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.

D.J. Taylor has written twelve novels, including English Settlement (1996), which won a Grinzane Cavour Prize, Trespass (1998) and Derby Day (2011), both of which were long-listed for the Booker Prize, Kept (2006), a U.S. Publishers' Weekly Book of the Year, and The Windsor Faction (2013), joint winner of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. His non-fiction includes Orwell: The Life, winner of the 2003 Whitbread Prize for Biography, The Prose Factory: Literary Life in England Since 1918 (2016) and Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature 1939-1951 (2019). His most recent books are a collection of short stories, Stewkey Blues (2022), and Critic at Large: Essays and Reviews: 2010-2022 (2023). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in Norwich with his wife, the novelist Rachel Hore.