David Keenan - This Is Memorial Device

1. Hidden Occluded by Chemistry by Water : Ross Raymond meets Big Patty and Lucas Black in 1981 and everything changes and I know I know I hate it when I hear people say things like oh that record changed my life that book changed my life Led Zeppelin changed my fucking life when you know that really their life just went on exactly the fucking same but meeting Patty and Lucas and starting to go to shows with Johnny McLaughlin and buying records and hearing this music really did change everything although it might be more accurate to say it deformed my life rather than just changed it if you know what I mean. And if you do youre in.

At the time that I met him, Big Patty lived somewhere near the top of South Bridge Street in Airdrie, which today is the worst street in Airdrie, the most boarded-up street in Airdrie, the street that most effectively announces it is all over for Airdrie, but the weird thing is Ive no idea how I first got to know him, perhaps I met him one night at The Staging Post across the road from Airdrie Library, perhaps I met him at the library itself, I was a teenage sci-fi, horror and existentialism nut and that was my haunt, if you know what I mean, my medieval castle, but really I have no idea, which is weird, but appropriate, perhaps, because it makes it seem more like an amnesiac alien abduction than the beginning of an awkward long-term friendship, which, looking back, is closer to what it actually felt like.

He was my first introduction to the music scene. I spent the New Years Eve of 1981 hanging out at his flat, which to me was a paradise of no parents and endless opportunity, but as the bells rang he forced us out onto the street and we ended up standing round in a park in the dark near Airdrie Academy hoping the future would walk right up behind us and tap us on the shoulder. Back then Johnny McLaughlin and I were working on our fanzine. We called it A Night Is a Morning That You Hasten to Light. Johnny came up with the title. It came from the French something like that. For the first issue we had interviewed Big Patty.

The night before the interview I couldnt sleep. I was always that way when it came to big moments. I worried that my questions would seem banal. At that time in my life I had a bed underneath a skylight in the loft of my parents house, right next to a radiator, where my cat, who was named Cody after Neal Cassadys character in Visions of Cody and whose memory comes back to me now like a puzzled ghost with great owl-like eyes staring out of the past, would curl up in the crook of my legs, and at the foot of the bed I had a bookcase filled with random dread; I was educating myself in suffering, sleeping naked in the woods, I told myself, books by Philip K. Dick and Christopher Lasch and Albert Camus and H. P. Lovecraft. Sometime in the night my mum came upstairs and knocked on the door of my bedroom, which I always kept locked because parents stick their noses in everywhere. I was listening to Y by The Pop Group, which was one of my favourite records at the time I played it to death, almost literally to death, to the point that it wouldnt play any more without sticking and jumping and I was smoking a cigarette out of the window while staring at a cluster of trees silhouetted on the horizon that I always associated with the future or the mystery of all of my life that was yet to come. Hold on, I said. When I unlocked the door she asked me what I was doing. Im preparing for an interview, I said. I think I might be up most of the night, I said. Do you have any ideas for questions? I asked her. She thought for a moment. Yes, she said. You should ask him if he always tells the truth in interviews.

Ive never done an interview before in my life, Big Patty said. How the fuck would I know? I had underlined a sentence from a philosophical text, something about the nature of love. He looked embarrassed. I have no idea, he said. I typed up the interview until 4 a.m. Then I fell asleep.

I had a paper round at this point everyone in Airdrie had a paper round, it was a rite of passage in Airdrie and I had two or three cassettes that I would alternate on the Walkman but mostly Fun House by The Stooges. I was delivering in Whinhall, on the outskirts of Airdrie, which was a desperate situation. Then I got a summer job in a flower shop in Coatbridge, then as a kitchen orderly in Monklands Hospital in Coatdyke. That put me off carrots for life. But suddenly I had enough money to buy records. Every Saturday I would meet Johnny and we would travel into Glasgow and buy two LPs each: the first Ramones album, The Sonics