Ballardian

Severin photo by Pennie Smith (1978).

The jury is still out on the usefulness of the Ballardian MySpace competition page. This is mainly because I can’t wait to build word of mouth, given there’s only two weeks until deadline, so I’ve had to send requests for people to add the page as a ‘friend’, and I’ve lost interest in that; I feel like some kind of desperado, knocking on people’s front doors, begging to be let in.

Still, I’ve learnt some things. Stumbling across the page of Steve Severin, bass player from Siouxsie and the Banshees, I see he lists Ballard as an influence.

Good man. I always liked Severin. All the Banshees looked great, but Steve had a better haircut than Gary Numan and a great name lifted from the Velvet Underground. I also liked his bass playing: textured and prominent, giving the Banshees a strangely lilting yet tough sound.

I assumed that Siouxsie wrote all the Banshees’ lyrics and therefore was the one decanting the Ballardian imagery, until I read Rip It Up and Start Again, where Simon Reynolds reveals that Severin’s fascination with Ballard’s Unlimited Dream Company was the inspiration for the Banshees album, A Kiss in the Dreamhouse:

Circa The Scream, The Banshees’ music was sexy in the same way as J.G. Ballard’s Crash. But now, inspired partly by Severin’s reading of Ballard’s latest book, The Unlimited Dream Company — ‘where the imagery is very lush, sensual and erotic,’ he says — The Banshees were making make-out music. If you put Dreamhouse on as a seduction soundtrack, you might even get results; before then, that ruse would have worked only if your date was a psychopath or a vampire.

Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again.

Interesting, too, to now discover on Steve’s page that he has written on Ballard. Steve’s been posting some of his work, and here’s a sample from a great piece he wrote for the Independent in 1996, on ‘Ballard & Cinema’:

By his own admission, Ballard has rejected shrinking violet angst for a much more robust dissection of our global malaise. Embracing our new world order from within his deranged inner mindscape. Instead his apocalyptic visions are (action) tailor-made for fin de siecle cinema. In sharp contrast to the banal & naive irony of violence adopted by Brett Easton-Ellis American Psycho, Ballard employs a shocking nihilism, his death of affect that is ultimately more provocative and humane. His stories disturb outside of the players rather than inside them.
…
In both Crash! and its bizarre prequel The Atrocity Exhibition Ballard attempted to unlock future mysteries by violating the private psyche with a relentless stream of public events and personalities that haunt and torment the central character. Probably the first exploration of sexual inadequacies induced by media saturation. Predating Natural born Killers Jungian collective popism by over two decades.

The ICA’s tribute selection makes the most intriguing of connections with the master of the nouveau roman, Alain Robbe-Grillet. The French novelist/auteur casts the technique of displaced memory and sinister eroticism into a vortex of puzzling snapshots. Never a denouement, the plot is cut-up into a loop of paradoxes & riddles. The parallels one can draw with Ballard are ones of detachment; of an inner space (reality) and outer world (fiction). Both employ sensory ellipses in search of a question. A quest for the unaskable. Pulp noir vs. sci-fi in a game of Russian roulette, as opposed to say, Peter Greenaways parlour tricks, these devices are foreboding and elusive.

Steven Severin, ‘Stranger than Fiction: Ballard & Cinema’, the Independent, 1996.

Note, too, that k-punk has written on the Ballardian Banshee mutation:

In Rip It Up, Simon says that the early Banshees were ’sexy in the way that Ballard’s Crash was sexy’, and Ballard’s abstract fiction-theory is as palpable and vast a presence in the Banshees as it is in other post-punk. (It’s telling that the turn from the angular dryness of the Banshees’ early sound to the humid lushness of their later phase should have been legitimated by Severin’s reading of The Unlimited Dream Company.) But what the Banshees drew (out) from Ballard was the equivalence of the semiotic, the pyschotic, the erotic and the savage. With psychoanalysis (and Ballard is nothing if not a committed reader of Freud), Ballard recognized that there is no ‘biological’ sexuality waiting beneath the ‘alienated layers’ of civilization. Ballard’s compulsively repeated theme of reversion to savagery does not present a return to a non-symbolized bucolic Nature, but a fall back into an intensely semioticized and ritualized symbolic space. (It is only the postmoderns who believe in a pre-symbolic Nature). Eroticism is made possible - not merely mediated - by signs and technical apparatus, such that the body, signs and machines become interchangeable.

I like that line: ‘eroticism is made possible, not merely mediated…’ Misreadings of Crash produce the reversal of that equation — witness the academic hysteria surrounding Baudrillard’s appraisal of the book, for example.

But really, all this talk makes me realise I really miss the Banshees, especially the Siouxsie/McGeoch/Severin/Budgie lineup.

Juju, for example — what a superstrange album, like being buried alive.

It’s pointing the bone at me right now…