Interviews: David Keenan and Stephen Pastel

I used to have a radio show that didn’t exist called Radio Thistle. My best friend and I taped ourselves transmitting to no one from our teenage bedrooms in Stirling, and invited imaginary guests to join us for a rock‘n’roll grilling. A recurring phantom interviewee was subterranean pop legend Stephen Pastel. (Spoiler alert: it was me, aged 15, doing a dubious, if audacious, impression.) 

This would have been the early-mid 90s, and his band, The Pastels, had already been blazing a trail for over a decade. It would take a while longer for them to have a number one seven-inch (with a Sonic Youth split of New York Dolls covers in late ‘21), and to star in a headline Glastonbury slot, via Paolo Nutini’s recent take on their ‘89 album cut, ‘Nothing To Be Done’. But there was never any rush. The Pastels work on Pastels time; they’ve never been shackled by hands on a clock.

Lately, Stephen Pastel has been toing and froing in place and time – specifically, to Airdrie in the early-mid 1980s. It’s thanks to a novel, a virtual cult, and a forthcoming theatre show with sound design by Pastel – all inspired by an underground band so magical that they never existed. You might have heard of them. Who can ever say for sure? Anyway, they’re called Memorial Device. 

David Keenan first conjured them in his brilliant 2017 novel, This Is Memorial Device: An Hallucinated Oral History of the Post-Punk Music Scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and Environs, 1978-1986. Its cabal of misfits and visionaries has since spawned a wildly popular Twitter account (Keenan doesn’t know who runs it), and a forthcoming prequel – Industry of Magic & Light – not to mention this stage production from Edinburgh International Book Festival and the Royal Lyceum. Adapted by Graham Eatough, it stars Paul Higgins (The Thick of It, Line of Duty) as frenzied protagonist Ross Raymond. 

“Such an incredible community has sprung up around Memorial Device,” Keenan muses on a sunny Monday in Glasgow subcultural paradise, Mono. “People read it, and it becomes their story. I had no ambition to do a theatre production, but very early on, I realised that Memorial Device doesn’t belong to me. All these people coming on board, it’s exactly part of the life of this book. And what Graham and Stephen are doing with it – it’s pretty bold.”

Paul Higgins stars in This is Memorial Device, photo by Robin Gautier 

At its heart, in every incarnation, Memorial Device is a psychotropic love letter to Lanarkshire. “I’ve always wanted to write about how amazing it can be in small towns,” Keenan says. “I’d go shopping with my gran when I was a kid, and I’d watch all these incredible characters walking down the high street. That’s been my fantasy world since I was 14. But it’s a fantasy that taps into a lot of people’s reality. It’s about falling in love and discovering poetry and listening to John Coltrane and painting. It’s set in Airdrie, but it’s every town, and any town. It’s about these beautiful moments where the world seems to open up to you through art, somehow. Art gives you that opportunity, that permission, to step out into the adventure.”

The Pastels make an early appearance in This Is Memorial Device – their seven-inches are on-sale upstairs at the Savoy Centre – so when Stephen Pastel joins us in Mono, he emerges from fantasy into reality in more ways than one. “I was blown away by the book’s real sense of adventurism when I first read it,” Pastel says, pulling up a chair beside us. “It’s that idea of starting from things that are almost prosaic experiences, then ascending into this absolute madness. I didn't grow up in Airdrie, but when I read the book, it had a real truth about the time.”

Keenan nods. “I think you can get closer to the truth through fiction than you can through a purely objective telling. That’s why it gets to that hallucinatory level – it’s that fevered moment where you’re getting so into art and music, and it’s so radically changing your life, that it’s almost as if reality itself is up for grabs.”

“The true story of post-punk, or underground, or independent music is not about the huge bands that had massive hits,” Keenan adds. “It's about the bands that recorded one demo cassette, people who put on three shows, who published a fanzine. They’re the real heroes. It takes a level of belief and bloody-minded commitment to come through with that kind of art.”

Pastel first got involved with the theatre production during an on-stage EIBF exploration in 2019. “We had a really good experience collaborating on it,” he says. “I think Graham and [Lyceum Artistic Director] David Greig always liked the idea of doing a more developed version in the future. And so it’s come back round again.” 

As for what the show might sound like, Pastel’s clear on what it’s not. “I always knew it shouldn’t sound like The Pastels,” he offers. “I also felt very strongly that Memorial Device’s music shouldn’t feature, because people have such a strong image in their minds of what that is. The first time we staged it, I saw the role of music more as providing the atmosphere and the noise of the time – the way it sounded, the way it was recorded.” 

Some Pastels-related archive recordings are rumoured to feature. These tapes are unlikely to include the fake Radio Thistle sessions, but never say never. One thing that’s assured is total immersion. “It’s got to have that same thing as the book,” Keenan says. “You come staggering out the other side of it going – what the fuck just happened?” Magic happens, everywhere, all the time. 

Nicola Meighan speaks to David Keenan as part of the Edinburgh International Book Festival at the Wee Red Bar on 13 Aug, 8:30pm