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Control
Author: Simon Sellars • Aug 18th, 2007 •Category: Ballardosphere, Ian Curtis, film, music
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.
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Simon Sellars
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I’ve been a fan of Joy Division since I was around eighteen years old, and it was ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ on their Closer LP that made me seek out Ballard in the first place. I think you’re right in suggesting that the links between Ian Curtis’ lyrics and J. G. Ballard’s work is tenuous, but the influence exists nonetheless.
This is from ‘Touching from a Distance’ by Deborah Curtis, the widow of Ian Curtis:
‘By now, Ian was putting more of an emotional distance between us. He did bring a couple of books home about Nazi Germany, but in the main he was reading Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Jean Paul Sartre, Hermann Hesse and J. G. Ballard. […] ‘Crash’ by J. G. Ballard combined sex with the suffering of car accident victims. It struck me that all Ian’s spare time was spent reading and thinking about human suffering. I knew he was looking for inspiration for his songs, yet the whole thing was culminating in an unhealthy obsession with mental and physical pain.’
Given Curtis was fascinated by the works of Ballard and Burroughs it is hardly surprising that links exist. I regard songs such as ‘No Love Lost’, ‘Colony’ and ‘Passover’ as perhaps the most directly linked (in terms of tone and language) with Ballard. And to forestall howls of protest, yes, I am aware that ‘No Love Lost’ also has powerful references to Ka-Tzetnick’s ‘House of Dolls’. Having read the book I remain inclined to argue the significance of Ballard as a major influence.
A number of other artists of the same era have also acknowledged a significant interest in Ballard, notably Cabaret Voltaire and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.
Hey thanks Rhys, I haven’t read Deborah’s book so that’s useful to know. And I agree — Radio On is superb.