J.G. Ballard and "Synth Britannia"

Would PBS ever greenlight something as interesting and non-Ken-Burns-y as "Synth Britannia," to which BBC viewers were recently treated? The documentary is described on the BBC website as site as "following a generation of post-punk musicians who took the synthesiser from the experimental fringes to the centre of the pop stage."

Were Pete Townsend and Brian Eno, who predate the musicians profiled, really "the experimental fringes"? In any case, the BBC says that the Beatles-on-Ed-Sullivan moment for synthesizer-driven music came in 1979, when Gary Numan appeared on the British show Top of the Pops.

Numan's best-known song in the United States is "Cars," which brings us to one of the themes of the documentary: the link between synth-pop and the work of the English writer J.G. Ballard, known for his dystopian ruminations on modern life, most famously in the novel "Crash."

Writes someone who worked on the documentary:

Early on when we were discussing themes and motifs to explore in Synth Britannia the topic of JG Ballard came up in conversation.… The world Ballard described in books like Crash and Concrete Island felt like a dystopian vision of the future and yet it was actually the present day rendered alien -- a world of motorways, concrete underpasses, airports, subways lit with fluorescent lights, spaghetti junctions and giant concrete tower blocks. In short, this was 70s Britain -- old Victorian slums and city centres eviscerated and concreted over.

This link between the environment and the music became very apparent on our travels around Britain to meet the pioneers of synthesizer music. All of the early synth artists found themselves making music in urban areas from the run down, empty streets of East London to industrial Sheffield under the shadow of the massive concrete Park Hill Estate.

In two excerpts from the documentary highlighted on the blog Ballardian, the connection between Ballard and the synth-pop pioneers are probed. The influence of "Crash" on the music videos for "Warm Leatherette," by The Normal (really one musician, Daniel Miller), and Numan's "Cars" could not be more explicit. The former video stresses the violence inherent in the book, the latter the sensuality.

Miller speaks eloquently about his debt to Ballard. I am not convinced, however, at least from this clip, that Numan--as opposed to his video director--knew anything about the novelist. Here's Numan, for instance, plumbing (in Nigel Tufnel fashion) what drove him to write such lyrics as "Here in my car / I feel safest of all / I can lock all my doors":

"'Cars' is just about feeling safe, in amongst people. In a car."