she runs across this project someday and shows it to him, I can only hope he will accept this experiment as it was intended: as a sincere tribute to the man and his work.

I feel that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decades. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.

J.G. Ballard, introduction to Crash, 1973.

The Crashman. Copyright 2008, Crashman Productions.

..:: MORE CRASHMAN
+ Crashman: YouTube
+ Crashman: LiveVideo

The Daily Mail reports on a recent sighting of the pop star on a late night bookstore run in Las Vegas. He apparently purchased a large quantity of SF. Begging the important question: what is Michael Jackson’s favorite literary science fiction? I’ll bet you dinner at Picasso that right now he’s curled up in the overstuffed armchair of his penthouse suite at the Bellagio, giggling at The Atrocity Exhibition.

Who knew such an activity could be subtly transformed into a bit of media jamming performance art? MJ’s continued pushing of the boundaries of the new weird, straddling some unexplored territory between late Marlon Brando and The Man Who Fell to Earth, is appreciated. Can you think of a more science fictional figure in the contemporary celebrity landscape?

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

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

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

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

Over at Fact magazine, k-punk has written a great re-appraisal of John Foxx’s Metamatic album from 1980. Metamatic still sounds as remarkable as it must have done to unschooled ears back then, completely wrenched from time and space and forged with laser hammers, ion-driven lathes and neon tongs. K-punk’s article is dense and packed with insight, with some sophisticated Ballardian detours, including the following which precisely sums up Ballard’s relationship to the built environment:

‘Ballardian’ is a word that is often associated with Foxx — and there is no more Ballardian record than Metamatic — but it is seldom used with any precision. … What is unique about Ballard as a science fiction writer is his comparative lack of interest in technology as such. What Ballard’s fiction examines is the impact of environments on the human nervous system (even the car in his most famous work, Crash, operates less as a machine than as a scene, a screen on which fantasies can be projected and a space in which they can be acted out). Ballard explores and names a ‘media landscape’, in which – via advertising hoardings – human drives, desires and fantasies are uploaded from the private space of the unconscious into the physical space of the city. Ballard’s principal area of interest, therefore, is not technology, but architecture.

..:: Previously on Ballardian: an exclusive interview with John Foxx.

Interview by Simon Sellars

Cousin Silas is a producer of dark-ambient soundscapes. He has five albums to his name and a few EPs, spiking the vein of glacial electronica. His work evokes Edward Artemiev and Brian Eno. In fact, for afficionados drawing inspiration from Eno’s most influential ambient works (Music for Airports, say, through to Thursday Afternoon), pleasure may very well be derived from the work of Silas. These textured pieces can be gently iterative, building ambience and atmosphere systematically; they can be as tenuous as ectoplasm, barely there; and they can be dramatically reductive, sloughing layers to reveal roiling depths beneath, echo sounding in waves of sound.

I spoke to Cousin Silas about Ballard, Lovecraft, Forteana, Moorcock, Eno, Tarkovsky — all the essentials.

Simon Sellars

SS: What inspired you to create two volumes of Ballard Landscapes?

CS: I’ve read a lot of fiction over the years, mainly science fiction. I began with Mike Moorcock’s Stealer of Souls, and then it was the odd name-dropping of Ballard that intrigued me. My first Ballard book was The Atrocity Exhibition, and I haven’t looked back, really. Out of all the authors I’ve read, Ballard is the only one who consistently hits the mark when it comes to events, situations and descriptions that I can relate to. A good example is his story, ‘Low Flying Aircraft’. When I read that, I think I was — still am — more impressed with the colours rather than the full picture. I was totally enmeshed — it didn’t take any imagination whatsoever to go deeper into the landscapes of that story, due to my childhood.

As a kid I spent a lot of time at my Grandma’s caravan. Being an only child, much of that time was spent playing on the dunes and beach. Out of season, the local Lido pool was always empty. There were always busy shipping lanes off the beach, mainly oil tankers, and on the way to and from the caravan we passed a place called RAF Binbrook, an air force base which had been abandoned. Empty caravans and beach huts, disused coastal railways, the fog drifting in from Immingham — it made isolation a byword. Also, in the Colne Valley, a lot of the textile industry went into slow decline. As a result the valley became full of empty mills, stagnant canals and rusting equipment — all the Ballardian icons were there. Plus the M62 was being built around the time I began to take notice of things happening off my street!

The short answer is that there’s something that inspires me in almost every paragraph of Ballard, let alone the chapters or novels, and the hard part was making a conscious decision to stop (maybe) at two volumes.

SS: Why not ‘Lovecraft landscapes’, after another of your literary influences?

CS: Lovecraft can’t be read quite the same. Sure, there’s the odd story that contains some marvellous moods — for example, his description of Innsmouth, or the landscapes he describes in ‘Dagon’ or ‘Dunwich’. Damn, those things inspire some amazing images. But a lot of Lovecraft’s imagery has dated — well, it’s his writing style — whereas Ballard’s is just so ‘now’, and yet so retro in some respects.

Lovecraft was a writer I really had to work at. A few years ago I used to write SF, and among the circle of friends and co-writers I became involved with, some were always going on about him. I eventually read a Lovecraft short-story collection and found it pretty damn good, and then I read At the Mountains of Madness, which took some time to get going. I think it was my third or fourth attempt. I kept saying that there simply MUST be something here… Anyway, I did eventually finish it and I really did enjoy it. Since then I’ve read more or less all he wrote. Some of it is terribly dated, but when Lovecraft was on form, he was simply astounding. Like Ballard, though, it was the geography and landscapes that inspired me, rather than the characters. Unlike Ballard, Lovecraft’s hit rate isn’t as high.

Image from Ballard Landscapes cover art.

SS: Your online bio says, ‘When the occasion arose, he found that sound alchemy was more expressive and exploratory than writing.’ That’s intriguing — can you elaborate?

CS: As I said, I used to write a few years back, same as I still (try) and play the guitar, but I found that the Silas material was far more expressive and creative. With Silas there’s only one real limitation, and whilst it might sound pretentious, it’s imagination. With writing there are certain basic rules and with a guitar, to be good, you have to be absolutely brilliant. With ‘sound alchemy’, you don’t even have to know the first thing about writing music, or even reading music, only ‘does it sound ‘right’ for what you’re doing?’ If the answer is ‘yes’, go for it. Obviously having a basic understanding of chords and pitch with the guitar does help, but it’s not essential. Much like the punk ethos, get up and have a go!

SS: Was your SF writing influenced in any way by Ballard?

CS: Initially I was inspired by Moorcock, but gradually I drifted into Ballard territory. I did two stories that were directly influenced by J.G., one was called ‘The Song Of The Shapes’ and I can’t remember the title of the other one. ‘The Shapes’ was basically about floating sounds, like bubbles. The other story was basically an exodus of humans going back into the sea. And to my credit, they were both published. To be fair, though, it wasn’t ‘strictly’ Ballard, but the whole New Worlds thing. I loved the freedom and no-holds-barred that existed in the fiction. I haven’t really written fiction for years now. I find I don’t have the imagination for actually writing like I had, or the time.

SS: It’s no surprise to learn you also draw inspiration from Fortean events. Listening to your soundscapes is very much like tuning into some kind of spectral presence, or even something less metaphysical but still intensely dislocating, like voices drowned in static. There’s that steady hum in your work, and then something unsettling going on in the background, hustling in at the edge of consciousness.

CS: I’ve always had an unhealthy interest/curiosity in most things Fortean. I’m an avid reader and subscriber of Fortean Times, and I’ve even got two CDs worth of material currently being considered/reworked and going under the working title of The Fortean Project. There’s material there that’s been inspired by unidentified underwater objects, objects landing in remote woods, Borley Rectory, poltergeists, strange sounds, EVP, all the usual suspects. Also, ‘Necropolis Line’, the title track on my Earthrid CD, was inspired directly by an article in Fortean Times. There are quite a few other tracks of mine that have been inspired either directly or otherwise by Forteana.

I’m inspired by the strangeness, the mystery, and the downright weirdness of all these unexplained and odd happenings. I don’t especially enjoy reading about the whole world of Forteana, but I am interested in things like Electronic Voice Phenomena, strange moorland lights, places where ill feelings occur, anomalous artefacts. Some stuff I find a little tedious and totally uninspirational, like crop circles and UFO abductions. Even though I inherently know that some of the topics and situations that come under the slowly expanding umbrella of Forteana is bollocks, it can still create certain feelings. The inspiration is rather difficult to describe really — again, it’s moods and feelings and trying to convey these into sound. Naming these pieces does hopefully help the listener to ‘attune’ to what I’m aiming for.

SS: The presence of the paranormal in Ballard is something I’ve been taking an interest in.

CS: Oddly, I’d never really seen the parallel. Then again, thinking about it, these Fortean themes crop up in any number of SF stories, they’re not the exclusive domain of J.G. People out of place, or displaced momentarily in time, visions of Godlike entities, time travel, and even resurrection can be found all over the place. I suppose it’s because of the way these ‘ideas’ are presented. If they’re presented as fact, then it opens all kinds of doors for discussion, study and speculation. However, if they’re in fiction, then, well, it’s fiction! Perfect example is War of the Worlds. Anyone who’s read the book hasn’t rushed out to find if they’re there, or packed the family and belongings into a car and set of for the hills. And yet, when Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre did a ‘play’, and produced it for radio in a documentary, on-the-spot news type thing, there was mass panic. Same story, different presentation.

SS: With the tracks on Ballard Landscapes 1 & 2, did you choose the title first and fit the music to suit, or did the music suggest a title?

CS: If I remember rightly, I think with the majority of the Ballard tracks I had an idea of the titles first. Some are direct, others less so. It was a case of trying to convey in sound what these images mean to me. Obviously the titles are like an aide memoir, and it could be argued that if ‘Rusting Gantry’ had been called, oh, I dunno, ‘Formless Clouds’, then the imagery and imagination of the listener would be taken somewhere else. I like to think that the titles and the pieces work well together.

Image from Ballard Landscapes cover art.

SS: Judging from those titles, it’s clear you place equal importance on Ballard’s worth as a short story writer. There seems to be as much, if not more, reference to his shorts than his novels.

CS: Probably more. Being inspired by Ballard’s short stories is easier than novels. With a short story, they’re usually on one level, and get to the point and conclude relatively quickly. A novel is obviously longer, and has a lot more going on. But for me, Ballard’s short stories are more essential than his novels for a variety of reasons — from the late 50s to the early 90s they are just stunning and contain some of the most powerful, experimental and genre-melting fiction this side of the Big Bang. A lot of the ideas that went into his novels were played out in short story form. Plus, in some short story collections such as Vermilion Sands and The Atrocity Exhibition, the boundaries between shorts and novels are somewhat blurred.

Unfortunately, since Empire of the Sun, which put Ballard firmly in the ‘general’ public arena, especially after the film arrived, his short stories seem to have been somewhat ignored. Plus, his actual output of short stories has abated over the last decade. Mind you, there isn’t really the market now that there was back then.

SS: An oft-stated criticism of Ballard, especially his later novels, is that they would have worked better as short stories.

CS: Short stories and novels are two quite separate forms of story telling. Some would argue that a short is never ‘allowed’ to develop, whereas a novel requires more skill in keeping the reader interested. For me there’s just as much skill if not more with a short story. You have to have more acute pacing, deviations from the ‘main’ story aren’t as flexible and there’s not as much time for full character-building as such. As I said above, some of his short stories were developed into novels, so in some respects you can judge the two mediums and the difference between them.

SS: When I interviewed Simon Reynolds, he said that Ballard and Brian Eno are ‘the two greatest British thinkers of the second half of the 20th Century.’ Given that Ballard and Eno are two of your major influences, do you agree with him?

CS: I’ve never really considered Ballard or Eno as thinkers. To me one writes incredibly atmospheric music, the other writes incredibly atmospheric fiction. Both Ballard and Eno are probably my strongest influences, but their influence is very tenuous, difficult to explain. They both invoke that certain mood of isolation. Isolation is a funny thing: it can be forced upon one, or be self-invoked. It seems in today’s world, the last thing you’d really expect is isolation, and yet even in the busiest of places, there are attributes and situations where one can feel it totally. Self-invoked isolation is where the person chooses to step back, away from all the social interaction and so on, to become, in some respects, a suburban exile. I can relate to a lot of Ballard’s fiction and it’s much the same with Eno’s music, although to a lesser extent — Eno isn’t as consistent, and his vocal albums are something else. I don’t mind them, but for me it’s stuff like Music for Films, Apollo, Another Green World, plus a couple of his ambient albums and the two he did with Harold Budd that contain some of the most moody and atmospheric music there is.

SS: You have two albums available for purchase at Fflint Central and one at Earthrid, but Ballard Landscapes is available for free through Earth Monkey. Do you occupy similar ideological ground to Cory Doctorow, who makes his stories and novels available for free online, justifying it like so: ‘Most people who download the book don’t end up buying it, but they wouldn’t have bought it in any event, so I haven’t lost any sales, I’ve just won an audience.’

CS: Simple answer: he’s hit the nail on the head. A while back I got an email from Earth Monkey, basically asking for contributions to a new net label. I simply thought, ‘why not’? If accepted, it would underline the fact that there’s not just maybe six people who like Cousin Silas, but also, it may well bring in a few more sales for the guys at Fflint and Earthrid. Plus, I’m not exactly in it for the money, but for the simple fact that even if one person ‘got’ or enjoyed Silas, then for me that’s a good return. It does sound awfully clichéd, but it’s how I feel.

SS: Tell us about the process of making the Ballard Landscapes. Do you use field recordings? I hear water drips, factory sounds, electrical hums and glitches.

CS: On some of the material I’ve done, I’ve used the odd field recording: a steam train on ‘Necropolis Line’, a dog barking on ‘John Wayne Gacy Contemplates’, plus a few tracks here and there have had either rain, or drops or a gunshot. The glitches, machinery and hums are all created with synths, editing or processing. You’d be quite surprised at what some of these sounds started as!

SS: A bit like Ballard, then, where you’re never quite sure what’s simulation, what’s ‘authentic’.

CS: I guess I could try and be clever by saying that there are a lot of real vs. artificial oppositions in his fiction, but again, it’s the geography, the ‘feel’, the atmosphere, moods and landscapes I try and convey. A kind of aural texture.

Image from Ballard Landscapes cover art.

SS: I’ve absorbed a lot of Ballard-inspired music and I see two distinct strands in sonic interpretations of his work. There’s the world-music camp that picks up on the lush, exotic, jungle tropes. Then there’s the ominous, insidious, unsettling, isolationist elements that appeal to a whole other subset of musicians. You’re aligned with the latter: do you see Ballard as an essentially dystopian, dark fantasist? Or do you, like Ballard himself, see something affirmative in this darkness — a willingness to ‘embrace the catastrophe’ in order to fulfil personal psychological needs?

CS: Maybe I’m just a superficial reader, maybe I don’t really go too deep in what writers are ‘saying’. Then again, if I did, would I lose that certain magic that writers like Ballard give me? I certainly pick up on the isolationism, and the alienation. With Ballard I think he totally disseminated the phrase ‘One Man Against The World’. He created situations where the man was turning his back against the world, or the world was turning its back on him, many variations that basically culminate in isolation. And sure, there are many dark areas in Ballard’s writing — that’s what inspires! To me, though, there’s a point where fiction and music (indeed, most of the ‘arts’) become lost in translation, as it were. I think when ‘deep’ questions are asked about the whys and wherefores, and ‘what does he really mean’, the whole point seems to become lost and diluted.

SS: Do you have a favourite Ballard novel or short story?

CS: That’s a really difficult question to answer. It’s like favourite music and albums — they change weekly, if not daily. Plus, due to his developing writing style, it would be unfair to choose. His earlier period was pretty different and whilst some of his icons and fixations were there, books like The Wind From Nowhere are more akin to John Wyndham. More often than not, I can rest assured that anything by Ballard will get my attention. I have recently been digging out a load of his novels to reread, some I haven’t read in over twenty years. At the time I bought it, I wasn’t too taken with Hello America, but after reading it again I realised what a fine book it is. I was probably overdosing on Ballard back then. I guess, if pushed, I’d have to pick either The Atrocity Exhibition and/or The Terminal Beach, purely for nostalgia, as they were the first ones I read and perhaps had the biggest impact. Then again, The Unlimited Dream Company was a voyage through one hell of a strange landscape… Must read that again soon.

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

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

SS: Is the composer Edward Artemiev an influence? You have a track called ‘Leaving Solaris’ on the Necropolis Line album, plus the Ballard track ‘Flight over Abandoned Village’ reminds me of that very displaced feel that Artemiev achieved in his soundtracks for Tarkovsky.

CS: Edward Artemiev hasn’t inspired me as much as his son, Artemiy, who has a label called Electroshock — I keep threatening to send him some material! Solaris was a film that did kind of inspire. I remember Brian Aldiss saying it was one of his fave films so I made a note and can remember watching it many years ago late one night. Stalker was on around the same time as well but I find it difficult sometimes with films like these, especially Stalker. The imagery is just outstanding, but you’re flitting between that and the subtitles so the full impact isn’t what it should be.

SS: You take your name from a Pete Sinfield lyric for King Crimson (‘Cousin Silas grew a beard, drew another flask of weird’). But you’re such a minimal stylist — so how did you name yourself from one of the most bloated songbooks in rock?

CS: It goes back to my mid-teens. I’d picked up a copy of (I think) Sounds, a music mag. With it came a free flexi disc, featuring Emerson Lake & Palmer. The first track was called ‘Brain Salad Surgery’, and then there was a fairly long piece with a load of cut ups/highlights of tracks from the actual album. It was my first foray into ‘proper’ rock music. I bought the album a couple of weeks later and then began a quest! I read up all there was on ELP, and began buying their previous albums. Along this voyage of discovery it came to light that Emerson had been in The Nice, Greg Lake in King Crimson and Carl Palmer did a brief stint with Arthur Brown. I bought some Nice, and Crimson, and then discovered Sinfield had been involved with early Crimson. These days I still listen to Crimson, and still reckon that those first few albums, In the Court of the Crimson King through to Islands, are peerless. I even bought Pete Sinfield’s only solo album, Still. Halcyon days! So, because I am an avid Crimson fan, and one of my fave albums is Lizard (which contains ‘Happy Families’, the song featuring, albeit briefly, Cousin Silas) it was a natural choice. To be fair it wasn’t me who chose the name. I had been ‘named’ something else, I can’t remember what it was but I know I wasn’t too keen on it. Cousin Silas was mentioned and I thought what the hell!

SS: I like Crimson, but I’ve never been able to get on with Sinfield’s imagery. A bit too pompous for me.

CS: Ironically enough, a few mates and myself were on about this the other night! Comparing Sinfield’s lyrics to Jon Anderson’s on ‘And You And I’ and Topographic Oceans, we wondered what ‘really’ was going on in those songs. I always think of Sinfield along the same lines as Fred Frith. On some releases, at face value, Frith ‘sounds’ like he’s not quite got the grip of how the guitar works, and yet on others he plays like a genius. Both of them experiment with their art (indeed, like Ballard in his condensed novels). And, to be fair to Sinfield, he has been behind some incredibly beautiful lyrics. His first foray, In The Court Of The Crimson King, has some great ones, In the Wake of Poseidon less so, and then we get Lizard, which is an album of opposites: some make sense, some don’t. Islands is kind of back on track again. Out of context (sometimes even in!) some make very little sense, but it’s the ‘whole’ that works. And don’t forget, he did write lyrics for Bucks Fizz and Cher!

SS: He even made an album with Eno, based on a Robert Sheckley book.

CS: Here, did you know Brian Eno has only ever acted once, and it was in Father Ted! He played, originally enough, Father Brian Eno.

SS: He did not!

CS: He did. I was watching a batch of Father Ted (the whole three series, actually) and in the last episode, ‘Going to America’, I saw his name on the final credits. I ran it back, and there he is, very briefly. I thought, well, I know he’s done a lot of soundtracks, I wonder how many times he’s actually acted. And if you go on IMDB, there’s only the one entry for him, in Father Ted. I was going to say that this was another thing that Ballard and Eno shared: that they’ve only ever acted the once. But with Ballard, on IMDB, there’s no entry for ‘acting’. However, I remembered the early Crash! thingy… it isn’t even mentioned on IMDB. I was sure he appeared (maybe as himself or a very, very close character) in an old black and white film. I remember him stood near a car, and an actress slightly out of shot in the background. So I looked on YouTube, and there it was. Followed the link, and had a good read on some website or other… Ballardian.com, I think it was. Tee hee.

SS: Will there be a Ballard Landscapes 3?

CS: Don’t tempt me! I honestly could spend the rest of my Silas years doing nothing but pieces inspired by Ballard. I feel as though I’ve only scratched the surface. Trouble is, where do you stop? With folks wanting more, and with no more on offer, would that enhance the stuff that’s already there? It’s the Fawlty Towers/Father Ted question: would more have diluted the lasting impact?

..:: TOP 5 BALLARD-RELATED TRACKS FROM COUSIN SILAS, AS CHOSEN BY SILAS HIMSELF

CS: When asked to name a top 5, I chose two and picked three others that are the most popular, judging by Last.fM and other download sites.

‘Vermilion Drift’ (from Ballard Landscapes 2)

CS: Obviously inspired by Vermilion Sands. I loved the way that you could go from the large dunescapes to being shut away inside one of those beach properties.

‘Concrete Islands’ (from Ballard Landscapes 2)

CS: The whole obsession with roads, motorways and cars has featured a lot throughout Ballard’s fiction. As I mentioned, I can remember them building the M62, and once in Madame Tussauds in Blackpool, as a kid, I went into the horror section and saw a mock up of an accident. It left a terrible impression on me for years. I think a motorbike had come off a flyover and hit a car. Nasty… For all that, there is a dark beauty about major roads and motorways when they’re quiet.

‘Empty Airport’ (from Ballard Landscapes 1)

CS: If I remember rightly, there are only two ‘sounds’ on here. I felt that any more would destroy the mood. Indirectly inspired by Ballard’s obsession with airports, and my idea of what one would be like when it’s empty.

‘Bikini Atoll’ (from Ballard Landscapes 1)

CS: I was well into the whole mystique of atomic bombs as a kid, where the results were contrasting in complete opposites: the destruction, with the strangely beautiful blast clouds (check out the mushroom blast of the first H bomb). The secrecy, the technology, the complete warping of nature was fascinating. It was only afterwards when the dust, literally, had settled, that it was revealed how these early tests had totally devastated these small islands of paradise. Earth Monkey put visuals to this track and it’s on Youtube. They did a phenomenal job.

‘Crashed Bomber With Weeds’ (from Falling: An Earth Monkey Sampler)

CS: Okay, so this isn’t on either of the Ballard albums. However, as you might gather from the title, it does have links with ol’ J.G. The Pennines run close to where I live, and from Sheffield, over towards Manchester, that whole backbone has, like iron filings to a magnet, attracted hundreds of air crashes over the years. In the valley, one of these sites witnessed the crash of a flying fortress. I remember looking at the crash site on a web page, and it was literally, a crashed bomber with weeds.

Also, it might be worth mentioning the Geographics album on Earth Monkey [also a free download]. I feel there is a definite link between the Ballard albums and Geo. As I said in the interview, a lot of the empathy I have towards Ballard’s landscapes (airports, airfields, roads, dune, beaches, etc.) come from my own experiences and memories. I try and ‘realise’ these on Geographics. Tracks like ‘The Fog From Immingham’, ‘Abandoned Airfield’, and ‘Cathedral Arch Of Trees (Lincolnshire)’ are all in effect realities, whereas by definition, the Ballard soundscapes are fictions…of a kind.

..:: MORE INFO
+ Cousin Silas at MySpace, including six unreleased tracks.

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

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

Thanks to the YouTube community for the uploads.

J.G. BALLARD INTERVIEWS
Ballard interviews.

J.G. BALLARD DOCUMENTARIES
Ballard docos.

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

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

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

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

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.

LEFT: Johnny in his Crime days (1977; photo by James Stark).

Johnny Strike, lead vocalist and guitarist with original San Fran punk legends Crime, has just released a new collection of short stories published by Rudos and Rubes. Entitled A Loud Humming Sound Came from Above, it features ‘Jimmy Ballard’s Hospital Review’, first published here on Ballardian in 2005.

Johnny certainly has form: he’s also been published in Ambit magazine, which, along with its editor Dr Martin Bax, has long been associated with Ballard (JGB was Ambit’s prose editor in the early 70s).

Here’s a recent interview with Johnny.

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Interview by Mike Holliday
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Michael Moorcock has been a prolific writer and editor for the last five decades. Born in London, he was editing his first magazine by the age of seventeen, and started writing genre fiction professionally as soon as he left school. In 1964 he took over the editorship of the British science fiction magazine New Worlds, gradually transforming it into an outlet for imaginative fiction that caught the contemporary zeitgeist. Under his editorship, New Worlds published many of J.G. Ballard’s most innovative stories, including several of those that would later be included in The Atrocity Exhibition.

Moorcock has known Ballard since the early 1960s, not only as editor and fellow writer, but also as a personal friend. For this interview, I asked him about Ballard’s influence, the significance of New Worlds, and his musical activities and latest writing projects.

Mike Holliday
————————————————————————————————————————————————

Can I start by asking how and when you first met Jim Ballard?

I think it was in E. J. Carnell’s office in Grape Street. Jimmy was working for one of the other MacLaren magazines (publisher of New Worlds, which Carnell then edited) — Chemistry and Industry, I think. We had a nodding acquaintance for a while. Then John Brunner and I (this would have been about 1960) decided to call a conference of SF writers, with a view to starting some kind of association. The meeting was very disappointing to me, Barry Bayley and Jimmy. We’d hoped to hear some stimulating stuff about, as it were, a new literature for the space age. Instead all these guys were interested in was ‘how to break into new markets — how to sell to TV’ and so on. United in our disappointment, we started meeting regularly once or twice a week, mostly at the White Swan in Knightsbridge, near where Jimmy was working. After I was married, we became even closer, seeing Jimmy, Mary and their kids pretty regularly. We all got on very well.

LEFT: Image taken from The Science Fiction Encyclopedia (Doubleday, 1979).

You’ve said in the past that both yourself and Ballard were reacting against what you saw as the sterility of modern literature, and especially the ‘English social novel’. Given this, what were your aspirations when you took over the editorship of New Worlds in 1964?

Well, Jimmy and I were both great fans of William Burroughs. We weren’t so much influenced by him as inspired by him. We were also interested in condensing narrative, of finding forms which would enable us to carry as many narratives as possible in as short a space. We were, I suppose, anti-modern rather than post-modern. Our ideas didn’t come out of academia. They were answers to the problems of working writers trying to find the best ways of dealing with our particular experience. Burroughs pointed the way, as we saw it. We talked about creating a new magazine which would run our more experimental work. When Jimmy did ‘The Terminal Beach’, Barry Bayley and I talked Carnell into running it in New Worlds. When I did ‘The Deep Fix’, Jimmy talked Carnell into running that. So we had a pretty good idea what we wanted to do. When I took over New Worlds our aspirations were reflected in those enthusiasms and the kind of work we’d started to do. I told Roberts and Vintner, the new publisher, what I wanted to do. They told me what I could do. So it was a slower process than we’d hoped. Also, we assumed there were dozens of writers out there champing at the bit, just waiting to submit the kind of stories we’d talked about. Sadly, it seemed at first there were only the three of us! It took a while to get the material we wanted. It even took time to formalise what we actually wanted to do. From the beginning Jimmy was my ‘star writer’ and complained I pushed him too hard — to write our first serial, for instance, which was Equinox, which became The Crystal World.

This photo is believed to have been taken in 1968 at the Brighton Arts Festival. From the left, Moorcock, Brian Aldiss, Mike Kustow (director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London), Ballard (photo courtesy Michael Moorcock).

Did Ballard fully share those aims or were there significant differences between you? And what do you think were the main differences between you and Ballard in the way you reflected your dissatisfaction with modern literature in your own writings?

The differences were mostly to do with personality, I think. I was a lot younger than Jimmy (almost ten years) and I’d had a lot of practical experience not only editing popular fiction magazines but changing them. I’d started with Tarzan Adventures, when I was 17, and had learned how to take an initially conservative readership with me. The same had happened on Sexton Blake Library, which I worked on when I was 19. I had to build the circulation as well as change the policy. That was one thing. Another was that Jimmy had, if you like, a narrower notion of the kinds of experimentalism he wanted to see. I really wanted to open the doors, as it were, to whatever was out there — not just writers who thought as Jimmy thought! I tended to write character-based fiction. Even Elric was that. When I came up with Jerry Cornelius — who was a personality and a technique combined — I don’t think Jimmy was altogether sure of what I was doing, partly because I tended to use comedy and had a far more sardonic voice. I was also far more politically focussed. I didn’t share Jimmy’s commitment to the Surrealists, though we’d both been impressed by the first Surrealist exhibition at the Whitechapel in the mid-fifties (I think). My influences included Firbank, whom Jimmy wasn’t interested in at all.

But these were very minor differences. What we both talked about all the time was the possibility of creating, out of the techniques and conventions of a certain kind of SF (most of which appeared in Galaxy magazine), something which could confront the subject matter and sensibility we felt wasn’t really being addressed by the conventions of Modernism. We felt that Modernism had had its day. We also thought we could reunite popular and ‘literary’ fiction through the medium of SF — or at least what we made of SF. Burroughs had shown us one way of doing this.

Jimmy had been through that Japanese prison camp. I had been through the Blitz. These were, if you like, extreme experiences, yet seemed to us to have a lot to do with how it was in the world we lived in. Neither of us were bothered by the H-Bomb, for instance, as such. Jimmy felt it had saved his life, probably. I saw it as keeping the peace; Brian Aldiss, too, saw the Bomb as having saved him being involved in the invasion of Japan. We were both impatient with the themes of the chattering classes of our day. I think our main differences were probably generational. Rock and roll was very much part of my life, as was the music, say, of Messiaen. Jimmy had no real interest in music at all. That said, we still had more in common than not. And still have, for that matter, for all that we developed very different styles.

LEFT: New Worlds for May/June 1964: the first issue edited by Moorcock, with Ballard’s story ‘Equinox’ and his article on William Burroughs both featuring prominently; the cover is by James Cawthorn.

In your account of New Worlds, reprinted in the recent anthology from Thunder’s Mouth Press, you wrote ‘Ballard remained the backbone of New Worlds’ policy. His influence was seminal and it was profound.’ Can you expand on why Ballard’s influence was so important for yourself and the other writers gathered round New Worlds during the 1960s?

Jimmy, as I said, was almost ten years older and had reflected longer on the issues which concerned us. Disch, Sladek, Langdon Jones, Spinrad and the rest were all roughly my age. Jimmy wasn’t so much ‘influential’ as ‘inspirational’, as I said in reference to Burroughs. Though we often disagreed superficially, he had already developed a vocabulary which identified problems I was still trying to identify and challenge. I got as much non-fiction out of him as I could. He was, I suspect, a bit disappointed that I didn’t follow his lead more closely. Indeed, he tended to be disappointed that all the writers didn’t do versions of what he was doing! But it was his presence, the quality of his work and the quality of his mind which was influential.

He inspired his contemporaries, like Aldiss and Brunner, for instance, to concentrate increasingly on contemporary imagery and issues. He was so far removed from even the best genre writers, such as Dick or Pohl and Kornbluth, that he was our finest model in showing new writers how to develop their own vocabularies. I didn’t want to write like Jimmy any more than the rest of our best writers, but he showed that it was possible to write idiosyncratically about what we saw as the urgent issues of the day, that genre conventions need only be employed where they were useful to the individual. Previous to that I think Jimmy would argue only Bradbury had managed that transformation. Bradbury was Jimmy’s inspiration before Burroughs. I had seen Bester and the Americans who influenced him as a similar inspiration. Neither of us could read what is generally called ‘Golden Age’ SF.

Honestly, I think it wasn’t much more than that Jimmy was there. And when he began publishing the stories which became The Atrocity Exhibition he showed other writers just how far you could go in your own direction. He showed that you could carry an entire narrative on an icon — especially an iconographic name, like Marilyn Monroe. We had also spoken about the new mythology of our times. Again, Jimmy showed how you could employ that mythology to present the reader with a complex fiction in a very small number of pages. Many people, in my view, misinterpreted this idea, or employed it very lazily. Jimmy brought a rigour to his work which was also inspirational. He helped raise the bar, if you like — raise the aspirations of the best writers. You can see this in writers like M. John Harrison, who was not especially influenced by Jimmy’s subject matter, but understood that he could aim to produce his very best work and know it would be published — at least in New Worlds.

You’ve already mentioned Burroughs. Which other authors did you most admire at that point, and how do you believe they influenced what yourself and Ballard were writing?

Burroughs, like Borges, showed us what it was possible to do. Neither Borges nor Burroughs were available to us until about 1960 or so. I first heard Borges’s stories related to me by a Spanish-speaking Swede while hitch-hiking from Uppsala to Paris. It was a while before City Lights, I think it was, brought out the first translations. Burroughs wasn’t a disappointment, when we finally met him, but Borges was. Burroughs pretty much lived as he wrote, while Borges was a rather conservative man with a keen interest in G. K. Chesterton. We were also great enthusiasts of noir thrillers and French nouvelle vague cinema. I was a huge fan of Camus, for instance. I’m not sure Jimmy read much existentialist stuff, but he loved the cinema produced in France at that time, as well as surrealist painting and Dada texts. Jarry was another inspiration to us. And I loved Boris Vian.

I think we were all part of a broad movement which was rejecting, as I said, the played out conventions of Modernism. We were looking for methods which worked for us. Some were eventually abandoned. Some were modified. We now live in a world where many of our innovations, techniques and subjects we considered our own, have become so commonly used nobody even knows where they originally came from. We’ve probably, therefore, achieved what we set out to do, to establish fresh conventions better able to deal with contemporary life.

Front row left to right: stripper Euphoria Bliss, Eduardo Paolozzi, Ballard, Michael Foreman (art editor of Ambit) and Dr Martin Bax, editor of Ambit. We don’t know who the chaps at the back are. This photo was taken in 1972, at the Royal Academy of Art in front of a Paolozzi sculpture that was being exhibited.

During the second half of the 1960s, Ballard was also closely associated with Ambit magazine, and with Eduardo Paolozzi. Was there much interplay between the rest of the New Worlds writers and Ambit or Paolozzi?

Well, I introduced Jimmy to Eduardo. I knew a number of pop artists mostly through Chris Finch, an art critic who began working for New Worlds around 1967, when I changed the format and paper stock so that we could run contemporary art as well as fiction. There was some interplay with Ambit because Jimmy became literary editor and commissioned work from me and Michael Butterworth, for instance. New Worlds was a commercial news-stand magazine. I brought specific experience to it and I had no interest in editing a ‘little magazine’. We had a big crossover audience with things like Oz and IT. We were appealing, I think, to a broader readership than Ambit, yet we took more risks. Ambit, ironically, seemed aimed at a narrower readership, more academic and consciously literary. Our original ideas had involved bringing a more confrontational, risk-taking fiction to a popular audience. I knew how to appeal to the wider market and New Worlds, especially in its larger format, did that. Circulation only became a problem when W.H. Smiths objected to our content, but we remained a news-stand magazine until Smiths found a way of busting us. Then we became a paperback quarterly.

Ironically we reprinted much of the material Smiths objected to in The Best of New Worlds and in New Worlds Quarterly, but since these came from major publishers (presumably) they didn’t object to distributing the same material! Ambit liked what we published and I think it’s fair to say that it picked up on what we were doing. We didn’t pick up much on what Ambit was doing. I have to say we were rather arrogant. We felt Ambit didn’t go far enough. Even when we ran Pynchon, for instance, we tended to think he was a bit weak compared to our most ambitious writers. I never thought his ‘Entropy’, which we ran, was anything like as well done as Pamela Zoline’s ‘The Heat Death of the Universe’. I liked Ambit, but to be honest, except where Jimmy had input, it seemed a bit cautious or — I don’t know, middle class? — in comparison to New Worlds. Only when Jimmy took over the fiction did it seem to perk up.

Eduardo Paolozzi’s cover for New Worlds, August 1967.

As well as more established writers such as yourself, Ballard, and Brian Aldiss, New Worlds published some of the earliest, and best, work of writers such as Tom Disch, John Sladek, M. John Harrison. How did you see your role as editor, and later publisher, to those newer writers?

I saw New Worlds as a resource for ambitious writers. A platform, if you like, from which they could fly wherever their ambition and intuition led them. I also knew that most commercial publishers are very cautious and hate taking risks and that they are encouraged to be a little braver if you put something in print first. In several cases we took work which had been turned down by mainstream publishers and only after we’d printed it did a new mainstream publisher accept it — ‘Report on Probability A’, ‘Camp Concentration’, ‘Bug Jack Barron’ and others were all rejected by the publishers who had expressed interest in them. After we ran them, established publishers decided to give them a go. In the case of Phil Dick, though we didn’t run any of his work in my New Worlds, we did publish the first serious assessments of him and Tom Maschler read these and decided to publish his work with Cape. Previous to that, Dick had scarcely appeared in England and only in very pulpish editions. Maschler also ‘poached’ Jimmy from Gollancz and would ask me my opinion of who, as it were, was hot. Michael Dempsey, originally with Hutchinson, was also inclined to publish writers he’d first read in New Worlds. We became good friends as a result.

In a recent interview with Ballardian, Iain Sinclair noted that Ballard is ‘seen as a great guru of the West, but the people who are doing that very rarely refer back to the earlier books. They go back maybe to Crash, because they know it’s a film, and they think that’s shocking, but … the real early energy and madness is still not appreciated.’ Which of Ballard’s books do you most admire?

I have to say it’s The Atrocity Exhibition closely followed by Empire of the Sun. For different reasons, of course.

Have you kept in touch with his later books, those that followed Empire of the Sun?

Not much, I must admit. I have no opinion of the later books I haven’t read, and feel very well-disposed towards them from what I’ve read about them. But I think it’s true that the real risk-taking books were mostly done some time ago. This isn’t a criticism, however. If anyone should be allowed to rest on their laurels, he should.

Earlier in your careers, both yourself and Ballard used what’s often referred to as non-linear narrative — most notably in the Jerry Cornelius stories and novels, and in The Atrocity Exhibition. But you’ve both largely forsaken those techniques for more traditional narrative styles — why do you think that is?

I’m not sure that’s wholly true of me. The Pyat books required a conventional narrative to convey the passage of real time, but I’ve continued to write Cornelius stories — see the recent Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius which has stories about Diana, 9/11 and so on. I’m currently working on a new short novel, Modem Times, which is a non-linear Cornelius story. Mother London was non-linear. Even some of the recent Elrics have been what you might call semi-linear! I don’t know why Jimmy has returned to his pre-Atrocity Exhibition mode in his recent books. No doubt he’s found that he can respond better to current stimuli with more linear forms. I’ve no theory about that.

LEFT: Jerry Cornelius, as conceived by Mal Dean for New Worlds…

What did Ballard think of your fantasy novels and the Jerry Cornelius writings?

Oh, honestly, I don’t think he really read much of them. He never quite ‘got’ Cornelius, though I think, oddly enough, that he understands what I was trying to do better now than when we were younger. He’s always been generous in his praise, but I don’t believe he’s ever read a lot of fiction. He’ll offer lavish praise, but it’s never very specific!

You’ve both written novels about, or set in, London: in your case, Mother London, King of the City, and parts of the Cornelius novels; in Ballard’s case The Unlimited Dream Company, Millennium People, Kingdom Come. Yet there are substantial differences between them; it seems to me that Ballard’s contain a sense of alienation so far as the city is concerned, whereas yours have more of a sense of belonging. Yet it’s Ballard that’s stayed in Shepperton, while you seem to have lived all over the place!

I don’t think Jimmy ever liked London much or he and Mary wouldn’t have moved to Shepperton when they did. He got out the first chance he had, partly, of course, because he thought they could give the children a better life. On the other hand I felt I owed it to my children to keep them at Holland Park Comprehensive where they could learn about life and survival! I couldn’t bear the idea of leaving until the whole city seemed to me to become commodified. Moving to the suburbs simply wasn’t an option for me. When I moved to Fulham around 1983 Jimmy welcomed me back and said, ‘You must come and visit me in the suburbs.’ I replied: ‘I’m in the suburbs, Jimmy. You’re in the bloody country.’ It felt odd, even then, not being in easy walking distance of the West End. I was born in the suburbs and got to the centre as soon as I could.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Jimmy has made something wonderful and original of his environment, but I can’t think of anything much worse than living in Shepperton. I’d wither and die there. Similarly, ‘my’ London is West and Central London, say as far as Holborn, while Iain Sinclair has made the East and the City his territory. No doubt we use the material we find wherever we settle, but we also have a rough notion of which environment suits us best. I’m tending to use Paris more and more, because I prefer contemporary Paris to contemporary London. In other circumstances, though, I’d be happy in LA or NY — any large city — but I’d rather live in the country if I couldn’t live in the city. I admire Jimmy for the creative use he’s made of that environment and his circumstances, but we’ve always been pretty much confirmed in our preferences. In both cases, we’ve recreated our environment in our own image, I’m sure.

Until 1980 Ladbroke Grove was the centre of my universe. As it was gentrified I went elsewhere for my stimulus, to places where, if you like, it was a little less comfortable to live (than modern Notting Hill); I was amused when Martin Amis and George Melly moved into an area they considered rough. When I first moved there, taxi drivers refused to take you north of Westbourne Grove and there were knife fights in the streets. I realised at one point that I was what Amis referred to as a ‘denizen’ of Notting Hill. For a while Queens Club Gardens, surrounded by council estates and largely hidden from the gentry, suited me, but once that was ‘discovered’ I had to move again. If I hadn’t started getting ill in Texas, I would have moved to LA or Paris long ago. I’m moving to Paris, but there’s nowhere in London I’d like to live any more. The parts of Paris I like still offer the mixture I prefer of classes and kinds of people.

Jimmy has no choice but to feel alienated. Consider his history and circumstances. I’ve never felt alienated at the heart of the city, only at its fringes. In a way I feel he, Iain and myself have divided up the city between us, each taking our preferred territory. Iain’s territory is almost as alien to me as Jimmy’s and Iain doesn’t know West London the way I do. I think, in his adoption of the suburbs, Jimmy is the most original of us. But it takes a Ballard to make Ballardland. I know of no other writer who could do what he’s done. I have a curiosity about centres of power, too, which has led me to live in LA as well as Texas — places with a highly developed mythology of their own which fascinates me. Jimmy tends to adapt his environment to his own, internal mythology.

What do you think of the film adaptations of Ballard’s work?

I haven’t much liked them. I thought Spielberg sentimentalised Empire of the Sun, while Crash was sensationalised. In both cases Ballard’s originals were vulgarised.

LEFT: …and Cornelius as conceived by Robert Fuest, director of The Final Programme.

When the film of your novel The Final Programme was released in 1973, you quickly disowned it. Simon reckons he read something where you vowed never to work in film or allow any of your books to be filmed again, yet today we hear news of a possible Elric adaptation. Why the change of heart?

I don’t think I swore never to work in film again. Indeed, I did the script for The Land that Time Forgot precisely to get experience script-writing and I’ve done various scripts (see Letters from Hollywood) over the years, none of which have been filmed. I have to admit that I find working in film even more boring than working in rock and roll. At my end, anyway. I realised that the reason people like Faulkner or Fitzgerald had so much trouble working in film was because there’s always someone else involved ready to mess with your ideas!

What I was reluctant to do was let a film-maker get hold of another of my major characters as they’d done with Jerry Cornelius and distort it, meaning that I would have a lot of trouble continuing to work — as happened after The Final Programme was released. I was out in California when I was convinced by the Weitz brothers that they could do a decent movie of Elric and I felt that movies were no longer in the hands of the effects department, that now the effects could be part of the narrative. Lord of the Rings showed that was now possible and the Weitz brothers approached me shortly after the first film (maybe more) had been out. I’m still a bit wary, though …

What fiction are you reading at the moment?

I just finished Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. And I’m about to read my daughter Kate’s first novel, The Waiting List.

Do you appreciate any current writers of imaginative fiction? Are there any out there that are as appropriate to the world today as Ballard was to the 1960s?

There are a lot of talented writers developing, if you like, what Ballard pioneered, but we’re not living in especially innovative times. There are a whole lot of reasons for that. I read quite a lot of new fiction and much of it is very good indeed. I’m probably not the best person, however, to say if there is work as appropriate to today as Ballard was to the 1960s. Chances are I wouldn’t recognise them. I do my best to read and encourage new writers, still. I have to admit, much as I admire many of them, no one has struck me with the impact that Burroughs and Ballard struck me with when I first began reading them.

The mighty Hawkwind, frequent collaborators of MM, and famously described by Moorcock as ‘like the crazed crew of a spaceship that didn’t quite know how everything worked but nevertheless wanted to try everything out’.

Unlike yourself, Ballard is notoriously uninterested in music, once saying ‘I think I’m the only person I know who doesn’t own a record player or a single record. … that gene seems to have skipped me.’ And yet there seems to be a cottage industry in discussing Ballardian music. Is there such a thing as ‘Ballardian music’? And why doesn’t there seem to be a ‘Moorcockian music’?!

I didn’t know there was Ballardian music. Maybe there isn’t Moorcockian music because I’m not working the same deep, singular vein in the same way. Or maybe it’s because I make my own music. That said, there are a bunch of bands who do claim to take inspiration from me: Cyrith Ungol, Blue Oyster Cult, Human League. In the past there’s been Hawkwind, Marc Bolan, Graham Bond, Deep Purple… My memory’s not great for band names… There was another Manchester band called An Alien Heat; Tygers of Pan Tang; The Damned…

Since I’m unfamiliar with the idea of ‘Ballardian music’ I’m not entirely sure how to answer! Roy Plumley, of Desert Island Discs, hated me and refused his producer’s request to put me on the show several times, yet he had Jimmy on. That always struck me as unfair, since Jimmy’s notoriously tone deaf, as he says. I felt a strong sense of injustice when Jimmy got to choose a bunch of records which I knew he wouldn’t listen to even if he was stranded on a desert island.

Moorcock on stage with the Blue Oyster Cult.

How did you come to write the novelisation of the Sex Pistols film, The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle? Did you see any parallels between the punk scene and the Ladbroke Grove/Hawkwind scene you were so much a part of?

I knew various punk bands or members of bands, though not especially well. Punks were just urban guerillas, if you like, with different haircuts. Hawkwind/Motorhead were about the only bands the punks still reckoned to have kept the faith, as it were, so I got on well with them when we happened to meet. I’d go to a lot of gigs. I had a nodding acquaintance with people like Siouxsie, whom I liked a lot. So when Maxim Jakubowski of Virgin Publishing suggested I do The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle I had no problems with the idea — especially since I’d always seen Irene Handle as Mrs Cornelius and I wanted to give Glen Matlock a bit better press than he was getting from some of the others at that time.

LEFT: Cover for the Deep Fix single ‘Dodgem Dude’.

Is your band Deep Fix still active?

No. From time to time we talk about doing a tribute band version of ourselves …

Why did Deep Fix record just the one album — New World’s Fair?

Though we had a three-album deal with UA, I got a bit bored with what we were doing. Eventually, Pete Pavli and I began a working partnership which put out a few tracks, mostly with Flicknife, but we had problems with producers, who didn’t really understand what we were trying to do, which was a lot different to the standard bass-and-drums-down-first sort of production and we felt we were wasting our time. That bit of work I did for Brian Eno, on Robert Calvert’s Lucky Leif and the Longships, made me want to work with him, but he went to the States soon afterwards and various circumstances meant that I lost interest. I always gave writing priority.

Are you still making your own music these days?

A bit, for my own pleasure. But I have painful neuropathy and my old fingers aren’t what they were. I started playing the harmonica more recently!

Michael Moorcock and J.G. Ballard at a signing for Empire of the Sun (presumably in 1984) at Forbidden Planet. We’ve no idea who the enthusiastic interloper is in the middle (photo courtesy Michael Moorcock).

How do you find the experience of interacting with your fans on the Moorcock’s Miscellany website? What prompted you to take such an active role with your readership?

I always have liked interacting with readers. I enjoy signings, readings and events of that sort. We used to mix with the audience when I did music. It’s just my nature. I suppose I’m a dyed in the wool populist. I’ve never felt apart from my readers. They, after all, allow me to earn a decent living. Why shouldn’t I like them? Attitudes like that are entirely to do with temperament, however. Some people feel intimidated by their audiences or intruded upon. I don’t. While I’m essentially a pretty solitary person, as Jimmy is, I find the net to be a great substitute for dropping into the pub. One can socialise without becoming too involved, if one wants to. When I’m working, of course, I tend to ignore the net completely. As it is, I still only use it as a kind of extension of my old methods. The WP is my typewriter and Google is my Encyclopaedia Britannica and OED. I don’t use my computer to play games, for instance, and very rarely to play or find music. Oh, it’s also my radio, of course, since I can’t get BBC radio in Texas!

In stark contrast to you, Ballard has often said he doesn’t use the internet. Has he never been tempted in the slightest?

I really don’t think he likes it. He’s perhaps a tad less suspicious of it than he was. But he’s by no means the only author I know who doesn’t have email or use the net. Harlan Ellison is another. Until very recently Iain Sinclair didn’t have email. Some authors don’t even own electric typewriters. Jimmy recently started using his old manual again! Mine is standing by in a corner, even as I write! You get settled in a preferred way of working and living. Jimmy has made his own world at Shepperton where his house is rather famously still fixed in the 60s and 70s! For my part, I always have to have my desk and office pretty much in the same configuration I’ve had it in since 1965. I completely sympathise with his preference. If a games company in Austin hadn’t come along and set me up with state-of-the-art equipment a few years ago I’d probably still be looking for spare parts for my old IBM Selectric. As it happened, I took to the net naturally and with great joy, but that wouldn’t have come about if that company hadn’t wanted me to write a game and a movie for them. (That was what became Silverheart — EA decided it was too expensive to produce).

As a writer, you’re famously prolific. I understand there’s a collection of your non-fiction writings in preparation, Into the Media Web, to be published by Savoy Books. How did that come about?

It was Savoy’s idea to get John Davey to collect my non-fiction and publish it. I haven’t seen the collection yet and probably won’t until it appears. Personally I didn’t think there was enough of my non-fiction worth reprinting, but they seemed to think there was. It will be strange to see so much of my forgotten past coming up in print.

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m working on the Jerry Cornelius story I mentioned, Modem Times. Coincidentally, Jimmy has been very insistent on my having Jerry return to take a look at modern London, which he does, though it’s also a return to 60s London, a sort of reassessment. My publisher has suggested I write a memoir of the 60s. I’m not sure I want to, really, but I’m making notes. I’m still working on the memoir of Mervyn Peake and having a bit of a hard time. Certain memories are very painful and Mervyn’s decline and death is still hard for me to get a grip on. I’m writing an Elric story for the new Weird Tales, for the fun of it. I have a set of Seaton Begg stories, The Metatemporal Detective, coming out in September or October. I’m supposed to be doing a Conan comic for Dark Horse. I’m probably going to give reviewing a bit of a rest, unless something really engages me.

Ballard and Moorcock at the London Hilton, September 2006. We suspect this is not JGB’s usual haunt of the Heathrow Hilton, but the one in central London (photo courtesy Linda Moorcock).

Like Jimmy, I think I’ve grown angrier and more radical in most respects as I’ve grown older. We’re both as disgusted with what’s going on in politics and business as we ever were. I just did a ‘fighting editorial’ for Interzone, calling on writers to take the kind of risks Burroughs (from whom Interzone took their title) took. The kind of risks Ballard took, for that matter. We’re living in cautious, retroactive times and I think we need to make an effort to resist what we too easily accept as the zeitgeist. I know this is also how Jimmy feels. I don’t think either of us is especially nostalgic or querulous, but it’s comforting to know that when we get together we’re a couple of Angry Old Men with as much invested in the present and, indeed, future as we ever had.

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Thank you, Michael Moorcock.
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..:: MORE INFO
+ Moorcock’s Miscellany

..:: BALLARDIAN INTERVIEW WITH J.G. BALLARD
+ Rattling Other People’s Cages

..:: INTERVIEWS IN THIS SERIES
+ Mac Tonnies on Ballard
+ Simon Reynolds on Ballard
+ Toby Litt on Ballard
+ Geoff Manaugh on Ballard
+ Iain Sinclair on Ballard
+ John Foxx on Ballard
+ Bruce Sterling on Ballard

..:: TRANSCRIPTIONS OF TALKS GIVEN BY J.G. BALLARD
+ An Evening with J.G. Ballard
+ J.G. Ballard Live in London

Simon Reynolds is one of the most recognisable music critics around — or at least his style is, not least for its willingness to tackle pop music as an art form worthy of sustained intellectual discourse rather than as a fleeting moment of adolescent flash. Reynolds breaks new ground, melding unbridled enthusiasm with a robust theoretical framework in a body of work that is thrilling for its eclecticism alone: he’s never less than compelling writing about hip hop, Britney or rave, as he is about grunge, prog or grime.

Reynolds has also invoked Ballard in past interviews regarding his own formative influences, so the stage seemed set for Simon to appear here on Ballardian. I wanted to chat to Reynolds when Rip It Up was published, but the moment slipped away for various reasons. But now, with the release of Simon’s latest collection, Bring the Noise, here’s a chance to put that right.

Simon Sellars.

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LEFT: Ballard (photo courtesy Fine Line Features).

SS: You were into Ballard before you were into music. What attracted you to his writing?

SR: A better emphasis would be to say I was into science fiction before I was into rock music, and that Ballard was one of my favourite SF writers. Obviously I always loved music but it was things my parents had introduced me to, like Beethoven, or Hollywood musicals, plus stray things I’d heard on the radio like the Beatles. And then aged fifteen or so I was inducted into that whole rockist apparatus of taking music – pop culture, youth culture, rock criticism – seriously. And the thing I was into on a fanatical level immediately before entering rock culture was science fiction; the new fanaticism displaced the prior fanaticism — not immediately, there was an overlap — but eventually totally. At one point I wanted to be a SF writer and then the next major ambition I had was to be a music journalist. Which is where I stuck!

I kinda half-forgot about Ballard along with other SF writers that were key for me: Frederick Pohl & CM Kornbluth, Alfred Bester, John Brunner, Philip K. Dick, to name just a few. Ironically this was at a time, the very end of the 70s and the early 80s, when Ballard’s influence was as strong as it’s ever been in music, with postpunk.

SS: Are you still sweet on Ballard today?

SR: It’s quite a common syndrome for people to grow out of SF and suddenly drop it as juvenile, and I’d always swore I’d not be one of those, but it happened. Really though it was because a whole set of other obsessions crowded SF out: music, rock journalism, politics and philosophy, critical theory. It’s really in the last decade or so that I rediscovered an interest in SF and particularly in Ballard, who now seemed to me to be clearly the most advanced writer and thinker in that field. I also read more of his critical thinking, his interviews and journalism, and become more and more impressed by him. He seems a much more towering figure now than he did when I first read him as a teenager.

The coveted Penguin editions (designer David Pelham).

SS: Which of his books rocked your world?

SR: In some ways the one that grabbed me most and has yet to relinquish its hold was the first one I read, The Drowned World. Penguin used to do these great paperback editions of SF and they had one series with really evocative paintings – glossy, garish, almost hyper-realist – on the covers. The Drowned World, The Drought and The Wind From Nowhere were all in that series and looked particularly good [ The Terminal Beach was in there too; SS ]. But with The Drowned World, the severity and fixatedness of Ballard imagination was what hooked me, and just the idea of the protagonist who – as with all the Ballard cataclysm novels – is perversely drawn towards the heart of the catastrophe, goes the opposite direction to everybody else, and really finds his true self in the transformed landscape. That really grabbed me. Also, the whole idea of the world you knew being drastically transformed… I lived near London, in a commuter town thirty miles north of the capital, and went up to the city quite frequently, so to imagine it submerged was exciting.

SS: Has he influenced your work in any way — as a cultural critic, say, rather than stylistically?

SR: Not really. The influences on my writing and thinking come from a totally different place, although there’s certain affinities maybe. A sense of the power of the irrational, these atavistic drives pulsing inside culture. I’ve long felt that pop music is driven by some pretty ambivalent, sometimes outright antisocial or malevolent energies. But I’ve probably derived that more from various French thinkers and Nietzsche, also from certain rock writers. And also just listening closely and honestly to my own responses to music. Still you could see that idea of music as fitting a Ballardian worldview to some degree. The idea of human culture as fundamentally perverse.

There’s another parallel actually, which applies to SF in general as well as Ballard in particular: that’s the extreme degree of self-reflexivity that you get within rock criticism. Or at least the zone I move within and which has now broken out into the blog world. It’s very similar to SF, or at least how SF was when I started reading it, which would have been in the years coming out of the whole New Wave of SF. SF writers seemed to have been really into analysing the genre, talking about what defined it as a field of writing and how that related to other forms. And that was largely because – just like rock criticism – its status was contested, it was very much an underdog genre that didn’t get the respect or acceptance from the literary establishment, give or take a Kingsley Amis or an Anthony Burgess who talked about being SF fans and had a go at the genre themselves now and then.

LEFT: New Worlds; new wave.

So SF, like rock writing, had this mixture of inferiority complex and superiority complex. SF writers loved to see SF as the one really crucial, relevant, truly contemporary form of literature. A literature of ideas, which was exactly what drew me to, the element of speculation, as well as the estrangement effect. Rock critics are just the same: they both crave that validation from the mainstream of arts criticism but they also kinda like being the renegade form. As well as novels and story collections, I would sometimes read books of critical essays by SF writers. It seemed like an exciting little subculture, especially the New Wave writers who always seemed to be having workshops and conferences! Ballard exemplifies that meta aspect of SF, although he goes beyond it to be just a great cultural critic.

SS: You’ve remarked elsewhere that his short stories have more appeal to you than the novels.

SR: After the disaster novels I think I read the mid-Seventies urban breakdown ones like Concrete Island and High-Rise, both of which I liked a lot, and also a couple of collections of short stories. And it’s the Ballard shorts that, with my critic’s hat on, I think are his supreme achievement – so magisterial, so distilled and precise and atmospheric and unsettling. In fact, my getting back into Ballard came about through a collection originally published in 1978 but reissued by Picador USA in 2001, The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard. My wife was working as a book reviews editor and it turned up in her mail and I was like, ‘I’m having that’. So many of the classic Ballard short stories are in there, some I’d read before in The Terminal Beach and similar collections I’d have got out of Berkhamsted Library as a teenager. There was one called Low-Flying Aircraft I particularly liked, especially the first long story in it, almost a novella [ 'The Ultimate City' ], about a young man who lives in a near-future where it’s very green-conscious and placid and dull so he goes to the deserted city and starts up urban life again, gets the generators going, and misfits start to flock in from the eco-communes and garden towns, but of course it all goes haywire.

The Best Short Stories collection has a few things from the Atrocity Exhibition era, and writing and reading them as a thirty-something I appreciated them more. But it wasn’t so much the experimental Atrocity-era stuff as the stories he did that are quite close to conventional hard-science SF, but with that extra dimension of interiority and the collective unconscious – all the inner space, psychological aspects that you associate with the New Wave of SF. Back in the day, I didn’t really get on with the experimental writing side of Ballard. I still haven’t read all of The Atrocity Exhibition I’m ashamed to admit, and only a few years ago finally read Crash all the way through. I’d had a go as a teenager but failed. The impetus to finally read it came from doing the book on postpunk, Rip It Up and Start Again, wanting to understand why it was such a big influence on certain bands. And for sure, it’s fantastic writing, and fantastic as thought, too.

There’s certain SF writers I can’t get on with, like Samuel Delaney, often the ones who are doing overtly experimental writing. Nor am I that crazy for the side of Philip K. Dick that’s all about multiple levels of reality, what is real and what’s hallucination. So similarly I prefer Ballard’s post-cataclysm novels and his short stories to the Atrocity Exhibition type stuff. I think maybe it’s that I like that thing where realism as a literary mode is applied to something with a SF or alternate history premise. In a way, I prefer the side of Ballard that relates to a writer like John Wyndham than the side that relates to Burroughs. I like that dour, flat Britishness confronted by something alien or catastrophic.

SS: You mention the influence of Ballard on postpunk. As someone who grew up with this music, Ballard was always a vague referent on the edge of my consciousness, glimpsed through obscure Cabaret Voltaire or Ultravox! interviews, so I appreciated the way Rip It Up took the time to unpack the connection. But what about today’s crop?

SR: Ballard allusions had become a bit of a cliché by the time I started writing about music professionally in the mid-80s – I did a piece on this post-Cabaret Voltaire, Sheffield outfit called Chakk and gave the singer a slightly hard time for overdoing the Ballardisms. Since then I’m hard pressed to think of Ballardisms coming through in music, although this very year The Klaxons put out an album called Myths of the Near Future [ also the title of a Ballard short-story collection ]. But the Ballard homage seems fairly cosmetic in this case.

SS: But there’s also kode9 and Burial, right? Every second review I read of their albums last year seemed to invoke the dreaded word ‘Ballardian’ – it seemed to become as much a cliché as it was during the postpunk period.

SR: That relates more to Spaceape’s contribution to the Kode 9 album, Memories of the Future. His lyrics and delivery – they’re a bit like Linton Kwesi Johnson reading excerpts from The Atrocity Exhibition. With Burial, the connection is that his album is supposed to be a concept record about South London becoming flooded when the Thames Barrier breaks in the global warmed near future. I think Katrina and New Orleans is more likely to be the inspiration, but there’s an obvious parallel there with The Drowned World.

LEFT: Spaceape and kode9 (photo via 3Voor12).

There is also an urban psychogeography thing going in Burial’s music (and dubstep generally) that recalls Ballard in Crash. The album draws a lot from South London, this interzone of semi-suburbia between Brixton, where the tube line stops and Croydon which is on the periphery of London, maybe a dozen miles from the centre. So it’s a hinterland probably not unlike the outer London areas near Heathrow where Ballard situated Crash. A real anomie zone, but possessed of a certain desolate beauty. Burial has also talked of putting his tunes through ‘the Car Test’, driving around South London playing the music in his car to see if it has the atmosphere he wants, the ‘distance’ in the music he’s looking for.

People have also compared Burial to Joy Division in terms of that bleak urbanism thing, and Martin Hannett, their producer, used to do a similar thing: drive around Manchester’s most brutally industrialised zones in his car, stoned, listening to Joy Division, PiL, Pere Ubu.

SS: You casually injected something interesting into our correspondence — that you see Ballard and Brian Eno as ‘the two greatest British thinkers of the second half of the 20th Century.’ I’m now going to pin you down and ask you to elaborate.

SR: That’s slightly over the top, isn’t it? I wonder if it really stands up. Then again,
as thinkers specifically about culture, in the British context, I can’t honestly think of too many rivals. Certainly as people who came out of the Sixties but came into their prime – as artists and as influences – in the Seventies, they are these towering figures, I think.

One of my fantasy projects that I toyed with for a while was a book on Ballard and Eno. They do seem of a type in some ways and they are patron saints of postpunk to an extent. But the project founders immediately owing to the fact that they are so eloquent about what they do and such brilliant writers, that there’d be zero role for any critic or commentator. There’d be very little to mediate or interpret, as they’ve said it all, so much better. They know what they are doing. I suppose you could historicize them, contextualise them. Ballard with the milieu he emerged out of in the Sixties, which was based around the ICA, right? And Eno with the UK art schools.

In some ways the affinity seems as much temperamental as anything ideas-based. There’s this wonderful Englishness. You imagine they would get on like a house on fire, trading ideas over whisky and soda in the Shepperton living room. One thing they both do is take ideas from science and set them loose in culture, find applications. Ballard is like a British McLuhan, except much better because he’s a far better writer, and a better thinker too – more original, more convincing. Eno is almost like a British Barthes, in some ways.

SS: Explaining his collage method in The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard said he wanted to produce ‘crossovers and linkages between unexpected and previously totally unrelated things, events, elements of the narration, ideas that in themselves begin to generate new matter.’ To me this seems strikingly similar to Eno’s formulation of generative music.

SR: I’m not sure about that. It seems more related to Burroughs and perhaps also to Ballard’s artistic debt to Surrealism, which I really appreciated a few years ago when I read him talk about it in that RE/Search collection of interviews. I liked the fact that J.G. would stick up for Dali and the rest. Surrealism and Dada is big teenage impact thing for a lot of us I think, until we learn to say ‘ooh Chagall, so much better than Dali.’

Eno’s generative music is much more cybernetics meets Zen, emptying out the authorial ego, setting up a process and then withdrawing. I don’t think with Ballard there’s that Eastern mystical aspect. With Ballard’s there’s always more of a violence bubbling up from below aspect, even though the writing is cold and controlled. Actually if Eno is a British Barthes, a languid sensualist, I’d say that Ballard is a British Bataille. I can also imagine Ballard enjoying Camille Paglia’s writing, which I can’t imagine Eno doing – it would be too passionate for him.

LEFT: One Brain (Eno portrait by Paris Rebel Richens).

SS: Alright, then, try this: both Ballard and Eno inverted, retooled, then abandoned the genre they started out in. As Richard Sutherland wrote, ‘to call Ballard’s work SF is a bit like describing Brian Eno’s music as rock ‘n’ roll.’

SR: Yes and no. Eno is like the culmination or extension of certain ideas within rock to the point where they verge on un-rock. But when he started out there were obvious debts to Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, a certain English kind of psychedelia. And he could do the ‘idiot energy’ thing with ‘Third Uncle’. I think he shifts the emphasis so it’s the noise or the mechanistic insistence of rock that’s retained and amplified, but he sheds the passion, the ego drama, the theatre of rebellion. Later there is the entropy of ambient, which as much as it’s un-rock is also the furthest extension of the psychedelic principle.

As for Ballard and SF – I see him having lots in common with the best people in the genre. I mentioned John Wyndham, who’s under-rated I think, and then people like Dick, Bester, Pohl. But really there are lots of SF people, especially in the Sixties and Seventies, who weren’t doing corny pulp nonsense. To elevate Ballard by divorcing him from his genre is unnecessary. The methodology in the disaster stories and the bulk of the short stories is totally SF.

SS: Spoken like a true SF fanboy! OK, as you said earlier, people tend to drop SF as ‘juvenile’; similarly, people often say that writers should grow out of writing about music. How do you maintain your interest?

SR: It doesn’t take any effort! It’s a compulsion, nothing I can do about it. Although there are lull years – and indeed the last few years have been slimmer pickings than for a long while. The Nineties were an insanely exciting time and that spilled over into the early part of this decade but now it feels like a number of sonic-cultural narratives have petered out. Hip hop in particular seems to be in deadlock. But still I can’t shake this gut belief that popular music is the place where the most exciting cultural energies and ideas get played out.

But maybe this feeling is just a hangover from having grown up during the postpunk era and then living through the hip hop Eighties and rave Nineties. Maybe that conviction can no longer be substantiated by what music is coming up with. It could be the ‘vibe’ has moved elsewhere. Certainly the art world seems to have resurged as a place where there’s a lot of energy and a lot of really interesting conversations are taking place. And television I think still has that function where it is where the society examines itself and talks about the issues. It generates an insane amount of rubbish but it’s always interesting, revealing rubbish. And the quality television is really our modern high culture I think, stuff that nearly everybody is plugged into and where a collective conversation goes on.

But if this is the case – that pop music is no longer where it’s at – I would be saddened because I think it’s a much more democratic zone than the art world or films or TV. The start-up costs are so much lower.

SS: You mentioned the blog world earlier; all-pervasive connectivity means that everyone’s a critic, these days. Any thoughts on that?

SR: Blogging’s too huge a subject really, because it goes into the whole nature of what music criticism is and what it’s for, and also the whole scarily transforming nature of the media, the future of magazines. But I was very excited about the music blogging scene when it emerged in the first years of this decade, and got even more excited when I joined in – there was some really great energy flowing back and forth in this circuit of blogs that I participated in, which is really just one small ‘hood in the universe of music blogs, itself a modest galaxy in the vast blogosphere.

Now I’m significantly less excited, while still finding more to read and be inspired by in the non-professional blog world than in music magazines. What I enjoy most, and what has dimmed quite a bit since ‘the golden age’ a few years ago, is the conversational aspect – people riffing on other people’s riffs, that whole argumentative side. But with a few exceptions people seem to have retreated back into a more solitary, monologue-like thing.

SS: As someone who has successfully integrated critical theory with writing on music, what do you think of the growing incursion of theory into blog-based music criticism?

SR: Is it growing? The only music blogs I can think of that go for real hardcore theory are k-punk and… that’s it really. There are blogs that are primarily philosophy and/or art blogs who also deal with music now and then, like Sit Down Man, You’re A Bloody Tragedy or Poetix, but I don’t think people would think of them as music blogs. Actually k-punk isn’t just a music blog either, although music is a privileged area of culture for Mark. You get music blogs that do music criticism in a high-powered form or go deeply into the minutiae of subgenres and esoteric knowledge. But I can’t think of that many who are applying concepts from critical theory.

I’d make a distinction here between theorising about music and using critical theory and applying it to music. The former goes on a lot, obviously – and you could argue that any critical position is at some level theoretical, it relates to an idea of what music should be and how it works. But there is plenty of theorisation about music going on. What I don’t see a lot of is people using ideas from critical theory or philosophy and so forth and using them to explicate pop music. Even I don’t do nearly as much as I used to. But I certainly still generate theorems and analytical ideas that go beyond the thumbs up/thumbs down consumer guidance aspect.

SS: OK, but it wasn’t so long ago that if you mentioned the word ‘scopophilia’ in a film review, for example, people would have thought you were referring to what Richard Gere allegedly did to some unfortunate gerbils (this actually happened to me — the misunderstanding, not the gerbil abuse). Now, if you drop it in a review, people groan because they’ve heard it all before; the word’s become such a cliché that you’re automatically a bit of a poser for using it. In music criticism, ‘hauntology’ seems to be gaining similar mass. But you were there from the start. So, what is hauntology, in musical terms, and why has it lit up the blogosphere the way it has?

SR: Well I think it was me who first broached the idea of ‘hauntology’ as a rubric for this loose network of contemporary bands who were playing with the cultural imagery of ghosts, spectres, the uncanny, the return of the cultural repressed, memory, and so forth, while also trying to make genuinely eerie music. But I didn’t particularly intend for there to be a tight correlation between Derrida’s concept of hauntology and what these bands were trying to do. It was just a convenient and cute term, ‘haunt’ referencing ghosts and ‘-ology’ suggesting the image of crackpot scientists working in the sound laboratory. There are certain affinities with Derrida’s ideas as elaborated in Spectres of Marx.

LEFT: Mordant logo.

Some of the groups – specifically The Focus Group and Belbury Poly of the Ghost Box label, and Mordant Music – are concerned with ideas of a lost futurism, a spirit of utopian idealism that seems to have faded away in recent decades but which they associate with post-WW2 modernism in architecture, the early days of electronic music, grand public works of amelioration and edification. So there’s a kind of radical nostalgia, a looking back to looking forward. But Spectres of Marx was a very specific intervention in a tradition of philosophy and political thought, and I feel there’s nothing to be gained by aligning what these groups are doing with Derrida’s ideas in some tight doctrinal way. Especially as none of them have read Derrida as far as I can tell!

The word ‘hauntology’ has got a lot of traction, though, because it chimes in with things that are going on in modern art (the trend for work based around the concept of the archive and dealing with questions of collective memory) and in academia (with the boom of studies related to the spectral and uncanny, work on ruins, remains and rubbish, mourning and memory work, nostalgia for the future). Even just on the level of the word ghost or its homonyms popping up across popular culture in countless band names, album titles, novels and non-fiction books, et al – something is going on.

With the ghostified bands specifically, I think what has grabbed some of us (apart from the music, which is fantastic) is that these are musicians who have tons of ideas both musical and non-musical. They tend to be very well read and thoughtful, real autodidacts with a passion for esoteric knowledge and bizarre historical arcana. They are making connections between music, film, books, TV, the occult, history, design… and their records also have a highly developed visual aesthetic. For me personally, a big thing is the Britishness of Ghost Box and Mordant Music, the way they are plumbing the nation’s collective unconscious. I’m become very interested in nationality, which is not to be confused with nationalism.

SS: To close, let’s discuss your latest collection, Bring the Noise, which has just been released. It collects your writings on alternative rock and hip hop — why did you bring these disparate musical enclaves together?

SR: I felt it was time to do a collection of all this stuff I’ve been writing for the last 20 years, but there was a problem in that Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock, which is an essay collection published in 1990, corralled a lot of the late-80s stuff I did, and then Energy Flash (aka Generation Ecstasy), while not a collection, is based on the rave and electronic music journalism I did in the Nineties, there’s a lot of remixing and sampling from my own pieces. So I didn’t want to overlap too much with Blissed Out or Energy Flash, and what was left was all the writing I did on alternative rock and on hip hop, which I wrote about almost the moment I started out professionally in 1986 – I wrote about Schoolly D, interviewed LL Cool J and Public Enemy, and so forth. And then a theme leap out at me, looking at the relationship between bohemian rock and black street music — this alternately fraught and fertile relationship, with the white underground sometimes trying to catch up with or incorporate ideas from hip hop, and sometimes going its own way. And hip hop referring to not just rap but the whole spectrum of street sounds: dancehall, R&B, grime. There are some pieces on rave in there but usually where it relates to the black/white theme. So it’s Bring the Noise: 20 Years of Writing About Hip Rock and Hip Hop. The ‘hip’ before ‘rock’ is kinda jokey but also accurate, in a way, since nearly all the rock bands in the book are or were hip in some sense, like Nirvana or PJ Harvey. Whereas I’ve nothing on, say, Bon Jovi in there!

It’s actually longer than 20 years since the first piece is from Monitor in 1985 and the last is from 2006. I have been around for ever, churning the stuff out. This book is 400 pages long and it is truly a tiny fraction of my output. But this particular slice through the corpus tells a story; it does work as a kind of history of the last couple of decades of pop culture. I’ve brought out the narrative and the theme by having little commentaries after the pieces that make connections and thread things together. So I think you could read it and get a pretty good picture of what happened in music, starting from when Rip It Up and Start Again ends, 1985, and going up to the present.

——————————————————————————————————
Thank you, Simon Reynolds.
——————————————————————————————————

..:: MORE INFO
+ blissblog: Simon’s blog
+ Simon’s Rip It Up blog
+ Simon’s Bring the Noise blog
+ Blissout, Simon’s dance-music archive

..:: INTERVIEWS IN THIS SERIES
+ Bruce Sterling on J.G. Ballard
+ John Foxx on J.G. Ballard
+ Iain Sinclair on J.G. Ballard
+ Toby Litt on J.G. Ballard

All the evidence accumulated over several decades cast a critical light on the high-rise as a viable social structure, but cost-effectiveness in the area of public housing and high profitability in the private sector kept pushing these vertical townships into the sky against the real needs of their occupants.

——————————————————
J.G. Ballard. High-Rise (1975).
——————————————————

At some stage, I hope to post something on the work of Robert Calvert, who wrote lyrics and sang for Hawkwind on and off from the early to late 70s. Calvert was rubbing shoulders with Michael Moorcock, and his lyrics and poetry reveal a strong influence from both Moorcock and Ballard.

For now, here are Calvert’s lyrics for the Hawkwind track ‘High-Rise’, from the PXR5 album (1979), based mostly on Ballard’s High-Rise, but with a bit of help from the JGB story ‘The Man on the 99th Floor’ (1962) as well:

Flat block
Of two dimensions
Neon totem pole to the sky
Keeping scores of people stacked up so high
Above the ground
But all they can hear is the sound
Of the wind in the antennae
It’s a human zoo
A suicide machine

High rise
Living in a high rise
High rise
Living in a high rise
High rise
Living in a high rise
High rise
All stacked up in a high rise block

Childhood
Of concrete cube shaped
A flypaper stuck with human life
Caged up rage
Swarming all the time
Tear out the telephones
Rip up the pages of directories
And wreck all these
High speed lifts and elevators
Be a sabotage rebel without a cause

High rise
Living in a high rise
High rise
Living in a high rise
High rise
Living in a high rise
High rise
All stacked up in a high rise block

Starfish
Of human blood shape
Tentacles of human gore
Spread out on the pavement from the 99th floor
Well somebody said that he jumped
But we know he was pushed
He was just like you might have been
On the 99th floor of a suicide machine

High rise
Living in a high rise
High rise
Living in a high rise
High rise
Living in a high rise
High rise
All stacked up in a high rise block”

——————————————————————————————————
‘High-Rise’ (lyrics by Robert Calvert; music by Simon House).
——————————————————————————————————

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

Biography
Question: What is Super-Cannes?

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

Last night I attended the second (and last, for now) screening of Philip Brophy’s 50-minute film Northern Void, billed as a “live cinema performance” accompanied by the real-time sonics of Ph2 (Brophy and Philip Samartzis). Northern Void is set along Plenty Rd, in the northern Melbourne suburb of Preston — specifically a three-kilometre, decaying industrial zone. The film is divided into three sections: The Present, set in 2013; The Future (2085); and The Post-Future (3079).

“The Present”: Northern Void (dir. Philip Brophy).

In “The Present”, a series of tableaux unfold: factories, blank business parks, decrepit office buildings, brutalist petrol stations. They look like still shots, but close examination reveals subtle motion: clouds inch along; a bird flaps in the distance. There are no people. The shots are looped; almost imperceptibly, the clouds return to their original position. Is this a deliberate aesthetic? Or a a necessary suturing to prevent the intrusion of offscreen elements irrelevant to the plot? In any case, it’s very effective: nothing happens. Everything remains the same, trapped in an eternal loop. The sound design begins with processed field recordings: birds, insects, magnified to unbearable levels. It settles down and melancholic piano chords pick their way through.

Madeline Hodge in Northern Void (dir. Philip Brophy). Photo by Pancho Calladetti.

In “The Future”, the same shots appear, except this time the factories and buildings are pockmarked and scarred, and everything is infested with a queasy, irradiated digital-pink glow. Glowing red clouds gather overhead, and suburban zombies begin to appear: young people, spectral — they are see-through at the edges — repeating bizarre facial and physical tics.

Left: Nat Bates in Northern Void (dir. Philip Brophy).

One poor soul scratches his ear over and over again; another (played by Nat Bates, director of the Liquid Architecture sound-art festival) looks to the ground and back up over and over, mimicking the film loops in the first part of the film. The sound in this section is brilliant, with Samartzis generating extremely unnerving electrical effects — like dying power stations — and violent feedback via what appears to be hyper-magnified recordings of fire. Brophy, meanwhile, triggers some kind of funky synth-bass line, obviously unable to escape his iconic 80s past.

In the “Post-Future”, nothing remains of the buildings, or the zombies, really, except their shapeshifting ghosts, which float around a blasted landscape, totally devoid of life. The sound design amps up a notch. Yep, you guessed it: it’s positively unearthly. Who knows what these guys have done here? Fed cicadas through a cheese grater and processed it in a digital blender, for all I know. It’s freaky stuff. And that colour palette: it’s the colour of rotting pork or severed heads. Or something.

“The Post-Future”: Northern Void (dir. Philip Brophy).

Northern Void is a savage vision and continues Brophy’s aim — started in his feature film, Body Melt — of completely irradiating Australia’s suburban “non-places” and seeing what bizarre life forms sprout in the aftermath. An extrapolation, of course, of what he perceives as a process that’s already in place in a late-capitalist society, specifically Plenty Rd, where, he writes, “cracked 60s brickwork, shrivelled 70s council shrubbery, peeling 80s computer-typeset signage, 90s Day-Glo painted lettering on darkened windows [represent] the corpus of business: dying slowly while tethered to an indifferent life-support system.”

At first glance, Brophy’s vision seems similar to J.G. Ballard’s: the latter is also concerned with laying waste to the suburbs in different and imaginative ways. Both are concerned with a type of posthumanism. But Ballard sees the total breakdown of society as a chance for people to “embrace the catastrophes for their own psychological needs” (quoted in The Sunday Times, 1990) — to reinvent themselves free of the restraints of technological society and its “toxic imagery”.

Brophy’s world is far bleaker. There is no reinvention, no way out. For Brophy, late capitalism is the end of history. Entropy and the serpent’s tail of consumerism wins. It’s too late to do anything about it except go down clicking your fingers to a funky bass line.

Still, I wouldn’t call the film wholly successful. Fifty minutes seems far too long for a plotless conceit such as this, as visually stunning and as sonically challenging as it is. Northern Void outlines an exasperating 22 scenarios that develop over the three stages of the film (although I’m aware there are valid points to be made about repetition and boredom and so on). Half that, or even less, and I don’t reckon I’d be fidgeting in my seat, as I was.

I’d be exhilarated, in fact (although that would be more a Ballardian conceit than a Brophyism).

Note: Northern Void is now moving onto screenings/performances in London and Moscow.

Nigel Brown in Northern Void (dir. Philip Brophy). Photo by Pancho Calladetti.

..:: MORE INFO
+ Philip Brophy home page
+ Philip Samartzis home page
+ Brophy’s overview of the project
+ Brophy on the genesis of Northern Void
+ Brophy interview with Nat Bates on Sleepy Brain

I referred to [J.G. Ballard's Crash] in some depth when discussing ‘Airbag’, the opening track of OK Computer, in my forthcoming book. … The sexual/spiritual rush that Thom Yorke’s narrator seems to achieve from near-annihilation on the road is prefigured by Ballard’s deadpan prose. Many people have also remarked on the extent to which Ballard seemed to foresee the extent to which Princess Diana’s fatal crash became a media event, riddled with psychosexual potential, even as she lay dying.
…
It’s as if the various stages in the narrative arc of Diana’s life are scripted by different writers: Barbara Cartland for the introduction and development; Jackie Collins for the crisis and its immediate fallout; and a bizarre switch to Ballard for a highly unlikely (but, in retrospect, utterly inevitable) finale.

Which opens things up to you, dear reader. Take a historical or contemporary figure, and decide which writer or, even better, which peculiar combination of writers could best have written his or her life. And no conceptual gewgaws this time. As penance for the implication that I’d read a book when I hadn’t, the author of the best one will receive a signed copy of my Radiohead book when it comes out.”

————————————–
Tim Footman. ‘Auto biography‘.
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Friends, you ask me many questions, most of which I cannot answer, but Kate from Brighton wanted to know what my work-space looks like. I like this question. I reckon you can tell a lot about an artist from the environment in which he works. Look at J.G. Ballard. Look at Jack Henry Abbot. Look at Shane McGowan.”

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Nick Cave, 1995.
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John Foxx live at Shrewsbury, 1998. © Extreme Voice.

This is part 2 of my interview with John Foxx, former lead singer of Ultravox before the band’s Midge Ure era, and an on-and-off solo artist for the past 25 years. Foxx’s Ultravox purveyed a damned, dreamy, paranoid — and often playful — weave of electronics and motorik-tinged new-wave beats: seductive, lush and totally unique. Later, his first solo album, Metamatic (1980), birthed the all-synthetic ‘metal beat’ sound, a streamlined, neon-punk electroclash that continues to exert a palpable influence today, with its blend of ‘monochromatic, urban surrealism’ and supercharged Kraftwerkian analogue motor. All of this was heady stuff for one Gary Numan, an unabashed fan of the group, who took Foxx’s blueprint and rebooted it with a mainstream sheen.

I spoke to John on the back of the release of his latest album, Tiny Colour Movies, and the remastering and re-release of the three Foxx-led Ultravox albums: Ultravox! (1977), Ha! Ha! Ha! (1977) and Systems of Romance (1978).

Simon Sellars

Note: Part 1 is here.
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John, I have to make a confession: in 1980, when Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’ was a huge hit, I became a fan of the Midge Ure version of the band. I was dimly aware that there was a previous incarnation led by you, but at that time I never bothered exploring it. The music press was so vitriolic to your version, as an impressionable kid reading the NME and Melody Maker in distant Australia, I never questioned it.

Don’t worry — I’ll protect you at the trials. There are several aspects to this. If anyone has the patience — mine’s threadbare. Here goes. First, I always enjoyed moving countercurrent. Much easier to swim that way. You can watch things from a distance. Very early on, we decided to investigate and develop lots of what had then been declared ungood and which we felt were manifesting themselves and were worth recording. These included psychedelia, electronics, cyberpunk, environments and elements suggested by the likes of Ballard and Burroughs, cheap European music and modes, and strange English pop, such as some aspects of the Shadows and Billy Fury which seemed to relate to a sort of undiscovered English retrofuturism. We were interested in a sort of ripped and burnt glamour. I was also taken with a detached, still stance. And some new things: Urban Bipedal RExploration. The City as Memory.

Pretty much everything that made life worth living, really.

We never saw ourselves as being in any way counter to what was happening, and nor did the other bands we knew. It’s true that some of the press of the moment seemed caught up in an enthusiastic, but surprisingly conservative view of what was admissible to the party. Whose party was it, exactly? As to the causes of this, I’m not sure – I suspect they may have felt caught off guard by the whole thing and had to swiftly cobble together some orthodox view to deal with it.

Ultravox have come in for their share of criticism since Island Records launched them with a bang eight months ago and amidst the flashing lights and polyvinyl jackets the band looked like they would bow out with a whimper. However, if their Marquee appearance was anything to go by, Ultravox are finally ‘getting it all together’. They were patchy enough and the bad bits were well on the mediocre side — obligatory loud and throbbing guitar and some empty posturing. But the good bits were quite blinding in their excellence and power. In places Ultravox were almost awe-inspiring”.

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Chas de Whalley, New Musical Express, September 1977.
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John Foxx ‘s controversial polyvinyl jacket, 1977.

Today, with ‘UltraFoxx’ getting namechecked by loads of people (including me), I just can’t comprehend the hate that was directed at your version of the band. Has the benefit of hindsight given you any insight into a cultural and critical climate that must have stung quite a bit?

It was an interesting play of peculiarly English, inverted class snobbery. I’ll attempt to explain something of this. We were entirely a working class band, so we were determined not to act out the pleb role the more middle-class writers seemed to expect. It would be letting the side down. We weren’t interested in pretending to be dumb, because we weren’t. We wanted a much wider frame. I suspect this irritated a few people entranced by their own view of what constituted the correct vision of punk behaviour and mores. A strange farce of inverted English class etiquettes ensued.

Later Vivienne Westwood named her shop ‘Nostalgie De Bou’ — a typically apt French term which means a nostalgia felt by the middle classes for the land, the mud, which they would not, of course, deign to touch themselves, but enjoyed vicariously through observing peasants. It also perfectly encompasses such activities as slumming and going to Harlem, as well as the Georgian predilection for a Sunday outing to watch the lunatics incarcerated in Bedlam. So, as usual, Vivienne was spot on.

Our stance was much less convoluted and more akin to my father’s ambitions as a boxer — to get out of the bloody mud and get out of those bloody towns and live like a human being for as long as possible. Get free enough to be able to redesign ourselves. Have some adventures along the way. Sure we were clumsy at times and we stumbled and got things wrong even according to our own lights, but we knew what those lights were and we certainly weren’t going to take instruction from any wet mockney.

By early 1977 we decided to let the whole thing rush by us while we made a still place to conduct our own experiments. It was all dead by early ’78 anyway — a beautiful bit of upheaval at just the right time. In retrospect, I think that was a good thing, because we became the first new wave band after punk fell off its perch. We got a brief time and space to make Systems of Romance, which contains several blueprints, including New Psychedelia, Electro, New Guitar, — many of these are still present in the gene code. I still see things through a sort of punk lens — one eye only, though. It’s always been valuable.

Although they are one of the most important British art rock bands, Ultravox have always been ignored or sneered at in the UK. But with re-mastered versions of their first three LPs just re-released, featuring extra tracks and sleeve notes … it’s long past time to rescue their legacy as synthetic rock pioneers…

The first three Ultravox albums, recorded when the band were led by John Foxx … have been most scandalously neglected … Systems of Romance produced a template for synthetic rock that Gary Numan, Duran Duran and others would follow. In Chicago and Detroit, the future producers of techno and house also listened attentively. This was rock from the future, all the more compelling at a time — now — when groups reheating twenty-five year old ideas are being sold to us as new”.

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K-punk, Fact Magazine, July 2006.
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Ultravox. L to r: John Foxx, Warren Cann, Billy Currie, Chris Cross, Robin Simon.

Why is the time right to remaster and re-release the first three Ultravox albums?

I think perhaps because they are getting mentioned with increasing frequency on people’s DNA checklists. It’s taken this long to allow a clearer view of just what was laid down there.

Brian Eno produced the first album. Is it safe to say that you took more from this partnership than the rest of the band? [Ultravox drummer] Warren Cann is quoted as saying that working with Eno “was absolutely NOT what we had actually envisaged. Eno was far more of a conceptualist, an ideas man”, and that Eno’s ideas were pretty much discarded in favour of a group production effort. Whereas you’ve said on a few occasions that you’ve been inspired by his work and theory.

Warren Cann, after undergoing Enossification. Altogether, now: “He wants to be a machine…”

I think Billy, Chris and I enjoyed Eno’s involvement a lot. I think Warren did too, and I also valued Warren’s scepticism. When we got to doing ‘My Sex’ it was the three of us working in the studio with Brian.

I was alert to the fact that there were certain forms of music that couldn’t be arrived at in any other way than operating in a recording studio and I wanted to discover what this could mean for us. Eno encouraged that and things took off in a new way, one that became a long stream of work: ‘My Sex’, ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’, ‘Dislocation’, ‘Just for a Moment’, and onward to ‘Lieutenant 030′, ‘Glimmer’ and ‘Mr No’, ‘The Garden’, ‘Smoke’, and today with ‘A Room As Big as a City’ and ‘Never Let Me Go’.

I stole a cathode face from newscasts
And a crumbling fugue of songs
From the reservoir of video souls
In the lakes beneath my tongue
In flesh of ash and silent movies

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– ‘I Want to Be A Machine’, Ultravox, 1977 (written by John Foxx)
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So his involvement was valuable for that. And for many other things, too: I also felt liberated from the usual ‘hands off the controls’ attitude of engineers at that time. We’d grown very tired of ‘can’t do that’. Brian encouraged use of the studio as a means of communal transport. Can do. Just drive the damn thing. Lets see what this does. The fact that he may not have been so technical wasn’t the issue. What mattered was the view of the craft we were operating.

Later, when Billy and I used to drop into Bob Marley sessions run by Lee Perry at Basing St studios, we saw a similar view of the all hands operating the spacecraft/ouija board. The studio becomes an organic extension of communal desire, and you suddenly experience an important event, piloted by Perry. It was something like that we glimpsed through Eno’s presence.

You once said you like to instil an emotional response in your listeners, and I experienced that the other day with Cathedral Oceans III. The feeling is extremely difficult to describe and I’m well aware that it will vary from listener to listener, but I felt dislocated, surreal, nostalgic, melancholy and sad all at once. I’m always amazed when music does this to me, and it always feels mystical and magical to me — a process beyond reason, theory and language. However, I know some theoretically minded musicians who argue that emotion in music is purely a function of music as ‘language’, a language they say is heavily influenced by film and visual mediums — certain chord sequences representing doom and tragedy, for example. They conclude that intrinsically there is no emotion in music. Can you explain a bit more about the role of emotion in your own work — and how you believe it’s generated?

Big subject – but fascinating. Here goes. What you say is accurate. At best, I think music operates mercifully beyond the reach of language and the intellect at first — one of the few forms capable of getting through the remaining gaps in a civilised psyche. It allows us to be Sensual Civilised Primitives — and don’t we just love that.

So, you have to experience the stuff first: sensuality as a vital component of intellect. Only then can you begin to apply intellect to choreograph your reactions, to begin our usual crafty dance out of experience. Enough to begin to categorise and connect, maybe even justify and compress what happened to you and reconcile this with other experienced elements — memory etc — to finally allow you to talk about it.

This first experience is the ‘Pleasure Despite’: it happens despite ideas and neuroses and discomfort and all the other necessary static. That is partly why it can provide such an efficient private transport — or connector. It only becomes anything akin to language afterwards — after the experience.

Language isn’t experience. Very far from it. Yet music is experience. A subjective surrender to something that can efficiently bypass most of our filters. Speaks to us directly. Also — it only exists in time. Music can never be experienced as a whole, except through memory. Therefore it requires a massive amount of a sort of seemingly passive — but actually tremendously active — subjective attention and objective connectivity to maintain its resonances throughout the duration of a piece.

A sort of furious knitting takes place. At one very simple level, the process is vaguely analogous to saying ‘blue room’ to a hundred people. What you do in that instant is create a hundred Blue Rooms in those heads — rooms that have never existed before and will never be the same again. They are manifested through all the neural pathways corresponding to ‘Blue Room,’ filtered through individual experiences and memories to date. If you were to say ‘Blue Room’ again to those people a year later, there would be a further layer of memory on the ‘Blue Room’ palimpsest, and so on, for the rest of their lives.

Music does all this in a much more abstract and subtle way, the neural equivalent of several cities worth of rooms and interior and exterior spaces of every imaginable hue. That’s just a little of how I think it operates- the listening, subjective bit. How it gets generated and transmitted is another story.

JG Ballard photo © Steve Double.

I’ve enjoyed the various short stories of yours that are reproduced all over the web — there’s a lot of Ballard in them, as we’ve discovered. What’s the status of your mooted ‘Quiet Man’ book of short stories? Will it ever be released?

It exists mainly as a means to write songs. Things get manifested there and I move them into music. There’s been some talk of releasing sections that have been read and recorded recently. K-punk did one that I haven’t heard yet, but which seems to have been of interest. Hard to say how it would work as a book. I think it’s probably better as fragments.

I’m doing some Super-8 filming of ‘The Quiet Man’ for a project called ‘Grey Suit Music’. It’s continuing something I began in 1978, and contains some scenes shot then using Eddie Milov from Gloria Mundi.

Do you have a novel or film script in you?

That’s a challenge which I’d love to take on one day. But it would take much more of that time thing, of which I have none at present. Barely time to take a walk.

What on Earth is going on with the track ‘Ray 1/Ray 2′, from your album with Louis, Crash and Burn? Surely this is a Billy Joel parody — a cheeky nod and a wink to ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’? You once said you wanted to bring a ‘more instinctive, human element’ into your work — a sense of play. Is this an example?

Yes. Technofun. It’s Subterranean Homesick Electron Rock of the most shameless kind. Leave Billy Joel out of it though, and insert Dylan Drunk, backed up by the Virtual Velvets. A long list of TechnoLies and SellSpeak. I’m always fascinated by the jargon of certain trades and their delicious absurdity. We fell over several times recording that.

What’s your position on the free trading and downloading of music? Mainstream artists react against downloading, pointing to lost income, while underground musicians say that they get no income from CDs anyway, and rather more from concerts and gigs, so therefore they welcome ‘illegal’ downloading as a promotional tool…

It will obviously be the only way you can derive income from music in future, apart from playing live. At present it’s a mess. Everyone involved acted too slowly and the rug was duly pulled. Survivors may be OK in future. But it will all take time to sort out. Not many people have it.

The next generation will benefit most. Work it out: 1% of the net downloading x 1 song at 1p = ? I haven’t done the figures — Negroponte did it in dollars but that was some time ago and things change daily. Of course, the usual suspects will inevitably attempt to interpose themselves between you and the money.

Why don’t you offer mp3 downloads on the Metamatic site? Tiny Colour Movies is on iTunes, but it’s DRM-protected and the bit rate, as with all iTunes wares, is a ridiculous 128kbps. I think most music lovers want to pay for downloads but part of the reason they continue to download illegally is because official stores like iTunes are so expensive and so restrictive in terms of the sonic quality and the rights management of the music. There has to be a better way, and I’m just wondering why more artists don’t offer downloads on their web sites. Cutting out the middleman, this could be done at a reasonable price and at CD quality, and I truly believe that the artist would in fact make more money this way.

Things will improve. Evolution takes time, administration, attention, persistence, knowledge. Plus effective distribution of music is actually only a single fraction of the aspects of the entity we like to call ‘musician’ — which is actually a swarm organism. It will cease to exist without all the buzzing components that make up its substance. The web simply can’t carry all that yet. I’m sure it will one day. But not quite yet.

You once described the music of the mid-80s as a “double-breasted dumbness”. Who excites and inspires you among the current crop of artists?

Mercifully it’s all become much more various since the mid 80s. I like elements and aspects of Depth through Surface, Peaches, Goldfrapp, Ladytron, Adult, Perspects, White Stripes, Radiohead, Robin Guthrie, Harold Budd, Oasis, The La’s, Aphex Twin, Vincent Gallo, M82, Fatal Love Triangle, BuzzBoy, Blofish, The Boards of Canada, Radon, Virus 252, Formal Equation, Louis Gordon, The Virtual Girls, Composite Human, Restricted Vision, Iggy Pop, The Machine Harmony Committee, Touch, Cannibal Clothing.

You’ve said that your career was shaped by your public image — that of a ghost among the city, finding dignity among the static — and that you had no choice in adopting that persona because you didn’t like being observed when you didn’t want to be. In some ways, it seems adopting such an outlook was prescient, in fact necessary for survival, given the rise of reality TV and the severely devolved notion of private space these days.

I think any sort of career I have is more a long accident. It is firmly shaped by deep personal inadequacies. Not shy but innately reserved. No good at being the object of attention in public. Need to go in for repairs frequently. Begin to feel like a shadow – time to leave swiftly. Only thing I could do was manifest someone who was tailored by all this, then operate him at one remove, in order to survive at all. No choice. Either that or: 1) Give it up. 2) Perish by degrees. 3) Hire someone else to do it for me. Being short of funds at the time I did the next best thing. What would you do?

John Foxx and his admirer, Gary Numan, as seen by Japanese magazine Music Life.

Does the rise of “reality” culture — mediated by technology — fill you with dread? Or do you still believe, as you once said, that “we’re now entering a world where technology is more elegant. There are problems and we can see them — social, political, etcetera — but things will work themselves out”.

Technology is elegant and we aren’t. An interesting effect of technology is it enables people to do the opposite of many previous norms.

For example, we can…

• Be dirty and have long hair (not that the two necessarily go together, of course). We have soap and antiseptics: no lice, fleas or septicaemia.
• Pierce ourselves for fun and status – with antiseptics and antibiotics.
• Have many sexual partners: we have contraceptives and some effective STD treatments.
• Get impossibly fat: we have liposuction and media attention for the truly high achieving.
• Become drug addicts: we have clinics and media attention.
• Wipe out small populations of civilians: we have remote devices (fortunately this looks like coming to an end).
• Use everything up: we have oil (fortunately this looks like coming to an end).
• Move and live and holiday away from home: we have transport (ditto)
• Buy pornography in the supermarket: we now have conventional media forced to compete with the Internet.
• Die of body development: we have steroids and ingestible synthetic hormones.
• Wear Nylon: we have effective deodorants and anti-perspirants.
• Drive everywhere and expect a road: we have cars.
• Live packed into vast cities: we have antibiotics, transport, aircon, water filtering, heating, sewers, and everything else which supports the ecology.
• Have fun surgery: we have developed lifesaving techniques we can now misuse for entertainment, art and money.
• Talk to anyone in the world, in public: we have mobile phones – closest thing to telepathy — yet people still shout.

I think that statement of mine you refer to was evidence of a desire to go home after being exhausted by questioning. Sure, it all may work itself out — but it’s going to need some very acute and constant current awareness. Logic is a form of insanity and needs to be judiciously suspended occasionally, in order to check on what is actually happening. Technologies operate in similar ways and likewise can create self-justifying ecologies of thought and behaviour. I think we constantly need to keep checking and suspending.

I can’t look at Big Brother or any sort of reality show. Brat Panto. Might watch the Cronenberg Variation if it arrives.

Will your Antonioni soundtrack ever be released?

No. It’s long gone.

Will you ever tour Australia?

I’d like to. But it will most likely be as drifting molecules about twenty years from now.

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..:: LINKS
+ A Whirlpool with Seductive Furniture: The John Foxx Interview Part 1 of this conversation
+ Metamatic Official John Foxx site
+ Cathedral Oceans Official site
+ Lively (and obsessive) Foxx forum at the official Ultravox site
+ K-punk review of the first three Ultravox albums
+ ‘Old sunlight from other times and other lives’: John Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies K-punk analysis
+ Rockwrok UltraFoxx tribute site

It’s an odd little review. Wobble gets headaches from the concepts on offer and writes that “you will always find marginal blokes walking in marginal (urban) places”, while expounding the belief that film and TV are more suited to said concepts than literature, with the exception being “…J G Ballard but, then again, he’s a great novelist and storyteller who knows how to use and develop psychogeographical themes and ideas in his narratives”.

PiL’s first two albums, First Issue and Metal Box, before Wobble jumped ship, are deliriously good, although not overtly Ballardian or psychogeographical, except in a cold, anomie-infested, post-punk fashion.

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

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

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 b