The power of verticality: looking for punk rock in Ballard's High-Rise

This is the way, step inside / This is the way, step inside / This is the way, step inside / This is the way, step ins-iiiiii-iiiide

Yeah man, it's Atrocity Exhibition, Joy Division's 1980 classic, with a title (and quite possibly the forbiddingly ominous tone and deeply unsettling lyrics) borrowed from JG Ballard's book. I mention this not just to state the obvious, but because I've just read Ballard's uber-bleak High-Rise, his novel about the total collapse of societal norms inside a giant tower block housing complex, home to 2,000 "respectable" people (they carry briefcases, have high-powered jobs, hold cocktail parties on their balconies etc). I vaguely recall someone (Jon Savage?) once saying that High-Rise, published in 1975, had had a pronounced influence on punk (or at least certain strains of punk), and I think this probably played a part in nudging me into reading the book. So, is it any good? Is it er, "punk"? To be honest, I'm not so sure. The book is certainly memorable and it's pretty shocking, so I guess the novel could be said to be a sort of literary analogue to punk. In the novel we watch the residents of the massive tower block mysteriously degenerate into amoral rapists, killers and cannibals. We witness small changes in behaviour at first, but before long we're accelerating into all-out territorial feuding, the formation of tribes for self-defence and to mount "raiding parties", before finally the residents descend into an orgy of depravity and utter nihilism. By the end, no-one still left alive in the shattered husk of the building seems to even care whether they'll survive the carnage. Throughout we get repeated descriptions of the physical breakdown of the building (blocked rubbish chutes, broken lifts, failed electricity and water supplies, spray-painted messages on the walls, heaps of rubbish bags littering every flat) and the squalid surroundings very clearly project the hopelessness of the rotting, soulless and increasingly zombified residents. These former dentists, stockbrokers and TV newsreaders are eventually reduced to hopeless beings entombed in their broken-down building. Abandon all hope ... 

Des-res: JG Ballard's High-Rise

So, fine, maybe it's superfically punk-like in its bleak, inflinching portrayal of urban negativity. I guess the book's "shock-factor" is also classic early punk, but ... I dunno. There's no humanity or hope in High-Rise. Decency of any kind is annihilated in the book, replaced by perversity and selfishness. The tabloids might have caricatured punk as exactly this (perverse, selfish, anti-social), but it's still just a cartoonish caricature. Kenny Everett's Sid Snot, not Sid Vicious with his "goofy" charm and his love of Bowie and clothes. Still, I can take the basic point. And the lingering after-effect of High-Rise could, I imagine, easily have seeped into early industrial music (Cabaret Voltaire, Human League, Throbbing Gristle and so on), and also into some of the iconography of post-punk, eg the inner sleeve of Athletico Spizz 80's Do A Runner album.

New species: Athletico Spizz 80 popping out of the flat for a pint of milk

Hmm, a lowering high-rise behind a lowering group of moody musicians: the power of verticality, eh? In Ross McKendrick's short film on gentrification in South Bermondsey, Your Views Are Valuable To Us, the power of verticality is a phrase to sum up the domination of 21st-century London by property developers whose buildings of choice tend to be new high-rise blocks ("luxury living with panoramic views"). Post-Grenfell, I think many people now have doubts about living high in the sky yet the buildings continue to go up and people need places in which to live. In High-Rise, the anti-hero Robert Laing, still eking out a weird almost post-human existence in the dilapidated building as the novel ends, reflects that “sometimes he found it difficult not to believe that they were living in a future that had already taken place, now exhausted”. Ballard's High-Rise might not be "prophetic" or a precurser of punk exactly, but I reckon it definitely captures something about the queasy reality of living in a vast apartment building in London. In my own comparatively modest 44-flat, three-storey building in east London there are as yet no cannibals or hunting parties prowling for victims at night. It's probably just a matter of time though ...