J. G. Ballard is my favourite writer of all times. Moreover, he's the ideal inspiration for Mental Obsessions' songs, since his main figures tend to isolate themselves from reality and are very much preoccupied by a strong idea, an aim, or a perversion, just like the figures described in our songs.
Basically, every single one of his novels or numerous short stories could form the basis of a Mental Obsessions song. The one novel arguably suited best for the theme is Crash from 1973 (see also: critique and another excerpt), the first chapter of which is given below.
In the song, which you can download at the bottom of this page, the words get their due space in order for them to unfold their full effect. A disquieting low-frequency structure is the only musical basis, complemented by casual, not too noisy bursts which match the gloomy atmosphere of the scene, in which the climax of the whole novel has already happened: Vaughan's death.
Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. During our friendship he had rehearsed his death im many crashes, but this was his only true accident. Driven on a collision course towards the limousine of the film actress, his car jumped the rails of the London Airport flyover and plunged through the roof of a bus filled with airline passengers. The crushed bodies of package tourists, like a haemorrhage of the sun, still lay across the vinyl seats when I pushed my way through the police engineers an hour later. Holding the arm of her chauffeur, the film actress Elisabeth Taylor, with whom Vaughan had dreamed of dying for so many months, stood alone under the revolving ambulance lights. As I knelt over Vaughan's body she placed a gloved hand to her throat. Could she see, in Vaughan's posture, the formula of the death which he had devised for her?
During the last weeks of his life Vaughan thought of nothing else but her death, a coronation of wounds he had staged with the devotion of an Earl Marshal. The walls of his apartment near the film studios at Shepperton were covered with the photographs he had taken through his zoom lens each morning a she left her hotel in London, from the pedestrian bridges above the westbound motorways, and from the roof of the multi-storey car-park at the studios. The magnified details of her knees and hands, of the inner surface of her thighs and the left apex of her mouth, I uneasily prepared for Vaughan on the copying machine in my office, handing him the packages of prints as if they were the instalments of a death warrant. At his apartment I watched him matching the details of her body with the photographs of grotesque wounds in a textbook of plastic surgery.
In his vision of a car-crash with the actess, Vaughan was obsessed by many wounds and impacts - by the dying chromium and collapsing bulkheads of their two cars meeting head-on in complex collisions endlessly repeated in slow-motion films, by the identical wounds inflicted on their bodies, by the image of windshield glass frosting around her face as she broke its tinted surface like a death-born Aphrodite, by the compound fractures of their thighs impacted against their handbrake mountings, and above all by the wounds to their genitalia, her uterus pierced by the heraldic beak of the manufacturer's medallion, his semen emptying across the luminescent dials that registered for ever the last temperature and fuel levels of the engine.
Excerpt of the first paragraph (47 sec)
The complete song (4:35 min)
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Last change: 08-Apr-1999