Rock stars in fiction

Rock and roll is defined by its excess. To fictionalise it can at best seem like a poor imitationIt was with great pleasure, as an adolescent, that I came upon a copy of Iain Banks' Espedair Street. Having been reared on the 19th-century novel, it was a liberating experience to discover a text which focused on what seemed to me the ultimate signifier for contemporaneity: rock stardom. For Espedair Streets' protagonist is Dan Weir ("Weird"), the hopelessly ugly bassist of successful Paisley rock ...

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