The life of a pop star is a strange one, at once fêted and hated, unmoored from reality in many ways. Days spent on a bus or a plane. Days of boredom punctuated by occasional moments of adulation. It's also, often, quite a short one, literally short in the case of many.
For a few, the career stretches into late middle age. For most, by their early thirties, the life is over and a new, usually less glamourous, less lucrative and less exiting one stretches in front of them. A life filled with strangers greeting them with "didn't you used to be..?" How they deal with this, and what their lives look like is examined in Exit Stage Left by Nick Duerden published in hardback on 28 April.
Duerden structures his book as a series of essays based on interviews with a wide variety of artists, loosely grouped into fairly arbitrary chapters; Troubadours, One Hit Wonders, Legends, Mavericks. There’s a fascinating range of people here, from the hardly known to superstars whose biggest hits are behind them and, while the stories are often broadly to be expected, there are some interesting outliers.
Expecting descent into drink and/or drugs? Tick. Expecting a quiet decline into relative obscurity via a journeyman musician route? Tick. Expecting a former child star to be training people to work at height on powered access platforms? Not so much.
Taken as a whole, the stories touch on some interesting themes; musicians as ‘other’, the venal music industry, the relationship of pop music with youth and it’s more complex relationship with aging, music as a creative practice and as a vocation.
Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos was relatively aged when the band got massive: he was 32 in 2004, when Take Me Out was released. He says, “…in pop music, the emphasis is mostly on the beginning of a career…[people] want David Bowie at twenty-five, not David Bowie at fifty-five.” This is echoed later in the book by Lloyd Cole: “People just don’t want middle-aged pop stars. We want novelty, or we want grandeur; we don’t want the dull stuff in between. We find old people charming; they become venerable, iconic. But we tend not to find middle-aged people charming.”
He implies that music defines a musician’s identity, something reflected later on in the Pyramid Stage chapter by Justin Hawkins of the Darkness who suggests that musicians are different from other people. Hawkins also reflects on how the creative process can be dependent upon misery: “When I was happily married, I didn’t write a single thing worth listening to. It’s a truism, really, but you don’t notice it at the time. When you’re in a relationship like that, you want to impress the person you’re with. So you modify your tastes, your outlook, you try to impress them – and absolutely nothing good comes from it, ever. I firmly believe that the best way to write [good] stuff, is to have stuff inside you that is fucking you up.”
Liam Ó Maonlaí of Irish folk-rock crossover darlings Hothouse Flowers talks about the writing process: “You can smell a song that’s written to make money, just as you can hear a song that was written because it had to be written. But the best songs are those that force their way out of a group of people who just happened to have meet.”
Ó Maonlaí followed a familiar trajectory, he gave up and went back to working as a jobbing musician. Then back to trading on his own back catalogue. He says, “As a musician, you are always the driver of your own destiny”. Del Amitri’s Justin Currie talks about youth and ageing: “Artists tend to write their best songs between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-seven” (the curse of twenty seven!?) “That’s why most of us tend to peak in our mid-twenties, I think, and I think that [more artists] should own up to that, to the fact that the more interesting music we make is during that period”.
Some of the interviews would have been better left out – Joan Armatrading for example doesn’t really say anything very interesting and you get the impression that many have been left in simply to show what big ex stars Duerdin has been able to pull in. There are a LOT of artists featured and the book feels like it could lose at least a half of them with the remaining ones given more space to tell the more interesting stories.
By necessity, the musicians Duerden features mostly haven’t been active in the industry for some time and there are plenty of names that will be unfamiliar, and there are one or two that don’t seem to have ever gone away. It’s often the lesser known, or long forgotten, ones that have the most interesting stories. Many of those featured have struggled with a loss of notoriety, many of them have battles with mental illness – depression and addiction the most common. There’s a pretty common trajectory here – make a living. Break up. Feel relief at getting off the treadmill. Do miscellaneous stuff and then, at some point, inevitably. get the band back together. The more interesting stories are those that deviate from this.
Few of those featured have much love for the industry that provided their living but a number have found that their post-fame years have given them space to reflect and grow. The most interesting stories are those protagonists have something to say about the nature of their success and are able to put it into some kind of perspective.
The most interesting interviews are those with unusual post-fame stories: Tanya Donelly (Belly via Throwing Muses and Breeders (with Pixies ex-bassist Kim Deal)) became a doula after leaving the industry and Natalie Merchant (10,000 Maniacs ) a peripatetic teacher who works largely unpaid, living off her pop star savings.
Duerden’s tone can come across as slightly sneering but the book is an interesting peek into an aspect of the music industry that isn’t often discussed.
Exit Stage Left by Nick Duerden arrives 28 April.
