A belated Happy 2015 to all my readers! I was pretty much tied up after Christmas and over the turn-of-th-year period, finishing off my dissertation with the final chapter concentrating on Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and a few selected novels of J. G. Ballard. I’m no expert on JGB, but I know what I like and I’ve concentrated on three novels The Drowned World (1962), High-Rise (1975) and Kingdom Come (2006), mostly becuase they have that kind of ‘dystopian’ theme running through them, albeit in a very ballardian way. I hope to be able to post some extracts of my labours here once the whole thing id done, dusted and ‘discussed’.
Meanwhile I can suggest this excellent South Bank Show documentary on JGB, presumably made just after Kingdom Come was published. It’s a kind of ‘Ballard for beginners’ with an interview by Melvyn Bragg, the bloke I wish I’d had as an English teacher at school.
My ballardian writings were also assisted by listening to selected musics of John Foxx, who has stated that during the recording of his seminal electronic album Metamatic he was “reading too much J.G. Ballard”. The fruits of that are adequately illustrated in this little pièce with accompanying visuals by Karborn, Foxx’s son and heir. I also took some stills off the telly which came out quite well, so I thought I’d share. (If you look hard enough you can see reflected the lights on my Christmas tree).
This was a man 