R.I.P. Ballard, Seabrook
Two recent deaths have prompted me to re-read the work of the authors concerned. J.G.Ballard’s death made national news, which was both impressive and deserved for such a great writer. I met him in late summer 1978, when I interviewed him for Search & Destroy magazine – run by V.Vale out of San Francisco (http://www.researchpubs.com). It was a hot day, and my drive down the M3 was sound-tracked by Siouxsie and the Banshees’ cool, malevolent “The Scream”. I missed the turn-off for Shepperton, and arrived late and flustered, but Ballard couldn’t have been kinder or more stimulating. It was my first non-musician interview, and I had a great time. This was a great period for science fiction and Ballard was at the cutting edge, describing an alternative present that was unfolding before your very eyes. His influence on popular culture was considerable, even then: published in 1975, “High Rise” (see picture) predicated much punk iconography while “Crash” explicitly informed the perfect electronic single by the Normal (Daniel Miller), “Warm Leatherette”. The flip – “TVOD” – also partook of Ballardian techno-barbarism. Vale published the interview – which will be available soon – in Search & Destroy Issue 10, and became such a convert that he later published two issues of Re/Search magazine, numbers 8/9 as a perfect bound special on “J.G.Ballard”, as well as an edition of “The Atrocity Exhibition” (1991) and “J.G.Ballard: Conversations” (2005).
A couple of months ago, I was told of David Seabrook’s death, which came as a shock: for much of last year I’d been in regular touch with him about his new book, an examination of the life and highly dubious death of Beatles’ lawyer David Jacobs. With his customary dogged tenacity, Seabrook was beginning to uncover a true Sixties darkside story: the real “Performance” if you like, mixing homosexuality (illegal until summer 1967), blackmail, organised crime, the music industry and the most famous pop stars on the planet. He had very little material to begin with: Jacobs is usually granted a line or two in most Beatles’ histories, even though he was at the centre of much Beatle business and the life of manager Brian Epstein – for instance, he cleared out the Chapel Street house after Epstein’s August 1967 overdose. When I interviewed Beatles publicist and Apple PR Derek Taylor in 1997, he mentioned Jacobs in passing: Brian ‘had a vast and successful group of homosexual friends. Including Nat Weiss, David Jacobs… that was a very dodgy business, it ended so badly, and I don’t know why he hanged himself…he had no innocence at all left, David Jacobs. I had lunch with Cecil Beaton, and I felt the same about him: hard, mean-spirited, ambitious, cruel and vindictive man.’
It remains to be seen whether Seabrook’s work will be completed, but in the meantime I went back to “Jack of Jumps” (2006), his exhaustive account of the ‘nude murders’ that gripped the capital in the mid sixties: between 1959 and 1965, eight prostitutes were murdered and dumped in various locations around West London. The killer was never caught. I can remember as a child seeing the photos of the dead women in the papers at the time, and over 40 years on, they still have the power to chill. “Jack of Jumps” has a relentless, grim momentum as Seabrook, relying on police documents and his own research, maps out a whole underworld ignored by almost all histories of the decade. My one reservation would be Seabrook’s lack of empathy with the difficult, dangerous and often compulsive lives led by the victims, but he was certainly onto something with his Sixties Darkside obsession – and the David Jacobs book could have been his masterpiece. The only other person currently working in this area is Stewart Home, and I can thoroughly recommend his fictional memoir about his mother, Julia Callan-Thompson, “Tainted Love” (2005). He also has a great blog…
A final thought, counter to the revisionist, neo-con view of the Sixties, from J.G.Ballard’s autobiography, “Miracles of Life”: ‘the 1960′s were a far more revolutionary time than younger people now realise, and most people assume that English life has always been much as it is today, except for mobile phones, emails and computers. But a social revolution took place, as significant in many ways as that of the post-war Labour government. Pop music and the space age, drugs and Vietnam, fashion and consumerism merged together into an interesting and volatile mix’.