In her classic memoirs, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine recounts not only the time she spent as a punk in the 1970s in her pioneering band Slits, but also documents her life after the end of the band. This is unusual. Most music books do not enter this territory, tending to stop when hits stop, thus covering up the veil on what happens next. The unspoken assumption seems to be that if it continues, the story will descend helplessly into memoirs of misfortune.
“The pain I’ve been feeling since the end of Slits is worse than breaking up with a boyfriend,” Albertine writes. I am returned to the world like a maple seed that spins in the wind. ”
I liked Albertine’s book, and I think it was this paragraph that prompted me to write my own book on the subject: the curious afterlife of pop stars. I wanted to know what it was like to start that awkward next chapter, where anonymity replaces shame and the ordinary stands for the extraordinary. The life Albertin forged for himself after punk was as complex as life usually is. She returned to education, studied cinema; suffered IVF; and suffered both illness and divorce. But she never plays music completely, because musicians don’t do that in most cases; they can not. I finished her book, convinced that he was a hero.
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But then maybe all the pop stars are? They are charming personalities, captivating and gifted, they do not lack self-confidence and, yes, sometimes they are a little strange. Artists may not always be the best people to drive heavy machinery in adulthood, but they remain persistent, driven and inspiring. They dared to dream, and then they went out and made that dream come true.
But falling back to the ground in this business is an inevitable certainty. Like athletes and women, they peak early. A songwriter once told me, quoting Bob Dylan, that “artists tend to write their best songs between the ages of 23 and 27.” Despite his enduring success, Dylan suggests that he would not be able to write the songs he wrote in his 20s in his last years, at least not in the same way or with the same instinct, largely because after this early impulse disappear, things calm down just in what you do, with all the boring grief associated with it. So what is it, I wondered, still doing this “work” at 35, 52 and beyond? What is it like to release your debut album with a global roar, and your 12th is barely whispering? Why is the continuing compulsion to create at all, to demand more worship? Honestly, what’s the point?
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So, armed with a bunch of potentially indiscriminate questions – because who likes to discuss failure? – I started to turn to musicians from different genres and eras, those who did not die young, but are still here, still working, to ask them what was on the periphery.
Many people have never bothered to answer. Others enthusiastically agreed, only to save later. The guitarist of one of the most stylish modern rock artists in America, someone whose skinny jeans no longer fit as well as before, was initially on fire, but was canceled at the last minute because, as his manager informs me, “his head just is “in the right place to discuss this right now. This is a difficult topic. ” However, those who spoke – a total of 50, from Joan Armatrading to S Club 7; Franz Ferdinand to Shirley Collins – they were infinitely candid and candid in a way they would never be at the height of their fame. I felt that they were enjoying the opportunity to speak again, to be heard over the noise of Ed Sheeran, Adele and Stormy. They were all humble, wise, determined. (Many were also divorced; at least one was tall.)
They are the real Stoics, I realized. We could learn a lot from them.
Every single story in popular music has a common beginning. Because in the beginning everything is a sauce. In 1987, seemingly overnight, Terrence Trent D’Arby became the most arrested new pop star of his generation. To hear him sing songs like If You Let Me Stay and Sign Your Name is to witness the art of auditory seduction; his knees twisted. He became terribly famous, terribly fast. He was 25 years old.
“I wanted admiration and I got it,” D’Arby tells me almost 35 years later, already working under the name Sananda Maitreya, “but I had to die to survive it.”
If his rise had a legend about it, then his death. Like Prince before him, he begins to feel capable of everything, each new song creates a masterpiece. His record company felt different – it wanted hits, not ornate rock operas – but D’Arby was not an easy man to refrain from. So, in pursuit of his muse, he spent the early ’90s reportedly living the life of a tortured hermit in a Los Angeles mansion. When I talk to him – which takes six months to settle – he suggests that he was grateful to continue “from such excess and cunning. I didn’t care then, and even less so now, this memory was sweet enough to allow me to forget most of it. “
Terrence Trent D’Arby achieved great fame in the 80’s – now he lives peacefully in Italy as Sananda Maitreya. Photo: Alami
Prince was dead, and so was Michael Jackson. D’Arby was still here, albeit with a name change – sparked by a dream he had in 1995 – to help him better bury the past. Today, Maitreya lives in Milan, is happily married with young children and writes, records and produces his own music, which he publishes on his own label, behaving as he pleases. In 2017, this meant the release of a 53-song album with at least one song dedicated to a first-hand experience of impotence. “I’m a person who likes to drink and smoke / It used to hang on the top of my shoes / Now all I have are these loose blues.”
The question of whether someone is already listening does not seem to bother him unnecessarily. When I ask him what he misses from the old days, if there is anything else, he answers: “I miss the unbridled, bold, naked stupidity of the vital electric arrogance of youth.
During the same era, Kevin Rowland found himself in a comparable situation. “I was too confident, too arrogant,” said the Dexys Midnight Runners singer. I thought everyone would hear our new music and say, “Wow.”
The fact that they didn’t do it, no more, left him perplexed. Dexys was one of the most brilliant bands of the ’80s, with numerous hits, several № 1 and timeless classics in Come On Eileen, a song legally required to be played at every wedding disco in mainland Britain since. But by the end of that decade, Rowland wanted to develop his craft and leave noisy songs behind. His label and probably some members of his own band just wanted more than that. It wasn’t broken, so why fix it?
“I could have done it without it,” said Kevin Rowland of the chorus of Come On Eileen, who greeted him at the grant office after the death of Dexys Midnight Runners. Photo: Brian Cook / Redferns
But Rowland tells me, “I just knew I couldn’t write the same songs again, so I didn’t even try.” Their new music is getting more and more introspective, sad and thoughtful; not ideal for radio, in other words. The band gave up, they broke up, and the singer found solace in drugs. Whatever money he had made was soon lost, and before he was in rehab came the need to join: deep humility. In the unemployment office, his fellow unemployed people recognized him and stormed in on Come On Eileen, half hoping he would get involved. “I could do without it,” he said.
The passing of fashion and fashion is rarely the fault of the artist. In a 1997 article for the New Yorker, American essayist Louis Menand suggested that fame could not last more than three years. “This is the intersection of personality and history, a perfect coincidence of the way the world happens and the way the star is. But the world is moving forward. “
To her credit, Susan Vega tried to move with him. It was 1990, and so far she has enjoyed great success for three years. This was not a bad feat, because her unadorned acoustic songs contrasted directly with the more arrogant activities of the pope in the 80’s, a time when Madonna ruled. “But until 1987,” Vega recalls, “every door was open to me, every concert I did was sold out.”
Suzanne Vega realized that her star was setting when her record company stopped sending cars to pick her up at the airport. Photo: Lynn Goldsmith / Corbis / VCG / Getty Images
So, in 1990, she announced her most ambitious tour to date. Instead of her usual requirements for an acoustic guitar and a searchlight, she already had a decorator, trucks and buses, a crew, a backing band; catering, reserve singer, woman for clothing. That was a big deal for me. “
On the night of the opening of the tour in New York, the place was only one third full. “I thought, ‘Where’s the rest of the audience?’ Maybe they’re still out in the lobby?
There was no rest from the audience; they had already continued. Vega herself hadn’t done anything wrong here, but rather made things a little too right. The industry has taken note of her previous success, reminding them of the marketable power of a singer who is in touch with her emotions, so she is investing in a new account: Shined O’Connor, Tanita Tikaram, Tracy Chapman. These artists made the godmother on stage dramatically redundant.
Vega’s tour, bleeding money, was interrupted. When she returned to JFK, she looked …
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