This is Memorial Device

David Keenan

Faber & Faber, £8.99

Review by Alastair Mabbott

HAVING championed obscure and uncommercial music for years in the pages of The Wire magazine (and in his previous book, England’s Hidden Reverse), David Keenan has, for his fictional debut, reimagined his old hometown of Airdrie as a hotbed of musical experimentalism.

This “hallucinated oral history”, comprising 26 interviews and monologues from people involved in the Airdrie music scene in the early 1980s, has purportedly been compiled by one Ross Raymond to celebrate that scene and to dispel the image of Scottish working class towns as cultural deserts.

In this community of vinyl obsessives and cassette collectors, music is a gateway to new ways of seeing, thinking and living, and the DIY post-punk ethic has given them licence to be artists. Seeing mainstream pop culture as something that people from their background can’t aspire to participate in, they take what they need from it to transform themselves and their surroundings. Unknown outside Airdrie, they are nevertheless legends. “We had our own Syd Barrett and Brian Jones and Nico and Pete Perrett,” one interviewee proudly declares.

These characters include Vanity, whose ventures into porn films cross over with her production of industrial music, electronics geek Robert Mulligan, who is preoccupied with “inventing a form o music that wid play itsel”, a widely-despised synth duo called Relate, whom Leigh Bowery is accused of ripping off, and a ritualistic band said to rob graves for thighbones to make into trumpets.

By common consent, Memorial Device tower over them all. They’re Airdrie’s own Velvets, despite the fact that they released virtually nothing and were almost unheard-of outside their hometown. Their vocalist, Lucas Black, is the town’s visionary savant figure, spoken of in the kind of reverential terms one would associate with Syd Barrett. Problems with his memory mean that Lucas wakes “each morning anew” and constantly consults his notebooks to find a “coherent shape” for his life.

To one degree or another, that’s what all the main characters are doing here, developing some quite sophisticated and individualised worldviews on their quests for some kind of gnostic wisdom – and memorialised here by Ross Raymond partly because “later on everyone went off and became social workers and did courses on how to teach English as a foreign language or got a job in Greggs”.

As well as evoking the wild, curious rush of being a music-obsessed teenager, the novel also harks back to a time when getting into the culture surrounding popular music could lead an enquiring mind almost anywhere: to Baudelaire or Situationism or Gurdjieff or Kenneth Anger. Fittingly, from the ghosts said to be haunting a park to the mannequin which some believe has acquired a life of its own, there’s an undercurrent of mysticism to this already “hallucinated” history.

A tribute to the transformative power of music, as well as a kaleidoscopic view of the back-biting, supportiveness, tangled relationships and self-mythologising of a local scene, This Is Memorial Device turns Keenan’s imaginary landscapes into a real and recognisable place, its bus shelters, bedsits and chip shops transfigured by the vibrancy of simply being young.