Riley Moore | Editor-in-Chief 

DJ Taylor is the author of Rock and Roll is Life: The True Story of the Helium Kids by One Who Was There (2018), Stewkey Blues: Stories (2022), Flame Music: Rock and Roll is Life Part II: The True Story of Resurgam Records by One Who Was There (2023), among other novels. Taylor’s nonfiction includes: The Prose Factory: Literary Life in England Since 1918 (2016), Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature 1939-1951 (2019), Orwell: The New Life (2023), among other books. 

Taylor is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Trustee of The Orwell Foundation and the Orwell Archive at University College, London. He publishes journalism in a variety of outlets: The Times Literary Supplement, The Wall St. Journal, The New Criterion, among others.

Taylor kindly agreed to be interviewed by Riley Moore in January. They discussed Taylor’s hilarious novel, Flame Music: Rock and Roll is Life Part II: The True Story of Resurgam Records by One Who Was There.

The following transcript has been edited for  length. 

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Riley Moore: In Rock and Roll is Life, Nick Du Pont is a publicist for the imaginary 1960s band The Helium Kids. But the story is told reflectively, with Nick recalling his time with The Helium Kids. So he’s a fictional, non-fiction writer. Does that give you a better vantage as a novelist? To essentially shift responsibility to your character to write the story? 

DJ Taylor: For Rock and Roll is Life to work, it had to be retrospective. It had to give off the sheen of personal history. With historical fiction, you get to write unreal people into a real world. You can have your characters do anything. They can meet Queen Victoria or Marilyn Monroe. There’s no limit. And the perspective on historical figures is sometimes enhanced if seen through unreal people. Characters have access to things that their real-life counterparts didn’t have. The idea in creating Nick was to have someone who the reader always believed. Nick isn’t an ex-band member. He isn’t a frustrated guitar player who had wished he had more songwriting. He’s simply recording an episode in his life. For that reason, too, I had to create his private life. He’s searching for his father, for instance. 

RM: What about plot in relation to prose? Nick, as you mention, searches for his father. He takes a road trip to New York. On the way, however, your prose is free. Roadkill is described as “nameless creatures pasted into multi-hued medallions of guts and fur.” Do you view plot as a large outline that you fill in with sentences like this? Or do you have larger goals—themes perhaps, or messages—in mind when creating a plot? 

DJT: In those early passages, Nick had been in Arizona, working for the Goldwater campaign and all its horror. And then ends up heading to NYC with, not his girlfriend, but his girlfriend’s mother, Lucille. I must admit I’ve never been in the places I’m writing about. But I thought, if you’re twenty-two years-old—and you’re living in segregation-era America, in 1964, and taking a road trip—your excitement at seeing the world would be overwhelming. Simply looking at the traffic, for example, on Route 66 would be extraordinary. Those early passages are meant to convey the excitement that Nick, a college-aged kid, would have felt, being from England. 

RM: How much of Rock and Roll is Life Part I was in your mind before you started? 

DJT: I’ve always wanted to write a book about music, and when you write, you play to your strengths. My comfort zone for English music is ‘64 to ‘97. So I knew, before I started, that I would set the first book in the ‘60s. And the fictitious band, The Helium Kids, are more representative than distinctive. The idea is that they’re always six months behind. They’re a beat group just as beat groups are going out. They’re late getting into psychedelia. And then, like a lot of English bands, they get heavy and travel to America. I tried to create a band that might have existed. The members have characteristics reminiscent of real people. Ian, the bass player, for example, holds his guitar vertically as Bill Wyman of the Stones did. If you know your ‘60s rock n’ roll, you’ll catch details like that. 

There’s differences between writing nonfiction and fiction. Nonfiction is easy, but laborious. It’s like a college essay plan—as soon as you have all the notes, you can write it. Whereas with a novel, you might start with three words on a postcard. It’s much more difficult to build a novel than a nonfiction book. Writing a biography of George Orwell is not difficult. It’s laborious and time-consuming. Before I began this novel, I had just a few notes on a piece of paper. Once I got going, the incremental nature was easy to sustain. 

RM: The story—an Oxford educated, bookish Nick Du Pont surrounded by drugged and demented rock n’ roll musicians—is funny. But Nick, fundamentally, takes his profession seriously. Is that how you get the humor to swing? By treating a funny predicament seriously? 

DJT: Nick is a serious person. He knows that his profession requires him to deal with things that are trivial in the extreme. He knows that the people he is dealing with are opportunistic, corrupt, and stupid. At the same time, however, he knows the cultural shifts introduced by pop music are immensely serious. Pop culture may be trivial in many of its manifestations, but the phenomena of pop culture are not trivial. 

RM: In both Rock and Roll is Life and Flame Music you break up the bands before we meet them. We know they are destined to fail (or at least not to last). Why did you do this? 

DJT: If you’re reading a book about, say, The Beatles, you know, ahead of time, that they broke up in the 1970s. So there’s no reason to feign excitement about a potential happy-ending. 

RM: In both novels, you integrate fictional journalism (reviews and interviews). This question has two parts: did those parts come as easily as the fiction? And is fictional journalism more enjoyable to write than its real-life counterpart? 

DJT: It came easier than the fiction. It wrote itself. In the mid 1970s, music journalism was very influential. New Music Express sold 250,000 copies a week. The senior journalists were, in a way, more important than the musicians. For instance, Nick Kent and Charles Shaar Murray—who were massively influenced by the Gonzo-journalists in the United States like Hunter S. Thompson—had much sway in what, or who, was listened to. So journalism was massive in the 70s, and, by including it in Rock and Roll is Life, I conveyed information about various bands. 

The interviews, too, were based on actual interviews with, say, Guns N’ Roses. The interview with The Flame Throwers bandmate Cris Itol—which is an anagram similar to Axl Rose—is influenced by Nick Kent’s interview of Izzy Stradlin, the guitarist for Guns N’ Roses, in 1989. 

Stradlin was inarticulate, and answered everything with something like: yeah, yeah, you know what I’m saying, yeah. It was hilarious, and I thought I’d use it to further the authenticity. The Flame Throwers are, really, pitched between Motley Crue and Guns N’ Roses.

RM: I’ve been lumping the novels together, but they are quite different; the Nick Du Pont of Flame Music, for instance, is more refined in his understanding of low-culture in comparison to the Nick Du Pont of Rock and Roll is Life Part I. What’s also different is the political and celebrity culture in the 1960s and the 1980s. This is what you write about the differences in bands (The Helium Kids and The Flame Throwers):

…the Helium Kids had been cynical, warped, vain, good-for-nothing but essentially tractable. They had been brought up in a world where it was necessary to do things or be punished for not doing them.The Flame Throwers, found in their natural habitat, were cynical, warped, vain, good-for-nothing but essentially deranged.

Is Nick’s measurement of the differences correct? The 60s bands are wild, but ultimately grounded? And the 80s bands are straightforwardly wild and disconnected? 

DJT: This is a proper, decent sociological point and it works on both sides of the Atlantic. Pop-musicians of the mid 1960s had grown up in the immediate postwar era. The Beatles, for instance, had been raised in the 1940s This was a world of Boy Scouts and heavy parents. They were essentially tractable. The Pop-musicians of the 1980s, however, grew up in the 60s and 70s, when that kind of discipline had ceased. 

You see this in sports, too. The professional footballers of the 60s had all done national service—they cut their hair short, they were old school. The kids who arrived twenty years later just wanted to enjoy themselves. 

That does not imply, though, that all of Nick’s opinions are my own. Some of his historical judgments are not mine, but are included because I think they’re funny. 

RM: Let’s talk about your integration of celebrities. Given Nick’s profession, writing about celebrities was unavoidable. But the celebrities are not characters. They make brief cameos or passing comments in the papers. Did they feel like a necessary intrusion into your narrative to maintain realism? Or was it enjoyable to have them floating around the margins? Were the 60s celebrities harder to capture than the 80s?

DJT: I liked having them in the books because it was fun, but that was not the only reason. Sometimes they are there to make points. There’s a reason, for instance, why Rock and Roll is Life begins with Nick meeting Barry Goldwater, and Flame Music begins with Nick almost meeting Nancy Reagan. There was a kind of American conservatism that began with Goldwater and then came to fruition under Reagan. 

And there’s a reason, too, why I included Mrs. Thatcher, who is obviously a hate-figure now in this country. In the early 1980s, the music business didn’t like Thatcher. But Nick’s record company, Resurgam Records—what is it? It’s a small business. It’s Thatcherism. Many of the record companies in the late 70s and early 80s were fundamentally exercises in free market, and yet they were diametrically opposed to Thatcher’s politics. I thought it would be quite funny to have the representatives of Resurgam Records at a reception where one of their executives is posh-boy Rory who knows Thatcher. 

Other political personalities show up to accentuate class divides. When the news breaks that Churchill dies in Rock and Roll is Life, for instance, the differences in reaction mark the differences in class. 

RM: I’m going to read you a quote. “If anything separated [The Flame Throwers] from the hordes of aspiring local scenesters, it was not so much musical proficiency as sheer attitude.” On what basis did you particularize the personalities of the band members? How did you go about constructing them?

DJT: What I did with both the main bands in each novel—The Helium Kids in Rock and Roll is Life and The Flame Throwers in Flame Music—is I created individual personalities, and then added details from real-life band members. The details from real life normally show up in the interviews. Bits of Jimmy Page, for instance, were used to create Garth Dangerfield of The Helium Kids. Florian had some of Brian Jones in him. I used some details of Charlie Watts to create the bass player. 

Nothing was flagrantly done, though. None of the characters could be summarized by reference to a real-life guitar player or singer. In fact—and I don’t mean this disparagingly—a lot of the real-life performers were not interesting enough to snatch them and put them in the books. 

RM: Did you construct Nick’s personal life—his disappointed mother and absent father—as a purposeful contrast to Nick’s professional one? In both novels, for instance, Nick attends a few funerals (singers, keyboard players, etc). There’s an overall tone of gloom, but nothing deeply melancholic. But when Nick reminisces about his mother, the tone is deeply melancholic. What are Nick’s mother and father doing in this novel? Do they personalize Nick? Are they “real life” as compared to Nick’s superficial, professional one?

DJT: Nick had to have a personal life, and I thought it would be interesting if it was an Anglo-American one. It gives Nick an interest in America itself. And with Nick’s personal life, you get to see the background—which is my background, really. The location of Nick’s home life is based on my home life. It’s a provincial life in which not many people get what they want. Ambitions go unfulfilled. If you wanted to do anything creative, you had to leave. I’m very fortunate to have fulfilled my ambitions. And having to leave to fulfill my ambitions is something I wanted to write about. I had published a collection of short stories recently, Stewkey Blues. They mainly follow people from Norfolk who lead frustrated, sometimes marginal lives. I’ve always been very sympathetic to this. That’s not to say Nick’s personal life is my own. The only bit of shared autobiography is where Nick is from, and Nick’s having to leave in order to accomplish his aims. 

RM: Although for most of Flame Music, rock n’ roll is life, there’s significant portions of the novel where rock n’ roll is death. Romantic relationships are dissolved, friendships are broken, characters die. But the novel is fundamentally upbeat; Nick’s always looking for something new, for the next big thing. What does Nick find so enticing about a lifestyle that has enormous drawbacks? Is he closer, as a matter of personality, to his employees than he’d like to admit?

DJT: Music is a romantic activity. It’s where your dreams are. It’s where you project your personal myths. It’s also, where I come from, a solitary activity. You have your favorite bands and it’s yours. It becomes a vital part of your personality. Nick believes that music, fundamentally, is romantic, and is worth the headache.

Flame Music is out now,  £14.99.

Image source: Irish Independent