This is an original book.
Jumps between late 1960s and present day well 2010.
In the late 1960s a British pop group based in Berlin with 4 members called Pearl Harbour all died suddenly within 48 hours of each other.
A journalist called Michael Stern from Belfast finds this story and does his own investigating work to see what happened to the band members.

There is a 5th man who turns up in Brussels in 2010 in hospital with locked in syndrome, his nurse/physio called Domonique slowly but surely manages to communicate with this man, the hospital call him X Midi.
Turns out X Midi's real name is Jacques Bernier he is from Belgium originally skipped his National service went AWOL. Became a drummer travelled to London,Paris and Berlin.
It was in Berlin that he played drums on a studio recording for Pearl Harbour, he took some LSD and felt something wasnt quite right.
He also done a little bit of investigating himself.
He and Michael Stern were meant to meet but higher forces got to them first.
They reckon the band were all spiked and the music they played combined could make normal people act in very sinister ways.
This would be good for Soldiers in the combat zone.

Jacques Bernier continues to drift for next 20 odd years, ends up in Switzerland really wants to go back to Belgium but doesnt want to get arrested eventually goes back is runover thats where Domique comes in to assist him and gain his trust.
When the hospital announces to the Press Jacques real name the spies come to the hospital with devasting consequences for Jacques.

Good book this bit far fetched but it keeps you guessing and also lots of references to the origins of Music. ( )

This crime thriller by Belgian writer Paul Colize about a British rock band was short-listed for a number of prizes when first released. Only now available in English, the book should find a natural home and receptive audience among rock fans everywhere.
It’s 1967. The rock band Pearl Harbor is taking a break after a hastily organized, late night Berlin recording session, and its four members have scattered. Within days, each of them is dead and unaccountably flush with cash. One is found at the bottom of a pool in a luxury hotel in Palma de Mallorca, one with a bullet in his head in a hotel room in Hamburg, one crushed under a train in a Berlin U-Bahn station, and one who was apparently hiding out in a London hotel and jumped from his fifth floor room.
Who could believe all these deaths were coincidental? The authorities, with their scattered jurisdictions and the differing modes of death believe it, especially when the bodies—and the victims’ histories—reveal alarmingly high levels of drug and alcohol abuse. The band members become no more than rock n roll detritus, washed up by the tide of 1960s counterculture. It’s a bang-up start to this well-constructed mystery.
Fast forward to 2010. In Brussels, a homeless man is hit by a car near the Gare du Midi train station. He’s badly injured, cannot speak, cannot be identified, and comes to be known as X Midi. You are privileged to read his thoughts, however, as he recuperates. He reconstructs his past and his fleeting but deadly association with Pearl Harbor in chapters that alternate with those narrated by his caretakers. They are trying with infinite patience to help him recover from locked-in syndrome, which leaves him almost totally incapable of communicating.
Drug and alcohol use is part of the immersive environment Colize creates and manages not to become tedious. Rumors of U.S. military involvement in the testing psychoactive drugs simmer. There’s lots of music-making too, which is filled with energy and considerable joy. Berlin’s rock scene takes place in bars and nightclubs, and the bartenders and denizens are portrayed convincingly.
Nevertheless, you may be grateful when X Midi’s narrative emerges from his substance-abusing days to confront the deeper and more sinister evil dogging him. Only gradually does he come to understand the true significance of Pear Harbor’s fateful and final recording session, in which he served as the substitute drummer. The back up. ( )

The early days of English rock, with their new sounds, buckets of drugs and anarchic lifestyle form the background to Paul Colize's Back Up, a Belgian thriller that bridges conspiracy theory and a classic mystery that you can eat like candy. In 1967, four members of the British rock band Pearl Harbor all die at the same time in different locations under mysterious circumstances. Forty years later a homeless man is hit by a car, leaving him in a near-comatose condition. Add a curious journalist who believes there is a connection between these events and a dedicated physiotherapist who begins the long process of discovering his patient's hidden secret and we are pulled along into a tale of international dirty politics that is gripping and well plotted. Alternate chapters are told in the voice of the patient, X Midi, whose story ties it all together...rock and roll and the fate of the free world! ( )

Paul Colize’s novel Back Up is self-described as a “Belgian crime novel” on the cover, but it doesn’t fit very neatly into the usual boundaries of that characterization. There are murders, to be sure, but the only sleuthing in the traditional sense is done by a journalist who appears almost tangentially in the book. Instead the plot is carried by a man trying to understand why he is threatened by the shadowy bad guys who have killed members of a rock group he joined for a private gig. He is the first-person narrator for about half the chapters, although an accident has left him with “locked-in syndrome,” able to communicate only by blinking.

Some aspects of the novel didn’t work very well for me. The glib narration by a non-verbal narrator was off-putting. The motive for the bad guys (presumably the CIA) wasn’t sold very well. The ending was a little too easy and left a lot hanging. There is, on the other hand, a lot of good local color about life for young people in Europe around the time of the Summer of Love, so if you’re of a certain age, you might enjoy it. ( )

Back Up, by Paul Colize is one of the most original books I've read in a long time. Half conspiracy novel and half cultural history of London and Europe in the early 60's. It's one of the few novels I've read that has the ability to evoke bittersweet feelings and abject terror simultaneously.

The book starts with the tragic death of the 5 members of Pearl Harbor, a budding Rock and Roll band, in 1965 and then shifts to a homeless man found comatose in Belgium. How are the two connected and what exactly happen at a fateful recording session that transpired shortly before the deaths of the young musicians? You'll enjoy learning the story. And the answers will make you think. ( )