"The Final Revival of Opal and Nev," by Dawnie Walton

"Utopia Avenue," by David Mitchell

"Stardust" (2020 film directed by Gabriel Range)

"Velvet Goldmine" (1998 film directed by Todd Haynes)

I am tired of opinions, even my own opinions. The internet is drowning in people's opinions -- to the point where a lot of people seem to think reality itself is a matter of opinion. I don't want to add to this mess. 

That's kind of a problem for a blog that is focused on my reviews of books and music. It's part of the reason I haven't written much on this blog over the past few years. 

But recently I read two very good novels that were about fictional rock bands, and watched a halfway decent biopic about David Bowie. They raised some issues about music and what it means, and that was enough to get me to think about blogging again.

"Stardust" has Johnny Flynn playing the young David Bowie on his woebegone first tour of America, following the release of "The Man Who Sold the World." For Bowie fans we get a lot of the familiar mythology of the time period: The David Jones/David Bowie dichotomy; the long hair and "yes, but it's a *man's* dress" outfits; the mental illness of Bowie's brother Terry; David's fears about his own mental health; his difficult relationship with wife Angie; his rivalry with Marc Bolan; etcetera. What we don't get is any of David Bowie's music. The Bowie estate wouldn't give the producers the rights to use any of his music. Instead, the movie just has Flynn singing songs by other artists that Bowie covered at the time. Of course, a biopic about a famous singer-songwriter is always going to have the difficulties that the actor doesn't look or sound exactly like the face and voice we know so well. There's nothing much it can do about that. But if the movie can't showcase the real artist's songwriting, it can be hard to see what was special about the person, and why the other characters in the story believe so much in this artist's talent. 

The 1998 movie "Velvet Goldmine" ran into a similar problem when it tried to tell a story based loosely on the friendship between Bowie and Iggy Pop. Bowie, who was alive then, of course, refused to give the rights to his song or his story, forcing the filmmakers into a Jacky Jormp-Jomp situation. Fortunately, they ran with it. That "loosely based" caveat became "verrrrry loosely based" and the whole movie turned into a bizarre gay fantasia. It also helped that the producers used a lot of original recordings of great non-Bowie songs from the glam rock era and got great musicians to perform new versions of others. 

Opal and Nev

So, if you don't need David Bowie's songs or even his name to tell a David Bowie story, do you need a real band to tell a rock band story? What is a rock band story without the music? 

I have seen movies and read books about fictional rock bands before. Most of the time, they don't get things quite right. The two novels I'm writing about here are exceptions. They can be quite convincing in their own ways. 

"The Final Revival of Opal and Nev" is about a fictional duo featuring Opal, an African American woman, and Nev, a British white guy. While they were not terribly popular in their brief 1970s heyday, Opal & Nev's reputation grew over the years. After a series of hits, Nev became practically a household name. Opal's career didn't take off in a similar fashion, but she became a kind of symbol of Black beauty and defiance -- especially as YouTube made it easy to find old interview clips. In interviews, Dawnie Walton has talked about Nina Simone as one inspiration for Opal, and David Bowie as one inspiration for Nev, but it's a credit to Walton that the characters seem to come alive on their own. 

I really liked this novel, but I didn't have a good sense of what Opal and Nev's music sounded like, and it's hard for me to imagine their glam rock/cabaret act going anywhere in 1970s America. In a way, that's OK, because "The Final Revival of Opal and Nev" is less concerned with music itself than it is with the complexities of racial politics in pop culture. It's particularly poignant in the way it shows how in music Black and white people need each other in a co-dependent way that can be both wonderful and terrible. And, our society being as it is, Black people get the worse end of the bargain when things go bad. 

Utopia Avenue

I don't know if David Mitchell had real-life models in mind for the musicians in his fictional band Utopia Avenue, but it was pretty easy for me to believe these characters -- or most of them. There's Dean, the bass player from working-class Gravesend; Griff, the veteran who developed his chops in the jazz and blues circuits; Elf Holloway, the middle-class woman from the folk scene; and finally, and farthest-out-there, Jasper, the black sheep bastard son of a prominent Dutch merchant family who found in music a balm for his severe mental health issues.

To place them in context, Mitchell has frequent scenes where they run across their contemporaries in the music world of 1967-68. When Elf performs solo at a London folk club, she gets encouragement from Sandy Denny and John Martyn. At a party, Jasper has a talk about his mental issues with Brian Jones, John Lennon and Syd Barrett. Later, Dean will take a trip with Jerry Garcia. 

It's all a bit much at times, but I forgave it because: 1. I am just the kind of music geek who is the target audience for this kind of thing; and 2. I was so invested in these fictional characters that I was ready to overlook the occasional scene that smacked of authorial self-indulgence. 

I had not read Mitchell before, but my wife read his breakthrough novel "Cloud Atlas" and told me to expect that "Utopia Avenue" might go off the rails at some point. It does get pretty weird when it plunges head-first into Jasper's story, and frankly I'm still not sure if I should describe his issue as "mental illness" or something more supernatural. But the story comes around again to give a satisfying, if bittersweet conclusion. 

I've talked about the characters and the historical context, but for me, what really sets "Utopia Avenue" apart from the other works I've discussed here is the novel's emphasis on music. The characters whose alternating points of view give us the story of this novel are musicians, and what do musicians think about when they think about music? They think about chord changes, the dynamics of arrangements, ways to musically connect with the other musicians and with the audience.