“The pain I feel from the end of Slits is worse than breaking up with a friend,” Albertine wrote. to do; I was thrown back into the world like a plane tree seed that spins in the wind. “ I loved Albertine’s book, and this one paragraph was so special, I think, that it prompted me to write my own book on this very subject: the bizarre afterlife of pop stars. I wanted to know what it’s like when this awkward next chapter begins, where anonymity replaces defamation and the ordinary is reaffirmed above the extraordinary. The life Albertine created for herself after punk was as complicated as life tends to be. He returned to education, studying cinema. underwent in vitro fertilization. and endured both illness and divorce. But he never let the music go completely, because musicians for the most part do not. they can not. I finished her book convinced that she was a hero. Subscribe to our Inside Saturday newsletter for an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the magazine’s biggest features, as well as a comprehensive list of our weekly snapshots But then maybe all the pop stars are? They are fascinating people, fascinating and gifted, they are not confident and, yes, occasionally and a little weird. Artists may not always be the best people to handle the heavy machinery of adulthood, but they remain persistent, dynamic and inspiring. They dared to dream, and then they went out and made that dream come true. But falling back to earth, in this business, is an inevitable certainty. Like athletes and women, they peak early. A songwriter once told me, citing Bob Dylan, that “artists tend to write their best songs between the ages of 23 and 27.” Despite his continued success, Dylan has suggested that he could not write the songs he wrote in his 20s in his last years, at least not in the same way or with the same instinct, mainly because, since this early momentum has faded, things just settle into what you do, with all the noisy ennui associated with it. So how is it, I wondered, to keep doing this “job” at 35, and 52 and beyond? What is it like to release your debut album in a world roar and your 12th without hearing a whisper? Why the constant compulsion to create at all, to demand even more worship? Honestly, what is the meaning? Do I shamelessly want to be one of the greatest artists in the world? Yes, I love Robbie Williams And so, armed with a lot of potentially useless questions – why would anyone like to talk about failure? – I started approaching musicians from different genres and eras, those who had not died young, but were still here, still working, to ask them how they are on the sidelines. Many never bothered to answer. Others enthusiastically agreed to rescue later. The guitarist from one of America’s most stylish modern rock concerts, someone whose skinny jeans no longer fit as they used to, was initially eager, but canceled at the last minute because, as his manager informed me, “his head is not” . you are in the right place to discuss it right now. It’s a difficult issue. ” Those who spoke, however – 50 in all, from Joan Armatrading to S Club 7. Franz Ferdinand at Searley Collins – were endlessly revealing and honest in a way that would never have been at the top of their fame. I felt that they enjoyed the opportunity to speak again, to be heard over the hum of Ed Sheeran, Adele and Stormzy. They were all humble, full of wisdom, determined. (Many were also divorced; at least one was high.) They are the real Stoics, I understand. We could learn a lot from them. Every single story in folk music has a common beginning. Because in the beginning everything is a sauce. In 1987, ostensibly overnight, Terence Trent D’Arby became the most exciting young pop star of his generation. Listening to him sing songs like If You Let Me Stay and Sign Your Name was to testify to the art of acoustic seduction. the knees bent. He became terribly famous, terribly fast. It was 25. “I wanted to be admired and I got it,” D’Arby tells me almost 35 years later, now working as Sananda Maitreya, “but I had to die to survive.” If his supremacy had the legend, then so did his death. Like Prince before him, he began to feel capable of anything, each new song composed a masterpiece. His record company felt different – he wanted hits, not elaborate rock operas – but D’Arby was not an easy one. And so, chasing his muse, he spent the early 1990s reportedly living the life of a tortured hermit in a Los Angeles mansion. When I talk to him – which takes six months to arrange – he tells me that he was grateful that he proceeded “with such exaggeration and style. I did not do much then, and even less now that my memory was kind enough to forget most of it. “ Terence Trent D’Arby gained immense fame in the 1980s – now living quietly in Italy as Sananda Maitreya. Photo: Alamy Prince was dead, and so was Michael Jackson. D’Arby was still here, albeit with a name change – inspired by a 1995 dream – to help bury the past better. Today, Maitreya lives in Milan, is happily married with young children and writes, records and produces his own music, which he releases on his own record label, behaving as he pleases. In 2017, that meant releasing a 53-track album with at least one song dedicated to a first-hand experience of disability. “I’m a guy who likes to drink and smoke / He used to hang up to the tops of my shoes / Now all I have is these little blouses.” The question of whether someone is listening no longer seems to bother them unjustifiably. When I ask him what, if nothing else, he has been missing since the old days, he replies: “I miss the unbridled, bold, naked stupidity of the lively electric insult of the youth.” At the same time, Kevin Rowland found himself in a similar position. “I was very confident, very arrogant,” says the Dexys Midnight Runners singer. “I thought everyone would listen to our new music and say, ‘Wow.’ The fact that they did not, no longer, left him puzzled. The Dexys were one of the most brilliant bands of the ’80s, with a string of hits, several No. 1s and a timeless classic on Come On Eileen, a song that is legally required to be played at every wedding disco in mainland Britain ever since. But by the end of that decade, Rowland wanted to develop his art and leave noisy songs behind. His record label, and probably some members of his band, just wanted more than that. It was not damaged, so why repair it? “I could have done it without it,” said Kevin Rowland of the Come On Eileen choir, which welcomed him to the dole office after the death of the Dexys Midnight Runners. Photo: Brian Cooke / Redferns But, Rowland tells me, “I just knew I could not rewrite the same songs, so I never tried.” Their new music was gaining an increasingly endoscopic, mournful and ruminant tone. not ideal for radio, in other words. The band fell apart, split up and the singer found solace in drugs. All the money he had made was soon lost, and before a period of detox came the need to sign: a deep humility. At the dole office, his unemployed colleagues recognized him and entered a Come On Eileen performance, hoping to participate in half. “I could have done it without it,” he notes. The passage 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 the star could not last more than three years. “It’s the intersection of personality with history, a perfect match between the way the world happens to be and the way the star is. “People, however, are moving forward.” In her honor, Suzanne Vega tried to move with it. It was 1990, and at this stage it had been a huge success for three years. This was not a miserable feat, as her acoustic songs were in stark contrast to her most daring pop pursuits in the 1980s, when Madonna was in power. “But until 1987,” Vega recalls, “every door was open for me, every concert I did sold out.” Suzanne Vega realized that her star was falling when her record company stopped sending cars to pick her up from the airport. Photo: Lynn Goldsmith / Corbis / VCG / Getty Images And so, in 1990, she announced her most ambitious tour. Instead of her usual demands for an acoustic guitar and a single headlight, she now had “a set designer, trucks and buses, a crew, a support band. catering, a backup singer, a woman doing the clothes. That was a big deal for me. “ On the opening night of the New York tour, the venue was just one-third full. “I thought, ‘Where is the rest of the audience?’ Maybe he’s still out in the lobby? “ There was no other audience. they had already moved on. Vega herself had done nothing wrong here, but she probably did things pretty much right. The industry had noted its past success, reminding it of a singer’s marketing power in touch with her emotions, and so had invested in a new batch: Sinéad O’Connor, Tanita Tikaram, Tracy Chapman. These artists made the godmother of the scene suddenly unnecessary. Vega’s tour, bleeding money, was soon cut short. When he returned to JFK, it seemed …