David Keenan, _This Is Memorial Device_

I WANTED TO read this the very minute I read a description of it in a review of one of Keenan's more recent books. This Is Memorial Device presents itself as an oral history of the musical scene of a particular city at a particular time, on the model of McCain and McNeil's Please Kill Me or Goodman's Meet Me in the Bathroom, but the city is not New York or London or San Francisco or Manchester but Airdrie, Scotland, about twelve miles west of Glasgow, population about 37,000. 

All the bands in this book are fictional, and even within the fiction none of them get noticed beyond the boundaries of Airdrie--not even Memorial Device, by unanimous assent the scene's leading band, whose recorded output consists of a couple of self-released LPs and a few self-released cassettes. For the initiated, however, for the true believers, for the early disciples, they were transformative, visionary, a once-in-a-lifetime glimpse of the possibility of transfiguration.

Judging from their cited influences--Sun Ra, La Monte Young, free jazz--Memorial Device and the other bands of the Airdrie scene would have been a challenging listen for the uninitiated. They had little in common with other bands coming out of Scotland in the early 1980s (Big Country, Aztec Camera, Mike Scott of the Waterboys) and they would have looked on such phenomena as Culture Club, Duran Duran, and Wham with bottomless loathing. But a key ingredient of any scene is the music you all hold in unreserved contempt.

I don't know whether Airdrie actually had a lively post-punk scene circa 1978-81, but Keenan evokes with heartbreaking accuracy that feeling of being in a scene, where everyone seems to be in a band or about to form a band or just devoted to seeing the shows and getting the cassettes, and a tiny stage with a buzzy PA in a basement with damp walls and a reeking bathroom seems like the perfect setting for glory.

I hit a bump about halfway through, where Keenan has a chapter that tries to render the sound of Scots vernacular (à la Irvine Welsh)--somewhat taxing for an American reader. But the rest of the book I gulped down, and the only problem was that, like most scenes, it was all over all too soon.