Jane Start is the classic one-hit wonder. She had a massive chart-topping song a decade ago, gifted to her by the international music sensation Jonesy, and is now scrabbling around for work, doing private performances for stag parties and licensing her music for toilet paper ads in Holland.
If you don’t remember Jane Start, that’s because she’s entirely fictional, coming from the pen of founder member of the Bangles turned novelist Susanna Hoffs in her newly released debut This Bird Has Flown. But Jane Start is at the forefront of a vanguard that includes Daisy Jones, Jane Quinn and Opal – the new stars in a women-led resurgence of the rock’n’roll novel.
It’s a scene kickstarted by the publication in 2019 of Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid, a novel told in interview transcript form about the meteoric rise and messy fallout of a 1970s band that bears more than a little resemblance to Fleetwood Mac.
An adaptation by Amazon Prime Video this year, starring Riley Keough and Sam Claflin – with a resulting chart-topping Spotify release for the fictional band’s music – helped to fuel a new passion for the mock-rock-umentary, novels about groups and singers that never existed.
And since the novel’s publication, there has been a growing tide of music-focused fiction. Dawnie Walton’s The Final Revival of Opal & Nev details the career of ahead-of-her-time black punk Opal in 1970s New York, and her turbulent association with singer/songwriter Neville Charles. It was longlisted for the Women’s prize for fiction last year.
Mary Jane by Jessica Anya Blau is about a teenage girl who nannies for a family who are helping a world-famous rock star hide from prying eyes. The same year, 2021, saw Songs in Ursa Major by Emma Brodie, in which folk-rock star Jane Quinn begins a stormy relationship with superstar Jesse Reid, reminiscent of the 1970s Joni Mitchell-James Taylor romance. And now we have Susanna Hoffs’s Jane Start.
Hoffs had a string of hits with the Bangles in the 1980s, including Walk Like an Egyptian, Eternal Flame and Manic Monday, and had released a slew of solo albums – the latest, Deep End, arriving just last month, alongside This Bird Has Flown. The novel is a romcom, with Jane meeting a charismatic but reserved British academic on a flight, but it’s also an exploration of fame and music, two subjects Los Angeles-born Hoffs knows very well.
She says: “I’ve had many decades as a musician and in the music business – which are two separate things in my mind – and I thought this was an opportunity to pull back the curtain on stuff that I know.
“I made Jane a one-hit wonder because, although I had a lot of success in the Bangles, I know what it feels like when you’ve had a taste of success and you try to follow it up after a decade of chart hits. So it’s about not only dealing with a moment of fame, but also dealing with what happened afterwards, the silence that can happen.”
The music novel isn’t new, of course: there was Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments, Iain Banks’s Espedair Street and Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. For music journalist and writer Laura Barton, it’s not necessarily a case of all thriller, no filler. “Whenever I hear about a novel set in the music world, I slightly recoil,” she says.
“Which is undoubtedly unfair, but I think it’s incredibly hard to write about music in fiction and to set a story in a music industry setting without it appearing painfully cliched. It’s all drink and drugs and tight trousers, and the bad old record company man trying to steal your songs. Not to mention some really dreadful descriptions of actual music.
“Those authors who have been convincing tend to have some actual firsthand understanding of it, such as Susanna Hoffs, or the story is more focused on ordinary people’s musical obsession – such as The Commitments or High Fidelity.”
Barton has spent a lot of time interviewing musicians and works for a record label, so has insights that a lot of novelists might not. “Where writers are conjuring up characters who are rockstars or roadies or record label bosses, things can get a little wobbly or caricatured. The people involved are rarely the figures you expect them to be. It’s a fascinating world though, and rich for storytelling. “
Before Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones & the Six, much fictional music writing was by men. Add to those mentioned above DJ Taylor’s Rock and Roll is Life: The True Story of the Helium Kids by One Who Was There and David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue. That’s changing with the current trend, which Barton couldn’t be happier about.
“That more women are writing about music, as journalists and novelists and academics, and wherever else, is wonderful,” she says. “There are so many women’s stories in this industry that have been told by men, or framed by men, or at least told from a largely male perspective.”
Andreas Campomar is the publisher of Constable, an imprint of the Little, Brown group, who later this year will be putting out the debut novel by another musician – and this time it is a man: Tim Booth of the band James.
Campomar says: “There does seem to have been a resurgence of the music novel, especially after Daisy Jones & the Six did so well. There is something especially romantic about that late 70s LA period; those sun-drenched colours, which was done so well in the TV adaptation. It’s a perfect setting for a great love story, which is what Daisy Jones, at its heart, is.
“It’s possible, or even probable, that some novelists are getting into this genre through a kind of wish-fulfilment. They’re able to act out their fantasies of being a musician or being in a band, with its attendant lifestyle, as well as the romance of being on the road,” he adds.
“There’s also that aspect of these novels about fictional bands that allows the reader an insight into the music world. Daisy Jones & the Six is thinly veiled Fleetwood Mac. There’s still a mystery and magic attached to the 70s Fleetwood Mac story. Novels such as this give us a perfected version of the truth as it might be.”
