My adventures in experimental music – by David Keenan

David Keenan acquired his craft as a music writer, he says, from reading the crème de la crème of critics who milked rock music for all it was worth during the 1970s – Lester Bangs, Griel Marcus, Paul Morley, Biba Kopf – before deciding that rock criticism was not his bag. In the preface to this weighty collection of his music journalism, he says he considered himself more of a ‘rock evangelist’. The pieces originally appeared between 1998, when Keenan was writing for hardcore music magazines such as Melody Maker, MOJO and the Wire, and 2015, after which he checked out of regular reviewing duties to pursue his career as a novelist. Luckily for him, his debut novel This Is Memorial Device proved a smash hit.

He dedicates Volcanic Tongue to ur-rocker Lou Reed, but the point is pressed that stylistic labels barely compute to Keenan, and there are lengthy and insightful pieces about free jazz, folk and modern composition too. Concerned not so much with the technical nuts and bolts driving music forwards, or re-examining existing mythomanias, Keenan is instead motivated to capture ‘the first rush of hearing’ and the attitudes behind – even forming – the sounds. Rock, he says, tends towards collapsing into nostalgia. But tracing what he terms the rock and roll ‘urge’ elsewhere has taken him far beyond rock – towards other music unafraid to work itself out in the moment of playing.