Volcanic Tongue

Last year I did a series of posts called Bagging Area Book Club and never got around to writing about any of David Keenan's books, several of which were on a list of potential posts. His appearance at AW62 has given me the prompt I needed to do it and also coincides with the release of an album and a book- both called Volcanic Tongue, both by Keenan.

Volcanic Tongue- A Time Travelling Evangelist's Guide To Late 20th Century Underground Music (the book) is a compendium of David's writing about music- interviews, articles, think pieces and in depth conversations with the likes of Nick Cave, Kevin Shields and John Martyn. It's a big book, in all senses- thick and with a heavy page count but also big in terms of ideas and creativity. 

Volcanic Tongue (the album) is a compilation of songs from bands that passed through the Glasgow record shop David ran with his partner Heather Leigh, also called Volcanic Tongue. The bands on the album, twenty of them, are from the underground, the underground of the underground, bands that self- released small runs of albums, handed out CD- Rs at gigs, put on nights in rooms above pubs and hoped get to enough people through the door to break even, bands that passed through David and Heather's shop between 2005 and 2015. Rock n' roll bands, folk bands, psychedelic bands, ambient outfits, drone duos, bands like Ashtray Navigations (blissed out drone/ folk) and Idea Fire Company (piano ambient/ avant garde), Counter Intuits (scuzzed up and fuzzed up garage rock) and Bronze Horse (acoustic guitar, handclaps and echo). Find it at Bandcamp, double vinyl and digital, a treasure trove of music. 

David Keenan's novels are a wild trip. The first I read was the legendary This Is Memorial Device, a love letter to the world of post punk bands and a fictional Airdrie rock group, Memorial Device. For The Good Times is set in Belfast during the 1970s, a tense tale of an IRA foot soldier, a kidnapping and Perry Como, a book that delves deep into a murky demi- world. I read Xstabeth not long after, a novel with some genuinely breathtaking passages, a story told by a teenage girl from St Petersburg, Russia. Xstabeth is haunted by ghosts and saints, Russian history and literature. Mystical and I found quite profoundly affecting. The fourth Keenan novel I tackled was Monument Maker, a weighty, experimental, time travelling story that has little actual narrative and detours into theology, sex, enigmas, the siege of Khartoum, Medieval cathedrals, the pyramids and God knows what else. It's partly also an exercise in what an author can do with the written page. It's both confusing and inspiring. 

David's partner Heather Leigh recorded an album in 2020, Glory Days- modernist folk music played on pedal steel and synth that sounds like the soundtrack to any and all of the above. 

In Fade