This Is Memorial Device

by David Keenan

  This Is Memorial Device

  An Hallucinated Oral History of the Post-Punk Scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and Environs 1978–1986

  David Keenan

  Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction to Why I Did It

  1. Hidden Occluded by Chemistry by Water

  2. This Is So Pointlessly Wrong

  3. Daytime Hangovers That Can Only Be Remedied by a Session of Furious Masturbation

  4. The Next Thing I Knew Remy and Regina Were Dating (If You Can Believe That)

  5. Rimbaud Was Desperate or Iggy Lived It

  6. Everyone Was Looking for That Mythical Ménage à Trois

  7. Wisps of Blonde Sawdust (Blonde Stardust)

  8. A Beautiful Form of Self-Scarification and Of Course Endlessly Attractive

  9. He Had Tried to Have His Testicles Removed on the NHS

  10. The Golden Light Coming From the Window and Spilling Over the Pavement Like a Perfect Dream

  11. Poor Condition With Promo Stickers

  12. A Likely Candidate for Sex for Marriage for Kidnap for Another Kind of Future Altogether

  13. Kitty-Catting into the Night Burglarising My Dreams

  14. Scatman and Bobbin the Dynamic Duo

  15. The Day of the Frozen Vampires

  16. Holdin Cells fur Oerweight Ballerinas

  17. Chasing a Twenty-Year-Old Girl Halfway Round the World and Setting Up Shop in a War Zone

  18. This Is Where I’m Gonna Sit It Out and Then Impregnate the Future

  19. A Minor Cog a Small Life a Little Bird

  20. I Thought They Had Cut the Top of His Head Off and Were Spooning Out His Brains

  21. Every Disappointment Was Like Something Awarded You in Heaven

  22. Ships Rising Up and Passing Through the Water Full of Sunlight and Memory the Tricks That It Plays

  23. An Inoculation Against Spirit-Devouring Life as Practised in the West Coast of Scotland

  24. Blood and Water Inside Me That Needs an Example

  25. My Dream Bride Which Is Of Course My Mother but Not With a Vagina Please

  26. I Saw All These Dead Moons Circling a Star

  Appendix A: Memorial Device Discography

  Appendix B: A Necessarily Incomplete Attempt to Map the Extent of the Post-Punk Music Scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and Environs 1978–1986

  Appendix C: This Is Memorial Device

  Appendix D: A Navigational Aid

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  Introduction to Why I Did It

  I did it to stand up for Airdrie. I did it because of Memorial Device. I did it because later on everyone went off and became social workers and did courses on how to teach English as a foreign language or got a job in Greggs. Well, not everybody. Some people died or disappeared or went into seclusion, more like. I did it – well, I was going to say I did it because back then anything seemed possible, back then being 1983 and 1984 and 1985, what I call the glory years. The glory years in Airdrie – what a joke, right? But really that would be untrue because back then everything seemed impossible.

  Me and Johnny McLaughlin, that was us back then. We thought it was important, what was happening. We thought it was important to document it. I got a few pieces in the Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser. It’s happening on your own doorstep, man, I told them. This isn’t Manchester or London or fucking Chingford. This is Airdrie. I wanted to put a cassette out, a cassette with all the local bands, Memorial Device, of course, and Glass Sarcophagus and Chinese Moon and Steel Teeth, but not Fangboard, fuck Fangboard, anything but them, and I wanted to call it This is Airdrie. But of course I didn’t. I wanted to write and publish a fanzine, and of course me and Johnny did publish a fanzine that ran for all of one issue before I dumped the copies we hadn’t shifted behind some bushes in Rawyards Park and urinated on them, which might have been my greatest contribution to the scene. But most of all I wanted to write a book.

  1983 and ’84 and ’85 were the years of Memorial Device. Previously they had been in other bands, bands that some people cared about and bands that some people thought were a joke, but when they came together it was undeniable. They sounded like nothing else. They sounded like Airdrie, which is to say they sounded like a black fucking hole. Everyone loved them or hated them and the people who hated them loved them twice as much. We thought they would go the whole way, we thought they would vindicate Airdrie, valorise Coatbridge, memorialise Greengairs. The rumour was that when Sonic Youth played Splash One in Glasgow in 1986 they asked for Memorial Device as their support act. Who knew what could have happened? But it was all over by then. And what’s left to show for it? I could never put it out my mind. Over the years I began tracking people down, writing letters, making sad international phone calls in the middle of the night. I had my interviews from the time, I had written some stuff back in the day. I talked Johnny into doing the same. It’s not about the music any more, Johnny said. Well, what the fuck is it about? Like I said, 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 2 p.m. like the future was just up ahead and we better be ready for it. And now already it’s the rotten past. That’s why I did it, if you want to know the truth.

  Ross Raymond, Airdrie, Lanarkshire, Scotland

  April 2016

  1. Hidden Occluded by Chemistry by Water: Ross Raymond meets Big Patty and Lucas Black in 1981 and everything changes and I know I know I hate it when I hear people say things like oh that record changed my life that book changed my life Led Zeppelin changed my fucking life when you know that really their life just went on exactly the fucking same but meeting Patty and Lucas and starting to go to shows with Johnny McLaughlin and buying records and hearing this music really did change everything although it might be more accurate to say it deformed my life rather than just changed it if you know what I mean. And if you do you’re in.

  At the time that I met him, Big Patty lived somewhere near the top of South Bridge Street in Airdrie, which today is the worst street in Airdrie, the most boarded-up street in Airdrie, the street that most effectively announces it is all over for Airdrie, but the weird thing is I’ve no idea how I first got to know him, perhaps I met him one night at The Staging Post across the road from Airdrie Library, perhaps I met him at the library itself, I was a teenage sci-fi, horror and existentialism nut and that was my haunt, if you know what I mean, my medieval castle, but really I have no idea, which is weird, but appropriate, perhaps, because it makes it seem more like an amnesiac alien abduction than the beginning of an awkward long-term friendship, which, looking back, is closer to what it actually felt like.

  He was my first introduction to the music scene. I spent the New Year’s Eve of 1981 hanging out at his flat, which to me was a paradise of no parents and endless opportunity, but as the bells rang he forced us out onto the street and we ended up standing round in a park in the dark near Airdrie Academy hoping the future would walk right up behind us and tap us on the shoulder. Back then Johnny McLaughlin and I were working on our fanzine. We called it A Night Is a Morning That You Hasten to Light. Johnny came up with the title. It came from the French – something like that. For the first issue we had interviewed Big Patty.

  The night before the interview I couldn’t sleep. I was always that way when it came to big moments. I worried that my questions would seem banal. At that time in my life I had a bed underneath a skylight in the loft of my parents’ house, right next to a radiato
r, where my cat, who was named Cody after Neal Cassady’s character in Visions of Cody and whose memory comes back to me now like a puzzled ghost with great owl-like eyes staring out of the past, would curl up in the crook of my legs, and at the foot of the bed I had a bookcase filled with random dread; I was educating myself in suffering, sleeping naked in the woods, I told myself, books by Philip K. Dick and Christopher Lasch and Albert Camus and H. P. Lovecraft. Sometime in the night my mum came upstairs and knocked on the door of my bedroom, which I always kept locked because parents stick their noses in everywhere. I was listening to Y by The Pop Group, which was one of my favourite records at the time – I played it to death, almost literally to death, to the point that it wouldn’t play any more without sticking and jumping – and I was smoking a cigarette out of the window while staring at a cluster of trees silhouetted on the horizon that I always associated with the future or the mystery of all of my life that was yet to come. Hold on, I said. When I unlocked the door she asked me what I was doing. I’m preparing for an interview, I said. I think I might be up most of the night, I said. Do you have any ideas for questions? I asked her. She thought for a moment. Yes, she said. You should ask him if he always tells the truth in interviews.

  I’ve never done an interview before in my life, Big Patty said. How the fuck would I know? I had underlined a sentence from a philosophical text, something about the nature of love. He looked embarrassed. I have no idea, he said. I typed up the interview until 4 a.m. Then I fell asleep.

  I had a paper round at this point – everyone in Airdrie had a paper round, it was a rite of passage in Airdrie – and I had two or three cassettes that I would alternate on the Walkman but mostly Fun House by The Stooges. I was delivering in Whinhall, on the outskirts of Airdrie, which was a desperate situation. Then I got a summer job in a flower shop in Coatbridge, then as a kitchen orderly in Monklands Hospital in Coatdyke. That put me off carrots for life. But suddenly I had enough money to buy records. Every Saturday I would meet Johnny and we would travel into Glasgow and buy two LPs each: the first Ramones album, The Sonics’ Boom, Easter Everywhere by The 13th Floor Elevators, which is still the greatest psychedelic record ever made, Can’s Tago Mago, Metal Box by Public Image Ltd, the first Roxy album, This Heat, Nurse With Wound, So Alone by Johnny Thunders – in fact anything by Johnny Thunders, everyone in Airdrie was obsessed with Johnny Thunders.

  We cottoned on early that there were certain bars that the musicians liked to hang out in and certain cafes too but most of them are long gone so it would be pointless to tell you about them and heartbreaking too, the booths with the torn leather seats, the shakers stopped up with damp clusters of salt, the chipped Formica tables, all vanquished in favour of faceless coffee shops full of idiot middle-class couples and pregnant mums. On Saturday evenings, after lying around in Johnny’s living room playing our latest purchases – The Modern Dance by Pere Ubu or Like Flies on Sherbert by Alex Chilton, which still sounds perverse and macabre, like a suicide note where you’re not sure whether it’s a joke or it’s for real – we would head out to one of the bars and mooch around and scope the scene. Occasionally we would bump into Big Patty and we’d both feign surprise, wow, what are you doing here, we hang out here all the time, etc. It got to the point that we struck up a real friendship, which at first was exciting. I’m in, I thought, bohemia here I come.

  Back then Patty worked part-time at a barber’s shop in Clarkston. I started going there to get my hair cut but at first I didn’t have the nerve to ask for him specifically and sometimes I would make excuses, feign a coughing fit or just disappear altogether if the queue ran down and I ended up stuck with the owner, an emaciated Italian, or even worse, his shrunken son who everyone said was bulimic, which at the time I thought was the female version of anorexia, which only inspired further confusion. Once I took in a picture of Antonin Artaud that I had photocopied from the front of a City Lights book and asked for the same haircut. You have completely different hair, Patty said. It’s not possible. Then he told me that his band, which at that point was called Slave Demographics, had been played on Radio Scotland’s alternative programme. To me it was a fantasy world.

  Sometimes in the evening I would borrow my parents’ car. I had just learned to drive and I would drive all the way to Caldercruix and up past the reservoir and then back to my old school, more like old prison camp, then down to the Safeway car park and round past the train station and once I saw Patty and his girlfriend at the time, I never met her, it was just before we began hanging out and they split up shortly afterwards, but I remember thinking that’s a real romance, that’s lying back in the grass and talking about Sylvia Plath right there. She had dark hair, cut in a short bob, eye make-up like an Egyptian goddess. He was smoking a cigarette, probably a joint, I thought, and wearing a battered top hat and a pair of shades. I watched them walk off into their own life and it felt like I was watching my future self, my dream avatar, heading back to a council house in Cairnhill that opened onto a parallel universe.

  My first gig was at an upstairs venue somewhere off West George Street in Glasgow. It was on the third floor of a building that also had a Chinese restaurant and a singles bar. There were two mutually exclusive queues, the punks and the straights. When Johnny and I finally got to the top of the stairs someone started singing ‘The Trail of the Lonesome Pine’ by Laurel and Hardy at us. Next thing I know I’m in the venue and drinking beer out of a bottle for the first time. They played a song by The Gun Club and Johnny and I danced. I had my hands in my pockets, I looked like a goon, basically, but Johnny had his head down and his arms in the air, dancing like he was completely carried away. Then I saw some girls that I recognised from Airdrie, real posers, and Johnny said to me, let’s pull a Thunders, which was code for let’s overwhelm these girls with credentials, which is what we tried to do. We’re the most psychedelic guys in here, Johnny said to them. Then he slapped one of the girls on the ass. I was amazed. He was clearly in his element. And she didn’t protest. In fact she laughed. Later I saw her getting off with some guy who looked like he was in his thirties with a bald patch on top of his head. I’m not even bald, I thought. What’s wrong with me? Eventually the band played. It was Patty’s new band, Occult Theocracy. They sounded like a clap of thunder on the furthest horizon of my brain. The singer, who everyone called Street Hassle and who you would sometimes see in the winter, in the snow, walking in the gutter with nothing but a cut-off T-shirt and a can of beer in his hand, took the microphone and forced it into his mouth so that he sounded like a buzzing fly and then he said, mama, he said, mama, then he hyperventilated for a while and then he said, mama, yeah, it feels good. When I got back home I stood in front of the mirror and I messed up my hair. I knew I’d never comb it again.

  I bought an acoustic guitar, it was all I could afford, and on days off work, in other words when I wasn’t having a chug in the staff toilet while imagining the cleaners in their underwear, I would sit in the park and pretend to play although in reality I couldn’t play a damn note. I would see people checking me out. I wore a huge pair of black wraparound shades and one day I caught sight of Big Patty with a couple of friends and they came over and sat down with me. Patty looked like a cadaver. I guessed that he was on drugs. This is Beano, he said, introducing the taller of the two, who had a swollen drinker’s nose or a bad case of rosacea – either way it was rough justice. The other one they called The Doug. The Doug wore a biker’s jacket with a quote from John Cage written on the back in Tipp-Ex, something about having nothing to say and saying it. I had picked up a copy of Cage’s Indeterminacy set on a recent record-buying trip and I tried to impress them. I listen to Indeterminacy at work on the headphones when I’m cleaning pots and pans, I told them. You’d be better listening to the pots and pans, The Doug deadpanned.

  Listen, Patty said. Could you do us a favour? Sure, I said. Name it. No, he said. Forget it. It’s not worth it. Come on, I said. I’m happy to help. He took out a cigarette and tried to
light it but the wind kept blowing out the match and after about the fifth attempt he crumpled the cigarette up in his hand and threw it to the ground. I need you to return something for me, he said. Actually a few things: a bunch of cassettes. I borrowed them from this guy in Craigneuk but things turned a bit, well, a bit crazy, actually, so I’d rather, you know, keep my distance. Also, he has a bunch of my LPs that I need to get back. Can you help me out? I wanted to ask him why he didn’t get Beano or The Doug to help him but instead I just agreed. Can you do it now? he asked me. Then he gave me a bunch of cassettes, album dubs with track listings written in almost indecipherably small pen. One of them had a Chocolate Watchband compilation on one side and the first Suicide album on the other, both of which I went out and bought the next weekend. Wait a second, The Doug said as I was about to leave, could you go some Buckie? Then he handed me a half bottle of Buckfast. I had never tasted Buckfast in my life and the truth is it was rancid but as I choked it down all three of them began clapping and chanting Ross, Ross, Ross so I felt obliged to drain the bottle in one shot. They looked at me in amazement. I was in.

  The address was in Howletnest Road. I put my Walkman on and listened to ‘Dirt’ on Fun House on the way over. Iggy was a genius. It never sounded better. My entire body was vibrating with the music and the Buckie and the sunshine. When I got there the place looked like a dumping ground. The garden was a mess, there was trash all over the front grass and there was a filthy caravan parked in the driveway. It was an immediate bringdown. I started to feel nauseous. I could hear someone inside the caravan and it was vibrating with the sound of this sick-making high-pitched drone. But I knocked on the front door of the house instead and as soon as I did the sound cut dead and all movement in the caravan stopped. A tiny middle-aged woman answered the door with a cigarette in her hand and long grey hair. Yes? she said. I’m looking for Fred, I said. You mean Lucas? she said. Is Lucas Fred? I asked her. That was his nickname at school, she said. I don’t encourage it. His name’s Lucas. Or Luke. Sometimes he gets called Luke. Or Luciani. Is Lucas in? I asked her. No, she said, I’m afraid Lucas isn’t available right now. Can I take a message?