Counter-culture and the passage of time
This Is Memorial Device
Wee Red Bar (Venue 506), until 29 August
JJJJ
There are many shows about fandom on this year’s Edinburgh Fringe; the bands, films and franchises that, since the 1960s, have provided generations of young people with waymarks, and a sense of shared identity, in an increasingly confusing and media-driven world.
There’s none more poignant, though – or more significant in the cultural landscape of Scotland – than This Is Memorial Device, Graham Eatough’s new stage version of the 2017 novel by David Keenan about “the greatest band that never existed”, an imaginary punk-art combo from Airdrie in Lanarkshire who, for three brief years in the early 1980s, light up the local landscape with their wild indie experimentalism, and even make brief forays to Glasgow, Edinburgh and London, before crashing and burning in classic rock-icon style.
On a stage cluttered with memorabilia kept for decades in his basement, Paul Higgins plays music writer Ross Raymond, who grew up in Airdrie alongside the members of Memorial Device, and remains obsessed with their brief moment of counter-cultural glory.
He tells the story of a band whose journey began when their lead guitarist, Big Patty, saw a tower block being demolished, and decided that in future, his music would sound like a building falling, or nothing; and with the help of some fragmented shopwindow dummies – who feature extensively in the story – constructs for us the three core members of the band, Big Patty in his shades and battered top hat, quiet Richard the drummer, and Lucas, the brain-injured genius, poet and lyricist, who needs his own “memorial device”, in the shape of a notebook, to remember what he did yesterday.
Following the pattern of the book, the show also features a recorded oral history of the band, in superb short filmed interviews with Julie Wilson Nimmo, Mary Gapinski, Sanjeev Kohli and Gabriel Quigley as assorted friends, fans and associates of the band in its pomp.
At the centre, though, stands Higgins, delivering a poignant and beautiful performance as a man still obsessed, like so many of today’s 40- and 50-somethings, with those moments of musical glory and communion that shaped their youth; and with that moment, just after the turn of the 1980s, when Scottish working-class artists had both the means and the motive to commune with the greatest minds of the 20th century underground and avant-garde, and to create their own counter-culture, on the streets where they grew up.