Volcanic Tongue: A Time-Travelling Evangelist’s Guide To Late 20th Century Underground Music album and book preview – Defying easy categorisation
From no-fi auteurs to imaginary bands from Airdrie, music critic and author David Keenan has championed them all. As a book of his writings is published alongside an accompanying compilation album, Neil Cooper assesses the work of a man once dubbed by avant-garde composer William Basinski as ‘off-the-charts mind-bogglingly brilliant’
David Keenan’s 2017 debut novel This Is Memorial Device erupted into view like a counter-cultural dam bursting. The book’s wild depiction of smalltown 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, with Keenan conjuring up an entire parallel universe. When the stage adaptation was first performed at Edinburgh College Of Art’s Wee Red Bar, it featured a poster for a Memorial Device show which 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 20th Century 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. The latter features the sort of no-fi auteurs (with monikers such as Ashtray Navigations, Orphan Fairytale and The Bachs) 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’ 18 Wheeler, Keenan sang and played guitar with Telstar Ponies before his musical adventures took him from post-rock to hardcore jazz to freeform freak-outs.
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 readers to reach for their dictionaries to check on the provenance of ‘hypnagogic pop’.
Keenan inspires devotion from his readers. This is most evident in the Memorial Device Twitter-feed, anonymously created and bestowing fellow travellers the honour of M.D.A.N.T. (Memorial Device Alternative National Treasure). While Volcanic Tongue displays his fascinating musical roots, these days Keenan is embracing his status as a fully fledged man of letters.
Volcanic Tongue: A Time-Travelling Evangelist’s Guide To Late 20th Century Underground Music is published by White Rabbit on Thursday 6 March; an album of the same name is released by Disciples on Friday 28 March; main picture: Heather Leigh.