See also Burial's albums and Kode9's 'Memories of the Near Future' for the sonic equivalent of the underwater London Ballard imagines in The Drowned World. You might not like it, but you were right. Your legacy is to have refined and updated that 'Orwellian' dystopian future into a 'Ballardian' present. I totally concur with the previous comments about John Foxx and The Normal - how could they have been ignored? As a musician myself, i think Ballard's influence lies in the types of extremes he explored - they are immediately identifiable to anyone who has ever been in a band! Being on a motorway or in a concrete car park at 5am, or dealing with macho bouncers in clubs playing 'alpha male' mind games is pure Ballard! Rest in peace Jim. A lot of Throbbing Gristle's stuff also evokes a Ballardian landscape, although they were more influenced by William Burroughs - but hey, Burroughs provided the introduction to a reprint of 'Atrocity Exhibition' and Ballard did the same for 'Naked Lunch', so perhaps the cross-fertilisation of influences is no surprise. Robin, Medway, UKīowie's 'Always Crashing in the Same Car' from 'Low' is also supposedly influenced by 'Crash'. He obviously foresaw that that run-down area would become prime real-estate. Also not mentioned was that High Rise was set in a tower block built where The Canary Wharf Tower now stands. Strangely 'Warm Leatherette' was also covered by Grace Jones. Suede's lyrics often touched on a Ballardian conceit of urban life, rich with allusions to concrete, traffic and ennui. Its picture of a scrapped RAF English Electric Lightning jet fighter lying on desolate moorland is the perfect Ballardian image the writer repeatedly used downed or crashed aircraft in his work. Suede, who always had a dash more pretension than most of their Brit Pop peers, paid homage to Ballard - knowingly or otherwise - with the cover image of their 1997 B-sides compilation, Sci-Fi Lullabies. You don't need to cite Ballard to have worn his influence.

Ballard the atrocity exhibition