The band release two albums and start work on a third while the Sixties dream crumbles around them. His creations mingle with real-life musicians and other celebrities names aren’t so much dropped as strewn across Utopia Avenue’s 550-odd pages. Mitchell has invented a band, the Utopia Avenue of the book’s title, and inserted them into the underground London and elsewhere of, roughly, 1967-9. Is he really the writer to revivify that hoary old carcass? (The song isn’t named, but it’s Bruce Springsteen’s Atlantic City.) Popular music has always been deeply woven into Mitchell’s work, and it can express ideas – here eternal recurrence, a key Mitchell theme – with a candour and clarity novels can only aspire to.īut a whole novel about about the music scene in the Sixties, that most picked-over, mythologised and clichéd of decades, would seem to be a major gamble for an author whose interests – for all his abundant gifts for story-telling, character and description – have generally tended away from mainstream subjects and towards the oblique and metaphysical.

Capturing a time when youthful idealism collided with jaded reality, this bewitching novel celebrates the power of music to connect across divides, define an era and thrill the soul.In ‘The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish’, one of the stories that make up Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell’s best-known work, the eponymous narrator is in a taxi when he hears a song on the radio “about how everything that dies some day comes back”. This is the story of a unique band’s brief, blazing journey from Soho dives to chart success and on to the promised land of America, just when the Summer of Love was giving way to something much darker – a tale of dreams, drugs, sexuality, madness and grief, and of fame’s pitfalls. Strangers to each other and from widely different backgrounds, together they create magic. The year is 1967 and word is spreading about a new band on London’s psychedelic scene – an unlikely combination of a female folksinger, a blues bassist, a jazz drummer and an electric guitarist. ‘ONE OF THE MOST BRILLIANTLY INVENTIVE WRITERS OF THIS, OR ANY, COUNTRY’ IndependentĪ story of music and dreams, drugs and madness, love and grief, from the acclaimed author of Cloud Atlas

Utopia avenue david mitchell