Based on the book by David Keenan

Adapted and Directed by Graham Eatough

Tickets – £20.00 (Con. available)

Legacy sells. Just have a gander at the touring rock groups littering venues all over the UK, utilising their heritage and nostalgia for a few more coins in the purse and maintaining their influence and deeply personal connection with fans.

And David Keenan’s tenaciously adept story of an Airdrie post-punk band, who, since the early eighties, have generated their merchandise, loyal social media presence, countless playlists, and now – a hugely slick and euphoric show, helmed by the tremendously terrific Paul Higgins. The stage adaptation of Keenan’s book, a smash hit with critics and audiences at the 2022 International Book Festival, has no dangers of receding into the doldrums of the forlorn with this up-scaled touring production of Graham Eatough’s impressive staging.  

Playing to sold-out Traverse audiences in Edinburgh, presented by the Royal Lyceum Theatre,  This Is Memorial Device is a devotedly intricate account of Memorial Device, the biggest band you’ve never heard of. Created by Keenan in their 2017 book, the band became a composite of the similar cult followings of others of their imagined ilk, threading of the hopes, follies, and successes of all those bands who inspired young fans and locals to reach onward, but Memorial Device was special – especially to Ross Raymond.

After all their exploits and ventures, no one possesses as much innocent charm and retained a fondness for the band as Raymond, looking to interview anyone and everyone involved with the band for a fanzine (which never made it to another printing). The utter thrill and surprise which ripples over Paul Higgins’s face snaps us into a sphere of musical appreciation and enjoyment, unrivalled in their intimacy as the conceptual space of the theatre is non-existent; we are all here together to share in this (only mildly cultish) appreciation of the band.

It’s an account for anyone who was ever young, even if they initially felt out of place. No matter the genre of music they listened to, the memories they held or the ones they pushed to forget – Keenan’s book and Eatough’s staging speak to everyone: truly. It fires at us from all angles; Martin Clark’s video vox-pops document memories and tie them even tighter into the mix, all bringing an authenticity that goes challenged by the production’s less lucid moments of brilliance. Nigel Edward’s lighting, with some extraordinary hallucinogenic movement direction, swirls together into these splendidly self-destructive moments.

Higgins makes effective use of Anna Orton’s set: cluttered yet organised chaos. Any aficionado or collector will recognise the (head)space strewn with endless amounts of memorabilia and references, all drawn into the flow of performance so naturally and without grandeur, enabling Higgins to stretch themselves into the audience even further with their slick performance, one which is so utterly believable, that it becomes impossible to discern performance space from reality. But, in essence, Higgins isn’t alone – the various band members represented with ramshackle mannequins, feeding us deeper into this betwixt state.

Expectantly, the outstanding music and Gavin Thomson’s sound design elevate the show enormously, captured as full-throttle enthusiasm for band culture, but anything the audience loves and is passionate about. It’s the one consistent in this otherwise slippery slope between the authentic and fictitious as it embraces the everyday pleasure of cultures, rejecting the highbrow throngs of judgement, flinging itself wildly into an appreciation of art. This Is Memorial Device isn’t for sitting in dusty collections: it is to be lived, re-played, carried and dreamed on forever.

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