by David Keenan
I explained that I needed to return some tapes to him and to pick up some records. By this point the noises in the caravan had resumed and I could make out a steady thump and what sounded like a drunk stumbling into furniture. I was starting to feel a panic coming over me. I looked back over my shoulder and I could make out a word picked out in the dirt of the caravan window. eugroM, it said. There was a buzzing in my ears. I felt like I was dissolving into the ground. Then I saw myself from above on the path and saw a thin trickle of blood run from my forehead and pool on the ground beside me and watched as a figure appeared from the caravan and lifted up my body and carried me back inside.
Lucas was building a volcano in the middle of his caravan. The volcano, he explained, was the equivalent of a wheelchair for a physically handicapped person. It’s a means of transport, he said. It allows me to make connections. The volcano was constructed out of old shoeboxes, crumpled newspapers, folded greeting cards, balls of wrapping paper. Long feather boas – pink, blue and purple – took the place of flowing lava. He held a red notebook in his hand. What did you say your name was again? he asked me. Ross, I told him. Ross Raymond. He wrote it down in his notebook. Have I ever met you before?
No, I said, first time, and I dabbed the cut on the side of my head with an old T-shirt he had given me. He had laid me on a dirty blue velvet couch beneath the window. I have had seven brain operations, he told me. I have struggled with mental illness for most of my life. But the creative part, the creative part has been the most rewarding. He spoke in a soft, slightly distant voice. A moonie, I thought to myself, a gentle lunatic.
The issue was memory. He had none, or very little, or rather all of his memories were hidden, occluded by chemistry, by water particularly – water on the brain, they called it – so that every moment was swept away, the specifics of his day-to-day existence like the splinters of a ship in a storm. This is the logbook, he said, thumbing through his notes, moments reconstructed in the wake of a disaster. Then he pointed to the volcano. And this is where the memories live.
I realised I had been set up. He would have had no idea what the cassettes were, if they were even his. Do you know Big Patty? I asked him. Big Patty, he said, breathing all over his name so that I could almost smell it. Hold on a second, he said, and then he picked up a green phone book with a dial on the front that made it pop up at certain letters. Big Patty, he said. Patty Whitaker? Patty Thomas? Patricia Black? He’s a musician, I said. Plays in Occult Theocracy? Music, music, music, he said. Music is one of the things that humans can be proudest of. Would you like to hear some music? He put a cassette in the player. It was the same sound I had heard from outside the caravan, a single barely fluctuating tone. I took a look at the cassette cover and it had the same tiny handwriting as the Suicide and Chocolate Watchband compilation. The track was by the Swedish composer Folke Rabe, a piece called ‘What??’. I had never heard anything like it before. It seemed to fill all the space in the caravan.
Have you ever been to Jos? Lucas asked me. No, I said, but I knew it, funnily enough. It’s a town in Nigeria, I told him. Then you know the centre of the world, he said. At first I wondered if it was a genuine memory or if he had picked it up from somewhere else. But then I thought about my own opinions and I shut the fuck up.
2. This Is So Pointlessly Wrong: Ross Raymond interviews Big Patty from Memorial Device for the second issue of the legendary fanzine that got dumped behind a hedge and that never saw the light of day and somehow only manages to ask one rotten question the entire time can you believe it.
So, eh, the first question is can you tell me a bit about what was the whole idea behind, eh, Memorial Device?
I was feeling … not disconcerted, not unreconciled – what’s the word that’s somewhere between the two?
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Awkward and out of sync, is that the best way to put it?
?
But out of sync with what, you know?
?
It was more like I was out of orbit. Like I had been hit with a piece of space debris and knocked for a loop. I had been writing songs or, let’s be fucking honest here why don’t we, struggling to write songs. Struggling to be a songwriter. I had a few chords that I had learned from The Modern Lovers. You know the ones, D, E, A, that other weird D one, the one Johnny Thunders used in ‘You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory’ and ‘Lonely Planet Boy’. The most beautiful chord of all. And I was trying to write lyrics.
You don’t mind if I spark one up, do you?
?
We would go to my girlfriend’s parents’ house … They had this cottage in Greengairs, it was quiet and boring … but they grew their own vegetables so you could make your own food for free … It sort of became my base … Here I was trying to make these sounds and trying to express something but it seemed like it was all craft … like I was trying to learn how to copy or emulate … that it was counterfeit somehow … I would write these songs and I would realise that the feelings in them … if you could even call them feelings … they were more like … I don’t know … they weren’t my own and they weren’t anyone else’s either … They were shop-soiled … cheap … It was like singing to a plant … You are green and you grow … in the rain … for a time … then you go … It was that level … Although it wasn’t really that level … That’s plainly stated in a way that I was incapable of back then … you know … the whole Lou Reed school of ‘I walked to the chair/Then I sat in it’ … That’s how Lester Bangs describes it … You into Lester Bangs?
?
Cool …
I mean, I liked that. I always have. But there was a feeling in me that didn’t come across like a chord progression and a melody. You have to understand I had a lot of anger. A lot of frustration. I still do. But I was never bored. That’s what I hated so much about punk. This whole thing about complaining about being bored. What’s that crap Situationist cartoon I can’t stand?
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The one where the two French chicks are bitching about how there is nothing they won’t do to raise the standard of boredom.
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I hated that. These people are punks and yet they’re complaining about how someone else won’t make an effort to entertain them?
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Give me a break. Wasn’t the whole point that you made your own entertainment?
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Then I had this awful feeling. Like it was all a drug. Something for sleepwalkers. Dreaming their way from generation through generation. Whether it was Frank Sinatra and I fucking hate Frank Sinatra. Whether it was Johnny Rotten or Bob Dylan. All these tossers singing from the same hymn book. Fucking choirboys. Or Elvis Presley but with Elvis maybe there was something different.
Did you ever hear about Sinew Singer?
?
He was this guy who came from Airdrie in the 1950s. Airdrie’s sole contribution to rock n roll as something that would actually expand your senses.
You know how he got his name?
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Check it out: his friend had a scrapbook that he filled with pictures of rock stars and pop stars. Buddy Holly. The Everly Brothers. Fucking Dion and the Belmonts, I don’t know. They were leafing through it one night and he turns to a page that has a picture of Elvis on it. Early Elvis. Young Elvis. Elvis where he looks like a flick knife. And just looking at him he feels like he has stuck his finger in a light bulb socket. He says he literally felt his hair rise up into a kind of electrified quiff. And you know what he means. That haircut was aerodynamic. It came from rushing headlong into the future. He asked his friend, who the fuck is this guy? And he says to him, it’s the new singer. But he mishears it as It’s Sinew Singer and his mind is even more blown apart. He mishears it as this guy whose every muscle, whose every vein, every fucking sinew of his body, is singing. You know? Fuck Iggy Pop! And then he realises his mistake though not really because in that moment he became Sinew Singer. He took on the mantle and it was down to him to live up to it. That’s genius right there, if you as
k me. In my opinion genius is accidental, is mistaken, is actually wrong at first. And I don’t care what you say. But it’s hard to be wrong in a housing estate in Airdrie. Even though really they’re all wrong! But they want to be right at all costs. They want to have an ironing board, a cooker and a washing machine. A duvet instead of a sleeping bag. A fucking concrete house with four windows. Some shitty car. A hoover. A job like a fucking jail sentence. A big TV in the living room. To be woken at six in the morning while it’s still dark. And on top of that they want respect. For being right. How is it possible to respect anyone for being right?
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How fucking simple. How mind-numbingly fucking dull. Congratulations. You did the right thing. You know?
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People ask me why I asked Remy to join Memorial Device. What was it that made me ask this guy from a supposedly naff synth-pop group to play bass with us. The point is when I first saw Relate play I just thought it was so wrong. Here were these two bozos … these two clowns, basically … though more macabre and sad and desperate than even that … Their make-up was badly applied so that their mouths were like two black half-moons, making them look like puffy cadavers … or a fucking inflatable nightmare … The music was awful, godawful … and here they were jumping up and down … I remember at one point Remy gave this sudden leap combined with a scissor kick … He was wearing hand-painted pyjamas, basically … and he smashed his head off the ceiling of the venue … Of course they were doing the whole deal where they poured blood over themselves but it looked like Remy really had split his head open and was bleeding badly … and there was no one in the audience … okay, maybe four or five people … but no one was paying them the slightest attention … except for me … and by this point I was hooked … fascinated … or maybe it’s more correct to say that I was under its spell … It was compulsive … These people are alive, I said to myself … They seemed completely unaware of the lack of response … Their faces were contorted so that now they looked like tortured eggs … This is so pointlessly wrong, I thought to myself … I love it.
It’s the same with Lucas. I mean Lucas is always performing, in a way. Because of his condition. He is always feeling his way into a new role. Every minute of the day. And I don’t mean that to sound exploitative. But every performance is like the first one. Every time he wakes it’s like the first morning on earth. With Lucas there is no possibility of being rote. He is perpetually new. I know there is a lot of suffering that comes from that too. I can only imagine. But I think there is something fulfilling for Lucas and for all of us in being able to make ritual use of forgetting and remembering. And of course that’s how I came up with the name Memorial Device. To me it was like Shakespeare.
Do you want a hit?
?
Cool. No worries. As I said … I had been through my own artistic crisis … I was into punk rock … for a bit … who wasn’t … but it seemed like everyone was going to jail … serving pointless sentences … The guys from The Tunnel … one of the great Airdrie groups … heavy ritualists … they had been locked up for desecrating graves … They had dug up a bunch of plots in Clarkston Parish Church looking for thighbones to make trumpets out of … That I could respect … That seemed like something worth doing time for … There was something tragic and naive about it … that appealed to me … but everyone else was going down for shoplifting … assault and battery … house breaking … possession … repeated drunk and disorderly … It was pathetic … I’m drawn to madness … I admit it … but only if it energises you … or if it destroys you completely … Only if you blow up or go tearing off … into another life … and another life … and another life running after it … These guys were just bums … I never championed the underdog … I never forgot they were still dogs … For me the people I respected were winners … maybe not in the eyes of society … but for me they weren’t victims … They came out on top … even if they were skint … and covered in rashes … and couldn’t look you in the eye … and were half insane … But it ended up where I was going to these … clubs … these … bunkers … really these fallout shelters … because that’s what it felt like … I’d be sitting in the dark watching this punk group … going through the motions … acting gobby … playing three chords … staggering through a bunch of songs that really they had rehearsed to death … There was no spontaneity to it … no reality … no life … and that’s when I began to think … Christ … we’ve dug these complexes … deep into the ground … we’ve built walls … we’ve filled in all the windows … we’ve painted the toilets black … we’ve drunk ourselves to the point of oblivion … just to keep life outside … Art was supposed to open you up to life and here we were … we had narrowed it to the point of a fucking black box … with a bunch of dirty mirrors lining the walls …
Alright, mate? Yeah, amazing mate, cannae beat it. What you up to? I’m doing an interview, mate, what’s it look like? An interview, mate. I’m not packing, mate. I’ve nothing on me. Naw, mate, naw. Try me later, mate, try me later. Sorry, man, just some dick that I know. You know The Whinhall Starvers?
?
That guy plays bass with them. You sure you don’t want a hit?
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So I heard about a block of flats that was being demolished in the East End of Glasgow … On the Sunday of the explosion I made my way out there on my own … There were helicopters hovering in clouds of dust … the crackle of police walkie-talkies … I saw no one from the music scene … except one guy … a bike courier … who frankly I couldn’t stand … though I was feeling in a good mood … I had risen early and I hadn’t been drinking the night before … so I ended up standing next to him … him in his shorts and T-shirt … and wearing some kind of baseball cap … forgive me … but it was repellent to me … especially his nose … his red runny nose … but anyway … I looked around and it was all locals … it was like an event … The building had history … It had gone up in the 1960s … I thought of all the people that had lived there … It was powerful … and people were eating chocolate bars and drinking drinks … and smoking cigarettes … and the rumour was they had diverted the trains … and suddenly this sound rang out … this air-raid siren … or warning call … and everyone gasped … someone next to me screamed … and you could hear the blades of the helicopters whirling round … and the charges went off … and the building crumpled … collapsing forward … and folding into itself … like a sick old man … falling to his knees on the subway … but there was something unmistakably artistic about it … In the sound of the explosion I heard the years of planning … the decades of construction … the span … of people’s lives … There were tower blocks all around and it missed them by metres … I was blown away … There was so much going on … I said to myself … okay … from now on music has to sound like a building coming down or forget it.
Look, mate, I gotta split, is that enough, is that okay?
?
Alright, mate, alright, catch you later …
Fuck!
3. Daytime Hangovers That Can Only Be Remedied by a Session of Furious Masturbation: Scott McKenzie becomes the first of many people to get obsessed by Mary Hanna (this is before she joined Memorial Device) but more than that he isn’t giving away though I tried him with follow-up questions several times he just blanked me that was his style his only ambition was to do as little as possible even though I kind of admire it and all of Airdrie salutes him for it in a really kind of slack half-arsed mooching-about-town way.
I would say that Mary was in about fifty per cent of the best groups to come out of Airdrie in the middle 1980s. She was certainly in demand. At first some people speculated that she was a lesbian. But it was more that she was just aloof. How did I meet her? Well, I am glad you asked that question because that is another story and in fact it has nothing to do with music. It was the first summer after I graduated from high school. I was seventeen years old. It was the kind of summer that we simply do not get any more. I swear to god t
hat the tar was melting in the streets. People were swimming in rivers. These filthy rivers. These stinky summer rivers. But even so. I took a job at a cement factory in Coatdyke. I worked on the desk, which was no work at all, lucky me. You do not get a lot of drop-in customers looking for bags of cement. Although of course you do get a few. It was normally people that had just bought their council house and were looking to build an extension, or freelance labourers. We dealt a lot with the trade.
My boss was an idiot, there is no point in pretending otherwise. When I filled in my application form he took it and he held it up to his face because he was also short-sighted and he said, that is good you have very neat handwriting. He thought that was the right thing to say. He thought that was how you evaluated potential employees. And my handwriting was not even neat. It was actually a mess. I could not even read it myself. I am going to have the run of the place here, I remember thinking to myself at the time. I’ll have my feet up.
Besides the boss there was a pool of men who looked after the delivering of the cement and the loading of it on and off the lorries and there was also a secretary named Rachel who looked like a duck. Or was it more like an emu. She had a long neck and a tiny head and she wore dark eyeshadow with her black hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. So maybe it was an emu. She was a fan of music and her boyfriend was balding with a long ginger ponytail. He would pick her up after work and they would go to the Glasgow Tech on a Friday night and they would drink pints of snakebite and they would dance to music by The Cure or The Sisters of Mercy. Or worse. Then she got a disease where her hair started to fall out. I do not know what it was called. Then she took to wearing a bandana on her head so that she looked like a nun. She looked like a nun who was wearing John Lennon-style glasses. It was not attractive but the boys in the delivery sheds would make jokes about getting the habit and that kind of humour.