Staying young forever by reading This Is Memorial Device

This Is Memorial Device. Actually no, it isn't. It's my blog on This Is Memorial Device. So I should say: This Is My Blog On This Is Memorial Device (er, yeah). Anyway music-lovers, I've just barrelled my way through David Keenan's much-admired 2017 book about a fictional post-punk music scene in Airdrie. Full title - This Is Memorial Device: An Hallucinated Oral History of the Post-Punk Scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and Environs 1978-1986. 

Kim Gordon wanted to live in this book ...

... but couldn't fit because it's only 20x13cm and she is a fully-grown adult woman 

Cards on the table: I wasn't entirely won over by it. Yes, I liked it in parts. The more serious/melancholy/emotionally-charged bits were the best in my opinion; the stories of wild rock-and-roll excess (presumably there to satirise hoary old stories of wild rock-and-roll excess) weren't, to my mind, particularly successful. To be fair, though, I still like the overall idea of the book and will admit to enjoying it all (to a degree) even when finding it er, ever so slightly ludicrous. Anyway, let's dive in. This hallucinated oral history purports to be a series of reminiscences from people involved in the post-punk music scene in this small town close to the east side of Glasgow. They're supposed to be telling it all to a certain Ross Raymond in 2016 - 30 or more years on from the main events. So you get an assortment of viewpoints, various voices. We hear from the people in the bands and the people who were friends with the people in the bands, and so on. Or just local weirdos who were somehow wrapped up in it. Ross, the would-be music journalist who says he did one episode of a fanzine on the Airdrie music scene, has his own Holden Caulfield-like voice, which we hear at the outset:

"We thought it was important, what was happening. We thought it was important to document it ... I did it to stand up for Airdrie. I did it because of Memorial Device. I did it because, for a moment, even when everything seemed impossible, everybody was doing everything, reading, listening, writing, creating, sticking up posters, taking notes, passing out, throwing up, rehearsing, rehearsing, rehearsing in dark windowless rooms at 2pm like the future was just ahead and we better be ready for it. And now it's already the rotten past. That's why I did it, if you want to know the truth."

Yeah man, the rotten past. The crummy, rotten past. Personally, I quite like this vein of adolescent mock-tragic (if that's what it is). Applying it to the pretensions and the romantic yearnings of an unglamorous fictional local music scene is a decent idea. And of course I'm sure Keenan isn't doing this simply to mock small-town music-making. It's all quite playful and (I suspect) he's ultimately half in love with these scenes and the semi-hopelessness of them, their doomed beauty. Or that's the way I read it anyway. There are some nice passages. Here's a "notorious Airdrie punk" called Street Hassle describing the guitarist from Memorial Device (supposedly the key band from the scene), and how he hooked up with the local glamour-puss woman:

"He always wore these boots. I don't know if you saw them, these quasi-military leather boots that almost went up to his knees and the next thing you know Maya is kicking around with him in thigh-length leather boots and smoking cigarettes and acting moody as fuck. They would walk down the main street in Airdrie and everyone would be turning their heads. Patty with his glasses on, those little Lennon specs ... and Maya next to him, only she's wearing a white fur coat and fucking white leather trousers and a pair of shades, looking round with this total disdain for the world ..."

Yeah, who hasn't worn a white fur coat and a look of total disdain for the world at some point in their small-town lives ..? OK, on one level it's over-ripe satire, but it's still close enough to real life to work. And it's fairly funny too, so ... fine. But it's also surely more than just slyly amusing. Yes this sort of thing can teeter on the edge of ridiculousness, but where would we be without a bit of vainglorious ambition? I must admit I'm all for it, and I hope Keenan is as well. Later on someone in the book says that a local music scene is "an international scene in microcosm". So Airdrie had its "own Syd Barrett and Brian Jones and Nico and Pete Perrett". Yes, fine with me. Another aspect of This Is Memorial Device that I liked (and in fact could have done with more of) was the stuff about musical influences and key records. One early-teen character (Duncan) is said to have an older brother with a good record collection: which we're told is "the Ramones and heavy metal". Best of all, we learn that Duncan's brother "must have had a least thirty LPs". Ha! If only I'd had an older brother with 30 albums when I was about 13 years old (fantastic). Meanwhile, another character is written off as an "amateur" for  wanting to buy 1969: The Velvet Underground Live while hanging out with a fantastical record-hoarder living in a weird house marooned in a "featureless field" in the countryside (a nice detail in an otherwise overblown episode, one of several that unfortunately mar the book for me). Yes, the overblown episodes. I won't dwell on them here, but stuff about IRA operatives living in secret annexes in someone's house, or cartoonish gang warfare scenes where an elderly retired teacher mysteriously bamboozles a violent group of bikers, or indeed numerous sex scenes with a variety of perversions - they all seemed to belong to a different (more juvenile) book. In fact, the book itself can sometimes feel like a sort of extended piece of fantasy-juvenilia - almost as if written by a middle-aged adolescent. Strange fruit. In fact, I'm a bit of a middle-aged adolescent myself so I can't really talk. Basically though, I think I'm trying to differentiate between the often very good descriptions of adolescent fervour (as rendered by an older version of the once-fervent youth), and the not-so-great zaniness of certain scenes which just seem - finally - to be immature in a different sense. I ought to say (before it's too late!) that I think Keenan is a good writer when he gets into his stride. I read Memorial Device on the back of his definitely-very-out-there IRA book, For The Good Times, which genuinely amazed me (even if, once again, I found it a little cartoonish and patchy). Memorial Device is, so to speak, more my subject (music and the obsessions it breeds), so it's possible I'm being a bit tougher with it. But also (hopefully) genuinely appreciative. So, back to the best parts ... 

Oddly enough, one of the best sections of the book for me was one whole chapter which barely mentions music. It involves an extended visit by one of the Airdrie characters to stay with another old Airdrie scenester (Patty, he of the big boots) at the latter's flat in Paris, years after the original music scene itself. It's almost like a standalone short story: not about music, but the strangeness of staying with someone you used to know earlier in your life and are only semi-successfully reconnecting with now. Tonally different to anything else in the book, I actually thought it worked really well - an unsophisticated Scottish guy cast adrift in Paris but - sort of - finding his feet. Meanwhile, another goodish sequence involves a drink-fuelled character (Miriam McLuskie) recounting how she heard a Memorial Device song where the band's mentally-damaged/lives-in-a-constant-present-which-is-his-own-form-of-genius singer Lucas sings a song which enumerates all the conceivable subjects of songs:

"... there were songs about falling in love and songs about being pure enamoured and songs about meetings and songs about falling out of love and songs about being all tore up and then there were songs about despair ... songs about God, songs about existential lifestyles, songs about the seasons, songs about autumn leaves and flowers in the springtime, songs about animals, about wanting to be an animal or acting like one, songs that were more like social commentary, trivial songs, songs about memory ..."

And so it goes on (with more songs about buildings and food no doubt). It's a nice Keenan riff and there are quite a few like this. It's amusing on the surface but it's obviously deeper than that as well: someone is remembering a song by a band called Memorial Device which involves a memory-less singer somehow remembering all the subjects of songs, which are themselves - as songs - memory-triggers, small memorial devices. It must be said, for all that it jumps around and seems to pitch-shift rather crazily, the book has numerous pleasing passages like this, some of which savour of nicely-judged musical observation by an author who used to write for The Wire magazine. We hear, for example that Memorial Device would give the impression "that it was their last gig ever, like they could fall apart at any moment". For sure, the melancholy business of remembering a lost youth which is remembered mostly as a coming of age through music and creativity, is - to coin a phrase - a timeless theme. The book returns again and again to this, and sometimes more or less completely hits the spot. Towards the end of the book, a character called Dominic Hunter sends a long email to "darling Ross", ie Ross Raymond, the book's supposed author. Dominic's message is saturated in emotion. And saturated in ... well, love for the times they had back in Airdrie in the long-lost eighties, a love still triggered by hearing certain songs:

" ... there were moments in time. And there were ideas that went along with them. And every time I hear it, it takes me back there. To my lovers. To my young lovers. Even though it was all a long time ago now. Can music preserve a moment in time?  Can it Ross? Do you think it can keep alive all the ideas that went along with it? Can it keep it young forever?"

Well, can it Ross? Can music keep your youthful ideas alive forever? Can it keep you young forever? I think we should be told ...