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. 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. The novel follows the creation of an eponymous London band in the mid 60s (take a prime cut of Pink Floyd, add a dash of Cream, a pinch of Dusty Springfield, marinade overnight) and its subsequent.

Strangers to each other and from widely different backgrounds, together they create magic. Utopia Avenue (2020) isn’t my favorite or most admired Mitchell work, but it may have been the one I most enjoyed in sheer fun and immersion. Mitchell makes the best use of his familiar elements, from recurring. 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. (Starred review) Magical a rollicking, rapturous tale of 1960s rock n roll. ‘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 When I finished David Mitchell’s new novel about a psychedelic 1960s folk-rock band, I started up to search for Utopia Avenue on YouTube. At first, it appears closer in theme and style to the semi-autobiographical Black Swan Green than to the giddying, multivalent Cloud Atlas or The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet: it is placed.

Utopia avenue review