Utopia Avenue

Set in London's psychedelic music scene of the late 1960s, the novel follows the formation, rise, and abrupt end of a fictional British rock band called Utopia Avenue. Each chapter is titled after one of the band's songs or key events and rotates among the perspectives of the four band members and their manager.

In January 1967, Dean Moss, a 23-year-old working-class bassist from Gravesend, loses his rent money to pickpockets, is evicted, and is fired from his café job, all in one day. That night, Levon Frankland, a Canadian-born music manager, invites Dean to evaluate a guitarist at the 2i's Coffee Bar. There, Dean watches Jasper de Zoet, a red-haired guitarist of Dutch and English parentage, play with dazzling skill in the otherwise mediocre Blues Cadillac. The drummer, Griff (Peter Griffin), a Yorkshireman from the jazz circuit, also impresses. When the Blues Cadillac implodes mid-gig, Levon orchestrates an impromptu set by Dean, Jasper, and Griff, marking the informal birth of the band.

A month later, Levon recruits Elf Holloway, a folk singer-songwriter and keyboard player from a middle-class Richmond family, recently dumped by her Australian boyfriend and musical partner, Bruce Fletcher. Elf forces herself to perform solo at Les Cousins, a Soho folk club, where the band invites her to join. At the Duke of Argyll pub, Jasper proposes the name "Utopia Avenue" after seeing a London street sign in a dream, drawn to the paradox that "utopia" means "no place," yet an avenue is a place.

Their debut gig at Brighton Polytechnic ends in disaster when violent mods hurl a bottle that gashes Griff's face. Levon pushes the band forward. Jasper writes "Darkroom," inspired by a brief romance with Mecca Rohmer, a young German photographer who takes the band's first publicity shots. A pirate radio DJ plays the song, and it catches fire. Ilex Records signs the band, "Darkroom" reaches number 19, and the band mimes it on Top of the Pops, with Elf becoming the first woman to appear playing an instrument on the show.

Beneath their success, each member carries private burdens. Dean is haunted by his father, Harry Moffat, a violent man with an alcohol addiction who burned Dean's guitar and record collection when Dean was 16. Elf wrestles with self-doubt and the lingering damage of Bruce's betrayal. Jasper's burden is the most extreme: Since age 15, he has heard a mysterious knocking inside his head, produced by an entity he and his school friend Heinz Formaggio call "Knock Knock." Using an alphabet grid at Bishop's Ely boarding school, they communicated with the entity, which claimed to be nearly 700 years old and declared Jasper a "trespasser" who must die. The crisis led to Jasper's treatment at Rijksdorp, a Dutch psychiatric clinic, where Dr. Galavazi prescribed an antipsychotic called Queludrin. At 18, Jasper attempted suicide by walking into the North Sea, but a second disembodied voice, "the Mongolian," intervened and performed psychic surgery that contained Knock Knock for roughly five years. Those five years are now expiring.

The band records their debut album, Paradise Is the Road to Paradise, but their second single flops. Bruce Fletcher reappears, and he and Elf resume their relationship. Bruce secretly steals Elf's piano composition, "Waltz for Griff," and sells it under his own name. When confronted, he challenges her to prove the theft in court. Elf channels her fury into "Prove It," a song that becomes a crowd favorite and draws the band's first significant female audience.

On Christmas Eve 1967, Griff's brother Steve is killed in a motorway crash while Griff is at the wheel. Griff survives but withdraws from the band, consumed by guilt. Levon faces a financial crisis as bookings are canceled. On New Year's Eve, painter Francis Bacon tells Levon to stop feeling sorry for himself and return to his role as a "builder" of artists' careers. Griff eventually comes back, having decided his brother would want him to keep playing. Meanwhile, Harry Moffat finds Dean and delivers a halting, tearful apology for his violence, explaining that he now attends Alcoholics Anonymous. Dean cannot reciprocate but is clearly shaken.

The band records their second album, Stuff of Life. During an Italian tour, Dean is arrested at Rome Airport after a corrupt officer plants cannabis in his jacket. He refuses to sign a false confession. Back in London, Amy Boxer, a journalist Dean has been dating, writes sympathetic coverage; fans stage a vigil outside the Italian Embassy; and Elf delivers a speech demanding Dean's release. The publicity boosts album sales. Around the same time, Elf's infant nephew Mark, the son of her older sister Imogen, dies of sudden infant death syndrome. Elf composes the instrumental "Even the Bluebells" as an elegy and performs it at the cremation.

In September 1968, the band flies to New York. Knock Knock has fully reawakened, and Queludrin no longer works. At the Chelsea Hotel, the entity speaks to Jasper directly, declaring his body its property and giving him until evening to die. Jasper spends his possibly final day walking alone through Manhattan, then surrenders in a hospital ward. Knock Knock possesses Jasper's body and performs at the Ghepardo club for the band's American debut. The first half of the set is lifeless, but Jasper negotiates a brief return for the final song, delivering a transcendent performance before collapsing onstage.

Backstage, Dr. Yu Leon Marinus, a colleague of Dr. Galavazi from Columbia University, and his associate Esther Little arrive. They belong to Horology, a secret organization that uses psychosoterica, a mind-based metaphysical discipline, to combat occult threats. They reveal Knock Knock's true identity: Enomoto, a Japanese abbot from circa 1800 whose order sacrificed infants to distill an immortality elixir. When Enomoto was poisoned, his soul migrated into Jasper's ancestor Jacob de Zoet, a Dutch clerk at a trading post in Nagasaki, and passed down through the bloodline. Marinus brokers a deal: Enomoto will release Jasper in exchange for a new host body. The surgery succeeds, and Jasper awakens free of Knock Knock for the first time.

During the tour, Elf begins a secret relationship with Luisa Rey, an American journalist, her first romantic relationship with a woman. On the Chelsea Hotel rooftop, she meets singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen and singer Janis Joplin, who becomes a kindred spirit. Elf experiences the relationship as a liberation from the labels she has long internalized.

The band plays triumphant American shows, culminating at the Golden State International Pop Festival. Dean decides to take responsibility for an infant son named Arthur, whose mother, Amanda Craddock, claims Dean is the father, regardless of uncertain paternity. He burns a business card from an agent who offered him a solo deal, choosing loyalty to the band. After taking LSD at the San Francisco home of musician Jerry Garcia, Dean has a hallucinatory experience of reconciliation with his father and writes Harry Moffat a postcard, his first communication in years.

Walking to a recording studio through San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood, Dean stops at a corner liquor store. Three armed robbers burst in. When Dean reaches for his wallet, the youngest robber mistakes the motion and shoots him. Dean dies.

The novel closes with an epilogue written by Elf in 2020, framed as liner notes for The Third Planet, a posthumous album. The band disbanded after Dean's death, and a fire destroyed the master tapes of their final sessions. Decades later, tapes from those sessions surfaced at a car-boot sale in Hawaii. Using only pre-1968 technology, Elf, Jasper, Griff, and Dean's adult son Arthur Craddock-Moss assembled them into a final album, titled after the last words Dean wrote in his notebook.