Tom Dunne: Daisy Jones And The Six promises to be intriguing viewing
Will Harrison (Graham), Suki Waterhouse (Karen) in Daisy Jones and the Six.
Hadn’t been warming to Daisy Jones and the Six – I stopped reading it twice - but news that it was to become a Prime Video series caught my attention. Based on Taylor Jenkins Reid’s 2019 novel of the same name, it is loosely inspired by Reid’s US childhood, soundtracked as it was by Fleetwood Mac.
The Mac looms large in its pages. It is 1970s America, AOR, drugs, sex, and touring. It is Almost Famous, with bells on. Is Daisy Jones based on Stevie Nicks? Is Billy Dunne actually Lindsey Buckingham in disguise? Or is he a relative of my dad’s brother Willie who emigrated in the 1940s? What is not to love?
Interestingly, the songs in the book are to be brought to life by writers such as Phoebe Bridgers, Jackson Browne and Marcus Mumford. In the book these are already impressive; the ideas, the turns of phrase are first class. I’ve have stolen any one of them.
Blake Mills, a very impressive guitarist/producer who has worked with Beck, Pink and Lana Del Rey, has been charged with recording their efforts. The only track I’ve heard so far, ‘Regret Me’, is superb.
It is also essentially one of the first releases from a “fictional band” since the days of The Monkees. (The Gorillaz are a cartoon band!) And what can I say: real bands, listen to this fictional band, and weep.
I like fictional bands. I was in one for about nine months. It had all the advantages of being in a real band – kudos, clothing choices- and none of the drawbacks – having to write songs and rehearse. But then a well-wisher introduced us to a drummer, and it was all downhill from there. Reality, overrated, as they say.
The Monkees were the poster boys. A cynically assembled, Frankenstein monster brought to life via the best writing talent of the day. The plan was to take on the Beatles and the plan worked, so much so they stopped being fictional. They became a real band, and a great one too.
Music is littered with similar tales. Doug from Travis was working in a retail shop when Fran begged him to join the band. Fran just wanted his mate in. Very reluctantly he learned to play bass. Twenty years later it’s still the day job. It not how you get in, it’s what you do when you get there.
The clichés were hard to get past. Daisy’s mum is a model, her dad distant but rich. She is a wild, stunningly beautiful child lost to the LA club scene and all that involves from 14. But she can write and sing. No one who sees or hears her can forget her.
Billy Dunne, I’m sure we’re related, is the leader of The Six. His dad, a drunk, left when he was a child. It left his mother like a character in a Dolly Parton song. The dad left them nothing, except that old beat up six-string. The only thing Billy was drawn to, etc.
Years later Billy is a recovering addict. His band are the Bob Weston era Fleetwood Mac, big, but no cigar. Daisy is a walking drug store. But when she performs with The Six and when she and Billy write together… the Rumours era beckons.
The cliches serve a useful purpose in helping to communicate that LA/Music world very economically. That said if Daisy had dressed a bit more like Christy Moore this book would have been 25% shorter. One memorable line; “I regret that marriage. I do not regret that dress.” Not something Christy has ever thought about his T-shirts, I hope.
And yet it works, and magically. It is tense and moving and lives long in the memory. The writing is tight and the tension unrelenting, which is good, because all bands are seconds away from self-immolation.
But where the book rings most true in is the description of the songwriting process. The give and take, the trust, the nervousness, the occasional bullishness, the interplay, the fragility of it all, is wonderfully captured.
That process by which two people produce something that apart they could not do, or at least not do as well, is top drawer.
Riley Keogh, daughter of the late Lisa Marie Presley, plays Daisy. You’d suspect this is a world she knows. Both the series and the album of the fictionalized songs, Aurora, are out today. See you on the bus.
