1967, the year of psychedelia and Sgt. Pepper. Soho, London, a strange crucible of concentrated creativity, and the most curious thing to emerge from it is Utopia Avenue. Comprising of blues bassist Dean Moss; folksinger Elf Holloway; jazz drummer Peter ‘Griff’ Griffin; and guitar genius Jasper de Zoet, somehow these four disparate elements manage to form a whole. But the road to fame can be bumpy and tricky to navigate with many trials creative, financial, romantic, and mental. This is the story of their short but blazing career and how even though they only produced two albums in two years, they left a musical legacy that would continue to live on.
There are certain things that, to certain readers, are literary catnip. Two of mine happen to be books set in the 60s and books about the music and popular culture of the 60s. So, as you can imagine, when I saw the synopsis for Utopia Avenue – Mitchell’s first novel since 2015’s Slade House – I was really excited. And thankfully that excitement wasn’t misplaced!
The novel is structured like an album, or a series of them, with the different sections being ‘A’ and ‘B’ sides, and the chapters the individual tracks (taking their titles from the band’s songs). Each chapter is told from the point of view of a particular character, and this determines the tone. For although this is one of Mitchell’s more realist works (not that Utopia Avenue is completely devoid of the fantastical elements that were at the forefront of The Bone Clocks and Slade House, but as they are mainly concentrated in one character, we’ll get to that later) he manages to incorporate a number of different styles (owing to the fact that the band are deliberately curated rather than formed organically).
As the creative powerhouses, Dean, Elf, and Jasper get the lion’s share of the focus – even poor Griff makes the joke about how everyone forgets about the drummer, but even though Griff only gets one chapter to himself, he is never presented as anything less than integral to the band, not only the beat that keeps them in time but the keystone that holds them together). Dean’s chapters are frequently tragi-comic in nature; good-looking and outwardly confident but inwardly insecure – about his class, his abilities to make as it a musician, all stemming from a difficult relationship with a difficult father. Elf’s chapters are an exploration of the plight of the talented female artist having to battle it out to be heard and taken seriously in a male-dominated industry – her middle class background a source of friendly friction between her and Dean – and an exploration of identity and sexuality.
In Jasper’s chapters Mitchell explores the culture of psychedelia and the character of the “mad” genius. He’s also the character Mitchell uses to explore his “extended universe”. An insanely talented guitarist, Jasper is also a direct descendant of Jacob De Zoet, the main character of his 2010 novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, and suffers from a peculiar mental affliction in the form of a knocking sound that has no discernible external source, whom Jasper christens “Knock Knock”. It is strongly implied that this is a consequence of the events of that novel, and not natural in origin, but if you haven’t read Thousand Autumns, or if fantastical elements just aren’t your cup of tea, the context of the setting – the casual drug taking of the 1960s art/music scene and the psychedelia subculture – and the way Mitchell presents it, means that the reader can take it either way: realist or fantastical. So Jasper’s strand obviously reintroduces us to the Horologists, but there are more characters from and references to Mitchell’s previous work – the band’s manager Levon Frankland, for instance, who previously appeared in The Bone Clocks, for instance. (You don’t have to have read any of his other novels for Utopia Avenue to make sense however, though as they’re good books I’d still recommend it.) And speaking of references, one of the elements of Utopia Avenue that has proved slightly contentious are the occasional cameos and name-dropping of famous artists of the period – Bowie and Lennon, for example. Some have found it gauche but I personally enjoyed it. They’re not excessive – just enough to build a fully rounded picture of the era – and worn lightly, and as the author himself said, it would be more conspicuous by their absence.
The narrative avoids the cliché of the “meteoric rise to fame”, showing the nuts and bolts of the band’s creative process, and their struggle as what they’re producing is good but so different people don’t know what to make of it, before they’re then poised on the brink of stardom, but to say what happens next would spoil everything.
To summarise, Utopia Avenue is a brilliantly written music novel that paints a vivid, and slightly trippy, picture of a certain time and place, with compelling characters and a band whose music you’ll wish was real and you could actually look up. If writing about music really is like dancing about architecture – as Mitchell himself quotes in an author essay – then expect to see architects giving descriptions of buildings through the medium of interpretive dance from now on.
Utopia Avenue is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
Utopia Avenue might be the most improbable British band you’ve never heard of. Emerging from London’s psychedelic scene in 1967, folksinger Elf Holloway, blues bassist Dean Moss, guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet and jazz drummer Griff Griffin together created a unique sound, with lyrics that captured their turbulent times. The band produced only two albums in two years, yet their legacy lives on.
This is the story of Utopia Avenue’s brief, blazing journey from Soho clubs and draughty ballrooms to the promised land of America, just when the Summer of Love was receding into something much darker – a kaleidoscopic tale of dreams, drugs, love, madness and grief; of stardom’s wobbly ladder and fame’s Faustian pact; and of the collision between idealism and reality as the Sixties drew to a close. Above all, this captivating novel celebrates the power of music to connect across divides, define an era and thrill the soul.
