Many will tell you that their lives were changed by seeing the Pistols, but for David Keenan it was The Pastels. Author of some of the most acclaimed Scottish novels of the past decade (This is Memorial Device and Xstabeth among them), Keenan was writing about music long before he made the leap to fiction. His musical horizons broadened – nay, shattered – by watching The Pastels play at Glasgow’s Fury Murrys in 1987, he’s been exploring the avant-garde hinterlands ever since, mainly for The Wire magazine, but also for a range of publications that includes NME, the New York Times and The Literary Review.