Interesting article on declining celebrity

Maccattack

LAST autumn, on a balmy midweek night, Rob Hirst pulled up outside the
Nowra School of Arts on the NSW South Coast.
Hirst, now 49, had spent more than half his life playing drums in
Midnight Oil, one of Australia's most cherished rock'n'roll bands. He
had performed in front of crowds in the hundreds of thousands.

Midnight Oil had sold more than six million albums around the world
and hit the top of the charts in the United States and Europe. They
had given millions of dollars to charity. They had even stopped
traffic in Manhattan as part of a protest against the environmental
practices of big corp-orations.

Suddenly, on the steps of the Nowra School of Arts that evening, Hirst
had an unsettling feeling. Beside him was his mate Paul Greene, with
whom he has made critically acclaimed albums as Hirst and Greene.

"As I approached the building I had a flashback to 1974, to a group
called Farm and its second gig with a new singer Peter Garrett," he
recalls with some irony.

"We rocked up to the Nowra School of Arts with a set of original songs
and some prog rock classics by Jethro Tull and Yes and Genesis. This
year we played to half as many people as we did then. It was one of
those moments that you realise that your life has come full circle.
Fortunately, the next night we played to a full house in Canberra and
in the space of 24 hours despair gave way to a moment of great joy."

A month later, Hirst rocked 80,000 fans at the Wave Aid tsunami
benefit with Midnight Oil. The following night his blues group
Backsliders played to 200 people at an inner-city pub.

It's been said before - fame is a savage god. But rock'n'roll fame is
the most savage of all. Generally it's a lifestyle that people fall
into when they're young. With a modicum of charisma, the first taste
of success can come easily.

It starts with the adulation of a dozen people in a local pub. For a
fairytale few, it can quickly move to being on radio and later on
television. In a matter of months a shelf-packer at Woolworths can be
a national icon.

The price that every entertainer pays is the adjustment in self-esteem
that inevitably comes when the winds of fashion change. Some of them
deal with it by simply continuing to write and perform and getting
satisfaction from that, like Hirst. For others it can lead into a
self-destructive slide. Some, like INXS's Michael Hutchence and
Crowded House's Paul Hester, never cope with those demons. Both
ultimately took their own lives after struggling with the downside of
rock'n'roll stardom.

As one survivor said: "You feel like a cliche from Spinal Tap, but
it's a hard adjustment to make. You've been living in a fantasy world,
living your dream and you've lost it all. Most people readjust, but
some never make it back."

Although income from record sales may be neglible, musicians can make
a living on tour and from songwriting royalties. The rewards in
self-esteem are immense - and there are the fringe benefits of drugs,
alcohol and the opposite sex.

Life on the road is an unreal existence ruled by a tour manager who
books the accommodation, the transport, the entertainment, the
restaurant, the washing, and hands out cash for expenses. On the road
the musician has no responsibilities beyond being loved by the fans.

"You become a pretty selfish person, an atavistic zombie," says Hirst,
whose book Willie's Bar And Grill, published in 2003, documents life
on the road in the US.

"You're shuttled around by minders everywhere. You have no
responsibility other than the gig that night. Nothing matters because
you're leaving town the next day, so what the hell if you leave behind
the detritus of your hedonism.

"In the 1980s it got to the point where if I didn't travel every day I
got anxiety attacks. I had to keep moving. Then you're home just long
enough to cause trouble - to complain that when you push the 9 button
on the phone nothing happens."

Multi-platinum supergroups such as Midnight Oil and Crowded House
spent months on the road playing to upwards of one million people in
the course of a tour. "The pressure not to f..k up in front of 60,000
Belgians is quite acute," says Hirst. "You burn up an incredible
amount of adrenalin. That burns through your immune system, and when
you're on tour you're not sleeping properly and you're eating bad food
... it wears you down. Your immune system doesn't work any more so
you're coming down with everything. Halfway through a tour you develop
the middle-distance stare."

Nonetheless, you're living a dream. The deafening silence when the
crowd is no longer there can be much worse than the tinnitus from a
line of Marshall amplifiers.

The road back is slower and more tortuous.

James Valentine aspired to be a jazz musician when he joined Models in
1985 as saxophonist. In less than a year he was appearing on
Countdown, playing on a No.1 hit album and shortly thereafter on a
tour bus in the US. He was a star. Within another 18 months he was no
longer a Model. Valentine, in a moment of clarity, made the jump to a
new career as a TV and radio broadcaster and author. Getting out
before he got in too deep was probably the best thing that happened to
him.

"The logical parallel is with sportspeople," he says. "If you're a
cricketer and you haven't made the Australian Test team by the time
you're 22, you know it's not going to happen. By the same token, you
know that if you have made the team that you're going to get slower as
you get older and that your body won't sustain more than another ten
or 15 years. So you plan a career path."

Music is a fashion industry. Everyone at some point goes out of
fashion. "For rock bands there's always someone there to tell you that
it's not over," says Valentine. "Even if the record is not selling
someone will tell you the next one will, or it was the producer's
fault or the record company. It was always someone else. And there's
any number of people who will tell you how great you are in spite of
overwhelming evidence to the contrary."

Adds Mark Seymour, of Hunters & Collectors: "Declining record sales
had to be pointed out to us. It's not true that we all sat down and
addressed the problem. As individuals it took a long time to cotton on
to it. The fact of the matter is that unless the business is
expanding, it's declining."

The myth of the rock star, such as Elvis Presley or Mick Jagger or
Britney Spears, is encoded in every digital download. It's part of the
fabric of pop music. Around that sweet dream is a vast apparatus of
managers, hair stylists, agents, record companies, radio stations,
publicists and fans. All of them have a stake in a pop star. All of
them are ready to keep the dream alive. No-one, when the time comes,
wants to talk about the elephant in the living room. There's always a
tour that can be booked.

Hirst describes this constant movement as "the big lie in
rock'n'roll". You appear to be going forward, but at a certain point
in every performer's life taste starts to turn on itself and the
downward spiral begins. When the band finally does call it a day, the
members, by now approaching middle age, have to learn basic life
skills - grocery shopping, child-minding and bill-paying. While
they're down at the mall buying the cat litter they face the next
question from the inevitable fan who is next in line at the checkout:
"What are you doing with the rest of your life?"

A small percentage will come away from their band with some money. For
the others, their only asset is yesterday's celebrity. There are few
experiences more depressing than being confronted with past glories.
"There is a common association with image," says Seymour, "that if
you've been on television you've got money. Fame represents freedom
and the power to grease the wheels. That's true to a certain extent.
In practical terms, it's a by-product of the job. It means I can
afford to provide for my family, but the recognition doesn't reflect
success.

Seymour has been reading English philosopher Alain de Botton's 2004
book Status Anxiety, which suggests: "Every adult life could be said
to be defined by two great love stories. The first - the story of our
quest for sexual love - is well known and well-charted. The second -
the story of our quest for love from the world - is a more secret and
shameful tale. And yet this second love story is no less intense than
the first."

Rock'n'roll is the mothership of status anxiety. Even when things are
going well there's status anxiety with the publication of each week's
hit parade. The anxiety can be critical when the music stops.

One musician who has since left the business told me that his
immediate future after leaving his group was a year of pulling bongs
with his fellow musicians and making plans for the comeback that was
never going to come. "And those guys are still there," he said with
some regret. Another former star from the 1980s was recently fired
from his group. This led to a life-threatening drug and alcohol binge
that only ended when the police arrived.

Valentine, coming from a jazz background, draws a distinction between
the ephemeral pop star and the working musician. The former are
generally teenagers who get into show business on the back of a fad
and then date. For the latter, it's a life's work that is truncated by
the vicissitudes of style. Hirst and Seymour, for instance, are in the
latter category. As singer songwriters, fame was a by-product, and
once the limelight dims they are back doing what they always did.

"The hardest thing to do when you've been in a really big band," says
Hirst, "is to bring back your expectations. You need to come to your
senses. The heyday won't come again, but I can still play my music in
my own time and make a living, You can't ask for more than that."

"I never wanted to leave Hunters & Collectors," admits Seymour. "I had
to start grappling with self-esteem issues on a fundamental level. I
had all these questions about what I had achieved as a solo artist -
was it as good as what I had done previously? And why didn't it enjoy
the same level of community support? These are questions that can't be
answered. I was paranoid about having to prove that I was as good as
the Hunters & Collectors. What's changed for me now is that I've
accepted the heritage of the Hunters & Collectors. I mostly wrote the
songs and I was at the centre of it. I've come to accept that the
catalogue was a part of my life and I've taken possession of that
stuff. Now I'm paranoid about other things."

Seymour, Hirst and others have continued to write new material and
reinvent themselves. For many, that's not an option and they clog up
the pubs in mutated versions of their previous groups, drawing on past
glories. The nostalgia circuit is always there. Groups still make a
living in the pubs and through an expatriate circuit that takes in
Bangkok, Brazil and London, but it's a far cry from their heyday.

INXS, who once played to 400,000 fans in Sydney's Centennial Park,
have signed on for a reality TV series as a way of finding a
replacement for Michael Hutchence. And they've suffered the ignominy
of not being able to secure a free-to-air broadcaster in Australia.

Having been world famous in the 1980s, INXS had fallen dramatically
out of favour a decade later, replaced by the grunge generation. They
shuffled management and record deals. They went through the "back to
the roots tour" phase, changed stylists and producers. Although the
latter albums were as strong as their earlier efforts, there was a
sense that the group was irrelevant in the 1990s.

Hutchence, Australia's most successful rock'n'roll star, was a victim
of status anxiety. A competitive player forced to sit on the sidelines
while his band was sliding backwards in the charts, he was unable to
start a solo career. Shortly before his death, he was about to play an
Australian tour of small to medium venues in support of an album that
had failed to chart. The writing was on the wall.

In his last years, Hutchence added heroin to his diet and his
depressive illness just got worse. It's unlikely that he committed
suicide because the last record didn't sell. It's impossible to say
what contributed to his death in Sydney in 1997, but the combination
of depression, drugs and status anxiety would have been powerful forces.

On March 27 this year, Paul Hester took his dogs for a walk in
Elsternwick Park, Melbourne. He tied one of the leashes around the
branch of a tree and hanged himself. He was 46 years old and left
behind two daughters. Hester had lived his dream. At eight years of
age he wrote in his notebook that he wanted to be in a band like the
Beatles. In his early twenties he was the drummer for Split Enz, then
an internationally respected rock'n'roll group. Hester then played the
drums and the fool to great success in Britain and Europe with Crowded
House. It was here that his childhood dream was well and truly fulfilled.

"Paul really loved the Beatles. If he'd loved the Rolling Stones it
would have been different," says Dr John Clifforth, Hester's closest
friend. "The Beatles was all about youth and getting it done by the
age of 25. The Rolling Stones are based on the blues ... and getting
better as they got older."

Hester pulled the plug on his own career, quitting Crowded House in
the midst of a US tour, clearly at that point dealing with major
depression. According to Clifforth, the ghost of Crowded House hung
around Hester, especially in his black moods. "You're left with five
or ten years to work out why you're depressed," says Clifforth. "There
is the regret of not sticking with it. Thinking that although it was
crap, it wasn't that bad. There's a lot of fallout from that."

"Once you make the decision to be a performer, it's not something that
you can ever stop doing," adds Seymour. "It's a very emotional way of
working."

It's hard to imagine what it's like standing in front of thousands of
people worshipping your artistic efforts. It focuses the mind and the
ego in a particular way. It gives musicians a charge that can't be
matched.

No-one will ever know what finally pushed Paul Hester or Michael
Hutchence to suicide after their battles with depression, drugs and
alcohol. As Mark Seymour noted after Hester's wake: "At times like
this you see a lot of people you haven't come across for a while. And
every guy who is my age and has kids is struggling with issues about
what they've achieved in their life and whether it's worth anything.
It's universal. I don't know one guy who isn't."

* Toby Creswell is a former editor of Rolling Stone and Juice. His
next book, 1001 Songs, will be published in November.