This was brilliant. It's out in ordinary paperback now and about the best six or seven quid's worth of EVERYTHING I have read in a very long time. I've already bought three copies to give away. I know rock and roll bands and Moorcock really captures the feel of the early and mid-70s during the last real UK rock and roll revival, when throwing the baby out with the bathwater was the object of getting rid of the bathwater. If you want to know about all the great, largely unpublicised rock and rollers of the seventies, this is like a STIFF ALBUM come to life -- Costello, Lowe, Parker, Edmunds, Stone -- they're all in this. This was a huge, seminal time in British rock and roll. Ian Dury, Wreckless Eric and Billy Bragg all turn up in this, in one way or another. Moorcock is the ONLY novelist who can write about rock and roll from the point of view of someone who has been in a successful rock band right at the centre of the 'alternative' culture of the seventies, and has his gold discs and collapsing nostrils to prove it! History of Notting Hill in the days before Amis and Hollywood reduced the place to sentimental fiction. This is a bitterer voice than Mother London and nicely offset by London Bone, which came out with the paperback of King. Bone in some ways is a more familiar, humane Moorcock voice than this. More like Mother London. But I loved this book just as much. Hits you the same way a good Stiff record used to hit you when I was a lad in the Seventies and we still thought we could make the world rock to our our own tunes. Roots info and a great tale, masses of characters, London lore, tremendous and mentally stimulating analysis of our consumerist society and a very funny denouement indeed! Gripping story, laugh-aloud jokes, memorable characters, wise words, fine prose. Hours of happy reading. If I knew you I'd give you a copy, too. KH.
