Stardust

The year is 1963 and Jim Maclaine, the central character of That’ll Be the Day, has grown his hair, grown up and become a singer with a rock and roll band called the Stray Cats.

Performing to bored audiences in seedy clubs, they live on dreams of making it big. A combination of luck, ruthlessness and a lot of hard hustling on the part of their manager Mike, Jim’s old fair-ground friend, makes the Stray Cats rock and roll superstars. But at what price do success and fame come?

Stardust is Ray Connolly’s novelisation of his Writers’ Guild of Great Britain award-winning screenplay for the 1974 film, starring David Essex, Adam Faith and Larry Hagman.

Born in 1941, Connolly was brought up in Lancashire and attended the London School of Economics, where he read social anthropology, and where Mick Jagger was a fellow student. He then interviewed sixties pop stars for the London Evening Standard. He has written numerous newspaper articles for the Daily Mail, The Sunday Times, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Observer.

Connolly has written several novels, including Sunday Morning and Shadows on a Wall, the movies That’ll Be the Day and Stardust, the television series Lytton’s Diary and Perfect Scoundrels and a biography of John Lennon. He also worked with record producer Sir George Martin on the television series The Rhythm of Life, and has written TV plays, films and documentaries, radio plays, short stories and much journalism.