Who was Daisy?

TV Se­ries

I have no in­ter­est in being some­one’s muse, OK? I’m no muse. I’m some­body,” says a young Daisy Jones when she’s try­ing to break into the pop-rock world of the 1970s in Los An­ge­les. But who is this woman who ex­hibits such a strong and dis­rup­tive char­ac­ter and who has be­come a new tele­vi­sion and also mu­si­cal phe­nom­e­non? The in­tense Daisy is fic­tional, but the Prime Video se­ries Daisy Jones and The Six has left many view­ers won­der­ing if she is a drama­ti­sa­tion of a real singer.

Daisy is ac­tu­ally the cre­ation of a British au­thor, Tay­lor Jenk­ins Reid, who in 2019 pub­lished the novel on which the se­ries is based (and which was trans­lated here as Todos quieren a Daisy Jones). Jenk­ins is pas­sion­ate about the music of the 1970s, and she went through all the record­ings and pub­li­ca­tions of that era to build a story that goes be­yond rock and roll, sex and drugs, and is about lone­li­ness, fi­delity and human re­la­tion­ships.

The plot is in­spired by the dy­nam­ics of the real-life pop group Fleet­wood Mac, but Jenk­ins her­self has ex­plained that what re­ally cap­ti­vated her were the clashes that usu­ally occur in bands be­tween two strong front­men (the in­evitable ex­am­ple is John Lennon and Paul Mc­Cart­ney).

On this basis, and faith­fully fol­low­ing the novel, Daisy Jones and The Six recre­ates the rise and fall of an Amer­i­can rock band, from the first per­for­mances at local fes­ti­vals to be­com­ing global stars and then sud­denly dis­ap­pear­ing from the scene. In this process we will see how the first mem­bers of The Six, led by the charis­matic Billy Dune, suc­ceed in the mu­si­cal cir­cuits of Pitts­burgh and end up land­ing in Los An­ge­les. There they meet Daisy, which will end up cat­a­pult­ing them to fame. The se­ries shows us two time­lines: the growth of the group thanks to the cre­ative ex­plo­sion be­tween Billy and Daisy, and the eval­u­a­tion made by the dif­fer­ent mem­bers 20 years later. The mys­tery that the viewer wants to see clar­i­fied is why, after their best at­tended con­cert, the group ended up dis­band­ing.

The se­ries has re­ceived very good re­views across the board, both for the pro­duc­tion, which im­merses you di­rectly in the sev­en­ties, and for the work of the ac­tors, who had to seem like a real band. The British actor Sam Claflin, who plays Billy Dune, not only per­fectly dis­guises his ac­cent, but sings the songs him­self. It is the same for Riley Keough in her role as Daisy, al­though she may have had it a lit­tle eas­ier, if only be­cause of her ge­net­ics, since she is the grand­daugh­ter of Elvis Pres­ley.

It is in­ter­est­ing that the fic­tional band’s huge mu­si­cal suc­cess, the album Au­rora – com­posed for the screen by a group of mu­si­cians in­clud­ing the singer of Mum­ford & Sons – has ac­tu­ally be­come a mu­si­cal suc­cess, and one of the tracks, Let Me Down Easy, be­came num­ber one on iTunes.