How Not To Write About Music – II: This Is Memorial Device by David Keenan

I tend not to buy many new books; most are acquired via a more serendipitous route, and that is certainly true of the music-related books found in my office space, currently standing at three and a bit bookcases groaning under the weight of musical history. It isn’t that I’m hippy-minded enough to think that some universal force puts the tomes I should read in my path; more that I’ll read anything and everything, and so I can generally find something interesting to devour in second-hand bookshops, charity outlets, and bargain bins.

Recent finds have included Bernie Taupin’s engaging “Scattershot,” “Hardcore Heart,” a history of the British hardcore scene, and “The Holy or The Broken,” which tells of the unlikely ascent of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” from interesting album filler to one of the most loved and covered songs of modern times.

I also recently stumbled across “This Is Memorial Device” by David Keenan, which I picked up mainly because the two pieces of cover blurb were courtesy of Kim Gordon and Irvine Welsh, respectively.

I can’t be the only person who has put this book down halfway through and researched whether the events and people described in the book are real. And, so it turns out that although it purports to be an account of the music scene in early 1980s Airdrie, at most, it captures the feeling of the place and the mood of the times as felt by imagined would-be post-punk pioneers. Fiction that is more compelling than fact.

Set out as a series of interviews, recordings, letters, and emails recalling those days, it reads like a series of hallucinatory fragments, a collection of memories and recollections, opinions, and anecdotes that feel like you are wandering through other people’s minds to piece together the times.

Bands such as the titular Memorial Device, Chinese Moon, Steel Teeth and Glass Sarcophagus, cutting-edge post-punkers, aging blues-rock outfits, synth stalwarts, and pop pioneers are all instantly recognizable, as are their troubled lead singers and band-hoping players, not to mention a revolving door of fans and friends, drug dealers and wayward partners, managers and photographers.

It brilliantly captures the feeling of being young, in a band and ready to take on the world, that blend of wide-eyed wonder and hope, aspiration and adventure and obsessiveness but also the bullshit and belligerence and bravado all now coated with an air of both nostalgia and melancholy as those once at the fast beating heart of the scene look back at those days with the wisdom of adulthood and the distance of time.

But even though it is fiction, never has a music book captured what it means to be involved in music, whether as a musician or gig-goer, hanger-on, or obsessive record collector. In some ways, it seems more real than the experiences many of us had pursuing our own dreams. It is a love letter to small towns and the music made there, to the fires and revolutions that post-punk created, and to the wistful memories that stay with those involved for the rest of their lives, memories that grow both simultaneously more inconsequential and more powerful as the years pass.

As one of the characters found here famously says, “It’s not easy being Iggy Pop in Airdrie,” and this book is dedicated to those who tried. It is brilliant; it is important. Hunt down a copy now and fall in love with a scene that never existed but which resonates in perfect harmony with our own memories.