Ahen Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, the events of the Napoleonic era were about half a century ago. David Mitchell also fulfills this since then exemplary distance for a historical novel in his new novel “Utopia Avenue”. It is about that distant past when pop music reinvented itself as art in creative struggles for liberation. Concept albums like “Sgt. Pepper” had created free spaces, and (not only) the electrified guitar became a seething laboratory of sounds.
In his pop history novel, Mitchell meticulously reconstructs a musical culture that was of little value in his own youth, the 1980s. When the writer was born in 1969, the fictional London band Utopia Avenue, about which his novel is about, had just disbanded after the death of their charismatic singer and bassist Dean Moss. Moss is responsible for the band’s R&B roots. The drummer Griff comes from jazz, the singer and multi-instrumentalist Elf Holloway from folk. Lead guitarist Jasper de Zoet is known as “Hendrix from the Netherlands”. Eclecticism is the order of the day and virtuosity is far from being the outrage that the punk movement would later label it as a crime.
