Tim: I’m sure my memories of that campaign’s details are vague, but at least I got the line right and it’s still a great example of advertising’s hold on politics and the technique of dressing up a cliché in new clothes.

Mike H: Thanks. I should admit right now I didn’t do the billboard mock-up and I think Simon assumed I did. I found it on the web some time over the last 10 years, and had it stored in my JGB pix files… it is cool, tho — you can immediately see how unsuited “Project for a New Novel” is for the medium. The advertising in Kingdom Come is probably worth an entire article on its own, as I didn’t “pay off” the campaign by correlating Pearson’s creative output to the overall plot and a psychosocial look at the madding crowds. I agree — it’s a lot more complex a story than was given credit.

Mike B: Thanks. I think the mind-blower for me was actually having the realization that the Advertiser’s Announcements were, in fact, “real” Atrocity Exhibition ads. The overlay of Claire and Catherine seemed much too contrived to be otherwise. As for all the Catherines in JG — the ones before he met Claire must simply be coincidence… altho I’ll defer to the name master, David Pringle, on that score.

I particularly like: ” Claire Churchill is not only Claire Churchill, but Ballard’s stand-in for Catherine Austin. And further, that each ad represents a conceptualization of not only Claire Churchill, but of the varied, perverse and geometric sexuality of The Atrocity Exhibition.”

There are many Catherines in Ballard’s work, the Catherine Austin who survives the Drought to appear in the Atrocity Exhibition, Catherine York of Storm-Bird, Storm-Dreamer, and the missing wife in Concrete Island. I was interested to read in Claire’s memoir of Ballard in the Observer:

“As Ballard admitted once, Catherine, the fantasy emerging from the car wrecks of Crash, was entirely based on an idea of Walsh. “She was even originally called Claire in the book,” Walsh recalls. “And had I really been a cross between Mother Teresa and Marilyn Monroe, as the portrait suggested, I might have been keen for that to go ahead. But I persuaded him to change the name in the end.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/apr/26/jg-ballard-appreciation-claire-walsh

Are all these Catherines really Claire in disguise?

I particularly like your mock-up of how “Project for a New Novel” would have looked on billboards.

And I’m glad you considered “Kingdom Come”. Some people regard it as representing a drop in Ballard’s standards, but I think there’s lots of fascinating ideas in there.

The reference to the Saatchi & Saatchi (SP) advert for the Tories isn’t accurate, though – the famous version wasn’t all-white or centred, though there may have been other versions that were. See, for example, the repro at the Daily Mail (an entirely appropriate source for any discussion of fascist/consumerist media) -
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1172516/Darling-pledges-3-1bn-help-people-work–jobless-total-hit-3m.html
The campaign has recently been revived as ‘Labour still isn’t working’.