The acclaimed novelist, journalist and former record shop owner tells us how his love of outsider music has shaped his work

As he recalls in his spectacular collection of music writing, Volcanic Tongue, the first gig David Keenan attended changed everything for him. The year was 1987 and Keenan, a 16-year-old science-fiction fan was, by his own estimation, “a slicked-back, tucked-in, all present and correct Scottish geek”. Via music fanzines, or perhaps via the BBC’s Rock On Scotland radio show, he had heard about The Pastels and, besuited on the advice of his father, he headed off to see the band in Glasgow.

The 1998 essay in which Keenan describes what happened is entitled ‘Epiphany: The Pastels’, a reflection of just how deeply the band’s DIY aesthetic connected. “One of the things that excited me was that they weren’t technically great musicians,” he remembers. “That was really mind-blowing to me. I was like, ‘Wow, you can just just make your own music. It’s quite incredible.’”

While his love of classic science fiction (it’s revealing that Volcanic Tongue is subtitled A Time-Travelling Evangelists’s Guide To Late 20th-Century Underground Music) has endured so that he can happily chat about the grandeur of Arthur C Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama, Keenan had a new focus: rock’n’roll.

As his knowledge of music deepened, he began to be excited too by the possibilities of writing about music, inspired by the way figures such as Richard Meltzer, author of The Aesthetics of Rock (1970) and occasional lyricist for Blue Öyster Cult, used music criticism as a place to experiment. “Liberation, that’s what rock’n’roll was for me, total cultural liberation,” he says, “and it gave you permission to start experimenting with your own art. And my own art, of course, was record reviews. That was where I first began to find my voice.”

Since 2017, Keenan has worked primarily as a novelist, a career that began with the publication of This Is Memorial Device, a portrait of a fictional Airdrie post-punk band. However, for many years, Keenan was best known for his contributions to The Wire, where between 1996 and 2015 he wrote about, among other genres, experimental rock, folk and industrial music. It was Keenan who invented the term ‘hypnagogic pop’ to describe “pop music refracted through the memory of a memory”.

Putting Volcanic Tongue together, Keenan was surprised how “autobiographical” it was, with an overarching narrative of going on “pilgrimages” to meet the musicians he admired. “In a way, I think one of the things I was doing was that I wanted to find out how these how these people lived as artists,” he says. “I wanted to see what their day-to-day life was, I wanted to see how you live as an artist because that was how I wanted to live.”

In the noughties, Keenan’s connection with experimental music deepened when, alongside his partner, the musician and artist Heather Leigh, he founded the Volcanic Tongue  mail order business and record store. Having lived briefly in Philadelphia, he realised it was difficult to get hold of American new weird recordings by the likes of Jack Rose, music that had acoustic roots but also drew on drone, psychedelia, Krautrock and a multitude of left-field musics. So why not distribute these recordings?

“Every time Sonic Youth played in Glasgow, the band would always visit the shop and drop a fortune,” Keenan remembers. “Thurston Moore was literally our first mail-order customer. The night we launched our website, an order came through within five minutes, and it was Thurston ordering a box of stuff. Just completely amazing.”

Over the course of a decade, Volcanic Tongue enabled anyone curious about new, non-mainstream music to find tracks they might otherwise never have encountered. From the artists’ perspective, Volcanic Tongue helped them find an audience. “I guess we enabled bands to keep going,” Keenan says, “because they could sell all their CDs to us, we enabled them to experiment.” Dealing in private-press vinyl, cassettes and CD-Rs, Volcanic Tongue helped musicians sell small-run “art objects”. There was a “totemic” and “authentic” quality to the releases.

Today, the conventional way to run even an unconventional record store is to have an online presence that lets people hear the music. Keenan and Leigh took a different approach. “A lot of the music I liked I read about before I ever heard it and I always loved that,” Keenan says. “I love to have the fantasy, the excitement of what these records might sound like just by reading about them. So we never had sound samples. I reviewed every single release every week and we sent out a newsletter on the Sunday night, kind of like a magazine.” The idea was that customers “had to take a punt on our reviews alone”, a kind of re-creation of the pre-digital inkies era

As to what Volcanic Tongue customers were reading, Keenan says he was less a critic, more an “evangelist” as a music journalist. “The big inspiration for me as a music writer was to try and write pieces that you could enjoy as much as the music,” he says, “and not only that, it captured what the music felt like.” Keenan was never particularly interested in analysing lyrics but the “total sonic experience”.

His work as a music writer has played into his subsequent life as a novelist. “When you transcribe interviews constantly, you start to realise that everyone has their own rhythm,” he says. “Everyone has their own way of punctuating a sentence. And I found that as a novelist that became very useful, because you could really get across a person’s personality or a character using the rhythms of speech.”

Volcanic Tongue closed in 2015, in part because both Keenan and Leigh didn’t want to come to “resent” the way the store took up so much time. Better to go out with good memories. Nevertheless, you can get a feel for the kinds of releases it championed from the unmissable, eponymous compilation LP that has been released alongside the book and gathers up some of Keenan’s favourite tracks from this time in his life. The double album is released on the Disciples label (DISC 33).

Records are the holy relics of the culture that we love, that late 20th century rock’n’roll culture… records are the central point of transmission for that

He still collects music and can’t resist “private-press free jazz vinyl”. Often, though, he buys CDs from Oxfam, because they can be picked up cheaply and “if you’ve got a good system”, which Keenan has, the music will sound “fucking amazing”. Vinyl, he thinks, is overpriced, to the point that records have become “luxury items”, but he still absolutely adores the format.

“Records are the holy relics of the culture that we love, that late 20th century rock’n’roll culture, which I’ve dedicated my life to,” he says. “I love that culture and records are the central point of transmission for that.”

Three Holy Relics

David Keenan talks us through his favourite tracks from Volcanic Tongue

Tables Of Grass Fields
The Bachs
Out Of The Bachs (Roto, 1968)

“It’s a private-press record that came out of Chicago in 1968. It’s very unusual for a garage band record from the time because it has no cover versions on it. Every single track is an original track by this band. And the funny thing about it is that people have tracked them down and they don’t really care about that record, they don’t really understand why people care about it. It’s all about all the possibilities of teenage garage band music. It’s so kind of keen. It’s totally committed. It really means a lot to me.”

Attaining Peace
JD Emmanuel
Wizards (North Star Productions, 1982)

“A guy called John Olson who plays in a band called Wolf Eyes really turned me on to this.  We didn’t even know he was called JD Emmanuel. He said, ‘There’s this record, I think it’s by a guy called Wizards,’ but that’s the title. He said, ‘It’s just got a guy on the front, a black-and-white shot of a guy staring at a candle.’ And he described it as sounding like Jandek playing Alpha Centauri by Tangerine Dream. And I was like, ‘Wow, that’s a sad description, that really makes me want to seek that out.’ We found a box of unopened original copies and we managed to get them shipped to the UK. It was pretty exciting.”

Metropoline
ESP Kinetic
(self-released, 1985)

“ESP Kinetic was a group formed by Neil Campbell, who’s a big part of the UK underground. He went on to form interesting groups like Vibracathedral Orchestra and Astral Social Club, coming out of Leeds, but ESP Kinetic were his original DIY band, and you can hear they’re really inspired by The Fall, Virgin Prunes and stuff like that. But again, there’s just such a sort of wild DIY exuberance to it that it’s just so exciting. It catches that post-punk, anything-can-happen sense of permission.”

FOR MORE

Volcanic Tongue, the album
www.disciples.bandcamp.com/album/volcanic-tongue-a-time-travelling-evangelist-s-guide-to-late-20th-century-underground-music-2

Volcanic Tongue, the book
store.whiterabbitbooks.co.uk/

David Keenan’s insta
instagram.com/reversediorama