This Is Memorial Device

by David Keenan

This Is Memorial Device, the debut novel by David Keenan, is a love letter to the small towns of Lanarkshire in the west of Scotland in the late 1970s and early 80s as they were temporarily transformed by the endless possibilities that came out of the freefall from punk rock.

It follows a cast of misfits, drop-outs, small town visionaries and would-be artists and musicians through a period of time where anything seemed possible, a moment where art and the demands it made were as serious as your life. At its core is the story of Memorial Device, a mythic post-punk group that could have gone all the way were it not for the visionary excess and uncompromising bloody-minded belief that served to confirm them as underground legends.

Written in a series of hallucinatory first-person eye-witness accounts that capture the prosaic madness of the time and place, heady with the magic of youth recalled, This Is Memorial Device combines the formal experimentation of David Foster Wallace at his peak circa Brief Interviews With Hideous Men with moments of delirious psychedelic modernism, laugh out loud bathos and tender poignancy.

Genres: Fiction, Music, Scotland, Contemporary, Historical Fiction, Historical, Novels

298 pages, Paperback

First published February 2, 2017

About the author

David Keenan is an author and critic based in Glasgow, Scotland. He has been a regular contributor to The Wire magazine for the past twenty years. His debut novel, This Is Memorial Device, was published by Faber in 2017.

Reviews

[Meike · Rating 4 out of 5]

David Keenan's This Is Memorial Device, now available in German - and with a much cooler title! :-)
This book is an oral history of the best Scottish band that never existed, and a love letter to all young music lovers longing to truly feel alive. In the small town of Airdrie, some teenagers grow up dreaming of a life full of romance and adventure - just like teenagers everywhere. The local music scene provides them with the possibility to develop their creativity, to be part of something bigger and to create their own legends. Structured around the wild and tragic history of a fictional band cleverly named "Memorial Device", every chapter introduces the viewpoint and life story of another sparkling protagonist of the Airdrie scene, all of them outrageous and glamorous in their own way. Much of the nostalgia and melancholy of the book derives from the fact that - as in every oral history - the anecdotes are told by much older characters looking back, and we often learn what has become of their youthful dreams.

With this novel, Keenan pays homage to teenagers and young adults in small towns who dream of something different than a safe and predictable life, but on their search for - it sounds cheesy, but hey, we are all hunting for it - freedom and happiness, they are ultimately caught up in the human condition: As numerous non-fictional oral histories about bands teach us, living the dream never turns out as expected, and what is true for international superstars also goes for the local heroes of Airdrie. But what they built and what they experienced cannot be taken away from them, and has shaped them for the rest of their lives.

This is not a fast read, as you have to take the time to really dive into all 26 interlocking stories (and frankly, it took me some time to get into the groove of the book), but it's worth it: The voices Keenan creates are hilarious, smart, weary, and edgy, and if the these people's quest to live it up and find a place for themselves does not affect you, you're officially a bore. Now I definitely have to read Keenan's new book, For The Good Times (now winner of the Gordon Burn Prize 2019).

Thanks to the good people at Liebeskind (https://www.liebeskind.de/) for providing me with a review copy!

[Jake Goretzki · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an unexpected delight. I thought this was marvellous. I found it extremely engaging.

So, the ‘concept’ here: a fictionalised account of the history of an early 80s local cult band in Airdrie (‘Memorial Device’). Structure-wise, it’s novel(ish). I’ve never read B.S. Johnson, but when I say that it’s experimental and novel (for me), I’m almost certain that someone in the sixties did this already. Or the thirties. But new to me.

Here’s an assembly of transcripts and interviews and first person accounts from band members, hangers on, lovers and friends. It feels taped together in places (this is great parody) and it has the aura of the punk fanzine about it (those skittish chapter preambles, for example). Somehow, I felt the same nosey interest I got with the first Knausgaards (the way he can talk about making a cup of tea and it’s oddly mesmerising). It’s like surreptitiously reading through someone’s scrapbook or photo albums on the shelf of an AirBnB, and suddenly it’s midnight.

Critically - and what really elevates it - is that these ‘found’ accounts are very often casually gorgeous, lyrical and moving. Something sounding “like the sound of a graveyard at the bottom of the sea”, “kissing her was like running your tongue along a cold marble pillar”. Lucas in particular comes through as a fully rounded presence (his mother’s account of his adoption is absolutely beautiful: “eyes too big for his face, his dad said...I’m his dad he said and we held each other, the three of us, and had a little cry”). The account of Chinese Moon (the puppet band in the department store window) is almost magical too - like something out of Russian folklore. Teddy Ohm is fascinating and straight out of a not-shit British gangster movie. Mary Hanna is threaded through it (like the name of a legendary siren at secondary who’d left by the time you were in first year but people still spoke about). They’re a great cast.

I also really enjoyed the crossover with non-fiction (Lucas’s favourite hippy song, ‘Space Anthem’ by Lothar and the Hand People is on YouTube. It’s him alright) and its faithfulness to the exhaustingly obscure indie music world.

As noted on the blurb, it’s about ‘being young’ too - but to call it ‘nostalgia’ would do it a disservice. (I’m younger than these guys, I fucking hate vinyl and I haven’t listened to a Smiths album for 25 years). It’s almost inevitably going to speak first to knackered Gen Xers and Late Boomers in Fred Perry - but it’s better than that, really.

All hail the Scottish voice in lit. Does anyone do oral history and chat better (well, Ireland aside)? I’m a big fan of Alan Warner, who has a similar tonality and crackle. There are echoes too of John McGregor in its ordinary settings and faithfulness to speech. Thomas Morris’s superb recent ‘We Don’t Know What We’re Doing’ has a similar feel. The settings: working class. Council flats and cul de sacs. Postmen and bouncers. Drunks and junkies. Chip shops and pubs. Shagging in bus stops. In the mostly drippy world of contemporary UK fiction, these things now feel really arresting. (I do hope I’m not projecting too much: If I’d been told this was set in Hertfordshire, not Lanark, I hope I’d have the same response).

All told, quite the most characterful, touching thing I’ve read in many a month. Like a marvellous found object. I hope it does well.

[Daisy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many moons ago I used to hang around in small, dingy venues watching various friends in various bands play to a hardcore (very small) group of chums and hangers on. The line-ups would change as members left to form new bands or train to be a sound engineer once they realised that they were not likely to be the next big thing. The names of the bands would change as their sound changed in an attempt to catch the wave of the current trend and everyone in their late teens who was part of that felt they were part of a scene, of something cool and important. Occasionally a member of some band or another would hit it big(gish) but it didn't create envy or make us realise how small our own scene was.
This experience is what Memorial Device captures perfectly, though set in Airdrie rather than my own North London. What sets this apart from the other band novels (although disappointingly it slips into Kevin Sampson Powder mode with a graphic account of some bizarre and disturbing sex acts) is that it uses a variety of narrators who have been involved to a greater or lesser degree in the history of the band. The voices are all unique, some in thick Glaswegian, some chapters take the form of interviews but they all add a bit of history to the story of the band. And that is the genius of the book, that Keenan captures the web-like links that form the folklore of a band.
A must read for anyone that has ever been in a band, a groupie of a band that never made it above pub venues or been a devotee of a band that you felt deserved wider acclaim.

[Nigeyb · Rating 3 out of 5]

This Is Memorial Device is a novel written in a series of hallucinatory, first-person, eye-witness accounts and follows a cast of misfits, drop-outs, small town visionaries, would-be artists and musicians during the early 1980s post punk scene in Airdrie. At its core is the story of Memorial Device, a mythic post-punk group and the greatest band you've never heard of.

I had high expectations for This Is Memorial Device. I gave up after about a third. I was enjoying it but it’s too disjointed, something not helped by reading it in small doses making it hard to keep track of the characters. I expected to be captivated but wasn’t. Probably a novel best read quickly to maintain momentum.

Sorry David Keenan, it's me not you.

[Lea · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was really looking forward to this, but it really let me down. A story about a fictional band and a fictional music scene in Scotland sounded right up my alley. Although I found the writing style okay at first, all the different characters have almost all the same sound.

It's incredibly male-gazey, even when it's supposedly written from women's perspectives, and it reads rather like short stories set in the same universe than a novel. Still, there were fascinating bits that showed talent. But the sex scenes alone made me want to quit after the first 100 pages.

[Patrick.G.P · Rating 5 out of 5]

Memorial Device - “best band you’ve never heard of”, from the small Scottish town of Airdrie during the early 80s, David Keenan maps out the psychological, metaphysical impact of the strange musicians and the bizarre menagerie of people that were drawn to their music and art.

More than two decades removed from the post-punk period of the novel, Keenan describes something that could have been my own formative period in the world of extreme music. The endless fascination with literature, obscure bands, and the extreme personalities that dominated the music scene. So many occurrences in the novel seem to be an echo of something experienced, it feels like something you’ve overheard at a party or a gig in a small club years ago, so much that I sometimes had to wonder at the strange synchronicity that seems to pulsate behind the characters within the music scene. The novel also captures the search for artistic and existential meaning that drives people into both creative and destructive endeavours. Artistic expression, whatever it may be, has to come out in some form or other.

Keenan’s prose is fluid, lightning-fast, and often, very often touched by the mark of genius exploding onto the page:
“I would start to wonder if any of the books he read penetrated deep enough to have an actual effect on his life. My own life has been so seriously damaged by books - I’ve never been able to enjoy a paperback without wanting to commit myself to it forever- that his library seemed more like a collection of firearms that had failed to go off.”

Interviews that read as intimate chats over a pint or two draw you further into the rabbit hole of the novel, where each person brings with them anecdotes that range from the beautiful and mystical to the downright bizarre. The key thing here is that I felt that I knew these people by the time I was halfway through the novel. I almost felt I could blend in with the crowd of artists and musicians and fall into a wonderful crash and burn night out on the town in Airdrie in the early eighties. Keenan not only taps into the universal power of music but the vortex of intersecting lives, interests, and bizarre occurrences that seems to be the pulsating lifeblood of the music scene.

The novel is also, as one might expect, peppered with references to music and literature, to the point that I often had to pause my reading to jot down names of bands or books I meant to check out once the opportunity arises. Keenan perfectly encapsulates the mystical, almost occult importance of records, books, and art, and the extreme impact these will have on a young person's life.

This is Memorial Device is a rare treat of a book; it feels more like an experience than a novel. It’s something to obsess over, to discuss, and to re-read. I do think that David Keenan has written a book I’d be willing to commit myself to… forever.

[Jonathan Pool · Rating 4 out of 5]

Synopsis
Memorial Device are an Airdrie post punk group in the early 1980’s. It’s a strange name (but eighties band did have strange names, a reality developed by Keenan throughout the book in a series of idiosyncratic nomenclature).
An explanation of sorts, is given:
Memorial Device - making ritual use of forgetting and remembering(18)
To a large extent, music as the medium which defines the town and its personalities in non-essential in capturing the essence of local heroes (and Bowie is unsurprisingly cited- “We can be Heroes, just for one day”. (Airdrie, which had a population of around 37,000 in 2012 exists throughout the UK.)

Highlights
Many of the best parts of the book are those that could be stand-alone short stories, character studies, and some of those anecdotes take place beyond Airdrie. Individual members of the band, most notably Lucas Black, are at their strongest outside the band dynamic. One of the strongest accounts features Richard, who ends up destitute in Israel. He quotes Dostoyevsky Notes from the Underground

There’s a paradox in Keenan’s writing. At times it’s raw, unrefined, brutal, harsh- all in keeping with a no frills community.
Keenan can also turn phrases, some of which are beautiful and others are intriguingly obscure and contradictory.

“she seemed nervous and delicate but also poetic and a little unhinged. In other words she was ticking all the right boxes” (189)

“less specific orthodoxies are more interesting in lieu of the destruction of orthodoxies altogether” (182)

Valentine (half Japanese, half Swedish ) ”her hair like a dark silent river, a river that was moving in complete silence “( (233)

”she was sipping from this huge can, which made her eyes seem like dark sunrises, the can like a dolmen or a standing stone, you know, like here comes the summer” (126)


Music/Literary context
This is a book inspired and informed by contemporary music 1983-5. There are too many bands to mention!
* The 'greatest' record acknowledged is Days Have Gone By by American guitarist John Fahey, released in 1967.
* Literature is referenced throughout the book. Russian novels. Gogol, Turgenev, Mikhail Bulgakov (“The Master and Margarita is my favourite; only the Michael Karpelson translation”) (127). That begs the question how many translations has the narrator sampled!

Author background & Reviews
I heard David Keenan in conversation with Cosmo Landesman at Curious Arts Sussex 25/8/2019. The talk took the form of an appropriately scattered group of thoughts and observations. Keenan’s energy was amazing.
*David Keenan makes no secret of the fact that he comes from an illiterate family. The voices though are like Beckett & Joyce
* Oral history. History is not written, but remembered. Keenan . Doesn’t believe in research. “I’m a fiction writer.”
*The Astonished Man, the first volume of Blaise Cendrars’ autobiography was a great influence.

Recommend

This is hardly a book to recommend to the uninitiated. It’s raw and disjointed. As a record of a life lived by a self-taught writer getting oral history down on paper, its impeccable.

[Ian Mond · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, I fucking loved that.

An oral history of Memorial Device, a post-punk band, the greatest rock group never to leave the city limits of Airdrie. Keenan has taken his clear passion for the music scene in his hometown during the 70s and 80s and transformed it into a surreal, grimy and often laugh out loud funny joy-ride. The temptation for Keenan would have been to go all out satire, to make this the Spinal Tap of Scottish rock and the avant-garde. The title of the book certainly hints in that direction. But while the book is hilarious, while Keenan, at times, is taking the piss (the larger than life characters, the crazy anecdotes… still getting my head around those mannequins… the fact no-one can adequately explain the sort of music Memorial Device play) it never tips over to outright lunacy. Whether its Patty with his top hat and his fascination in the occult or Lucas Black with his acquired brain injury which means he can’t remember what he did from day to day, or the drummer Richard who, chasing tail, heads off to fight the good fight for the Palestinian people, the band-members of Memorial Device and those who orbit their lives all feel real, authentic.

Because this is an oral history, or a gathering together of first-person accounts about the band and the scene at the time, Keenan gets to play around with structure and technique and this provides an ever-changing texture and tone that I found exciting and addictive. I’m stoked that this book was recognised by the Gordon Burn Prize, but it should also have featured on the list of nominees for the Goldsmith and, as a debut absolutely deserved a nod for the Costa Prize. I know, I know a book about a made-up post-punk band in 1980s Scotland is very niche but if a guy from Melbourne with the musical tastes of a confused seven-year-old can fall in love with this book then maybe it has greater universal appeal than first thought.

[Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this, laughed inappropriately at times and tried to fit people I know into almost all the characters having also grown up in small town Scotland and being part of a music scene.

I am sure the writing style will annoy a lot of people but I thought it worked well and I really enjoyed those times where what felt like a stand alone piece of the narrative linked back or forwards and became crucial to the overarching story.

Not that there really is a story in the traditional start/middle/end way its more a free form narrative told from the different points of view of the tellers. The author does a good job in telling the story with different voices and ways of writing which sometimes jar nicely with the way the previous chapter was written.

If you ever played in a band, hung around bands or just followed a band around then you will recognise so many of these characters and have probably been to many of the places described or places exactly like them but with different names.

It's also a book about growing up, hanging out, meeting girls/boys and all of it done pretty much set to music. You probably did or know someone who did most of the things in this book even if really the local legend you never quite believed. You might change your mind after reading this!

We all had that one band growing up that created a local scene and everyone thought would make it this is their story!

[MisterHobgoblin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This Is Memorial Device is a fictional documentary of a fictional band, Memorial Device, that hailed from Airdrie, a small, predominantly Catholic town in the west of Scotland.

The documentary is compiled by Ross Raymond, a wannabe journalist whose youth was greatly impacted by the local music scene. The four band members of Memorial Device were his heroes. The band was seen as the culmination of various precursor bands, and shone brightly and briefly before the members went off to pursue different directions.

Some chapters are editorial, written by Ross himself. Others are in the form of interviews or reminiscences of those who were close to the band at the time – archivists, lovers, rivals. The introduction of these chapters is not terribly well signposted, and much of the content is rambling which can lead to confusion about the relationships between the dozens of characters – never fear, there is an Appendix listing everyone who is mentioned, however briefly.

The result is a fragmentary story with little plot and absolutely no direction. There’s not even a terribly clear timeline to cling to. Instead, we have microscopic level of detail and analysis, focused on the music scene in Airdrie in the 1970s and 1980s. Occasionally there is a hint of aspiration – an interview at a record company in London – but mostly we are talking about people who are absolute legends within a circle of no more than 50 others. Their celebrity status is portrayed without question and without irony; the detail of their lives is picked over in such forensic detail because it really matters to Ross and those who were there at the time.

There are drugs, there is drink; there is deviant sex. This is not a novel for the faint hearted. But what makes it is that it is so recognisable. Those of us fortunate enough to grow up in small towns in the same time period will recognise the importance of pub bands, cafes, the local independent record shop, the local weirdo, the time Steve Sims got a pint of beer poured over him for talking to the wrong girl. The beauty is in the sincerity with which people there at the time believe in the importance of these markers, even though they appear utterly trivial and irrelevant to those who were not in exactly that point of space and time.

Memorial Device is not an easy read. At times, in truth, it is bewildering, repetitive and boring. It is written with a slavish adherence to authenticity, much as Roberto Bolaño achieved with his History of Nazi Literature in the Americas or his meticulous list of murders in 2666. And almost half the length is an index of pretty much everything that is mentioned anywhere. The reader has to marvel at the effort that would have been required to produce this despite the certainty that it would be of no value to anyone. The ultimate effect of this strange text is something that is satisfying to have read, even if the journey makes the reader wonder whether it is worth the effort.

I am grateful to Netgalley and Fabers for providing me with an advance reading copy of this novel.

[✨arrianne✨ · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a hate-read for me, which I only really finished out of spite. I think the problem is me, in that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the quality of the writing and it is exactly what it sets out to be, but it just made me think of incredibly boring men at parties trying to be all deep and meaningful and wanking on and on about obscure bands in a desperate attempt to interest you. Those bands are almost definitely awful, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of this nonsense and a scorn for those who aren’t as obsessed, does not a personality make.

So yeah, I think my hatred of the very concept of the characters in this book is probably the reason I detested it, rather than anything wrong with the book itself.

[Mark Bailey · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Even though it was all a long time ago now. Can music preserve a moment in time? Do you think it can keep alive all the ideas that went along with it? Can it keep it young forever?'

Memorial Device: The greatest band that never was.

Fictional account of an 80's cult band in the North Lanarkshire town of Airdrie. Presented in the form of a series of ghostly transcripts from people who were there, either directly or on the periphery.

You don't have to be a music fanatic to 'get it', it goes beyond just a book about a band -  but perhaps you'd buzz off it even more if you've had any involvement in an alternative music scene, particularly in a post-industrial town or city in any capacity - such as a band, roadie, reviewer, sound engineer, venue owner, promoter, regular gig-goer. Some of the descriptions of the local scene are uncanny - 'it isn't easy being Iggy Pop in a small town in the west of Scotland'. 

It's within the entries and transcripts that lies the real beauty. It's surreal, nostalgic, brutal and beautiful all in one. Poetic and raw accounts of vacant youth from an array of misfits, largely misguided or absent, lost or untamed as they scramble for place, space and expression in barren landscapes.

Awash with literary references throughout such as Golgol, Dosteyevsky, Burroughs, Kerouac. 

This is a unique and powerful account of ephemeral and untouchable youth. As one entry poignantly asks: 'Why is the future so quick to snatch it all away?'

[Alex Sarll]

Memorial Device being a cult eighties post-punk band, but also a description for the notebook its brain-damaged singer used to falteringly keep his place in the world, and of course for this book, an attempt by two fans to construct an oral history of the local music scene which defined their youth. They're all made up, of course – the bands, the fans, the small-town legends and local heroes and urban myths. But the beauty of setting it in Airdrie and Coatbridge is that most of us have so little idea what was really happening there in the early eighties that for all we know, it might as well be true. Hell, I imagine plenty of readers even need to check whether Airdrie and Coatbridge are real places to start with. Last month I got quite tetchy with Jeff Noon's latest novel, among other things for being based around the death of a transparent Bowie analogue. For one thing, you can't just remove Bowie from history and then show us everything else unchanged; for another, Noon's King Lost was just a bit rubbish compared to the real world's Ziggy Stardust. Whereas here...well, the web of time can withstand a few local bands who never made an impact beyond local hearts and minds being swapped out. And whatever was going down in Airdrie in the real world, I doubt it was quite this fascinating. But at the same time, this is all weirdly recognisable. All those bands who were famous for fifteen people, who occasioned an epiphany in some nowhere club one night for the few punters actually paying any attention – we all had some of those. The faces on the scene, the notorious loose cannon, the band everyone thought were shit but who still hung out in the same pub. The weird rumours about so-and-so's dad, the indelible anecdote about such-and-such's wanking habits. This is every small-town scene (and a few big city ones, at that), the pure form of which they all partake, or something very close to it. And similarly, the oral history conceit...it's noticeable that however inarticulate any given contributor starts out, as they gather momentum they all approach a similar visionary state, a shared sense of poetry. A bit like the immortality of Greek philosophers, where only by approaching pure reason do we shed everything unshared and become the person who can live forever, at the cost of anything recognisable as personhood. Because it's not just about music, it's about all the big stuff you start pondering at the same age you fall hard for music. It's about time, and the way music or drugs or music and drugs can erase it, and about memory and ageing and the ways people change and whether in the end there's really any core to us. It's about the grand theories of the world which a certain strain of weirdo concocts, half-remembered and still haunting the people whose ears they bent about it decades after the fact. It's a reminder of the odd sort of shared consensus counterculture which used to exist, with its musical touchstones (the Velvets, Suicide, Iggy) but also an unofficial reading list where Kerouac, Celine and Russian novels rubbed shoulders with John Brunner (and not even the cool near-future dystopias), John Norman and Octavia Butler. If there's a weakness here, it probably lies with the female characters - they tend either to be nagging matriarchs, or sexualised visions, and while the latter are given the same chance to rhapsodise as the boys, and offer as many insights, it's noticeable how none of them seem to be just yer basic indie spods in the way many of the guys are. And of course if you hold with the notion that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, well, what does that make a prismatic effort to dance about architecture that was never even built? But that's clearly part of the point, and the charm, for anyone remotely on board with the project.

Also, and this was something I wasn't necessarily expecting from the reviews, or conveying in my own, but it's very funny. By turns recognisable, dry, and plain outrageously daft. Much of it is cumulative in the sort of way quotation doesn't really convey, but I did enjoy this bit, from one of the few entries that's presented as interview rather than monologue:

"RR: Do you have a history of drug use?

SH: A history would imply something that could be pieced together and that could be made sense of. In that case I have no history of drug use to speak of."

And if you do take the plunge, on no account omit at least a skim-read of the index, or you'll miss a treat.

[Mason Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

This one was disappointing, given that it seemed perfectly targeted for me: obscure music, documenting a scene (albeit fictional), and a cast of odd characters. Sadly, I found it to be a mishmash of points of view, characters coming and going without anything much happening, every chapter a digression from the previous ones. Stylistically it's also all over the place, including at least one chapter that was nearly a single, comma-spliced sentence, painful to read. Add in too many puerile not-quite-adult-male antics and I couldn't finish it, sadly.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

gritty novel based in Airdie moulded like an Irvine Welsh style of writing and plot. the book itself is based around a post punk band this is memorial device.

[Lesley · Rating 4 out of 5]

So, I have no ‘mind’s eye’ or visual imagination (aphantasia - it’s a thing). I can’t visualise. If I read visual details in a book, no image forms in my mind, it’s just so much information. I realised reading ‘This is Memorial Device’ that what I do absorb from reading however is voices and sounds. And this is a book full of voices, and as a book about experimental music, a load of interesting noises. Since I finished it, my inner narrator is a drug-fucked / pissed-up Scot, accompanied by a mad electronic / post-punk soundtrack in my ‘mind’s ear’. It’s pretty cool.

Enough about me anyway. With the caveat of don’t expect any strong/interesting female characters, this is brilliant stuff. A collection of interviews and first-hand accounts of a fictitious legendary underground band in the arse-end of west Scotland in the mid 80s. Loved the concept and form: lots of different voices and memories and perspectives - some poignant, some hilarious, some pretty dark. It perfectly evokes that era that held such promise, briefly - the experimental post-punk years were far more exciting than the dead-end of punk: same DIY ethos but much better music and style, infused by literature, art, cinema, philosophy etc. The book is full of existential / cosmic musings, mad anecdotes and mad characters, and also has the best index you’ll ever read - a work of art in its own right. One to re-read; I missed a lot the first time just trying to keep up with the huge dramatis personae, so didn’t pay enough attention to the deep stuff. I’ll know to skim over the more priapic elements and enjoy the cosmics next time around.

[Clare · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the most original books I've read in a long time and definitely the first book to make me wish a fictional band was real. This is the oral history of fictional arthouse band Memorial Device and the scene and crowd of friends that they sprang from in small town Aidrie, Scotland. The story of the characters teenage years and coming of age will strike a chord with anyone who had a large group of friends whose lives revolved around a music scene. Everything is about music and who has the best record collection and who can get hold of alcohol and who has parents who won't mind/care if you all hang round there for hours at a time. It's an intriguing cast of characters, many of who meet unhappy endings and their stories unfold over several chapters told by several different people. I won't pretend that its easy to keep up with who's who and whats happening when, but it doesn't really matter as the writing is so absorbing and every few paragraphs there is a turn of phrase that catches you and reels you back in again. My favourite was about the character with the large book collection who was described as using his books like weapons, and you also have to love an index which references falling into a bush while half cut. This book won't be to everyone's taste but if you love music and it was a major part of your growing up then you'll find much to love here.

I received a ARC from Netgalley in exchange for a fair review.

[Tom]

I grew up in the early 90s. Looking back recently, I realised that getting access to the internet was an important moment when my cultural horizons expanded. For example, music was no longer limited by what was on the radio or television; outward connections now grew quickly and proliferated exponentially.

This Is Memorial Device is about the decades before the internet when similar connections could only be made locally and personally, by knowing the right (or wrong) people. It documents feelings that will be familiar to anybody who's been part of a small community of weirdos and outsiders: the thrilling opening of new possibilities, puzzlement at the paths people take, the frustrating contradictions inherent in any loosely connected group of people. It's hard not to get swept up by the reality of Keenan's characters and the brilliant, documentary-style prose. The story that's assembled feels equally triumphant and elegiac.

Thanks to Patrick for the recommendation. Patrick hit the nail on the head in his review of the book, saying that it 'perfectly encapsulates the mystical, almost occult importance of records, books, and art, and the extreme impact these will have on a young person's life'. I found This Is Memorial Device to be both a glowing endorsement and a stark warning about trying to find meaning in creativity!

[Paul Dembina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well that was really good. A fictitious account of the post-punk music scene in Airdrie in the early 80s centred on legendary band Memorial Device, consisting of interviews with the various musicians, mover, shakers and hangers-on from that era

It was funny and touching in places.

It's worth reading the Appendices and (at least scanning) the Index. A few samples:

From the Memorial Device discography, a review - "sounds like an autistic Joy Division recorded with a broken microphone at the bottom of a well and played back using coat hanger for a needle"

A band called The Spazzer, band members Mick Jazzer, Bubonic Craig, Bob Noxious & Pig Ignorant

The Index has this intriguing set of references (all referring to real instances in the text):

smell (of horse's breath)
smell (of stale make-up)
smell (of warm towels drying on radiators)

ENJOY!

[Kirsty]

This book has been sitting half-read on my Kindle for over a year; it's time for me to accept that I'll never finish it. I was intrigued by the concept and setting (my wife is from Airdrie, where the novel is set), and I've never read a novel about a band from a small Scottish town. But I just couldn't get past the way the female characters were written. There's a particularly disgusting part about the sexualisation of a cancerous breast that I won't even describe – it's the point that I put the book down, and for the next year every time I thought about picking the book up again I'd think of that scene and read something else instead. So – this book is good in theory, not so much in practice.

[Vartika · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a bookseller operating in the Taylor Jenkins Reid economy, my first impression of this book was as a more literary Daisy Jones & The Six , if the latter centered around a band that barely was—or, as David Keenan writes it, "the greatest band you have never heard of." Of course, there are many band novels 'like' This is Memorial Device (most notably Kevin Sampson's 1999 book Powder , with which it shares its indulgence in describing several rather disturbing sex acts) but perhaps the book's own subtitle clarifies the uniqueness of its endeavour best: this is "An Hallucinated Oral History of the Post-Punk Scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and Environs 1978-1986" as recorded and compiled by two fanboys who grew up with and in it.

This is Memorial Device is, in essence, about the feeling that music creates—the hopes of adventure and aliveness that teenagers turn to it with, that sense of being part of something bigger that oneself as a band member, a groupie, a fan, a friend, a passerby, the bigness of engaging with fleeting but meaningful revelations at the drop of the needle—and the complex web of people that come together to form the lore surrounding a mythic group. Through a series of casually transcribed interviews and first-person reminiscences with a cast of small-town misfits, local visionaries, artists, losers, and hangers-on, it explores the deeply metaphysical impact of a local music scene on the people who were drawn to, in, and out of it, whose lives were rippled and deformed by the force of it. The focus is on the experience of being part of a hyper-local scene, and it is through its attendant eccentricities and illogics and obsessions with the obscure that an image of short-lived but legendary acts with names like Memorial Device and Chinese Moon begin to take shape in our minds.

Here, David Keenan—himself a former record store worker and music writer from Scotland—appropriates and inverts the idea of the conventional music documentary. He creates a believable catalogue of a fictional indie scene (the appendices detailing the names and natures of lost bands, discographies, and biographies are as much a work of art as the rest of the book) which threatens to spill over with its DIY-ness, its clumsiness, and candidness. Despite presenting the whole work as a sort of fan project, his aim is to humanise rather than glamourise: This is Memorial Device repeatedly throws us into the testimonies of veritable assholes who are as self-important, violent, and violently sexist as those who formed and frequented the real post-punk scene in the 1980s.

Indeed, most of the chapters are meant to evoke feelings of disgust rather than veneration; those voicing them are flawed and fucked up and not any more desirable for it. Historically, women in the music scene have been maligned, sidelined, and brutally sexualised, and this is just as true for this "hallucinated" account—but despite the way the largely male interviewees in the novel frame or dismiss their stories, these women's talent and genius does make itself known (consider the character of Mary Hanna, whom we never hear from directly and who is often referred to as a "lesbian" or a "bitch," but clearly comes across as one of the most talented people in the picture and the kind who remains a legend long after they're gone; or that of Vanity, who is objectified beyond recompense but is also clearly the force that made so many aspects of the Airdrie music scene recognisable and relevant). The combination of mental illness, material struggles, and artistic creativity have forever been fetishised by the industry, but the manner in which Keenan here unveils the struggles of characters like the Memorial Device singer Lucas Black (reminiscent, to me, of Daniel Johnstone) and drummer Richard Curtis (who follows a 20-year-old to Palestine and ends up first in penury and then in prison) is beautiful and unprecedentedly sensitive.

What makes This is Memorial Device a band novel like none other is its unerring commitment to authenticity even if it makes the book boring, offensive, and unbearably difficult to read—because that is, and has always been, the substance of musical subcultures and the truth of the matter. This same quality is also what makes it so resonant for the reader; at times I felt like I was engaging with variations on an exact experience or epiphany I myself have had, and it very often made me want to text the friends I had them with. Reading about these adults looking back at the way their youthful dreams and misadventures directed and derailed their lives, I felt connected with a version of myself I am often nostalgic for, at a world that felt pregnant with possibilities and at ideas that appeared meaningful even when they weren't so great. If that is something you look for when you yearn to pick up a book about a band, this book is it: it captures perfectly the near occult significance of books, records, and art for the young, it distills the experience of part of a community of wierdos, or even just an off-kilter loner, with an undeniable forcefulness. It is dizzying and hypnotic, and so so unhinged. It doesn't inch towards hagiography, is not about success or harmony: it is about the noise that becomes music becomes life.

A more literary Daisy Jones & the Six? No. Better.

[Odhrán · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredibly familiar place and time, but in a different place and time entirely. This book transported me to Airdrie but also to my own later teenage years. It creates an invigorating atmosphere in the most mundane conditions. What you imagined your young adult life was at the time. Class.

[Mark Rubenstein · Rating 1 out of 5]

All wax and very little wick.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

He looked at me like he was caught in the teeth of something; like a great mouth had opened up behind him and he had felt that first pressure on his flesh; that frisson just before the tooth penetrates the skin; which is the prerogative of young bodies, I realise now; that expectant shudder where doom itself seems like a fair exchange and more worthy of jaw-dropping awe and complete and utter surrender than total weeping despair. I felt like I was pregnant with every idea in the world and that none of them mattered.

[Tristan Bath · Rating 5 out of 5]

By utilising the loose convoluted narrative of a jumpy oral history format, telling the story of a fictionalised music scene with no true centre point, David Keenan's first novel makes keen use of the best part of music journalism writing: fantasy. Tellings of happenings by a procession of (untrustworthy?) characters often more interesting than the people they're describing end up portraying a fantasy land of misfits and music easily better on paper than it could ever be in reality. I suggest it is all too often so in underground music world. Even so, the sheer sense of liberation, the lust for life, the beautiful misery, and miserable joy of these characters – largely living in Airdrie, Scotland in the grey-cool-big-haired 1980s – is so palpable, it's impossible not get yanked right into their scene. The one constant is perhaps Keenan's journalistic note-taker presumably recording/receiving/editing the fictionalised oral history of this post-punk experimental noise rock post-kraut scene, giving in to the musical obsessive arrogance his ilk thrive off (with no small sense of irony I hasten to add).

Many of the chapters divert into philosophically fruitful territory, but it's Keenan's skill for compressing deep meaning into rich throwaway phrases that makes the text economic with its words and light on description, yet pregnant with mood and meaning. It's impossible to improve on how Kim Gordon put it on the cover – "I wanted to live in this book". Though she lived a large part of her life touring grungy rock clubs, don't forget.

[Chris Nickson · Rating 3 out of 5]

An odd book, with a mood somewhere between Geoff Dyer's The Colour of Memory and Alan Warner's Morvern Callar, it may ostensibly be about a mysterious band from Airdrie, but somehow turns into an elegy from a time and place. And did any of them exist? The place maybe, although whether as described here is a different matter. I can't say I like the book, but it's curiously compelling, although, some of the accounts are too long, to the extent of becoming boring, and the more fanatastical sections don't hold up. A lot of name-dropping of bands, musicians, music, artists from the 70s and 80s. Too much perhaps, I don't know. Still, I finished it, and that's some sort of testament to its power.

[Scott Cumming · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one wasn't quite the experience I was looking for. Memorial Device themselves seem too ethereal throughout and each chapter seems to be about someone else drifting in the orbit of the band, but never really focuses on them.

I'm not saying this was bad, I would just say it was up and down in terms of how engaging the chapters are. It's perhaps the weight of expectation in that I expected an utter classic Scottish novel that didn't materialise for me.

I'd be keen to see where Keenan went from here and if his narratives become more focused and direct or if the opaque psychedelia remains throughout his oeuvre.

[Bethnoir · Rating 2 out of 5]

I did not finish this book. After the unpleasant pornographic chapter which I felt upset by I decided that it was written by a man for men and not for me, pity, because I liked the idea of it and the energy, but life's too short.

[Doo Rag]

finding the unanimity of positive reviews on this one pretty tuff to feature. this is one of the wankiest things i've ever read.

[AK · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved it so much I don't quite know what to say.