This Is Memorial Device (Music From The Stage Play) - Music By Stephen Pastel And Gavin Thomson This Is Memorial Device (Music From The Stage Play)

This Is Memorial Device is a cult novel by David Keenan. It’s “an hallucinated oral history of the post-punk scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and environs 1978-1986”. If you grew up in Glasgow you would probably be surprised to learn that such a vivid, adjacent world existed there, but it did. There’s a love in the book, an unreasonableness, and at its epicentre a brilliant original group called Memorial Device.

In 2019 I was asked by the theatre director, Graham Eatough, to provide music for a reading of it at the Edinburgh Book Festival. It was a modest budget and I dug out some home recordings I had from teenage Friday nights spent jamming and getting drunk and taking acid with a teenage pal, Corky. This music seemed to me very like the music in the book – maybe not Memorial Device’s own music but some other group from the same scene. David confirmed that one of our songs, ‘We Have Sex’ was indeed genius and “if the Tate or the Guggenheim truly knew what was up they would purchase it for their archive, amazing.”

When I was invited to take part in a full theatrical adaptation of This Is Memorial Device on a slightly bigger budget I was enthusiastic but also wary of undermining the myth around some of the music, particularly Memorial Device. So for the most part I wanted their music to be present but in peoples imaginations. I started work with Gavin Thomson (Pastels sound-person and multi-instrumentalist). We took as our starting point the teenage jams I had made all these years ago, writing new music as well. Gav and I worked quickly and we immediately got in sync with the rest of the team which was by now fronted by the brilliant actor, Paul Higgins. I’m really proud of what we made together. This Is Memorial Device won the Fringe First award which is the most prestigious accolade for new theatre at the Edinburgh Festival.

A few months later we decided we would try to make a record from what we had. We wondered if it was maybe lacking in some contrasts and over-representing the gnarliness of the book, when it is actually so many different things, many beautiful. Revisiting what we’d done we started looking for different colours and it became clear that we needed our Pastels cohorts to become part of it – mostly Katrina and Tom. In places it is now close to The Pastels, but in places not at all. It goes somewhere else – it’s like the train ride to Airdrie  – somewhere along the way an invisible line is drawn, you know you’re not in Glasgow.

What we’ve done runs parallel to the book and to the theatre production weaving in and out – a third voice. Very excited to be part of this brilliant cult.

Stephen Pastel, 2024