Show 30 – David Keenan

The Quietus Radio

Today’s guest on this special edition of The Quietus Hour podcast is writer David Keenan.

David has been, at various times, an independent record label boss, a contributor to The Wire and Melody Maker, the author of England’s Hidden Reverse, a musician, a record store owner and a published poet. Well, he can now add novelist to the list, as this week sees the publication of his debut for Faber, This Is Memorial Device.

It is a singular novel – and one of the best we’ve read at TQHQ in the last year. It’s frequently hilarious and touching, while also being an uncomfortably precise portrait of the often inward looking world of underground music fandom, that has its own distinct voice while also echoing David Foster Wallace, the Irvine Welsh of Trainspotting and Alan Warner.

The action of the novel is set in Airdrie, Lanarkshire, in the early 80s and is told from the point of view of several characters in and around the mythical post punk band, Memorial Device.

David talks about the genesis of his novel, the problems of forming a band with only mannequins as members and gives us the insider’s view of the night his former band 18 Wheeler supported Oasis at King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut in 1993. But not only that he picks all of the music which stretches from Felt to Whitehouse via an Italian punk band called Tampax.