This is Memorial Device

Remember that incredibly cool band from Scotland in the ’80s that changed music forever despite only playing a few gigs? No? Well that’s because they didn’t exist. This sort-of one-man play (a hit in Edinburgh in 2022) is adapted from David Keenan’s 2017 hallucinatory novel about an imagined Scottish post-punk band called Memorial Device. There’s a lead singer who can’t form memories and a bassist who likes to cover himself in blood, that kind of thing.

Paul Higgins plays Ross Raymond, a fanzine editor-cum-journalist who was there for all of it, enthusiastically bringing the band to life with mannequins, a fancy dress box and a laptop. Higgins is great, one of those middle-aged music obsessives who's never quite let go of their youth, telling the story with a passionate intensity, like he can’t quite believe we don’t know more about Memorial Device. Mimicking the form of the novel, which consists of interviews with other people who were there, a projector screen plays talking heads who flesh out some of the story.

The text, adapted and directed by Graham Eatough, brings that place and that era to life in a beautifully joyful, haunted way. There’s the attention to detail first and foremost: the carefully created memorabilia, genealogy maps of the various bands that coalesced and broke up to eventually get to Memorial Device (Occult Theocracy, Slave Demographics), and the snippets of music from Gavin Thomson and Stephen Pastel which suggest a kind of woozy psychedelic vibe.

And Eatough’s adaptation weaves threads about memory - what gets remembered, what gets forgotten - in a really intricate way that gives the piece a delicate supporting structure, made especially profound through the character of Lucas who has no short-term memory. It’s this character that leads to some of the most poetic ideas – the way he creates his life anew each day, through assiduous note-taking, a ‘manufacturing of continuity’.

But even as it’s entrancing on a theatrical level, it lacks narrative. It’s just not really telling enough of the story that it promises. It gets distracted by its sense of atmosphere. On one level that’s fitting in telling the story of a band who wanted to defy convention, but weirdly it’s a show that could do with a bit more tell.