Modest Muse

Man of influence: Writer J.G. Ballard. (David Levenson/Getty Images)

Literary trends and cults come and go, but for 50 years now, James Graham Ballard has been one of the coolest authors on the planet. The artists he has influenced show the wide reach of his bizarre, provocative and unsettling work. They include fellow transgressive authors like Martin Amis and Will Self, as well as disparate directors David Cronenberg (who adapted Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash) and Steven Spielberg (who filmed the author’s 1987 book Empire of the Sun). Perhaps most fascinating, however, has been Ballard’s influence on modern music.

The British author, now 76, is often said to have inspired the entire genre of industrial music, and his fiction certainly explores its central preoccupations. Ballard writes about the increasingly intimate relationship between humans and machines (most infamously with Crash, in which characters become aroused by car crashes) as well as the disturbing atmosphere of mind control created by the prevalence of mass media (as found in the experimental 1970 story collection The Atrocity Exhibition). As well, the post-punk era would have been radically different without Ballard’s writings on the murky future of human relations. Joy Division’s lead singer, Ian Curtis, was an avowed devotee, while original Ultravox vocalist John Foxx once accused himself of “reading way too much J.G. Ballard.” The Buggles’ smash hit Video Killed the Radio Star was inspired by the Ballard short story The Sound-Sweep; Britain’s Comsat Angels took their name from another of the writer’s tales.

Nowadays, Ballard’s following is more diffuse — from Madonna (whose 2001 Drowned World tour was inspired by the novel of the same name) to   Chilean/German “jazztronica” duo Flanger to the new English “punk rave” buzz band Klaxons, whose upcoming debut album is named after Ballard’s 1982 short story collection Myths of the Near Future.

It comes as somewhat of a surprise, then, to find out that Ballard’s favourite piece of music is the old Tin Pan Alley song the Teddy Bear’s Picnic.

“When I was a small boy,” the author recalls over the phone from his home in the London suburb of Shepperton, “I was given one of those wind-up gramophones [and] Teddy Bear’s Picnic, which I played hundreds of times in my bedroom. By the time I grew up, I couldn’t bear the sound of that song — everything about it drove me mad. And then I discovered, in my 60s, that actually I rather liked the song again. Perhaps I felt that my childhood was slipping away from me for the last time. Now, I could listen to it happily forever.”

(HarperCollins)

Any suspicions that the author is abandoning his surreally dark worldview and succumbing to nostalgia should be erased by his new novel, Kingdom Come, in which Teddy Bear’s Picnic makes a crucial appearance. In a vast shopping mall called the “Metro-Centre,” the white inhabitants of the fictional English town of Brooklands have created a fascist state where consumer capitalism is an all-powerful ideology and even becomes a form of religion. Three giant, motorized teddy bears who move to the mall music preside over the Centre from a circular plinth and grow from mascots to idols. (Ballard says they were inspired by a similar real-life trio in Kingston upon Thames, near his home.) When things start to break down, as they inevitably do in a Ballard novel, the shoppers make offerings of honey and treacle to the bears, and start to pray to them, singing Ballard’s favourite song.

When music appears in Ballard’s books, it tends to accompany erratic events and bizarre behaviour. In Cocaine Nights (1996), disco music soundtracks a scene of sexual violence. In The Day of Creation (1987), African guerrillas with “looted radios and cassettes” create a scene which is “part party and part lynch mob.” In The Drowned World, a doctor further disturbs a mentally unstable patient by playing phonograph records of drumming as an experiment.

Ballard himself professes not to have thought of this connection, but the association of music with chaos does not surprise him. “I’m not in any way musical myself,” he says. “I haven’t got a single cassette, record, CD [or] a record player of any kind. If my girlfriend is playing some Mozart on the radio, I take great pleasure in listening to it, but I’ve reached the age where rock music just gives me a headache.”

He claims not to have had any dialogue with the musicians who are influenced by his work. “I’ve heard that some of these groups were interested in my stuff, but I never met any of them. I would have been a big disappointment, I’m afraid, because I’m a big musical ignoramus.”

Nonetheless, the traffic between Ballard and popular music culture has not taken place on a one-way street. He recalls reading the weekly British magazine New Musical Express religiously in the mid-’70s, when his daughters, then in their early teens, started bringing it home. “I had no idea of what was being reviewed or discussed,” he admits, but says that punk’s “political dimension” intrigued him, as well as the “terrific vitality” of the writing.

“It expressed sentiments about politics and society, and longing for rebellion and change, and all sorts of social factors — sexual revolution, drugs — carried within this charged-up prose. The moment my daughters brought the week’s issue home, I’d grab it from them and start reading avidly, because it seemed to convey the news — not about rock music, which I wasn’t interested in, but about the larger world. I was sad when [my daughters] went off to their colleges. I was tempted to buy [the NME] once or twice, but it wasn’t quite the same thing.”

Ballard was interviewed in the NME in 1985, where he commented on punks:  “Bourgeois society offered them the mortgage, they offered back psychosis.” The bourgeoisie’s own psychosis has been a preoccupation of Ballard’s over the last 10 years in Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes (2000), Millennium People (2003) and now Kingdom Come. All four depict nightmarish, not-implausible near-future scenarios, where the well-to-do use violence to make themselves feel more alive. Typically, devious psychiatrists serve as catalysts, prescribing selective raids and riots to increase the morale of people living in suburbs and gated communities. Violence is “something that late capitalist societies may fall back on in order to keep the pot boiling,” says Ballard. “This is what bothers me.”

Mad about punk: Sex Pistols fans, circa 1977. (Keystone Features/Getty Images)

The punks, he believes, partook of a madness that was both beautiful and dangerous. “They hated everything about bourgeois, middle-class England. To some extent, they were right: for them, madness was a sort of freedom, the only freedom left. I think that the tragic death of Sid Vicious proved the point, but it was a wonderful movement while it lasted. Now I get the impression that rock music has been deeply absorbed within the commercial music industry. The Rolling Stones are now every bit as part of the establishment as Bing Crosby was, and just about as seditious.”

Crosby himself famously sang Teddy Bear’s Picnic, but only Ballard could use it to express a seditious sentiment. Indeed, if punk and the Stones have been defanged, and if so much pop music seeks to repeat past glories with diminishing results, can literature provide a viable way to conceive of rebellion against boredom and stultifying social norms? Ballard seems ambivalent. Near the end of Kingdom Come, he writes what could be read as a self-defeating passage about how hope of “freedom” dies when “people begin to talk earnestly about the novel.”

“The middle-class version of boredom which we live today has a number of distinguishing signs,” he says. “One of them is book groups earnestly discussing the novel. The whole teaching of English literature — all that earnest do-goodery that is said to 19-year-olds, the illusion that moral dimensions in serious fiction help us to keep our bearings — that’s a huge middle-class delusion. And delusions are dangerous because they lead to false hopes of security.”

But when asked whether cautionary fiction simply preaches to the converted, Ballard demurs. He cites Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Brave New World, and 1984 as examples of fiction that have influenced many people’s ways of thinking, and adds, “I’d like in a very small way, in a modest way, to think that mine did, too.”

Mike Doherty teaches literature at the University of Toronto and is a post-doctoral research fellow with the London Consortium. 

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