Science Fiction-Music Interconnections: The Ambient 90s

Electronic music, developed from the synthesiser experiments of the earlier twentieth century and refined by German band Kraftwerk in the 1970s, was at the peak of its popularity on the cusp of the 1990s, both in the pop mainstream and underground variants. Combined with the prevalence of mind-altering chemicals, different strands of 90s electronic music drew heavily on science fiction themes. In the UK, the ‘ambient’ instrumental soundscapes of Brian Eno and others were modified for club-goers ‘coming down’ from chemical highs as the basis of ‘ambient house’. The Orb, a partnership of Alex Paterson and Jimmy Cauty, a member of the Justified Ancients of Mu-Mu (or JAMs), were influential in refining the genre. Cauty eventually re-worked their collaboration Space into a solo recording, released in 1990; with nods to 1970s ambient pioneers Tangerine Dream and Pink Floyd, it was envisaged as “a voyage through the solar system from Mercury outwards”, with each piece named after a planet.

Space, 1990

The Orb evolved into Paterson and a shifting cast of associates; their 1991 debut album Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld set the template for sci-fi-influenced themes and imagery. The album’s centrepiece, the side-long ‘A huge ever-growing pulsating brain that rules from the centre of the Ultraworld’ was directly inspired by an episode of Blake’s Seven, ‘Ultraworld’, written by Trevor Hoyle. Their live performances were accompanied by “a constant stream of psychedelic images… projected onto the screens about the stage” (another echo of Pink Floyd), typically featuring aliens, astronauts and futuristic cityscapes. Their next album, U.F. Orb, continued the sci-fi links with samples from NASA transmissions, science fiction references and ambient explorations of space travel, notably on the 40-minute 1992 single, ‘Blue Room’. The track is believed to reference a secret location at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, containing UFO evidence. An edited version was aired on Top of the Pops. 

The Orb’s affinity with the progressive rock of an earlier era was illustrated by their connection to guitarist Steve Hillage, member of 1970s cosmic rockers Khan and Gong. He played on several sessions, was credited as a co-writer on ‘Blue Room’ and his 1979 solo proto-ambient album Rainbow Dome Musick was sometimes aired before Orb performances. Hillage, who was originally part of the influential Canterbury Scene and later worked with Hawkwind’s Nik Turner, pursued his own early 90s ambient/dance project as System 7 with partner Miquette Giraudy. Hillage’s burgeoning interest in electronica led to him programming the acts for the first Dance Tent at the Glastonbury Festival of 1995, at which System 7 themselves performed.

Paterson’s contemporaries, Cauty and Bill Drummond, had first recorded as the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, a name taken from a secret society in the counter-cultural 1975 Illuminatus! Trilogy of novels by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. The duo’s first commercial success was as the Timelords, whose single ‘Doctorin’ the Tardis’, incorporating the Dr Who theme tune, was a ‘novelty’ number one in the UK in 1988. They released an ambient house album in 1990, Chill Out, a term derived from an area called ‘The White Room’ (the title of their next album) at London’s Heaven nightclub, where Cauty and Paterson were DJs in the late 1980s. Later applied to various forms of “music of a trance-like nature”, chill-out was defined by slowed-down dance beats. Cauty and Drummond rose to international fame with a series of classic chart-topping singles as the KLF, whilst earning notoriety for their post-modern pranks. Upon their retirement from music in 1992, they deleted their back catalogue and pursued situationist ‘actions’, art projects and media campaigns as the K Foundation. When they returned on 23 August 2017, it was with a novel, 2023: A Trilogy, a “self-referential dystopian tale” credited to the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, drawing both on the Illuminatus! Trilogy and their own self-created ‘mythology’. 

Many of the original creative forces behind ambient house moved beyond its confines; Cornish electronic artist Richard James went by the name Aphex Twin, and explored the hinterlands of acid house, ambient, jungle and techno music in a bewildering series of releases with an other-worldly flavour. He enjoyed chart success in the late 90s, before promptly reverting back to more experimental forms. Another band rising from obscurity to mainstream success in the 90s were the Shamen, initially a psychedelic guitar band who embraced new technology and sampling. An interest in mind-expansion and dance culture saw them emerge as pioneers of multi-media performance whose ‘Synergy’ concept was intended to dissolve “the boundaries between rock gigs and warehouse parties”. Their 1990 LP En-Tact was described by one breathless reviewer as “the KLF remixed by William Gibson in a massive multi-coloured warehouse inside your head”.

 

After the untimely death of key member Will Sin, the Shamen subsequently enjoyed their biggest hit with ‘Ebenezer Goode’ in 1992, a straightforward celebration of drug/rave culture which also erased much of their underground credibility. A spoken-word collaboration with the celebrated author, ethno-botanist and psychedelic enthusiast Terence McKenna (“the intellectual voice of rave culture”) on ‘Re-Evolution’ was more in the spirit of their early work. With another contribution by Steve Hillage on the same album, the past was acknowledged as they simultaneously embraced the future. With a long-standing interest in cyberspace, the Shamen were among the first bands to explore Internet releases on their interactive site Nemeton, launched in 1995. The group’s mainstay, founder member Colin Angus, commented that “We’ve always seen ourselves as an ‘information band’, so it was a natural step to connect to the internet.” 

'An A-Z of Ambient', The Wire, Issue 113, July 1993

Hillage and McKenna’s involvement, like that of Timothy Leary with the contemporary Cyberpunk trend, reinforced the connections between the cultural explorations of the late 60s/early 70s and the dawn of the 90s, not least a shared interest in altered states of consciousness. It also linked to ‘new age’ overtones, a label with which ambient house was becoming associated, together with ‘chill out’, or ‘trance’, as the terms became interchangeable – certainly for the record labels who capitalised on its popularity with vast numbers of compilations over the following years. Once the impetus of its innovators was removed, the music was as bland and formulaic as the artwork; uninspiring and depressingly earth-bound.

Trevor Hoyle – An Interview (Part Two)

The versatile English author Trevor Hoyle was featured on SF Forward last year, with an introductory profile; afterwards, my friend Chris Scarfe, who grew up close to the Hoyle family in the Newhey area of Rochdale, kindly arranged for me to meet, and interview, the author. As an admirer of his work, it proved to be an absorbing and wide-ranging conversation, encompassing Trevor’s early career as an actor, television presenter and copy-writer, his influences from film and literature and his richly varied output. This feature covers several topics relating to science fiction – which represents only a portion of his published work – and is based on notes and a transcript of that conversation; the words are Trevor’s own. 

Part Two

On the possibility of his novel The Last Gasp being filmed: That’s been and gone… they renewed it for five or six years. They kept giving me money – not a lot of money, but it was a five thousand dollar option each time – so I thought, well if they do want to get it made, they’re not just going to throw money away, but year on year nothing ever came of it. What you need for a film project of course is either a big name director to attach to it, or a star; once that’s in place everything follows… if Ridley Scott wants to do it, then everything follows, but they couldn’t get anyone interested enough to act in it or direct it … I just took the money which amounted to quite a lot over five or six years and that was it.

On sf film: I think the best by far is Solaris. I was at Granada TV doing What’s On [a weekly regional arts and entertainment programme which Trevor wrote and presented, c. 1971-74] when Solaris came out and I went to see it and I was absolutely blown away, it really was one of those life-changing moments … I couldn’t understand the bloody thing, it just sucked me in... There’s a book of essays on science fiction films [Cinema Futura, 2010, edited by Mark Morris] – the editor wrote to me and said ‘do you want to pick a science fiction film and write about it?’ I said yeah, absolutely, if I can have Solaris … I wrote a critique of that – not a critique, it wasn’t academic. It was a tribute, a fan’s homage. I think the film’s better than the book by Stanisław Lem, who was a good writer. Tarkovsky [the director] took the book as a jumping-off point, and he did something magical with it – to me, that film gets nearer to imagining what an alien civilisation would really be like than any other cinematic portrayal…

On 2001: A Space Odyssey: 2001 was ground-breaking, it really was – you had to be around and at the right age to feel the effect, because up until then we’d been watching things like Destination Moon, which was not a bad film for 1950-something, but 2001 was absolutely ground-breaking. That was the major change really; up until then science fiction had been cheap and nasty B-films – Invasion of the Body Snatchers (actually that’s a fantastic film, cheaply made but still brilliant). It was in Cinerama, that’s where you have three projectors – you could actually see the blurred edges where the separate prints overlapped — they were supposed to be synchronized. In Manchester they had the Theatre Royal I think it was called; it was an old theatre converted into Cinerama, and I went to see it about five times in two weeks. The screen’s curved so you actually do get a 3D effect. It would be crude now but in 1970 when I saw it, 2001 gained tremendously from that presentation; not just watching the film but being immersed in it.

On The Invaders: That’s a great series – Roy Thinnes [the lead actor] was a good hero – the episodes were well-written, well-directed but didn’t fuss around; they just gave you a very simple story – well, it was the same story – invaders from another planet, but done with hardly any special effects. It was all achieved simply with reactions, you never saw anything…

On A Clockwork Orange: A ground-breaking book and film, certainly the film, again by Kubrick. I find A Clockwork Orange difficult to watch – I don’t mean I’m bored by it but uneasy, I think. Unsettled. Maybe that’s what it’s meant to do but I’m on edge all the time, and perhaps that’s what Kubrick wants you to feel. You come out of it thinking ‘I was hungry but I didn’t like the meal’.

On Blake’s 7: I went to a Blake’s 7 convention two years ago, first one I’d been to. I was the only writer there. There were lots of actors — Gareth Thomas, Blake, he was there, walking with a stick, he looked poorly. He’s dead now, which is no surprise at all. The fans who came knew far more about Blake’s 7 than I did. I’d written three books based on scripts, and I wrote a script for Series 4, and they were asking all kinds of arcane questions: ‘did such-and-such happen?’ and I had to say ‘ain’t got a clue, mate, I don’t know!’

My involvement came about through Nick Austin at Panther books ... I’d written the Q series for him, three books, and he rang me one day and said ‘there’s a new series coming up created by Terry Nation’ – the man who invented the Daleks, wrote for Doctor Who – ‘and they want a novelisation’. (I don’t know if I’d written any before, I’ve done about 15 novelisations [now], I did Ghostbusters! They found out at the last minute ‘cause it was a big hit in America, it was coming over here. They panicked and said ‘have we got a book?’ – no, they hadn’t so they had to get somebody to write it, and quick.) Nick Austin said ‘It’s called Blake’s 7, do you want to do it?’

You have to write these to a tight deadline – the book has to come out at the same time as the show, not weeks or months later… so I wrote the first Blake’s 7 novel and then I did two more, all for different publishers. I got to know Chris Boucher, the Script Editor at the BBC, and he said ‘have you got any ideas for the next series?’ So I submitted two or three outlines and he picked one, which became ‘Ultraworld’… there’s audio-books of the three novels [written by Trevor], read by Paul Darrow (Avon) and Jacqueline Pearce, who played Servalan…

On the scriptwriter’s involvement in filming: No [it’s not encouraged] – I went down to television centre when they were doing an episode in the studio, because in those days you had location work — done on film of course — and you had the studio recording, which was on tape. The alien planet in Blake’s 7 was always a quarry, the same quarry somewhere half an hour out of London, Beaconsfield, somewhere like that…

On fans of the series: Blake fans are so obsessive, far more than I was. I was never a big fan to be honest. I thought it was cardboardy, a bit cheesy, but it’s become almost a cult thing for a lot of people, as that convention proves. People were coming up, they had stuff of mine, facsimile scripts, and DVDs of my episode I’d never seen before. I said ‘where the hell did you get these?’, and they’d say ‘can you sign your name in the top right-hand corner’ – that exact spot, nowhere else.

There’s a funny thing — that is, amusing — about TV novelisations. By the time the books came out, while the show was on the air, of course I’d written them months before they were filmed, so sometimes I didn’t even know which actors were playing who because they hadn’t cast the minor parts. I added characterisation to all the characters in the books, otherwise you’re just transcribing the scripts. You have to make a book of it. I’d invent bits of dialogue to make linkages, so these weren’t actual changes, they were additions to make sense of it. But if the book didn’t follow the script word for word, and deviated ever so slightly, I got all kinds of crap from the fans. ‘This book is a travesty – the weapon V-914 didn’t appear in episode 3!’ And no, it didn’t, because I gave the weapon its name.

And the other thing of course: the script that I was working to was altered on the studio floor, because that’s what directors do, they say ‘that line of dialogue doesn’t work – we’ll either lose it, do it with a look, or re-write it’… I don’t know that, I’m at home, sat in my shed in Newhey writing, and they’re altering stuff in the studio and on location. The book is published by the time it’s edited [the programme], so it couldn’t be changed anyway – but these guys [the fans] are so fanatical they’re irate that you’ve changed it; I’ve read stuff online: ‘the book’s nothing like the show’ – well I took Terry Nation’s scripts and never changed a thing. I didn’t ‘invent’.

On Star Trek and Star Wars: The early Star Wars I thought were good. Star Trek – no, I never took to it, it was too much men in lurex pyjamas firing laser guns, which had never been my kind of science fiction anyway. I’ve always been more for the Philip K. Dick-type stuff… but when the first Star Wars came out, ‘cause again like 2001 and like Clockwork Orange, these are really seminal films that alter the landscape totally. I was writing my Q Series science fiction trilogy for Panther at the time and the local rep rang me up and said ‘there’s this new film coming out, a premiere in Manchester at the Odeon, do you want to come to it?’ I’d read something about the film, so I said ‘yes’ and I was really impressed. It was a press preview and there were lots of science fiction fans there and again, you’ve got to put it in the context of when it was, whatever year it was [1977] and there’d been nothing as well done as that, technically. I mean now it’s passé, when you look at it. It’s like looking at 2001, looking at it now with our eyes and accustomed as we are to CGI, it can look a bit hammy, but you’ve got to think of people looking at it with 1970-eyes and put it in that context.

Part One here.

Trevor Hoyle – An Introduction

Trevor Hoyle is a versatile English author, having published over 20 books ranging across genres, from mainstream novels, memoir, spy and suspense thrillers to acclaimed science fiction and drama, encompassing ecological disaster and football hooliganism along the way. Based outside the metropolitan cultural centres in unfashionable Rochdale, where he was born, grew up, and still follows the local football team as a season ticket holder at Spotland, he has (according to the SF Encyclopaedia) “most unusually, been able to apply an erudite surrealism to works directed towards a mass market.”

Trevor Hoyle (photo by Glyn Hughes)

Hoyle’s early training as an actor is reflected in his success as a dramatist and script-writer for television and radio, including the plays GIGO [Garbage In Garbage Out], inspired by his interest in quantum mechanics, which won a Radio Times Drama Award, and Randle’s Scandals: The Life and Liver of Frank Randle, about the subversive Lancashire comedian. He attributes the development of a distinctive method and literary style to the experience he gained working as an advertising copywriter in Manchester, which he describes as “the best training on the job a fiction writer can get.” Hoyle self-published his first book, The Relatively Constant Copywriter, in 1972, after it was rejected by 18 publishers; several of their responses are reproduced inside the book, concluding that whilst “interesting” and “well written”, “it is an uncommercial novel.”
 

After becoming a full-time author, Hoyle had a stint writing and presenting Granada TV’s weekly arts show What’s On, before the publication of Rule of Night in 1975, an unflinching look at social deprivation and urban violence from the perspective of a memorable anti-hero in teenage football hooligan Kenny Seddon. Rule of Night was a significant breakthrough for Hoyle, garnering critical praise both at the time and on its 2003 re-issue, with many reviewers noting echoes of A Clockwork Orange in this “powerfully authentic account of working-class life and gang violence.” His subsequent Q series of novels, incorporating parallel world theories and alternate realities, cemented his reputation as an innovative science fiction writer and led to his involvement in the BBC’s prime-time series Blake’s 7, writing scripts and producing novelizations of various episodes.

Hoyle has established himself as a highly productive author, producing successful ‘commercial’ work alongside more experimental fiction, notably 1979’s The Man Who Travelled On Motorways, “a multi-layered exploration of fantasy and reality, recollection and illusion, sex and terror and the dynamic nature of the collective unconscious”, and 1984’s Vail, described by the author as “a dystopian vision of Britain as a police state.” The ability to combine elements of different genres is amply evidenced by his epic novel of global complicity in climate change, The Last Gasp: first published in 1983 and revised in 1990, it was re-issued in 2016, having been extensively re-written to bring its themes up to date. With a strong cast of characters, a plot spanning decades and continents which interweaves corporate greed and ecological disaster with military and political interference in the environment, its cinematic qualities have been recognised by Hollywood studios taking a movie option on the book. Hoyle explains that “dystopian futures are much more interesting and filled with dramatic potential than utopian ones, which to a novelist is a definite attraction”. In many ways, The Last Gasp is not so much speculative science fiction as sober prediction, based on evidence and identifiable trends in world climate; as Andy Hedgecock put it, “Hoyle seems less like a prophet and more like a chronicler of imminent chaos.”

 

A two-part interview with Trevor Hoyle followed in 2018.