The BBC news website has a feature on a shop that’s opened in Gloucestershire that has nothing to sell. Instead its shelves and drinks chillers are stocked with rubbish – packets, bottles and cans – collected in a half day in The Forest of Dean. There’s a 28 year old Worcester Sauce flavour crisp packet the local council was able to date by the competition Walkers was running at the time. The oldest dated item is from 1983, the year that Jacko’s Billie Jean, Bowie’s Let’s Dance and Kajagoogoo’s Too Shy were Number 1.

One picture in particular caught my eye. It shows a chiller cabinet standing in ancient woodland. Cue Grandaddy’s prescient song from 2000’s The Sophtware Slump, an album I’ve not listened to for a long time. It’s possibly the finest example of Ballardian Dystopia captured in music. I think I’ll give it a spin today.

What other albums are there that capture that capture a similar sense of the kind of sci-fi associated with Ballard, Philip K Dick et al rather than fantasy or space opera?

Slightly unrelated but quite excited at discovering the other day that Channel 4 will be showing a new science fiction series, » Continue Reading.