Play On Series:

Everybody wants to be famous.

Nobody tells you how

or the price you pay.

Synopsis

Britain, the 1980s. Kit Redington is a working musician when Stevie explodes into his life—beautiful, fearless and consumed by the need to become a star.

They make a pact. Kit will teach her to sing, create the music and find a way into the recording industry. What begins in an empty seaside nightclub becomes a passionate creative partnership, an intense love affair and a shared obsession.

But success has its own designs.

As managers, publishers, producers and record companies gather around Stevie, the dream that united them begins to drive them apart. Talent becomes currency, loyalty becomes negotiable, and Kit discovers that helping someone become valuable does not guarantee him a place in the future he helped create.

In the aftermath, Kit struggles to rebuild his life and music. Stevie returns, damaged but still dangerously compelling, while Sophie Mann offers him something he has never known: a love unconnected to fame, manipulation or professional ambition. Torn between the woman whose identity has become entwined with his own and the woman who represents a different future, Kit must finally decide whether loyalty to the past is worth sacrificing the possibility of happiness.

Kit’s journey carries him from seaside clubs, London studios and West End offices to the hotels and nightclubs of the Arabian Gulf. He embraces a changing musical landscape of synthesisers, sequencers and manufactured pop, old betrayals give rise to new dangers. An enigmatic dream of a veiled woman draws Kit towards a destiny he cannot understand, while illness, addiction and violence threaten to end his odyssey before he can find his way home.

Decades later, university lecturer Dr Christopher teaches aspiring musicians about the hidden machinery of the business: image, management, copyright, exploitation and the uncomfortable realities behind the manufacture of stardom.

Acting as a modern Greek chorus, his lectures accompany Kit and Stevie’s story. Yet Christopher is not the detached observer he first appears to be. As the two timelines converge, the audience discovers that the lessons he teaches were paid for through experience—and that his life became inseparably bound to theirs.

Spanning three novels and two generations, the Play On trilogy is a funny, passionate and poignant saga of music, sex, love, ambition and betrayal. It follows four people whose lives diverge and intersect across more than thirty years, each searching for identity, purpose and a second chance.

Because the past never entirely releases us.

The music changes. The players change.

But the story plays on.

Soundtracks: