A review of the recent Barbican gig: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,813739,00.html A doughnut ring of diesel fug, an endless procession of cars and Eddie Stobart lorries, a Tarmac tourniquet. The M25 is many things - and now it's a work of art, says Iain Sinclair Saturday October 19, 2002 The Guardian The M25 For one night only the M25 is to be re-routed to pass through the Barbican. This is not one of Mayor Livingstone's anti-pod measures (sponsored limos and cabs only). Nor is the surreal one-night stand part of the general craziness that infects contemporary London: designer gridlock, cattle-car underground network, traffic-calming measures that induce cardiac flutters. It's fine for Ken to take a hire-car home from Blackpool - so long as he sits in the front with the driver. The rest of us are choking on fumes, chain-smoking to bring down our heartbeats, sucking on mobile phones like comfort dummies. In other words, motorway conditions have been imported, by generously rewarded utopians, to solve the horrors of the inner city. Meteorologists have identified a new microclimate associated with the M25: "the inverted thermal cone". A doughnut ring of perpetual diesel fug and muck, road heat, visible from space, now masks traffic-island London. A cone of pollution climbs above the never-ceasing procession of cars and Eddie Stobart lorries, folding back on itself to become a prophylactic membrane: the true Millennium Dome. We're trapped and there's no way out. The sky looks like something seen from inside a dirty milk bottle. But the Barbican event will offer culture clients the optimum experience of London's Tarmac tourniquet, a virtual superhighway (filmed by Chris Petit), running continually, without stutter or stall - "Look, ma, no hands" - on three screens. Acoustic footsteps, the invisible nuisance of photovoltaic scanners hidden in service station forecourts, hypnotic trance rhythms of rubber tyres on wet roads, whispered instructions from border-zone magus JG Ballard ("Blow up Bluewater!"), will be finessed by Bruce Gilbert and Robin Rimbaud. The full heaven-and-hell palimpsest of the orbital highway, without leaving the City of London. How has this come about? And what does it mean? When I began tramping around the ragged edge of the M25, testing the uncertain permissions of the outer suburbs, I thought there might be a book in it; notes and photographs (hundreds of them) brought back to Hackney. Ducking and diving through the empty quarter, in the company of an old friend, the painter Renchi Bicknell, turned up more narrative than a single work could contain: toxic waste, casually cosmeticised MOD properties converted into Legoland housing, Heathrow bullion swag funding Essex rave culture (the happy conjunction of orbital motorway and mobile phone), prophetic texts by 19th-century science-fiction writers, lost hospitals, golf courses fronting landfill scams. As Ballard said (and he's been saying it since the Sixties, long before the M25 was opened): "The motorway landscape is where the future of England reveals itself - and that future is boring." His list of attractions - off-highway shopping, gated communities, CCTV, mediparcs, Heathrow, low-concept executive housing, marinas - was a soothing mantra (imagine the voice of an air terminal announcement, after the ding- dong). Ballard's essays and stories reveal themselves as lethally benign answers to questions that nobody has the imagination or the courage to ask. Through repetition, Ballard insisted, boredom becomes transcendence. The M25 works - if you stay on it long enough. If you allow it to become the gateway to an alternate reality. It soon became obvious - operating with a decent, mid-market independent publisher like Granta - that something as unwieldy as a book about a motorway walk needed to back its claim to shelf-space with a raft of other activities. The Channel 4 film. The readings. And, thanks to Paul Smith and the Barbican, the "parallelist performance in three-lane theatre". This, as I should explain, is the "other" Paul Smith. The one who lost his hyphen in Leicester, in an open-plan office. The one who does something mysterious for Mute Records, and who occasionally takes a cab to the lower reaches of Harrow Road. But who is only seen in airport terminals, coming off the red-eye shuttle, without luggage. Looking for somewhere to fill an ashtray. Smith imported Ken Kesey for his final tour (taking in the solstice in Cornwall, the Edinburgh festival and, of course, the Barbican). This time everybody wanted to know who they had to fuck to get off the bus. Paul finished up wrestling with Kesey on Blackheath. The unexpurgated story will have to wait for his autobiography. Paul Smith facilitates. Slowly. I met him in a Limehouse pub, just after I had published my second novel, Downriver, in 1991. He hoped to launch a spoken-word label: his fantasy wants list included William Burroughs, Anthony Burgess reading A Clockwork Orange, and Ballard. I put him on to Barry Miles and a major Sixties archive. Stewart Home was in there somewhere (he always is). Deals were struck, hands shaken. I didn't see Paul again for four or five years. But the CDs duly appeared, if you didn't blink and miss them, around the turn of the millennium. Meanwhile, Smith's King Mob/Disobey umbrella operated underground clubs, presentations in unlikely venues (slaughterhouses, doss houses, decommissioned synagogues). The great Bruce Gilbert manipulated sound fields, subtle, persuasive, ear-splitting. Home ranted in a series of manic (by memory) self-impersonations. Kathy Acker did a turn when she was in town. Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, with massed choirs, sold out the Barbican - and shook the balcony so much, I lost my fillings. The underlying notion, which will be the real point to the M25/London Orbital event this month, is the old avant-garde conceit of bringing interesting operators (hermits) from different (in)disciplines together: so that money-burning moralists like Drummond and Cauty get to meet Ballard, Gilbert works with Petit and his editor, Emma Matthews. Poet and performance artist Brian Catling watches a hero figure of his adolescence (Ballard again). And a moderately large audience, who may never have heard of them before, are exposed to the stunning mimetic skills of Aaron Williamson and the poetry (and Bartók riffing) of the former Hell's Angel and present Anglo-Saxon scholar, Dr Bill Griffiths. The Barbican event is factored from customised nostalgia, New York in the Seventies, London in the Sixties, Paris in the Twenties, mythical eras that Paul Smith and his co-conspirators were lucky enough to miss (or to have forgotten). But it is also, I believe, one of the ways to get things moving again. The top-heavy bureaucratic demands of cultural corporations, hungry for sponsorship, frantic for budget, pitching for dollar, Euro and yen, make any short-term performance piece difficult to stage. The architecture is cumbersome, fixed where it is, the machinery of promotion chokes the thing it is trying to promote. In and out, that's the future. Exploit the real estate, do it cheap and fast. Celebrity is the commodity. Notoriety gets the book published. The book underwrites the tour. Lord Archer backstage in Lincoln, prison as theatre. Howard Marks, on his never-ending circuit, follows Max Bygraves into Hastings. If you can't afford the T-shirt, buy the book. It's got a great photo on the cover. Marks as the missing Rolling Stone. The book, as I've discovered, is no longer promoted by a little drinks party and a reading at the local bookshop. Now the book sells the event. Authors and agents, so far as I know, haven't yet come to terms with this new landscape. The book - and there might as well be only one of them - is a sculptural object, a fetish, carried around. To readings, lectures, radio, TV soundbites, and now theatre. Theatre in which quasi- fictional characters step out of the pages to revise inadequate portraits. The characters talk back. The road plays itself on three screens. Sound-snoops are out there sampling the acoustic debris of mobile phones and service station monologues. The critic Kevin Jackson, having posted an account of one section of the walk for a broadsheet, was suckered into the story, made to join the party, to keep on walking. And now by an infinitely reductive process he appears at the Barbican: as himself. A fiction reviewing a fiction, a textual Xerox doing a number on his infamous feet. Ballard has never, before this event, visited the Barbican. In some senses - think of High-Rise - he can be said to have invented it. But he didn't need to see it, the tropical jungle under glass, the labyrinthine walkways, comfortable hermiticism. The Barbican exists to express a classically Ballardian paradox: being in the city but not of the city. With its postwar utopianism, climbing out of the ruins, it belongs to the era of Abercrombie and his County of London Plan, all those benevolent impositions, parkways, garden cities, orbital highways linking inner and outer boroughs. The Barbican and the M25 should have been twins. But the motorway that turned London into a traffic island waited for Margaret Thatcher. It was born posthumous, doomed from the start - but now, thanks to Paul Smith and his associates, road and faux-Aztec fort will come together in a glorious, head-on, multiple pile-up. Be there. · M25/London Orbital is at the Barbican, London EC2, on Friday. Box office: 020-7638 8891 · London Orbital by Iain Sinclair is published by Granta · London Orbital is on Channel 4 on October 29 at 11.30pm http://www.barbican.org.uk/generic/details.asp?eventID=1280&artFormID=2& artForm=music Iain Sinclair’s M25 London Orbital Iain Sinclair’s latest book ‘London Orbital’ sets out to discover an area less fashionable than the streets and rivers of inner London: the previously uncharted stretch of urban settlement outside London bounded by the great circle of the M25. For this book Sinclair WALKED around the M25, unwinding time with his anti-clockwise odyssey, uncovering a history of forgotten villages, suburban utopias and the hellish asylums. Based on and inspired by Iain Sinclair’s ‘London Orbital’, this extraordinary performance brings together readings by Iain Sinclair, J.G.Ballard, Bill Drummond and Ken Campbell; Chris Petit’s specially shot and manipulated M25 film and new music performed live by WIRE, Scanner and Jimmy Cauty. Produced by the Barbican in association with King Mob Venue Title: Barbican Hall Friday 25 October, 7.30pm