David Keenan – Volcanic Tongue

David Keenan’s debut novel, This is Memorial Device (2017), erupted into view like a counter cultural dam bursting. The book’s wild depiction of small town Scottish post punk pop life was based around the short lived crash and burn of a group called Memorial Device.

 

Keenan’s epic immortalisation of the ultimate legends in their own living room seemed to come from the inside, as Keenan conjured up an entire parallel universe. When the stage adaptation of the book was first performed at Edinburgh College of Art’s Wee Red Bar, a poster for a Memorial Device show remains there to this day.

 

After five more novels in as many years, such devotion to detail can be seen and heard in Volcanic Tongue – A Time-Travelling Evangelist’s Guide to Late 20^thCentury Underground Music. Keenan’s bumper-sized compendium of music writing culled from his years as the Wire magazine’s evangelist in chief is accompanied by a compilation album of the same name. This features the sort of no-fi auteurs who sound like they might have once shared a bill with his imaginary band. 

 

Volcanic Tongue was the name of the shop Keenan ran for a decade with his partner Heather Leigh in Glasgow’s Hidden Lane. This became a deep dive haven for the couple’s very personal stock of out-there underground sounds reflecting Keenan’s own musical odyssey.

 

From a brief tenure with Creation Records second stringers 18 Wheeler, Keenan sang and played guitar with the Telstar Ponies before his musical adventures took him from post rock to hardcore jazz to freeform freakouts and out and out Noise.

 

This John the Baptist like devotion was the case too with Keenan’s assorted lines of inquiry in The Wire. Industrial, kosmische, Japanese Noise, Acid psych and a million other sub genres were in the mix. He coined defining phrases such as ‘New Weird America’ before prompting the magazine’s readers to reach for the dictionary to check on the provenance of ‘hypnagogic pop’.

 

Keenan inspires devotion from his readers. This is most evident in the Memorial Device Twitter-feed, set up by persons unknown to big up its own fanbase by bestowing fellow travellers the honour of Memorial Device Alternative National Treasure.

 

These days Keenan embraces his status as a fully fledged man of letters even as Volcanic Tongue reveals his musical roots. As being declared a M.D.A.N.T. has become a badge of honour, there’s a little bit of Memorial Device in us all.

 

Volcanic Tongue – A Time-Travelling Evangelist’s Guide to Late 20^thCentury Underground Music is published by White Rabbit, 6^thMarch. The album of the same name is released on 28^thMarch.

The List, March 2025