John Lennon said: "We're going to live, or we're going to die. If we're dead, we're going to have to deal with that. If we're alive, we're going to have to deal with being alive." Is there a curse on Rock 'n' Roll? Is talent so powerful that it destroys? The death of one of the purest musical talents in recent years, Amy Winehouse, has reopened this and many other questions.

The "Club 27" really does exist, and it includes some of the best musicians of all time, very young adults who created works of art but who were themselves overwhelmed by art. This volume tells their story: from the first, Robert Johnson, who is said to have sold his soul to the devil for the gift of Blues, on to Ian Curtis and Kurt Cobain, and passing through the runaway lives of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, the mysterious death of Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, and the fatality of "the day the music died" in 1959, when Buddy Holly's airplane crashed.