Sometimes you come upon a book that you've been longing to read and know is out there. Maybe something that you wanted to write yourself but perhaps couldn't or didn't for one reason or not. Because you lack the spark or the personal experience, vision or drive or connections or whatever, In any case, you'll be glad to find it and it will inspire you onwards in your own personal creative endeavor. Such is the case for me with David Keenan's debut novel, This is Memorial Device.
Set in Airdrie, Scotland in the early eighties around an entirely fictionalised scene of bands with entirely wonderful names and created histories, strung together as an oral history in chapters of personal reminiscences of adventuring and dreaming by the people in the bands and those that gravitated around them that may remind you of similarly published factual accounts of Punk particularly Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's Please Kill Me.
Ok, so that idea might sound alright but to actually manage to pull it off is no easy trick. Decent novels about fictional musicians making their way in rock, or pop, or rock and roll or whatever you want to call it,are few and far between. Because you're flirting with cliche wherever you might choose to step. Partly because we all know the way these things go. If you're talking about a band, they meet, do small gigs, do bigger gigs, sign a record deal, become stars, drugs, groupies, ego blah blah blah.Or else the music just comes across as sounding awful and the whole exercise seems an act of somewhat desperate wish-fulfillment on the part of the author. I wish it wasn't the case because I like this stuff but it's very different to make a genuinely original statement and write a book worth reading in this particular field.
So why do I like This is Memorial Device so much? Because it focuses on the genuine underground for starters, and not the classic hipster taste of the narrator of High Fidelity for example. The characters in This is Memorial Device are hipper than you and me. In fact they're hipper than anybody you've ever met or are likely to. And they all come from Airdrie, which you suspect is actually a rather dead end satellite town. But nevertheless, these people lived the dream in their late teens and early twenties. Or so they tell themselves and just as importantly other people, in the accounts they give to the pair they tell their stories to who are busily engaged in compiling the document.
These people are almost the novelistic equivalents of the narrator of LCD Soundsystem's Losing My Edge. Their taste begins with Can's Tago Mago, proceeds on through the 13th Floor Elevators, Metal Box, the first Roxy album to Nurse With Wound and on towards Memorial Device, the fictional band at the heart of the book, the best band you've never seen but they did, who sounded like John Coltrane on guitar, bass, drums and occasional organ. All these people read the existentialists, the great Russian novels and the beats. They have ludicrous, excessive sex which they're intent on documenting in the most indescribably immoderate detail in an attempt to capture the moment all these years later.
The quotes on the front cover of my copy catch the mood. 'I wanted to live in this book' says Kim Gordon. Irvine Welsh meanwhile states, 'It captures the terrific, obsessive, ludicrous pomposity of every music fan's youth in an utterly definitive way.' Telling testimonials from the kind of people who always make sure that they're on hand to offer the stamp of approval for the demimonde. But they're not wrong.
Most of all it's very funny. These characters are inevitably destined to remain thwarted. As it says on the back of the book, 'It's not easy being Iggy Pop in Airdrie...' but they do their very best. And in doing so, in attempting to vivify their memories of youth, they shine a light on the delusions of those really living the life at the same point in time in the more fashionable and actually happening scenes in New York, London and Manchester. This book is about music, but of course it's also about much more than that. The particular constituency it was written for will love it.
Ok, so that idea might sound alright but to actually manage to pull it off is no easy trick. Decent novels about fictional musicians making their way in rock, or pop, or rock and roll or whatever you want to call it,are few and far between. Because you're flirting with cliche wherever you might choose to step. Partly because we all know the way these things go. If you're talking about a band, they meet, do small gigs, do bigger gigs, sign a record deal, become stars, drugs, groupies, ego blah blah blah.Or else the music just comes across as sounding awful and the whole exercise seems an act of somewhat desperate wish-fulfillment on the part of the author. I wish it wasn't the case because I like this stuff but it's very different to make a genuinely original statement and write a book worth reading in this particular field.
So why do I like This is Memorial Device so much? Because it focuses on the genuine underground for starters, and not the classic hipster taste of the narrator of High Fidelity for example. The characters in This is Memorial Device are hipper than you and me. In fact they're hipper than anybody you've ever met or are likely to. And they all come from Airdrie, which you suspect is actually a rather dead end satellite town. But nevertheless, these people lived the dream in their late teens and early twenties. Or so they tell themselves and just as importantly other people, in the accounts they give to the pair they tell their stories to who are busily engaged in compiling the document.
These people are almost the novelistic equivalents of the narrator of LCD Soundsystem's Losing My Edge. Their taste begins with Can's Tago Mago, proceeds on through the 13th Floor Elevators, Metal Box, the first Roxy album to Nurse With Wound and on towards Memorial Device, the fictional band at the heart of the book, the best band you've never seen but they did, who sounded like John Coltrane on guitar, bass, drums and occasional organ. All these people read the existentialists, the great Russian novels and the beats. They have ludicrous, excessive sex which they're intent on documenting in the most indescribably immoderate detail in an attempt to capture the moment all these years later.
The quotes on the front cover of my copy catch the mood. 'I wanted to live in this book' says Kim Gordon. Irvine Welsh meanwhile states, 'It captures the terrific, obsessive, ludicrous pomposity of every music fan's youth in an utterly definitive way.' Telling testimonials from the kind of people who always make sure that they're on hand to offer the stamp of approval for the demimonde. But they're not wrong.
Most of all it's very funny. These characters are inevitably destined to remain thwarted. As it says on the back of the book, 'It's not easy being Iggy Pop in Airdrie...' but they do their very best. And in doing so, in attempting to vivify their memories of youth, they shine a light on the delusions of those really living the life at the same point in time in the more fashionable and actually happening scenes in New York, London and Manchester. This book is about music, but of course it's also about much more than that. The particular constituency it was written for will love it.
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