Overview

Rock and Roll is Life pays homage to a formative period in music history, at the height of the Helium Kids’ popularity. Three decades after their heyday in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, the band’s publicist Nick Du Pont looks back on the turbulent trajectory of the supergroup, traversing the bacchanalian excesses and tragedies of a golden age in British music.

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9781912914524

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Reviews

Taylor's magnificent new novel is Spinal Tap for literary types . . . thoroughly entertaining, knowledgeable romp through the fear and loathing of rock's golden age. Beautifully written and consistently funny, it is also a poignant account of one man's search for his own identity. * Mail on Sunday * Hugely entertaining . . . perceptive and sardonic . . . a dazzling rollercoaster homage to an era both bacchanalian and oddly innocent. -- Dermot Bolger * The Guardian * A highly entertaining riff on the music business in the 1960s and 1970s . . . an immensely satisfying portrait of a creative and occasionally monstrous industry. -- Ian Critchley * Literary Review * An affectionate homage to a sub-genre of music journalism that has lost much of its cultural cachet in the internet age. Taylor skillfully combines nostalgic reverence and ironic distance in this genial romp, puncturing the mythology of the era while never quite repudiating its charms. -- Houman Barekat * The Spectator * This tale of pop group excess cleverly slips fact into fiction . . . Taylor's wry, detached style and eye for detail is a pleasure to read. -- Will Hodgkinson * The Times * D. J. Taylor has a gift for rendering the defining details of a world . . . It might be said that the book depicts a world that comes with the satire built in, but for good or ill rock music and its successors have taken on a cultural and economic importance that no one could have predicted. The subject requires a powerful imaginative chronicler. In D. J. Taylor it finds a writer closer to Balzac than it may even deserve. -- Sean O'Brien * Times Literary Supplement * A literary version of Rob Reiner's hilarious mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, tragically narrated by a provincial depressive. -- Lewis Jones * Daily Telegraph * Entertaining . . . By the end, you'll almost be humming the music. -- Suzi Feay * The Tablet * One of the finest of our twenty-first century novelists. -- A. N. Wilson The list of truly great music-based novels might be a short one, but with the addition of Rock and Roll is Life it just got slightly longer. -- Ashley Norris * Shindig *

Author Information

D.J. Taylor has written twelve novels, including English Settlement (1996), which won a Grinzane Cavour Prize, Trespass (1998) and Derby Day (2011), both of which were long-listed for the Booker Prize, Kept (2006), a U.S. Publishers' Weekly Book of the Year, and The Windsor Faction (2013), joint winner of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. His non-fiction includes Orwell: The Life, winner of the 2003 Whitbread Prize for Biography, The Prose Factory: Literary Life in England Since 1918 (2016) and Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature 1939-1951 (2019). His most recent books are a collection of short stories, Stewkey Blues (2022), and Critic at Large: Essays and Reviews: 2010-2022 (2023). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in Norwich with his wife, the novelist Rachel Hore.

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