Joan As Police Woman Christobel (2019)
By definition, John Higgs is an author. But he also is something like a cultural cartographer. His books trace the strange routes by which ideas become cultural phenomena, myth and shared imagination.
He has written widely about counterculture and the hidden architectures of modern life: from the anarchic mythology of The KLF in The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds, to the visionary legacy of William Blake in William Blake vs the World. In each case, John is less interested in straightforward biography than in how stories take on lives of their own, showing how culture behaves like a kind of shared dream.
His latest work, Lynchian: The Spell of David Lynch, is a study of filmmaker and the strange emotional logic of his cinema. The book reflects on why Lynch’s films continue to resonate so strongly, even when they resist interpretation. As John writes, Lynch’s work raises questions rather than resolving them: why do dreamlike images like flickering lights or unresolved mysteries feel so emotionally precise? And why do attempts to replicate that “Lynchian” quality so often fail?
Alongside his books, John has become a distinctive voice in contemporary cultural commentary. Whether he’s writing about art, music, pop culture or belief systems, his work suggests that the extraordinary is never as far from everyday life as it might seem.
When we asked John for a track, he took a moment before answering. Then he sent “Christobel” by Joan As Police Woman, from the 2006 album Real Life. According to John, the song is “especially potent to listen to when you are driving at night, because it knows where it is going even when you don’t.”
Start the conversation
Become a paid member of The Rest to gain access to the comments section.