Heroes and villains… the best book about rock’n’roll since High Fidelity | Books | Entertainment

Novelist ML Rio is reminiscing about one of the first gigs she went to as a 14-year-old US high school student. Sheffield’s own Arctic Monkeys, as it happens. “None of my friends knew who they were so I went by myself. I actually stole my mother’s car and drove like four states away because I wanted to see them,” she chuckles.

It was driving home like a “bat out of hell” in the middle of the night – desperate to return the car before her parents discovered they were both missing – that she was pulled over for speeding by a Virginia state trooper.

“Which was tricky because I didn’t have a driver’s licence,” she continues. “I only had a learner’s permit, so I wasn’t supposed to be in the car by myself. I wasn’t supposed to be driving after 9pm. And I certainly wasn’t supposed to be doing 20 miles over the speed limit. But this is the kind of thing that could only happen in America.”

Her life “flashing before her eyes”, the trooper swaggered over to her car, took a look at her permit and asked: “Are you religious, ma’am?’ I was like, ‘What is the right answer here?’ Guessing by this man’s accent I’m gonna go with ‘Yes’, so I was like, ‘Yes sir, raised a Roman Catholic’, and he says, ‘Well I want you to say a prayer of thanks on your way home, because I’m going to let you off with a warning.’”

It’s an anecdote that reveals much about Rio’s early love for music and determination to see bands live – even if it meant taking a few risks along the way. And it feeds into her breakneck new novel,
Hot Wax, when 10-year-old Suzanne, daughter of Rio’s messy late-eighties wannabe rock star Gil – frontman of Gil and the Kills – crashes her mother’s car coming home from an illicit gig. “At least I didn’t crash,” the author notes dryly.

ML Rio – born Melanie but forced to adopt initials (the “L” is made-up, her middle name being Ferguson, “because my parents hate me!”) to avoid confusion with a Columbian porn star – is without doubt a rock star writer. The author of If We Were Villains, a huge underground hit thanks to so-called BookTok, of which more shortly, has just kicked off
a two-and-a-half-month tour promoting Hot Wax, complete with band T-shirts.

Fitting, given the book is very much about the road – a talented young band on the tour that will make or (more likely) break them; and, fast-forward three decades, Suzanne’s own journey of self-discovery following Gil’s death. It might just be one of the best novels ever about our passion for pop music. Perfect for fans of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments and Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six. Equally, anyone who’s enjoyed classic sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll memoirs from the likes of Mötley Crüe, Keith Richards or Ozzy Osbourne will almost certainly love it.

Rio, who grew up listening to her father’s Elvis, Bowie and Led Zeppelin CDs before striking out on her own, says: “Sadly, I don’t have much musical talent myself, but I do have a good ear, and I started going to rock shows when I was 14. I grew up on my dad’s stories of bouncing concerts in the 70s, because he lived in Los Angeles during the golden age of the rock scene.”

Like a band trying to make it big, Hot Wax was a long time coming. Rio’s debut, If We Were Villains – a murder mystery featuring a clique of elite US drama students at a prestigious Shakespeare college – was published in 2017 to almost total silence but subsequently became an underground hit during the pandemic, in part due to TikTok influencers. And readers in the UK were among the first to really “get” the book.

“For so long I thought Villains was never going to find its people,” she admits. “I was so young when I wrote that book, 22, and I was not super well-equipped for what I was getting myself into. I wanted to be a writer pretty much my whole life, but I was not prepared for how cutthroat it can be, because it is ferociously competitive. There are way more people who want to get published than the market can possibly support.”

Despite critical acclaim, Villains quickly became what’s known in the trade as an “orphaned book” – leaving its author pretty much high and dry in publishing circles.

Rio continues: “It fell off a cliff – nobody bought the book. And when it came to selling Hot Wax, we heard a lot of, ‘I like it, but the sales numbers just aren’t there’, which was heartbreaking because I was 25 and thinking my career was over before it had even gotten started.”

With writing on hold, Rio moved to the UK to take a Master’s degree.

“When I came back to the States, the first thing I did was start amassing records very, very fast and then I stumbled into this job working for a music magazine, which gave me a whole different kind of access – suddenly I had backstage passes, I was interviewing artists and hanging out with bands and going on the road with them.

“So I got to see that scene from all sides, both as an audience member and a reporter and a fan. And much like Villains, I’d never seen that world represented in fiction in a way that felt persuasive to me. It was also a great opportunity to write about a kind of messy group of people, which is really my bread and butter as a writer.”

That was when the new book really began to come together, as its author spent the next two years living out of her car to get “boots on the ground and kind of go do a bunch of big giant road trips” with her dog Marlowe – named after doomed English playwright Christopher – so she could reflect life on tour accurately.

“Between about 2020 and 2023, I must have done six or seven road trips from the East Coast to the West Coast and all the way back, taking a slightly different route every time,” she explains.

“Occasionally, I would crash with friends and I did a couple of writing residencies, but I stayed in some of the scariest motels you’ve ever seen. Getting out on those really open country highways where there just aren’t any police – that was a good time.”

Now in her mid-thirties and having completed a PhD in English literature, Rio’s debut, now published she guesses in 22 countries and counting, has become a flag-bearer of the literary genre known as “dark academia” – campus novels with a sinister undercurrent.

It’s often compared to Donna Tartt’s cult 1992 novel, The Secret History, something its author doesn’t especially relish.

“Your publisher picks comp titles for you and then your book will be relentlessly compared to that other book, whether it’s a good fit or not,” she says. “Hot Wax has been endlessly compared to Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six, which is funny because I’ve actually never read that book and I think they’re very, very different novels. People are like, ‘There’s music… it’s the same.’

“While there are things that are wonderful about The Secret History, there were also a lot of things about it that p***ed me off. One was it felt it was deliberately alienating the reader, it felt like the author showing off how smart she is.

“I didn’t want that with Villains, I wanted it to be accessible, because it’s about something that’s often incorrectly perceived as high-brow. Another thing was it was such a sausagefest and the only woman in the story as a significant character has no real function except for the boys to fight over.”

Turning back to Hot Wax, who did she take inspiration from?

“There was not just one playlist for this book,” she smiles. “It was like six different playlists because there’s one for the project, one for the band, one for each individual member of the band, so I could kind of figure out what their musical genealogy sounded like.

“My Hot Wax playlist – just the main playlist – has 97 days of music on it; you could listen to it for 97 straight days and never repeat a song, and that doesn’t even take into account the 1,500 records now living in a storage unit in New Jersey because they don’t fit my house!”

When pressed, she names post-punk rockers The Gun Club, hardcore band Fugazi, The Stooges and The New York Dolls as inspiration for Gil and the Kills, for whom she created everything, from set lists to lyrics and LPs. Don’t expect Hot Wax to feature Taylor Swift-style stadium gigs or stardom, though.

“This is very much not a book about superstars,” she adds. “It’s a book about a ragtag band of working musicians barely making ends meet and it’s just blood, sweat and tears – trying to keep it alive against the odds – because that’s the story of art.

“It’s so rare you actually achieve that escape velocity and you get to a place where you’re The Rolling Stones and you don’t have to worry about money or publicity or any of that. These are the scuzzy little club shows because that’s where anything can happen, before the music industry gobbles it up and corporatises the hell out of it.”

She adds: “I hope it gives people a little bit of a nudge to go see some smaller acts, maybe some local bands they haven’t heard before. And also, a nudge to support analog media. We don’t own anything anymore, but vinyl is forever – no one can take that from you.”

• Hot Wax by ML Rio (Headline, £20) is out now