He’s a real live unicorn, David Keenan. A mirage from a bygone age, freak of evolution – or maybe just the last of the fervent believers in the notion of the music journalist as writer-writer, of music journalism as art form (as distinct from the PR wing of the tech-service industry formerly known as the music business).
Keenan came to prominence in the early 1990s, the last generation of pre-blog alt-culture documenters. This means he comes preprogrammed with print journalism ethics: not just basic writing hygiene practises such as hard-copy proofing or analogue research, but a love for physical, visceral things – the on-the-body effects of sound and language, the veneration of fanzines, vinyl, limited-edition releases, objects and their fields.
As implied by the title (also the name of the record outlet he and his partner, the musician Heather Leigh, ran in Glasgow for 10 years), he’s steadfast in the notion of journalist as hot-blowing evangelist rather than cool-blooded critic.
Keenan was probably best known for his writings in The Wire before making the leap from non-fiction to novel (This Is Memorial Device, For the Good Times, the mammoth Monument Maker). A livid appetite for noise and prose appears to have kept him young. Volcanic Tongue is a 500-plus page anthology of his writing spanning several decades, a gloriously unruly compendium of profiles, appreciation pieces, interviews and reviews – basically a torrent of first-responses that often approaches onomatopoeic glossolalia (as opposed to consumer guide reports).
In his fiction, Keenan favours the mad mystics; his avatars in music writing are the child-man mouth-breathers, the frothers, the ranters, the Old Testament prophets of the Nixon era who spent their nocturnal hours standing on hilltops, railing at the gods, invoking curses on the Babylonian philistines of the biz: Melzer, Tosches, most of all Lester Bangs.
Lester’s influence is profound, manifested in the Beat-appropriated rhythm and flow of the prose, but also shared totems: the Velvets, the Stooges, Beefheart, PiL’s Metal Box, Pere Ubu and Peter Laughner. Keenan writes well on all these artists, but in those pieces there’s a sense of apprenticeship, of spending an inheritance left by his elders – until his review of Adele Bertei’s beautiful memoir Peter and the Wolves, which feels like a reckoning:
“ … why am I so fascinated by both Bangs and Laughner? I think, perhaps, they were the first generation to take rock‘n’roll at its word. And to take it seriously; Dylan, Lou Reed, Van Morrison. Alongside people like Paul Williams (and in Scotland, Brian Hogg and Lindsay Hutton), they were the generation that birthed rock‘n’roll fandom. Rock music transformed their lives, led them to poetry, fashion, literature, excess.”
Keenan begins this book with an origin story, his first indie club gig, The Pastels in Glasgow at age 15, accompanied by his charismatic, sharp-dressed dad. From there it’s a magical rabbit-hole. His dense, allusive, hyper-spiralling style (somewhere between Greg Tate and Energy Flash-era Simon Reynolds, with a dash of Irish Bill Graham’s longline free-associations) will come as a rude shock to middlebrowsers raised on boot-cut Uncut retrospectives, or the cheeky-matey Hepworth/Ellen school, or Q’s dullard if you-like-that-you’ll-love-this listicles. This, from an Ellen Fullman review:
“This is the sound of the long-gone, a form of stereo spiritualism that reanimates voices from the past by tuning into the kind of wavelengths that would attract them. The nebulous depths of a scratchy 78 are reanimated as a black scrying mirror, allowing occluded images of the past access to the future via overtones that feel like scrambled messages from another time and place.”
Volcanic Tongue sizzles with deadline-generated sweat: the compressed energy of intensive, obsessive research periods, followed by an exhaustive disgorging of copy, a sort of serial-monomaniacal binge-purge cycle of culture journalism at its most committed: see features on the New Weird Americana, Tortoise, Sonic Youth, Gallic sci-fi psychedelia, noise rock and kosmische music.
[ Thurston Moore: ‘I didn’t want to get into a Morrissey thing of settling scores’Opens in new window ]
Keenan soars in his explorations of lesser-known tributaries: Germany’s Faust and Conrad Schnitzler, New Zealand cottage industry The Dead C, San Franciscan proto-cyberpunks Chrome, UK industrial occultists Coil. There’s also a fascinating rendezvous with free jazz lion-in-winter Peter Brötzmann in Wuppertal, and a voyage into pastoral folk horror with Shirley Collins.
Reader be warned, Keenan’s prose is mostly delivered in head-level geek-speak, as compared to the emotional accessibility of writers like Miranda Sawyer or Jude Rogers. His sentences are high-speed trains, so be prepared to leap aboard or get mangled. No sane person would love everything in here (an overlong Jandek interview needed pruning) but you’ll be impressed and inspired by Keenan’s total immersion in his own obsessions, his refusal to half-ass it. I was bewitched, bewildered and bedazzled by this rare whale of a book.
Peter Murphy is a novelist, musician and arts journalist. He records and performs under the name Cursed Murphy
