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Books

Rock and Roll is Life: The True Story of the Helium Kids by One Who Was There: A Novel, by D.J. Taylor, reviewed

16 June 2018

9:00 AM

16 June 2018

9:00 AM

The narrator-protagonist of D.J. Taylor’s new novel, a mild-mannered Oxford graduate named Nick Du Pont, has resisted the lure of a proper career to become a publicist for a flower-pop group called the Helium Kids.

The story begins in 1964, with Nick and the band in the United States. It’s the year of the Civil Rights Act, and the Helium Kids’ entire tour is set in venues along the Mason–Dixon Line, prompting Nick to reflect on the ‘terrible, pulled-both-ways wonder of 1960s America’.

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