Daisy Jones & the Six: Everyone looks perpetually glamorous, but it’s a soulless jingle

Television: The drama starring Elvis’s grandchild Riley Keough is at its best when laying bare the misogyny of the music industry

Covers versions occasionally surpass the original but not in the case of Daisy Jones & The Six (Prime Video from Friday). This tale of a hairy, earnest and doomed 1970s rock band lands like an over-cranked pastiche of Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, with occasional detours into Oliver Stone’s maniacal Doors biopic.

Daisy Jones is a poor little rich girl who dreams of being a blues singer and who, barely in her teens, sneaks into the Whiskey A-Go-Go on the Sunset Strip to see The Byrds play Goin’ Back. Meanwhile, in a down-at-heel suburb of Pittsburgh, Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin) is a rangy songwriter with a knack for everyman balladry and a hefty chip on his shoulder.

What he doesn’t have is the ability to write pop hits. However, when a manager puts Jones (Riley Keough) together with The Dunnes – along with Suki Waterhouse as an exotic keyboard player from London – and renames the project Daisy Jones & The Six, pop history is made.

Fake pop history, that is. If fictional, Daisy Jones & The Six are blatantly modelled on the eternal drama machine that was Stevie Nicks-Lindsey Buckingham-era Fleetwood Mac. They row, they snort all of the cocaine in North America, they write rollicking power-pop. Everyone looks perpetually glamorous, with their shaggy fringes and draping Seventies clobber.

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The series, adapted by Scott Neustadter and Michael H Weber from the 2019 novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid, is framed as a VH1 Behind the Music-style documentary. It’s the late 1990s and we’re looking back to the 1970s.

And it is at its best when laying bare the misogyny of the music industry which, to this day has yet to have a #MeToo moment of reckoning. One of Jones’s songs is stolen by a less talented male artist and becomes a smash. Another dude explains that he wants her to be his muse. When she tells him she wants to be the voice, not the muse, he looks at it as if she is crazy.

The problem with Daisy Jones & The Six is that you never believe in its ersatz version of 1970s rock. Their fake songs are clearly caricatures cobbled together in the 21st century; the chemistry between Jones and Billy and his guitarist brother Graham feel as if it was cribbed from an excitable Fleetwood Mac biography.

Keough, daughter of the late Lisa Marie Presley, is persuasively unravelled as the little girl lost Jones. And Claflin is full of conflict in his depiction of Billy Dunne. Sadly, everything else about Daisy Jones feels flimsy – this is a jingle that strains for grandeur but, in doing so, reveals itself to be hollowed out and soulless.