Songs are mysterious companions. I remember turning the dial of my mother’s transistor radio one summer’s evening in the late Seventies and finding Across the Universe by The Beatles. It transfixed me. Why? How? What was it about the combination of words, music, voice, phrasing that took me out of myself, then gently left me not quite the same as I was before? I’m still not sure how songs work, but I know they have touched me countless times since. Songs have been windows. Songs have articulated what I never knew needed articulating. Songs have embodied possible versions of myself I liked more than the real one. Songs have been messages in bottles, about life, love, people, politics, the world. Songs have been sonic photo albums, preserving a time, a summer, an hour, a younger Me. Songs have been the fabric of friendships. Songs have emboldened, cautioned and calmed me. Songs have opened spaces to dream in.
Songs have bypassed my brain and gone straight to my body, triggering bouts of dancing that I’m glad is nowhere on YouTube – though dear God, it was good for me.
I wanted to write a book about songs for years. Finally, in 2015 or so, my ‘music novel’ was at the front of the queue. I soon hit a speed-bump: as the famous quote goes, ‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.’ How can you catch the elusive, mysterious thrill of a song in a net of words? It made sense to focus on musicians, and to set the book in 1967 and 1968, when evergreen songs were released almost weekly; when the LP emerged as an art form in its own right (see Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band); and when the counter-culture felt like a real thing, not just a slogan, a lazy cliche or a feverish dream of Utopia caused by a lack of real-world experience. My band begin in Soho, London, because it was briefly the centre of things. Utopia Avenue are formed from a folk-singing woman, a psychedelic blue-blooded guitarist, a working-class bassist and a northern jazz drummer, to be as broad a microcosm as possible. The story of their unglamorous beginnings, meteoric middle and unexpected ending took me five years, on and off, to plot, to write, to edit and to polish.
If you get the chance to join Utopia Avenue on their journey, I hope you enjoy the trip.
David Mitchell,
West Cork, 2020.
