There’s a poignant scene toward the end of This Is Us, the 2013 Morgan Spurlock documentary about One Direction, in which the band members are gathered around a bonfire talking about what their lives might look like in the future. “Don’t you think it’s a bit of a Benjamin Button thing, that we’ll get to do it backwards?” wonders Liam Payne. “After this, we get to have a proper normal life and have a wife and kids… that’s what I look forward to.”
At the time, it seemed like a sweet throwaway remark. Watching it back now, it feels horribly ominous. The boys didn’t know that they wouldn’t really get to have a “normal life” after such a swift and meteoric rise to fame. From November 2011 onwards, after the release of debut album Up All Night, they would go on tour for pretty much four years solid, while also experiencing the sort of fame that was—even by boy band standards—quite extreme. Payne later spoke candidly about the impact that such a relentless schedule had on his mental health and addiction struggles: “In child development, as a teen, the one thing you need is freedom to make choices,” he told The Diary of a CEO podcast in 2021. “Although we could do anything we wanted, it seemed from the outside, we were always locked in a room at night, and then it would be: car, hotel room, stage, sing, locked.”
After Payne’s death earlier this month, in which he fell from a balcony in Argentina after allegedly ingesting multiple substances, a number of leading music figures have come forward urging better protections for young people entering the industry. Songwriter Guy Chambers told The Guardian that he believed under-18s shouldn’t be put to work as pop stars, full stop. “I do think putting a 16-year-old in an adult world like that is potentially really damaging,” he said. Robbie Williams, who was 16 when he joined English pop group Take That, and has been vocal about facing similar struggles, has called for greater empathy across the board. “Even famous strangers need your compassion,” he wrote on Instagram. “We all let you down,” former X Factor judge Sharon Osbourne wrote on the platform. “You were just a kid when you entered one of the toughest industries in the world. Who was in your corner?”
Of course, it’s one thing to call for better protections in the industry, and it’s another to actually implement them. Matt Thomas, co-founder and chair of Music Support—a UK charity supporting those in the music industry who struggle with mental health and addiction issues—has been advocating for change for nearly a decade. He’s unequivocal about the need to treat a musician’s mental health in the same way as other aspects of their physical and artistic upkeep. “In the same way that young people are given singing lessons, dancing lessons, and all sorts of [processes] for developing an artist, the mental health side of things and preventative side of things should be given equal importance,” he says, adding that he thinks “it’s possible with the right kind of structure and set-up, but it’s going to need a huge amount of cooperation.”
Sarah Woods, chief executive of Help Musicians and Music Minds Matter—two other UK charities committed to mental health support within the music industry—echoes Thomas’s sentiment. While there’s “no silver bullet,” she says, a more widespread awareness of the very specific struggles that musicians and those in the industry might face is imperative. Late nights, long hours, hard deadlines, and a competitive work environment can really take their toll. And that’s without even factoring in the intense pressures of fame. “As a charity, we are proactively working on broadening our services to help prevent crises by doing more to ensure individuals can recognize any warning signs themselves, and working with industry organizations to build greater collective understanding,” she says.
Still, the situation isn’t totally dire. Both Thomas and Woods tell me that, even in the past five to 10 years, much has changed already. Musicians are more candid and open about their mental health in comparison to previous decades, and we’re already seeing that candidness translate into genuine change. Take an artist like Chappell Roan, for example, who cancelled recent tour dates to protect her mental health. An ascendent artist cancelling live dates at such a critical point in her career would have been unheard of 10 years ago. But, as we’ve learned, measures like these are critical. “When we started Music Support I can’t tell you how many doors were slammed in our face,” says Thomas. “Now, people are calling us to get involved. But it needs to be consistent. It needs to be part of everyday parlance, not just something that comes up when there’s a media spotlight.”
But the onus shouldn’t always be on musicians. We’re also seeing a slow but steady tide change within certain organizations. Mike Smith, a former music industry boss at Warner Chappell, told The Guardian that when he was at Warner in 2018, there was a material push for improvements. “We set up a fund in the contract of our songwriters to cover their mental health care because we were seeing around 25 percent of them suffering anxiety or depression—and these were not even the frontline pop stars,” he said. “The major music companies were all doing similar things to help—taking people onto the payroll to advise the artists and staff… It is better now, partly because we are having the conversations about it.”
But these conversations need to continue, and they need to metamorphose into genuine, material change within every corner of the industry—from 16-year-olds in pop, to tour managers, to those who leave major bands and find themselves suddenly at a loose end after years on the road. “With the right early interventions in place, it is possible to help young people in the industry fulfil their potential in a non-destructive way,” says Thomas, citing the importance of psychotherapy, professional help, and fostering an environment that includes positive role models who aren’t financially motivated. “Ultimately, we’re talking about children, and we’re talking about human beings, and we need to remember that before any thought of them being a commodity for a system to then monetize.”