Sarasota, FL

I loved his anecdote about JGB’s friend, Dr Christopher Evans (1931-1979):

“Shortly after first reading ‘Crash’ in the early 1970s, I’d seen Dr Chris Evans 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…”

Which SF convention might that have been, I wonder? Perhaps “Mancon” in 1976? Or something earlier?

Evans’s “oozing sexuality” had diminished by the time I met him, at the Brighton Worldcon in August 1979; but that, as it turned out, was just a couple of months before his death. He was sun-tanned, but noticeably thin. But having seen him occasionally on television over the years prior to that, I can well believe that in the early-to-mid 1970s he was as Dave Britton describes. Without being homosexually inclined, no doubt JGB responded to that sexuality in the man, as well as to his other qualities.

Funnily enough, I’ve been thinking a lot about Dr Chris Evans this past couple of days — I’ve been re-reading his book _The Mighty Micro_ (1979) for the first time in over 30 years (remarkably prescient in some respects, less so in others); and I’ve also been listening to his voice on old tapes (definitely public-school, and not a hint of Welsh), having dug out my 1970s and 1980s audio-tapes in search of something else to do with Ballard.

I’ve also been skimming through Brian Aldiss’s _Shape of Further Things_ again, which, in part, is a book about Dr Chris Evans. Here’s a 1969-style vision of the coming Internet:

“Fifteen minutes into Thursday, 9th January 1969. I’ve been walking up and down my drive by the light of a half-moon… My location: a little village called Southmoor, in Berkshire, England. … Friends of ours have just left. Dr Christopher Evans and his wife Nancy. They came down from Twickenham for drinks, dinner, and talk. … He was saying how much and how fast computers have developed. … Chris said, ‘At the National Physical Laboratory where I work, I’m a subscriber to Telecomp, which links me to a computer a few miles away. You could get the G.P.O. to put you on the circuit too, if you wanted, although it’s pretty costly as yet. You get a separate telephone and a switch-box, and can just dial yourself on to the computer. It comes through on a sort of telex machine not much bigger than an ordinary typewriter, and talks to you in almost ordinary English. This is the area where some of the major advances are now coming… Soon you’ll be able to talk to computers practically man-to-man. You must come over and play with this computer some time.’ ”

(Aldiss, _The Shape of Further Things_, Faber, 1970, p13-14, 18-19.)

Wow: computers — talking “man-to-man”! This would have been exactly the sort of imagination-stimulating stuff that Evans fed to Ballard too, in the late 1960s, early 1970s.

David.

Tomorrow I must spend the time to fully appreciate the embedded audios and videos, especially the Proby stuff.

And like you, I think “Reverbstorm” is the best recording that Savoy made …

“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.”

You know why Ballard specified “a suburb of Manchester,” don’t you? It was because that’s where his parents were living immediately before they sailed for Shanghai in 1929. JGB’s father, a Lancashire man, worked for a large Manchester cotton-printing company, who sent him out to help run their subsidiary in Shanghai shortly after he got married. If James Ballard senior had not accepted that job, then the boy JGB may well have grown up in a suburb of Manchester. That was a “life not lived” for him — like his later alternate-self fantasies of being a doctor, a psychiatrist, or an RAF H-bomber pilot.

As it was, JGB did see a little of Manchester after his father returned to England in 1950. (JGB and his mother and sister had returned at the end of 1945.) His dad bought a house in the Manchester area, where he and his wife (and daughter) must have lived for at least a few years before moving south. In Iain Sinclair’s BFI “Crash” book, JGB is quoted as saying: “I remember watching TV with my parents in Manchester in something like 1951. There was only one channel. We looked at a screen the size of a lightbulb.”

Now, there was no TV available in the Manchester area until the opening of the BBC’s Holme Moss transmitter, up on the high moors (near where Brady and Hindley later buried their victims), in October 1951 — so my best guess is that JGB’s parents bought their first TV set soon after that, and that JGB may have first watched it with them on a visit circa Christmas 1951. He was a student at Queen Mary College, University of London, during the academic year 1951-1952, so he could only have been visiting during vacation time…

Maybe the glimpse(s) of suburban Manchester he got in the early 1950s were quite enough to feed his fantasies of that “provincial” might-have-been life.

David.

I well remember the JGB interview on the BBC2’s Face to Face, probably round about the time i first read Empire of the Sun, fascinated that such an outwardly conventional man should have such an imagination.

Loved the ambiguous comment on JGB’s influence on Will Self.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by Ballardian: New interview: Savoy Records, world’s strangest record company: PJ Proby, New Order, Cramps, Fenella Fielding, Ballard: http://bit.ly/bcQKiK...