Ivor Davis, who accompanied the Beatles on their first American tour and later wrote “The Beatles and Me on Tour,” has contributed an Amazon review of Sara Holliday's "A Thousand Dances: A Novel of the British Blues Boom":
"I devoured “A Thousand Dances” by Sara Holliday for several reasons," Davis writes. "It transported me back to England in the Sixties—(Anyone out there remember the 20th century?) where I grew up on the dance floor of Cy Laurie and Humphrey Lyttelton’s London jazz clubs. It was the time four mop-haired lads from deepest darkest Liverpool—I forget their names-- were offering to hold the hands of any young woman who would listen.
Flash back fifty plus years and Ms. Holliday has recaptured the mood, the music, and every nuance of that era in her exhilarating and witty tale. She must have lived on those Sceptered Isles in another life, because the dialogue is spot. So is that cheeky humor that evolved into “The Swinging Sixties.”
For me it was a sentimental journey back to Britain of a bygone era. Our hero, a lively young chap named Nicky Spinnery in post World War II ration book England, loves fake orange juice. Cor blimey mate--I hated the stuff. ‘Orrible. It’s the era of when Keith Richards wasn’t emaciated, Mick Jagger was boyish and perky and Eric Clapton was an up and coming young guitarist. The days when comedian Benny Hill, peddled his gross, gazing down cleavages brand of humor that had the Brits rolling with laughter in front of their black and white tellies in living rooms across the nation.
Okay. So, shut your cakehole Ivor. My advice: Get out there and swing with “A Thousand Dances.” As I did."
