![]() Lynch told Dean all his songs were shit, except the few that were drivel. Ray’s bank order only arrived yesterday, and the queue to cash it just now took forty minutes, so he pushes on, past Lynch & Lupton’s Music Publishers, where Mr. Dean’s cutting it fine this week, even by his standards. Nevitt is waiting in her parlor like a giant spider. Dean wishes he could join Rick for a cuppa, a smoke, and a chat about session work, but Friday morning is rent-paying morning, and Mrs. He recognizes Rick “One Take” Wakeman in the window of the Gioconda café across the street. He checks that his bankbook with its precious cargo of ten five-pound notes is safe in his coat pocket. His wrists and hands are working, at least. Dean gets to his feet, gingerly, ignoring the throbs of pain, praying that nothing’s broken. A bewhiskered stockbroker type in a bowler hat smirks at the long-haired lout’s misfortune and is gone. He’s in the air long enough to see the gutter and sky swap places and to think, This’ll bloody hurt, before the pavement slams his ribs, kneecap, and ankle. Can we really change the world, or does the world change us?ĭean hurries past the phoenix theatre, dodges a blind man in dark glasses, steps onto Charing Cross Road to overtake a slow-moving woman and pram, leaps a grimy puddle, and swerves into Denmark Street where he skids on a sheet of black ice. Emerging from London’s psychedelic scene in 1967, and fronted by folk singer Elf Holloway, blues bassist Dean Moss and guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet, Utopia Avenue embarked on a meteoric journey from the seedy clubs of Soho, a TV debut on Top of the Pops, the cusp of chart success, glory in Amsterdam, prison in Rome, and a fateful American sojourn in the Chelsea Hotel, Laurel Canyon, and San Francisco during the autumn of ’68.ĭavid Mitchell’s kaleidoscopic novel tells the unexpurgated story of Utopia Avenue’s turbulent life and times of fame’s Faustian pact and stardom’s wobbly ladder of the families we choose and the ones we don’t of voices in the head, and the truths and lies they whisper of music, madness, and idealism. Utopia Avenue is the strangest British band you’ve never heard of. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post Making your way through this novel feels like riding a high-end convertible down Hollywood Boulevard.”- Slate Mitchell’s prose is suppler and richer than ever. “Mitchell’s rich imaginative stews bubble with history and drama, and this time the flavor is a blend of Carnaby Street and Chateau Marmont.”- The Washington Post.New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice The long-awaited new novel from the bestselling, prize-winning author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks.
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