Review: Daisy Jones & The Six

Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Daisy Jones & the Six is the story of a fictional rock band from the 1970s. It is written as an oral history, very much in the style of Barney Hoskyns’ ‘Hotel California’ or ‘Trampled Underfoot’, about the Laurel Canyon scene and Led Zeppelin respectively, and shares much with both. Indeed, it is so convincing that I finished it aching to listen to ‘Aurora’, the group’s most successful, and final, album.
The story of the rise of The Six, centred around their lead singer, and natural rock star, Billy Dunne, and the parallel path of Daisy Jones, wild child, hedonistic drug user and crazily talented, is told in a cut-and-shuffle manner where individual interviews are edited together to produce a single narrative from multiple viewpoints. The spectacular, seemingly destined, collaboration between Daisy and The Six, and the volatile, complicated relationship between Billy and Daisy, is both the spark that brings the group unimagined success and the seed that eventually tears the the band apart.
Very obviously inspired by the complex relationships between the members of Fleetwood Mac, Taylor Jenkins Reid makes you care about these characters, all of them flawed, so that the inevitable implosion is as stunning as it is total. My only gripe is that the meaningful lyrics that many of her ‘interviewees’ pore over in such detail, and which are printed in full at the end of the book, come across as a little trite and generic, particularly without any musical context - but then that is also true of many of the great ‘70s bands, and I still love them.

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