It's 1978 and Nick Du Pont, one-time PR man to Sixties rock behemoths the Helium Kids, is back in London and bent on founding his own record label. A new kind of music - sharp, hard and dangerous - is bursting onto the airwaves on both sides of the Atlantic and Nick wants a slice of the action - in particular, the work of The Flame Throwers, the most provocative assemblage of street-smart desperadoes ever to hail from downtown Los Angeles.
Picking up from where the highly-praised Rock and Roll is Life (2018) left off, this is the story of Resurgam Records and the personal traumas and tragedies that attended its coruscating rise - until the time when, as so invariably happens, the dancers shuffle to a halt and the music stops. 'Taylor's 1,000-watt satire is set half in the real rockbiz, ' Philip Norman has observed, and 'half in an imaginary one whose monsters are just as believable - and unbelievable. A near-narcotic treat.
"One of the finest of our twenty-first century novelists." --A.N. Wilson
"Flame Music opens in the late 1970s, a crossroads both for the rock business and for atypically brainy PR man Nick Du Pont as he launches his own indy record label. Taylor's 1,000-watt satire is set half in the real rockbiz, half in an imaginary one whose monsters are just as believable - and unbelievable. A near-narcotic treat." --Philip Norman