Adventure Rocketship! Let's All Go To The Science Fiction Disco

by Jonathan Wright

  The embattled singer defected from the Pistols in 1978 to form the pioneering post-punk group, Public Image Ltd. Odd, abusive and abstruse, PiL and their post-punk offspring heightened punk’s egalitarian spirit to a radical degree. Women and non-whites could be included. Songs could be long. Synthesizers and violins could vie with electric guitars. Discordance was paid more than lip service, it was given oxygen. Most importantly, scraps of other genres and methodologies were scavenged and deployed with apocalyptic gusto: prog, dub, krautrock, world music, jazz, folk, funk. Minimalism, amateurism and improvisation were given space in which to seek uneasy equilibrium.

  There was, however, an even more profound influence at post-punk’s disposal, one not so much verboten by punk as never considered: literature.

  Of that literature, Ballard’s prose was pivotal. His novel Concrete Island came out in 1974. It is a liminal text, marking the turning point of his gradual shift away from transgressive science fiction and toward a kind of sickeningly clinical magic realism. The book’s premise is platonically pure, symbolically crystalline. A man crashes his car into a deserted, sunken plot of land where two motorways intersect. Injured and stranded, he strives to survive and escape. On the island, however, nodes of perception, identity and reality are splintered and spun into solipsistic loops. Escape no longer becomes the primary goal. The Robinson Crusoe archetype is inverted and perverted. The main character’s view of reality contracts and expands to fit its cage – be it a front seat of a car, a de facto island, or the confines of one man’s own skull.

  When The Concrete Island was published, punk rock, in the strictest definition of the term, was just being conceived. The Ramones formed in 1974, and from that spark leapt an inferno. Paradoxically, the seeds of post-punk were being sown at the exact same time, in a more nebulous movement, one given the retroactive name of proto-punk. Artists and groups such as Patti Smith, Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno, Peter Hammill, Pere Ubu and Television were helping to dig the romantic, poetic well from which the post-punks would soon draw inspiration. Only they were doing so without the aftershock of punk to propel them, which rendered proto-punk a looser and less militant form of expression.

  The proto-punks were zealously literary. The Beats – particularly William S Burroughs, Ballard’s closest American analog – were revered. Nineteenth-century French writers such as Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine came back in vogue; Tom Verlaine, co-founder with poet Richard Hell of the proto-punk Neon Boys, even went so far as to take his stage name from the latter. (Verlaine went on to front Television, a band that most fully embodied post-punk before the movement had even begun.) That said, science fiction remained off the table. The austere, hermetic nature of the genre would become post-punk’s purview.

  Ballard bridged that gap. Like Burroughs, he worked science fiction concepts and tropes into his daring, deconstructionist work (starting with the 1966 novel The Crystal World, which spun the emerging ontological implications of quantum theory into a hallucinatory tale of tranquil, beauteous apocalypse, one that also turned Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness inside out). But where Burroughs was a Beat writer who segued into the outermost fringes of science fiction, Ballard was an insider. He’d cut his teeth writing SF short stories for genre magazines in both the UK and the US – and just as punk’s evolution ping-ponged across the Atlantic, so did Ballard seep into the water table of post-punk.

  The examples of Ballard references in post-punk are numerous and well documented.

  Following his death in 2009 at the age of 78, numerous articles popped up that listed random handfuls of these songs from the late 70s and early 80s. Invariably, The Normal’s 1978 song Warm Leatherette, a robotic paean to Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash, itself a hymn to the eroticisation of car wrecks, surfaced near the top of these lists. It isn’t a famous song, or even a particularly important one in the development of post-punk; other synthesizer-heavy groups of the era such as Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle were doing far more to construct the foundation of what would soon become industrial music. Warm Leatherette is notable, though, for its chillingly maniacal devotion to its source material. “A tear of petrol is in your eye, the hand brake penetrates your thigh,” drones Daniel Miller, The Normal’s sole member (and the man who would soon use his label, Mute Records, to help launch the careers of everyone from Depeche Mode to Nick Cave). When Grace Jones had a fluke hit with a funky cover of Warm Leatherette in 1980, it retained the words of the original but little else. In its own way, Jones’ bubbly, disco-friendly reading of Ballardian grotesquerie is as disturbing as the harsh, stark original.

  Coincidentally, Jones released another cover of a Ballard-influenced post-punk group in 1980 – namely Joy Division, whose brooding song She’s Lost Control was given a slightly more intriguing reggae treatment by Jones. She’s Lost Control doesn’t draw explicitly from Ballard, but other Joy Division songs are downright exultant in their worship of the writer. That is, as exultant as Joy Division ever got. Before hanging himself in 1980, singer Ian Curtis paid tribute to Ballard in tracks such as The Atrocity Exhibition, named after Ballard’s 1970 recursive mosaic of body horror, political satire and technophobic dread.

  The song begins with an electric guitar reduced to an approximation of glottal stoppage, a death rattle. Meantime, Curtis moans coldly, a disembodied interlocutor: “Asylums with doors open wide, where people had paid to see inside. For entertainment they watch his body twist, behind his eyes he says, ‘I still exist.’” If the paralysis of post-modern humanity stems from our eerie ability to view suffering as mere spectacle, Ballard’s abstraction comes from making a spectacle of the spectators. So what does that render Curtis, a detached observer of Ballard? Unconsciously or not, it ties into the fractal levels of nested perception and dehumanisation that make The Atrocity Exhibition the ultimate distillation of Ballard’s worldview – and The Atrocity Exhibition the ideal summation of not only Joy Division’s music, but of post-punk’s synergy with Ballard’s work.

  Just as telling, though, is the number of non-post-punk artists who reference Ballard in their work. It’s a very low number. And even when space-rock explorers Hawkwind – who not so coincidentally collaborated with Moorcock and drew often from his novels – based their 1979 song High Rise on the Ballard novel of the same name, it’s done out of clear solidarity with post-punk. High Rise is a particularly intriguing example of Ballard’s work. The 1975 book details a near future where the breakdown of a super-modern high-rise complex turns its tenants into tribal primitives who nonetheless are invested with a calculating, post-modern self-consciousness. It’s post-apocalypse minus the apocalypse. In many ways, Hawkwind’s music, which spans eras and genres, from psychedelia to prog rock to synth-punk to metal, revels in the same polyglot paradox.

  The fact that there are few Ballardian bands outside the post-punk canon speaks volumes. There’s a socioeconomic specificity, namely the late 20th century, with which post-punk resonates. The same goes for Ballard. Despite the fact that both post-punk and Ballard have had sizable resurgences in the new millennium (including a new and extensive line of Ballard reissues that began in 2012 with the 50th anniversary of his first major work, The Drowning World), Ballard’s once-ballyhooed powers of prophecy have revealed their shelf life. Yes, Ballard once uncannily predicted such absurdities as the cowboy actor Ronald Reagan leading the free world. But as is the case with so much science fiction, the future has proven futurism quaint – or at least ill-equipped to encompass the complexity of the flesh-and-blood 21st century. To understand Ballard’s true impact is to read his work with a conscious, constant conception of the context in which he lived and wrote. Accordingly, post-punk no longer sounds remotely as edgy or alien as it once did, seeing as how it reflects and distorts a cultural topology that no longer exists. Its power now isn’t predictive, but anthropological. Ballard the clinician remains eminent regardless.

  In a 2006 interview conducted by Simon Sellars for ballardian.com, Mike Ryan explored an int
riguing dimension of the shopworn Ballard playlist. Rather than focusing exclusively on Ballard’s unwitting manifestation in post-punk and industrial (although he’s a foremost authority on the subject), Ryan ventures into relatively uncharted territory: what did Ballard himself actually listen to? As it turns out, not much. Just as someone with a poor sense of taste is apt to over-season his food, Ballard’s tone-deafness led to a fondness for cloying sweets. The image, for instance, of Ballard settling down before the phonogram and dropping the needle on one of his favourite songs, Bing Crosby’s rendition of Cole Porter’s Don’t Fence Me In, somehow borders on the horrific.

  Then again, Crosby once infamously sang a duet with David Bowie – the same David Bowie whose 1977 album Low marks the event horizon where proto-punk became post-punk. The album whose song Warszawa inspired an early incarnation of Joy Division to name itself Warsaw. And whose song Always Crashing In The Same Car evokes and echoes Crash in a way that no song has, post-punk or otherwise, before or since. If only Crosby had sung on that track with Bowie, perhaps Ballard, the purveyor of so many transcendentally repellant tableaux, could have stomached a listen.

  Ladyhawke: Reclaiming a Soundtrack from its Historical Moment

  - Anne C Perry -

  [Ladyhawke is] a near-perfect action-romance marred only by the worst soundtrack ever composed.

  Rob Vaux, Flipside Movie Emporium

  (August 2002)

  Richard Donner’s 1985 fantasy Ladyhawke has, as the opening quote here indicates, become infamous for its dated music. Other signifiers of its provenance are certainly present – Michelle Pfeiffer’s ‘Joan of Arc’ haircut today looks more Princess Di than V For Vendetta – but, by far and away, the single element that betrays Ladyhawke as a product of its time is its Alan Parsons-produced soundtrack. Synth-heavy and thuddingly anachronistic, it recalls a now nearly unimaginable era when producers were willing to experiment with the scores and soundtracks for prestigious films.

  Which is curious because it’s not as if these same producers took too many risks elsewhere. The cast is stellar (Pfeiffer, Rutger Hauer, Matthew Broderick, Leo McKern, John Wood, even a young Alfred Molina), while the cinematography by Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now, Last Tango In Paris, The Last Emperor) is spectacular. So why the problematic, and now oh-so-dated, soundtrack?

  To answer this, it helps to understand that historical films are required to do (at least) three things simultaneously. They must look like their release-day audience’s ideas about the past. They must entertain this release-day audience. Most importantly of all, these films must somehow bridge the gap between the apparently authentic past and the actually entertaining present. The historical film, then, must feel both historically authentic and unmistakably modern. Because of this, anachronistic elements feature regularly – and intentionally – in historical films.

  Seen through this prism, Ladyhawke’s soundtrack is an effort to make an otherwise difficult world – comprised of shape-shifting people, evil bishops and oblique curses about the mutability of day and night, all set in a crumbling, discomfortingly unfamiliar 12th-century Europe – meaningful to its audience. The film’s fantasy elements, so potentially alienating for audiences, arguably only make this more necessary.

  This all sounds like a laudable project for a composer, so why do so many critics hate (not too strong a word) Ladyhawke’s music? One way to approach this question is to consider the soundtracks of other historical movies. Almost without exception, these aim to impart a certain intensity via a serious, right-sounding (rather than authentic) score as they seek to bridge that ever-present gap between the apparently authentic past and the actually entertaining present.

  We can go further: no matter how unrealistic a historical fantasy film may be, a serious soundtrack legitimises the story and the setting in a way the rest of movie either does not, cannot or will not. Consider, for example, the joyous bombast of the score to Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl (2003): for all Johnny Depp’s charismatic lunacy, for all the alienating distance of a film based on a theme park ride, set in the 17th-century Caribbean and featuring undead pirates, the score continually reminds its audience that the film is, ultimately, still a serious undertaking, and worth time and emotional investment

  In contrast, Ladyhawke’s soundtrack is absolutely, almost shockingly, an echo of its own specific historical moment. Sweeping, propulsive and drenched in (to contemporary ears) retro electronica, the music from Parsons and composer Andrew Powell is unmistakably a product of 1985, and entirely intended to resonate with its 1985 audience. Evidence it succeeded comes from contemporaneous reviews: of the small sample available online, not a single one mentions the music. Strong acting, weak plotting and pacing, strong visuals, weak scripting, vanishing accents, Michelle Pfeiffer’s beauty – yes, but nothing about the soundtrack.

  Spend five minutes searching reviews of Ladyhawke from the 1990s and 2000s, though, and the soundtrack will be mentioned in every one, and almost always pejoratively: Ladyhawke’s soundtrack is, time and time again, dismissed as “dated,” “cut off at the knees” and, regularly, just plain “terrible.”

  Again, why is this reaction so extreme? Leaving aside obvious jibes about cheesy 80s synths, one important element here may be the stark contrast between Ladyhawke and the non-fantastical historical epics that followed in its wake, Henry V (1989), Braveheart (1995) and Gladiator (2000). Quite simply, Ladyhawke’s brand of meaningful fantastic-historical fell out of fashion almost as soon as it was released, which in turn meant nobody tried Parsons’ and Powell’s musical approach to bridging that gap between the apparently authentic past and the actually entertaining present.

  Instead, as the historical film reached a zenith of pompous high seriousness, high-serious and conservative soundtracks were in vogue too. It’s a musical trend that’s continued into the 21st century even as the historic fantastic has been in the ascendancy through movies such as the Pirates films and Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy. Nobody, it seems, is willing to speak up for Parsons and Powell.

  Except maybe things are beginning to change. Fast forward to 2013 and there’s evidence audiences have become more accepting of the apparently inauthentic past and the obviously historically inauthentic score. Even the much-derided A Knight’s Tale (2001) with its infamous medieval rendition of Queen’s We Will Rock You, a movie crushingly dismissed by critic Lisa Schwarzbaum as “history made smaller than life” in Entertainment Weekly, has found its defenders.

  Equally importantly, reviewers have begun trying to contextualise Ladyhawke and its score, placing the movie within larger historical fantasy-film trends by pointing out that its ultra-modern score places it in the company of other ambitious SF and fantasy films, including Conan The Barbarian (1982), Dune (1984) and Legend (1985). With modern audiences now revisiting the 1980s in other contexts as well, it’s perhaps not surprising to find that feelings about Ladyhawke too may be changing. What was 10 years ago horribly dated now looks like an experiment with form, an ambitious effort to bridge the gap between the apparently authentic past and the legitimately entertaining present in a new and interesting fashion: with an intentionally, obviously anachronistic soundtrack. Nearly 30 years after its release, Ladyhawke’s derided score is finding new advocates.

  All that said, perhaps Ladyhawke’s appeal is, and will always be, limited to the nostalgic and the irony junkies. Or perhaps something larger and more interesting is happening. Perhaps the appreciation of a film’s discrete elements, its anthropological and artifactual meaning, is no longer limited to cinema buffs and film studies majors. Perhaps audiences are becoming more sophisticated in understanding and appreciating the divide between the apparently authentic past and the actually entertaining present. Perhaps, finally, we armchair cineastes are coming into our own.

  Martin Millar: Urban Pioneer

  - Jon Courtenay Grimwood -

  Hell, so many people now crowd London’s hip urban fantasy bus that
it’s in danger of becoming as tourist tat as Camden Market. (Unless Camden is hip again and I missed the memo…)

  Of course, the bus was somewhat less crowded in 2007, when Martin Millar published Lonely Werewolf Girl, his angsty-lycanthropes-meet-fashion-victim- elementals return to form. And the whole hip urban fantasy kick was pretty much waiting to break in 1992 when his Good Fairies Of New York first appeared.

  “It seemed an unpromising subject at the time. I had no particular feeling people wanted to read an adult novel about fairies,” he says now. “However, that’s no reason not to write something. It’s always best to write exactly what you want.” And what Millar wanted to write, its seems, was a wonderfully weird novel about Johnny Thunders and two dysfunctional Scottish fairies, Heather and Morag, who open the book by crashing through a fourth-floor window on 4th Street, New York and promptly vomit on the owner’s carpet. “I liked Johnny Thunders. I never saw The New York Dolls play, but I did see The Heartbreakers several times and they were good. Johnny was a good figure to work in to the plot,” adds Millar.

  More than simply Millar’s best-known book, Good Fairies is a key urban fantasy text. (If you can apply so boring a description to the story of two Celtic fairies thrown out of their glen for playing punk on their fiddles, thrown out of Scotland for doing something unspeakable to the MacLeod banner, and ending up in New York with the worst hangover in history after doing way too many magic mushrooms in a field in Cornwall.) It wasn’t the first Millar I read, but it remains my favourite because nobody else had then come close to doing anything similar.

  But before that – way before that – there was Alby. And so far as I’m concerned, no one had done anything similar to that either. Milk, Sulphate And Alby Starvation appeared in 1987 to rave word of mouth or total incomprehension and little in-between. (Declaration: I was sent the script as an editor, thought it was the most brilliant thing I’d read that year and utterly failed to persuade a publishing meeting to agree.)