by David Keenan
It was easy how we got together.
Memorial Device played a show at this cafe in town, this pre-theatre deal with sandwiches and hot dogs and alcohol in the afternoon so that everybody was drunk by 4 p.m.
It was part of a literary festival and Memorial Device had got the gig because in the past they had accompanied Patrick Remora for a few readings and he had briefly become this big deal because Allen Ginsberg had come through town in 1973 and an interview had just been published where he recalled performing with local musicians in Glasgow and had mentioned enjoying the work of the Scottish poets of the time and so now it was anyone’s game and Remora was being touted as the next – well, if not the next Ian Hamilton Finlay then the next Basil Bunting, as there was an uncredited photograph doing the rounds of Remora drunk and asleep, barely a kid, in Ginsberg’s lap, just like the photo of Ginsberg with his head in Bunting’s lap from their reading at Morden Tower in Newcastle in 1965.
On the afternoon of the concert I went about it very deliberately.
I dressed to kill in black strappy heels and in a minidress and with a tiny handbag over my shoulder in which I had a copy of a book by Blaise Cendrars, that was strategic, as well as make-up and condoms and a hip flask and a cassette of Lou Reed’s The Bells, which is the best album ever made if you ask me, although I also had a cassette of Berlin for disrupting parties and for bringing everyone down on the advice of Lester Bangs.
The show was good, though not as great as everyone made out.
I think everyone wanted to see them do something iconoclastic and disruptive in the face of these uptight literary fuds, so they were ready to read into whatever they did some kind of deliberate refusal of the circumstances.
I remember Remy was playing synth, it was one of the few times they had a synthesiser in the set-up, and I guess it was supposed to be kind of like Allen Ravenstine on the early Pere Ubu recordings but really it sounded kind of gay, you know, like he was dancing around behind this keyboard up on a stand and it might as well have been an ironing board, it was that camp, and he was going crazy, mock crazy in a way, banging his head and dancing all around, I don’t think he was ever forgiven for being in a synth-pop duo and here it was, the ghost of Relate, live on stage.
At this point let me say this, let me underline it.
We all live out our unhappiness on different scales.
Lucas, it seemed to me, had given up on the idea of cosmic suffering or epic injustice in favour of a tolerable though constantly present low-level misery, a moment-to-moment survival that snaked, like the handwriting in his journal, from left to right and back and forth, backwards and forwards in time, but that remained trapped on the page, always in the same dimension, a form of compressed life that made me think of a crab, trapped inside its shell, moving sideways but somehow never gaining ground, and once, near the end, I woke in the night and saw him in his shorts by the open window, a microphone in each hand, and I thought that’s his claws, in the moment between sleeping and awakening I saw him raise his claws and lower two microphones out of the window like he was running fishing lines down to the bottom of the ocean and I sat up in bed and watched his silhouette, which by this point was more like a starfish, the sun rising slowly behind him like it was twenty thousand leagues away, and after an endless moment where I’m sure he knew I was watching him but where he never spoke or made a movement, not even a shiver in front of the open window in the cold of the morning, which seems miraculous now, barely plausible, I asked him what he was doing and without turning round he said he was recording the dawn chorus and I asked him what does it sound like and he opened his journal and he read me those words, complete contentment, his final words, it seems to me now and even then, even without any idea of what was coming next, of what would happen to us and who would remember us and the horror of the situation that would engulf us, like placing my head in an oven, like being trapped in a fridge on waste ground, with no one else around and no way of opening it from the inside, and the night before he had led me around the room on his big feet, his huge bare feet, he had taken his socks and shoes off and had me stand with my feet on top of his and held my hands while I leaned back and he had led me around the room like a marionette, lifting his legs in slow motion and placing me in strange positions, and we had danced to his favourite song, which was ‘Space Hymn’ by Lothar and the Hand People, he had transcribed the lyrics into his notebook, but this time he just mouthed the words, the song is like a meditation piece where you picture seeing the earth from outer space and they call it a starship of stone and they rhyme it with dying alone.
I’m sorry for crying.
It still gets to me.
But that was like his one concession to cosmic loneliness, if you like, and even then it was just a daft song by a bunch of hippies.
He had a scar across his forehead, as I’m sure you know, and more scars underneath his hair, from all of the surgery, and it was so sexy.
The canals of Mars, he called them.
I can see the face on Mars, I would say, and then I would kiss him.
But sometimes I would look into his eyes and I would see that all memory had gone and he would look at me blankly, but still kindly, as if he had woken up in bed with a bewildered stranger and had to move quickly to reassure her that everything was okay, a kindness that it occurred to me must have been deeper than memory or familiarity, a basic recognition that was at the heart of his personality, a capacity not so much to reflect, he didn’t simply mirror, he wasn’t seeing himself, I’m sure of that, that was the hardest thing for him to see in a way, I don’t know if he ever really recognised himself, but he was capable of seeing in others that same kernel of fear, that nut of terror, that empty silhouette that we try to flesh out with language, that we try to define into existence, though we’re as nebulous as stars, which brings me back to Lothar and the Hand People, but he could see that, and his journals were like these attempts to write himself into existence, that’s how they seemed, the sentences would go this way and that, crab-like, in angles across the page or little clusters of text that were illegible to anyone but himself, names, hand-drawn maps, sketches, codes, acronyms, long lines of initials, stories, lyrics, parables, homilies, reconstructions, reminders, his problems had become the little things and the little things had engulfed the big things, like how to get to a friend’s house, what time was rehearsal, where do I live, who are you, etc.
It was like a walking frame or a wheelchair, a crutch, which when you think about it is what most writing is, something to support the figure of the writer, so that he doesn’t fall back into the primordial soup of everyone else, which is no one.
So that he can believe in himself he creates a fiction, he invents something that he can then say, here, at least, is an outline of my life, or rather an outline of my life as I would have it, only with Lucas it was an outline of his life as he received it, he was more of a scientist or a mystic than an author or inventor, trying to penetrate to the heart of the mystery of himself through scattered clues, things that would never tie up, like plotting the constellations, he had to come up with some kind of coherent shape out of all these disparate moments, separated by a huge gulf of silence, by empty space, by what might as well have been thousands of light years.
It’s no exaggeration to say that he woke each morning anew, unsure of who he was and where he was, but somehow it’s possible to become accustomed to even that, so that when he woke there would be that moment of confusion, which in turn would trigger a memory, a memory of being confused before, and so the confusion would become his underlying base state and the foundation of his day-to-day identity, you know, like I was confused yesterday, I am confused today, I will be confused tomorrow, what are those lines of Rilke’s he always used to quote from his journal, ‘We did not know his unheard-of head/with eyes like ripening fruit …’, there were more like that, he was in love with Rilke, and every day when he had the chance or saw his name in the front of his journal he would read
him again as if for the first time and he said it was like a past life, every time, and I think it was the same with music, he was a huge fan of free jazz, German free jazz specifically, stuff like Peter Brötzmann and Peter Kowald and Alex von Schlippenbach, music that was so in the moment that it was like music without a memory, music that insisted on pushing forwards regardless, and with their history, their German history, this form of amnesia, this idea that velocity and forgetfulness could take us safely into the future, well, it cast a spell on him.
That explains the big break in Memorial Device, the rupture, where they moved from doing songs into this freely improvised rock music where Lucas would just spontaneously come up with lyrics, of course there were always echoes of Rilke, whether he was consciously aware of it or not, who knows, and of course they began to record the shows and issue live recordings and Lucas would listen to them for hours, taking notes, listening to himself the way you would someone else, like if someone had played you a Bob Dylan album and told you that was you, that you had made that – not quite, but I think there was that degree of revelation for him in the music, because you could tell he was hypnotised, mesmerised by his own performance, he would look round at me and then back towards the speakers and then back to me again, all with this incredulous look on his face, like was this some kind of set-up, was somebody leading him on?
It got to the point that he was able to formulate it in very simple terms, like if I do X then Y will result, but without any feeling of movement between one letter and the next.
X happened then Y appeared.
That’s when it occurred to me, aren’t we all stranded in single moments?
Do we ever experience that between state, the movement between X and Y?
Are any of us any the less stranded?
Isn’t every act, every moment, every setting in play an act of blind faith based on limited examples?
But I don’t want to go too far down that road.
I can already feel the storm trooper rising to his feet and putting his hat on and walking towards me and it’s at this point that I have to shake myself awake and sit up in bed and scream, though who knows in what bedroom and behind what closed curtains.
Appendix A: Memorial Device Discography
– Ur/On LP (self-released/no label/paste-on sleeves, hand-numbered edition of #120) 1983: ‘two massive sidelong tracks in the brain-erasing style of Ash Ra Tempel/Ohr Records et al.’ – Friction #2.
– Adherence 12” (self-released/no label/paste-on sleeves, hand-numbered edition of #220) 1984: ‘still the definitive Memorial Device release and the one that best captures the hypnotic power of their live shows, a single track over two sides of vinyl that combines the celestial sound of interstellar shortwave with a two-chord jam that is so echo-damaged and distraught that it comes over like The Velvet Underground live from Atlantis or the Sun Ra Arkestra caught in the orbit of the planet Jupiter while vocalist Lucas Black drops single seemingly unrelated phrases like depth charges into the void.’ – Go Ahead and Drop the Bomb: Memorial Device Memorial Edition 1987.
– Certainty of a Sleepwalker 7” (Peacocks Wildly Excited by the Wind PWEBTW-113) 1984: ‘sounds like an autistic Joy Division recorded with a broken microphone at the bottom of a well and played back using a coat hanger for a needle.’ – Contrition #8.
– Inverted Calder Cross cassette (Sufferage Tapes ST-68 C60) 1984: live recording from a private show in a garage in Caldercruix 3/3/84. ‘Memorial Device live report: Memorial Device are a four-piece rock group that have been making waves in the Lanarkshire area for the past year or so, making industrial-strength waves, to be precise, as their model seems to be the more experimental Krautrock groups of the 1970s crossed with a strange aspect of their own and with a singer who has been compared to Ian Curtis. Tonight’s show, however, underlines their garage band heritage, quite literally, as it took place in a garage on the outskirts of Caldercruix. The support act was an overweight uncomfortable-looking guy in a woolly hat making bleeping noises with a table covered in what looked like broken computer parts. It was boring and pretentious. How much longer will we put up with this sort of thing? The audience seemed to be in agreement. During the interval there was an overwhelming smell of petrol that made me nervous every time someone sparked one up. By the time Memorial Device came on stage you could barely see them for all of the smoke in the room. They played one chord for what seemed like an eternity and then their singer, who cast a huge shadow through the smoke, seemed to rise up from the ground like he had levitated up through a trapdoor and began to sing, though when I say sing it was more like a chant, a chant where the words seemed to evolve and seemed to keep growing. Like the first word came out of the last one and so on like a twisted flower. It’s hard to explain but the effect was admittedly powerful. It was just one track but one endless track that left your head spinning and that made you lose track of time. The musicianship was basic but with a raw appeal. I was glad to be invited and while they may never make it to the London stage – or even the Glasgow basement – it was good going for Airdrie and shows that we can hold our heads up alongside other small towns in the area when it comes to the post-punk scene.’ – Rupert Gower, The Monk’s Chunk: Your Fortnightly Guide to Arts & Music in the Monklands Area, April 1984.
– Give Us Sorrow/Give Us Rope cassette (Sufferage Tapes ST-76 C90) 1984: massively crude live recording of a show from Kilmarnock 21/4/84. ‘The singer sings about songs in a voice like a ventriloquist while the band do their best to avoid playing anything that could be construed as a song whatsoever then they rub sandpaper all over the tape and expect anyone to buy it?’ – Popcorn Petals #2.
– Pentecost 2x7” (Primitive Painters PP-1-1-1) 1985: ‘starts off mediocre but soon builds up into a frenzy of musical genius.’ – Giles Gordon.
Unofficial Releases:
– Inverted C*Brig cassette (Nothing Songs NO-001 C120): live Mary Hannaera recording from 1985.
– Inverted C*Dyke cassette (Nothing Songs NO-002 C120): live Mary Hannaera recording from 1985.
– Backwards B*hill cassette (Nothing Songs NO-003 C120): live Mary Hanna-era recording from 1985.
– Backwards B*well cassette (Nothing Songs NO-004 C120): live Mary Hanna-era recording from 1985.
(1st pressing: ‘Vanity’ sleeves. 2nd pressing: generic black-on-white text)
Addendum:
Lucas Black – The Morning of the Executioners LP (G.G.G.G.S. #001 hand-numbered edition of #333) 1986: ‘field recordings’ sonically dicked with by Patty Pierce and Remy Farr. Posthumous release.
Appendix B: A Necessarily Incomplete Attempt to Map the Extent of the Post-Punk Music Scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and environs 1978–1986
– Absolute Refusal – Nein Nein Nein offshoot.
– The Beguiled – aka Richard Starkey: poetry, no wave, a black leather glove.
– Chinese Moon – showroom dummies.
– The Clarkston Parks – mod/freakbeat group from Petersburn.
– Cold Stars – amazing glam-punk hybrid w/a Coatbridge wasteland edge.
– Dark Bathroom – whatever.
– Disabled Adults – crude DIY.
– Dissipated – wretchedly crude DIY group with one legendarily rare single, ‘Fanny Pad’, due to the group using most of the run of two hundred copies as target practice for an air rifle.
– Fangboard – no one would take anything to do with them, that was a whole other scene completely.
– Freaky DK – local DJ who had a freak hit in 1978 with the punk spoof ‘Yer Maw’, which consisted of verses filled with lewd and rude questions and a chorus that answered them with ‘Yer maw, yer maw! Yer maw, yer maw, yer maw!’
– Glass Sarcophagus – legendary industrial-noise duo led by porn star and future pop star Vanity and with John Bailey on guitar.
– Jung Team – industrial-strength dub-rock.
– Kazoo Icing Compass – drone-rock loner from Gartness. Disappeared after a single album of ‘br
oken instrumentals’.
– Memorial Device – the greatest rock group of the modern age or at least of Airdrie – Patty Pierce, Lucas Black, Remy Farr and Richard Curtis – but even better when they had Mary Hanna in them.
– Meschersmith – commie punk-pop.
– The Monarchs of the Night Time – Airdrie’s greatest garage band managed by legendary local promoter Fuckface The Eagle.
– Mount the Bitch – metal band from Caldercruix.
– Nein Nein Nein – conceptual, bloody-minded, minimalist.
– Occult Theocracy – Big Patty’s ‘bogus’ psychedelic rock band that briefly featured Street Hassle on vocals.
– Porous – four-piece with two bassists and two drummers who generated the kind of low-end wall of sound that made the name kind of ironic.
– Rat Tattoo – teenage metal for radio hams.
– Relate – performance art synth-pop duo with two lovers who looked like Leigh Bowery, one of whom joined Memorial Device for no discernible reason that anyone could make out whatsoever.
– Sentimental Mercenaries – prog group from Airdrie.
– Slave Demographics – Big Patty’s first band best known for their cover of The Godz’ ‘Permanent Green Light’, which was even more primitive than the original.
– The Spazzers – wheelchair-bound quartet formed by lead vocalist Mick Jazzer and with guitarists Bubonic Craig and Bob Noxious and drummer Pig Ignorant. No known recordings, unfortunately.
– Steel Teeth – aka Robert Mulligan, who built his own electronics and flipped hamburgers in Mount Vernon.
– The Traveller in Black – cheesy new wave one-man synth bullshit.
– The Tunnel – heavy ritualists.
– Ultra Violet – post-punk group from Clarkston, singer hanged himself from a tree after running up debts on a stolen credit card.
– The Whinhall Starvers – punk group from Whinhall. One 7” single, ‘Chasing the Breadvan’.