Book Review: Life after the limelight dims on musicians
LONDON, ENGLAND - JUNE 12: Robbie Williams performs at half time during the Soccer Aid for Unicef 2022 match between Team England and Team World XI at London Stadium on June 12, 2022 in London, England. (Photo by Alex Davidson/Getty Images)
- Exit Stage Left: The Curious Afterlife of Pop Stars
- Nick Duerden
- Headline €25
There's a tongue-in-cheek phrase familiar and popular among Irish acts of a certain level: Still at the music. A musician bumps into a peer on the street and gets asked: Still at the music? Yes, they’re still at the music. An awkward family dinner and an aunt asks what they’re up to. They reply: Still at the music. You get the idea.
Because to make it at any level in the music industry, whether in Ireland (if such an ‘industry’ even exists), London, or the US, you’ve got to be determined. To not be still at the music is an admission of defeat.
That’s the phrase that came to mind throughout the numerous musicians’ tales told in Nick Duerden’s Exit Stage Left. What happens to those we once idolised, he ponders, after their moment in the spotlight has been cursorily sniffed out and they are replaced by the next big thing in an industry that has always fetishised the next big thing above all else?
The rollcall of interviewees and stories told is worthy of a festival lineup: Happy Mondays, Robbie Williams, Róisín Murphy, Franz Ferdinand, Bob Geldof, David Gray, and Snow Patrol, to name just a few.
After a clunky introduction featuring ‘40-second plays’/interviews with Bill Drummond of the KLF (“arguably the wiliest pop provocateur of his era”), whose story has been told so often in the past 20 years, Duerden talks to Peter Perrett, singer with The Only Ones, known for Another Girl, Another Planet. They could be called a one-hit wonder but for the fact the song didn’t even break the top 50 on release in 1978. After an early US tour support slot with The Who was cut short, Perrett quit the band. He says, “I regret that, I do. Ever since, I’ve kept thinking about what might have been.”
Such regret rears its head throughout these (cautionary?) tales. Wendy James of the “deliberately trashy pop act” Transvision Vamp says they were frazzled by the time of their third album. “We’d worked non-stop, much as you do in a pop band on a major label when they want to get as much out of you as possible. I would say, with a little bit of hindsight, that I’m glad we split up when we did.”
But at least The Only Ones and Transvision Vamp ‘made it’ — so many bands and wannabes would kill for a sliver of their success.
Enter Towers of London, a post-Libertines ‘landfill indie’ band in the mid-noughties led by, sigh, Donny Tourette. They tried their hardest to attract attention, but as Duerden has it, they failed time and again to make inroads. By 2007, Tourette had entered the Celebrity Big Brother house. “I was literally blackmailed into it by the label,” claims Tourette. He lasted two days, bolting over the wall and refusing to return.
He’s wont to use cliches — “Once a member marries, with its promise of intimacy, domesticity, and a sudden interest in the colour pallets of Farrow & Ball, the tunnel vision that had allowed the band to exist in the first place is compromised” — and lines to make you eyeroll: “Zoom had not yet been invented,” he writes about the late 1990s.
Comparing and contrasting James Blunt with his singer-songwriter predecessor David Gray, he jokes: “The message conveyed here, with great unsubtlety, was that singing soldiers are SexyTough™. David Gray had never been SexyTough™ — not like this.”
Gray, who played three nights at Dublin’s 3Arena and a show at Musgrave Park in Cork this summer, admits: “When I listen to something I’ve written that I particularly like, I do dream of it — and me, I suppose — becoming massive again, but I know I’m not in control of that.”
Scottish art-rockers Franz Ferdinand have released five albums over the course of their career -— and did a greatest hits earlier in 2022 — but are still best known for the indie disco song of ‘Take Me Out'. But singer Alex Kapranos is content with their lot: “I could never stop writing, or playing, music.” That’s an idea easier for some than others.
Damage comprised five black boys from London who found themselves under the purview of Simon Cowell in the early 2000s. “We’d always positioned ourselves as a boy band. Everything was a fight,” says Andrez Harriott.
Duerden points out how one of the bands that ended up with songs that might otherwise have been Damage’s also looked good in cashmere, and boasted a similar ability to sing while sitting on tall stools. All-white Irish act Westlife faced few of the marketing or radio-play issues that Damage did. Westlife quickly became huge, thus rendering any competitors redundant, he explains.
The pop band cycle can be a dangerous one. Paul Cattermole rode the highs with S Club 7 at the turn of the century, but found himself underused in the studio and thus increasingly disillusioned. He left in 2002, tried something new, a la Robbie Williams post-Take That, but, well, it failed miserably and Cattermole spiralled, soon being declared bankrupt and trying, unsuccessfully, to sell his Brit Award on eBay. But now, even after all that, he’s still at the music.
He says all acts in pop music at some point plateau. “You will be tested on that plateau. The question is: Do you have the temerity to bust through it?”
As I write, K-pop seven-piece, BTS, have announced a hiatus, at the height of their fame, to pursue solo careers. “It’s not that we’re disbanding! We’re just living apart for a while,” said Suga. “I hope you see that it’s a healthy plan,” added J-Hope. “It’s something that we all need.”
Robbie Williams, meanwhile, who left one of the biggest pop bands at their apex in the mid-nineties to go solo, has announced three dates at Dublin’s 3Arena in the autumn. He broke records, selling 1.6m gig tickets in a single day and 11 of his 12 albums would top the charts. And yet even when his star wanes — ahem, 2006’s Rudebox — he still craves more. Hence, perhaps, the autumn arena tour, ‘a joyous celebration of Robbie’s 25 years as a solo artist’.
He tells Duerden: “Do I want everybody to stick with me? Do I unashamedly want to still be one of the biggest artists in the world? Yeah, yes, I do. And so, how am I going to achieve that?”
As for Perrett, meanwhile, after quitting The Only Ones, he spiralled, losing pretty much everything in the ensuing decades while in a drugs stupor. But the music persisted. Another Girl, Another Planet was covered by the likes of the Replacements and Blink-182 and attained classic status.
The band reformed — and later split up again — but Perrett was determined, this time, to continue. He confides in Duerden: “You know, in some ways, I don’t think I deserve anything anymore because I rejected my art. That’s the very worst thing an artist can do.”
He’s released two solo albums in the last five years — still very much at the music, then.
