I’ve never read anything like this before. It’s a novel that takes the form of a biography of an obscure band, Memorial Device, based in Airdrie, western Scotland, in the early 1980s. Assembled by fan Ross Raymond, the book consists of various recollections, interviews and essays by people associated with this micro-scene. It digresses wildly and the group supposedly at the core of the story never comes into focus. This isn’t a failing of the book. It seems to be a deliberate reminder that the more deeply you probe into history looking for answers, the more questions you will find. It also makes the point that the group was far less important than the sense of community it briefly inspired. Possibly, the scene was so fragmented and insignificant that it never even counted as a scene – except to those who invested their time and emotions in these characters and who need to sustain their myth.
In the hands of a lesser author, this could so easily have become cheery, blokey nostalgia for men of a certain age who grew up with punk and post-punk. Instead it’s something much more realistic and savage.
Various appendices extend the illusion that this is a real biography. There’s a list of bands in the scene: “A Necessarily Incomplete Attempt to Map the Extent of the Post-Punk Music Scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and environs of the Post-Punk Music Scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and environs 1978–1986”. There are accounts of the major and minor players in the story. And there’s even a 25-page index – deliberately itemising the contents of the novel in ridiculous detail.
Parts of it are incoherent and hard-going, but that's presumably deliberate. When it clicks into place – such as chapters 17 and 24 – it’s so compulsively readable that you wish more of the book had been presented this way.
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