Even if you attained musical consciousness in the 1970s – an era of bloated supergroups living inside the bubble of inflated egos, amid the labyrinthine overindulgences of prog rock – you won’t have heard of British supergroup the Helium Kids, because DJ Taylor’s fictional band don’t actually exist.

Mind you, not even the Machiavellian wheeler-dealers who manipulate their path to brief glory consider them to have any musical originality. As one manager asks their publicist, Nick Du Pont, the narrator of Taylor’s hugely entertaining new novel, “What makes an educated man like you … spend the best years of his life telling lies?”

This question lies at the heart of this kaleidoscopic excursion through the changing fashions and faces that fill Du Pont’s life. One answer is the often overlooked factor that shapes most people’s destinies: the process of drift, whereby, barely noticing, we arrive in the jobs that define our lives.

The older Svengalis who orchestrate the band’s rise all have backgrounds in show business – booking music hall acts, or flirting with indecency laws by staging burlesque Soho shows. During the 1960s the money migrates to rock music and their business instincts follow it.

But Du Pont is an outsider to showbiz, born on a Norwich council estate, where his mother makes ends meet with part-time jobs. His very un-East Anglian surname comes from his American GI father, who disappears back to a nomadic existence in the US, sending his wife occasional letters about plans that never materialise, signed, “Your loving husband, Maurice Du Pont”.

Nick is an outsider when he wins a minor scholarship to attend Oxford. But in 1960s America, the cachet of his Oxford degree and the fact that even a Norwich accent sounds posh in New York land him a job as the PR for an unknown English group, the Helium Kids.

The Kids begin as a beat group, only one of whom – the classically trained, perennially bullied, former child prodigy Florian – has any talent. But Nick discovers his own latent ability to concoct press releases and exploit the media to create the hype in which a band can thrive. For a decade he becomes their spin doctor, helping to maximise success for a group always six months behind the times, pulled along in the slipstream of the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. They even appear in the background of the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour film, although John Lennon recalls them as “fucking hooligans. Don’t know why we had them on board.”

Lots of novels – most recently Joseph O’Connor’s The Thrill of It All – give us the pulsating adrenaline rush of being inside a band riding the crest of fame. But Taylor’s perceptive and sardonic approach is to give us rock’n’roll as viewed from the wings. As the band’s publicist and fixer, Du Pont is both central and peripheral to the action. He notices how most band members, supposedly at the heart of the counterculture, vote Conservative, or how a girl’s outrageous trendy clothes are “simply camouflage, a second skin that she sloughed off, snake-like, whenever the old world calls”.

Taylor even lets the band replicate famous rock history landmarks. There’s an echo of Brian Jones’s fate, and the chaotically arranged free concert in Louisiana resembles the shambolic Rolling Stones’ Altamont one. Aficionados of the period will enjoy picking out these threads, along with cameo appearances, from the Queen Mother to Andy Warhol. But Nick’s narrative curiously minimises segments of his own life, almost as if, like the perfect PR man, he has discovered how to blend, chameleon-like, into the backdrop of his own story.

For 30 years Taylor’s output has been distinguished not just by his prodigiousness but by his mastery of different genres. These range from his prizewinning biography of Orwell to his equally fine biography of Thackeray, and from a playfully serious counterfactual novel like The Windsor Faction to a steady output of eclectic and often astringent journalism.

All these skills and styles – including his sharp eye for parody and the ridiculous – come to life here in his deft interpolation of mock obituaries and pastiche reviews from periodicals including Uncut, New Musical Express and the Macclesfield Advertiser, and a Philip Larkin poem that not even Larkin knew about. Rock and Roll Is Life grows into a dazzling rollercoaster homage to an era both bacchanalian and oddly innocent. But it is a more subtle study of a Norwich council estate boy who makes good. Taylor’s sharply realised narrator is formed from the juxtaposition of cultures that brought together his mismatched parents: a man who travelled with, yet remained wryly detached from, the best second-rate band of the 1970s.

• Dermot Bolger’s The Lonely Sea and Sky is published by New Island. Rock and Roll is Life by D J Taylor (Constable & Robinson, £18.99). To order a copy for £16.14, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.