There was a time, growing up in Airdrie, when it felt as if anything could happen – though in the end, to the world at large, there isn’t a single speck of evidence remaining that it did. And it wasn’t just in Airdrie, situated on the outskirts of Glasgow, but in small towns up and down the UK. Punk rock had failed in its promise to deliver music from musicians but, from 1978 to 1986, something much more electric had risen in its wake. People never used the term post-punk at the time, at least as far as I can remember, but there was a feeling that the entire culture was up for grabs.

The bible … Antonin Artaud’s Anthology

Punk had levelled everything and now post-punk was doing the remaking. It was no longer about London or even Manchester or any of the metropolitan centres. It was about covert DIY activity in small towns. It was about extreme musical experimentation drawn from a range of very alternative influences. And it was about sporting an avant garde haircut in the self-ravaged style of the mad French poet and playwright Antonin Artaud, whose City Lights Anthology became a kind of oracle for us.

Even though it was only 16 miles away, Glasgow might as well have been another planet. People would talk in hushed tones about getting a gig there, but really it felt impossibile. Indeed, it was this sense of impossibility – of the horizons being effectively the next town down, Coatbridge – that drove things. It’s not easy being Iggy Pop in a small town in the west of Scotland.

Local characters would outdo their musical heroes in terms of sheer bloody-minded belief: they were living it harder than any of them, putting on gigs in tacky discos, where they would play a 20-minute set of barely coherent post-Stooges drone while the singer got naked and poured fake blood over himself and got banned for life. I can’t even remember the name of that group – they played only one show and never recorded a thing – but it was enough to make them local legends.

The singer got naked, poured fake blood over himself and got banned for life

Immolation and wanton self-destruction were a big part of the scene. I guess they’d always been around but, for a few years, those impulses were somehow redirected into music. That feeling of pointlessness and despair, that sense that real life was always happening somewhere else, changed into a brief celebration of the moment and its potential. Post-punk spoke to us in Airdrie in a way that made us believe the centre of the world was exactly where we were standing – and we had better do something about it. It was the catalyst for a mass flowering of the arts, an existentialist revolution that turned Britain’s working-class towns and villages on their heads.

I would sit on a wall in the town centre and watch them go past: kids dressed like Alan Vega from Suicide, or Siouxsie from Siouxsie and the Banshees, with books by Albert Camus conspicuously sticking out of their pockets. We read Sounds and NME and were left to fantasise about what all those bands they frothed about sounded like. We recorded our own hallucinated versions of their songs and released them on cassettes with photocopied sleeves, to be handed out to friends.

The groups had names like Dissipated, Cold Stars, Steel Teeth, Anthropoid & UFO. My debut novel, This Is Memorial Device, follows the arc of an invented band, Memorial Device, as they crash and burn across the space of three glorious summers. The characters are based on my own fantasies of what the generation just before mine got up to. They are the people I saw from my wall, wearing their torn T-shirts and black leather jackets with band names written on the back. The first copy of the Artaud Anthology I ever saw was sticking out of the pocket of a guy everyone called Hamburger Lady, because those two words – a track by Throbbing Gristle – were emblazoned across the back of his leather jacket in Tipp-Ex.

‘My God, this is Airdrie’ … the streets of the hotspot. Photograph: Alamy

I had a paper round and would painstakingly put together compilations to listen to, mostly picked up from reading the back of people’s jackets. As well as Throbbing Gristle, I delivered Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertisers to the sound of John Cage. (Someone really did have a quote from Cage on their jacket: “I have nothing to say and I am saying it.”) And then there was Johnny Thunders of the New York Dolls. Everyone in Airdrie was obsessed with Thunders – and Lou Reed. Throbbing Gristle + Lou Reed became the central equation for everything that was happening.

The track Hamburger Lady consisted of bleak electronics and a macabre modulated vocal about a charred woman’s body wired up to tubes on a hospital bed. I would listen to the album it came from on my Walkman as my round reached the Holehills estate. When it got to Hamburger Lady, I’d play it three or four times, since this was the song that most effectively soundtracked the row after row of flats that smelled of piss, drowning out the sound of arguments and fights that seemed to be constantly taking place behind the closed doors.

But I was just a dumb kid with no friends who had any interest in alternative music and culture. In the dark pre-social media days, the only way to make new friends with similar interests was to put personal ads in the local arts and music paper, a publication whose name now escapes me but had something to do with speed and acceleration, as if the acquisition of sufficient cultural smarts would serve to launch you out of Airdrie altogether.

Keenan’s crew in an Airdrie park.

One day, I spotted an entry: “Looking for Hamburger Ladies.” I knew they weren’t looking for women to work in a fast-food van because there was also a line about deconditioning. Deconditioning was big, all the post-punks were at it. So I wrote and got a response: “Let’s meet.” I was sure it was the guy with the Hamburger Lady leather jacket. I checked his address. It wasn’t just on my paper round – it was in the flats where I would blast out Hamburger Lady. I felt as if I was deconditioning Airdrie all by myself, as if I had worked some kind of primitive magic. I remembered how, at those very flats, I had once stepped over a steaming pile of human excrement on the stairs. I was so excited.

We agreed to meet outside John Menzies. There he was, in the rain, with a copy of Sounds over his head, wearing black drainpipes, a black T-shirt with a huge rip revealing one of his nipples, and that black leather jacket. Like most of the kids who hung around outside Menzies, he was flagrantly smoking a joint and, as customers walked in and out, they stared at him as if he was an alien, which is exactly how he looked to me.

There was no Tipp-Ex on my leather jacket because it was new and my mum would have murdered me

“Hi,” I said. “I’m David.” I was wearing a leather jacket of my own, but there was no Tipp-Ex on it because it was brand new and my mum would have murdered me. I was also wearing monkey boots, which were pretty hip at the time, or so I believed. He looked me up and down and said: “Monkey boots are an offensive weapon.” To this day, I have no idea what he meant. But I had definitely failed some kind of audition.

“Want a hit?” he said. “No, I’m good,” I replied, but in a way that made it seem that I was all smoked up already, so no need for a top-up. We made our way up Clark Street as the sun came out. People in cars going by would roll down their window and shout abuse at us but, as I came to learn, he never got fazed. He didn’t even seem to notice – even when someone threw an actual loaf of pan bread at us. I was kind of impressed. Pan bread is a luxury you don’t normally go tossing out of a car window in Airdrie.

We sat in a park for a bit and he pulled out a warm can of Strongbow, which we split. Then we climbed a tree, the tall one at the back of the park, and sat in the highest branches smoking cigarettes. “Look,” he said, “you can see Glasgow from here.”

Listen at your own risk … the cover of Anthropoid & UFO’s cassette. Photograph: David Keenan

We went back to his flat. There was no human excrement on the stairs this time. He showed me a fanzine he was working on called De-Escalate. The pages were all pasted together, ready to go to the printer. He had written articles on Artaud, Joy Division and a group called the Chocolate Watchband. Plus he had interviewed a tramp who slept rough at the back of the Safeway car park. “This is Airdrie,” I thought to myself. “My God.” I felt inspired and began writing my own fanzine, while co-writing a bunch of others with kids I met at the library or who I approached outside Menzies.

Shortly after our first meeting, I accompanied Hamburger Lady to a printing shop in Glasgow where he presented his fanzine to the guy who ran the press. “You can’t possibly print from this,” he said. “It’s arranged all wrong.” He handed the mock-up back whereupon Hamburger Lady took it in his hands, staring at the guy the whole time, and tore it to shreds. “Forget about it,” he said, and we walked out in triumph and confusion. It was the most amazing performance I had ever seen.

It couldn’t last. As well as being a love letter to a time and place, a celebration of that energy, This Is Memorial Device also deals with the fallout. People died, became disillusioned, used up all their energy. Venues – even just a safe pub where you could hang out – began to disappear. People got jobs and gave up the scene. But they never left. Airdrie has one of the least mobile populations of any town in the UK. It’s a vortex. I fantasise that they are still there, all these artists, writers and musicians who did nothing, really, that the world will ever recognise. I fantasise that behind closed doors they’re still writing, painting, jamming and plotting.

Years later, I heard that Hamburger Lady had died. He fell from the top of some abandoned industrial structure in one of the many treacherous old quarries that dot the outskirts of Airdrie. I guess he was trying to get high enough to see Glasgow.

• This Is Memorial Device (Faber, £14.99) is out now.