Taylor Jenkins-Reid mimics music journalism to tell an unconventional and wholly convincing rock’n’roll story in her new novel.Tina Jackson learns how she pieced it together

You may not have yet heard of Daisy Jones and The Six, but with a publishers’ lead title, celebrity endorsements and an Amazon Prime TV series in the pipeline, chances are that by the end of the year you’ll want to track down Daisy’s music and play it, even though the fabulous 1970s songbird has never existed.

Daisy’s creator, Taylor Jenkins Reid will be more familiar to US readers than UK ones; Daisy Jones and The Six is the first of her six novels to be published in the UK. It’s a showstopping introduction to her though: a wholly immersive fiction, told as oral history, through first-person interviews with everyone who was there, about the tangled relationships behind the Stevie Nicks-like figure of Daisy and the rise to fame of a band of country rock superstars.

‘It’s a book I never thought I would write,’ says Taylor down the phone from the West Coast. ‘I didn’t even know if I had permission to write it! I’m not a rock person, not really, but I’ve always loved Fleetwood Mac, though I’m more a Beyoncé, Cardi B type of person.’

Taylor may not be a 70s rock person, but she clearly understands its personalities, weaving together the tangled strands of a story of the starcrossed song-writing partnership of Daisy and lead singer Billy – a man with his own demons whose earthmother wife Camila is his creative muse until flawed, charismatic Daisy begins to exert her influence.

‘I’ve always been drawn to singers who write about each other,’ says Taylor. ‘Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham were writing songs, and writing them about each other. I’ve always been fascinated by that. So that was the beginning of it.

And I was into this band called The Civil Wars, and they had this certain chemistry, writing these really intimate lyrics – just passionate stuff. I thought they had to be together, but they weren’t – they were with other people. And then out of the blue they just broke up. And I was interested in how this had come about. So I’ve always been intrigued.’ Taylor’s breakthrough novel, 2017’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo – a behind-the-scenes look at the secret life of a reclusive 1960s screen siren – was her first book to tackle celebrity culture, and she thought she had done with it.