Some of the celebrities have more unusual demands; Fleetwood Mac
requested exotic and tropical flowers, three hard-boiled eggs, a
small bowl of tuna with no salt and two chicken breasts on a plate
with no seasoning.
********************************************************************
On the edge

Why do depressed, drug-addled loners make such irresistible rock
stars? Alexis Petridis investigates

Wednesday February 16, 2005
The Guardian


'Ol' Dirty Bastard's dysfunction was the attraction, to an extent.
He was a calamity waiting to happen'

February 2005, it seems, is a good month to be a mentally unstable
rock star. Just look around the newsagent's. Richey Edwards - the
anorexic, self-harming, bulimic former guitarist of the Manic Street
Preachers, who went missing, presumed dead, a decade ago - has
appeared in newspapers and on the cover of NME. Several magazines
have published glowing reviews of two new albums by Conor "Bright
Eyes" Oberst, which, like all his work, come studded with references
to depression and psychiatric medicine, and of British rapper Roots
Manuva's Awfully Deep, which pleads with his management not to "send
me to the farm that's funny". In the contents page of Mojo is a
picture of rock's most famous acid casualty, Syd Barrett, above the
words: "Reaching for mental freedom and risking mental collapse -
there's nothing like it". The phrase is from an article about his
masterpiece, Pink Floyd's debut album The Piper at the Gates of
Dawn, but out of context it reads like an advertising slogan: Rock
stars with psychiatric disorders - it's the real thing.

But then, as far as the fans and the media are concerned, any month
is a good month to be a mentally unstable rock star. "Rock fans love
great stories and mysteries and want their heroes to be interesting,
intense characters," says NME editor Conor McNicholas. "Heroes have
to stand out from the crowd, and to do that you have to be different
and inspirational. A lot of different, inspirational figures over
the years did happen to have some kind of mental illness."

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The notion of the rock star as an alienated, self-destructive and
mentally unstable tragic hero is one of the most pervasive myths in
pop music. It was sparked in the late 1960s, when a string of
musicians emerged whose overindulgence in LSD led to varying degrees
of mental collapse: Pink Floyd's Barrett, Fleetwood Mac's Peter
Green, Brian Wilson, the late Skip Spence of Moby Grape. And it was
codified by David Bowie's 1972 concept album, The Rise and Fall of
Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, which was partly based on
the earliest LSD casualty, minor English rock'n'roller Vince Taylor.
Familiarity with the myth's stock ingredients - drugs, bewildering
behaviour, early promise unfulfilled, at least one impenetrable
musical statement, reclusiveness - has done nothing to satiate fans'
desire for more of the same.

And more of the same keep coming along. In late 2003, Elliott
Smith's struggle with drug addiction and depression ended when he
stabbed himself twice in the heart. In heavy-metal magazine Kerrang,
you can read about American Head Charge, a band "succumbing to
violent bursts of knife-wielding insanity, alcoholism and
depression". A whole genre has risen in the US - emo (short
for "emotional") - of music based around nakedly confessional
lyrics. Initially a punk movement, emo's influence has spread
through hard rock and acoustic alt-country until you can scarcely
move for artists suggesting you feel their pain in the most explicit
terms imaginable.

According to Oliver James, a clinical psychologist and author of
They Fuck You Up: How to Survive Family Life, the rise in numbers
and popularity of emo acts may be linked to a rise in mental illness
among their obvious target market of 18- to 24-year-olds (the age
group most likely to be affected by psychological problems,
according to studies published in Europe and Australia). "Rates of
every kind of mental illness apart from schizophrenia have gone up,"
he says. "It's about a third of young people who suffer from minor
depression, which is pretty serious. It's that really fucked-up
state of mind that a lot of people in their teens and 20s get into
at some point. There has been an increase of pressures upon young
people. In the 1950s people were assigned an identity by society,
your identity was given to you, whereas now you have to earn it
through education and career; you have to decide what kind of person
you're going to be, and that creates a lot of stress among young
people.

"The problems you have are reflected in the music you like. It
relieves the burden to feel that someone has managed to express the
despair you're feeling. If someone else is feeling it, you're not,
at least for the time you're listening: you're taken away from the
pain that you're feeling and feeling a different pain with which you
can identify. Rock music can also articulate explicitly what you may
not dare to think. It's an arena in which your fantasies are
enacted."

Audiences, though, are not drawn only to empathetic lyrics, but to
the stories of mythic rock stars, scarred by mental illness. These
are, after all, the most popular articles in heritage rock
magazines. James maintains that "concerning yourself with the
details of their fuck-ups is a way of trying to explore your own
fuck-ups".

Others, though, think the impulse may be more voyeuristic. The
latest issue of hip-hop magazine the Source features the late rapper
Ol' Dirty Bastard on its cover wearing a pair of sunglasses with
only one lens, his face fixed - as it almost always was in
photographs - in a look somewhere between complete bewilderment and
menace. Today it seems poignant, but a year ago it would have made
people laugh. He was, as obituaries kept pointing out, the clown
prince of rap, whose evident insanity and shambolic life frequently
seemed less a cause for concern than a running joke among hip-hop
fans.

"To a lot of people who deem themselves politically correct, I think
Ol' Dirty Bastard became their minstrel show. He was as close as
they could get to the ghetto and watch someone totally dissolve as a
human, while sitting far enough back to laugh," Dante Ross, the man
who signed the rapper to Elektra Records in the mid-1990s, once
said. Not that the record company was above pandering to precisely
that impulse. In the same interview, conducted a few years before
the rapper's death, Ross claimed: "His dysfunction was the
attraction, to an extent. You don't come across a character like
that too often. He was a calamity waiting to happen. That's kind of
the beauty of it."

The same was once said of Craig Nicholls, frontman for Australian
quartet the Vines. At the end of last year it emerged that Nicholls
has Asperger's, a form of autism. But before that revelation, it was
lurid tales of Nicholls' instability that bolstered the band's
meteoric rise in 2002. One feature in the music press,
headlined "Mental as Anything", promised a tale of "breakdowns, self-
mutilations, hotel tear-ups, hospitalisations and more breakdowns".

Robin Turner, the band's A&R man, claims another music magazine was
even more cynical in its depiction of Nicholls. "We took a
journalist to interview him in America," he says. "Craig tried to
smash the journalist's Dictaphone and then locked himself in the bog
for three hours. The next day we bumped into the magazine's editor
and he asked how it went. The journalist was saying, 'Oh, he freaked
out, poor bloke, he's a really troubled guy.' The editor had this
huge grin on his face. You could see him thinking, 'This is money.'

"It really shocked me that that was the way he was thinking about
it. But the myth suddenly built. In America, the press was literally
like, 'Come and see this guy before he kills himself.' Is it a myth
that record buyers want to buy into? God, yes."

But if fans buy into it, that may be because rock music, unlike
other art forms, is depicted as benefiting from being created by
those with mental illness. Most critics would tell you Van Gogh's
paintings are great despite, rather than because of, his psychiatric
problems - but that's not true of the Beach Boys' Smile or Barrett's
The Madcap Laughs or Nirvana's In Utero, for example, whose
greatness is widely held to be inexorably entwined with their
creators' mental problems.

James suggests there may be a grain of truth in the argument: "The
difference with rock, compared to other art forms, is that being off
your head isn't necessarily an obstruction to doing great work.
There are many examples of people who were off their heads when they
did write great songs. They were on drugs, which is the same
difference: your thoughts are seriously impaired, your emotions are
all over the place."

It's certainly persuasive enough for some people to try to contrive
what others can't control. One of rock's more surprising phenomena
has been the rise of the curiously manufactured "tortured genius",
who lays claim to the angst, misery and unpredictability of Edwards
or Nicholls or even the tabloids' bete noire, Pete Doherty - but is
unlikely to mutilate themselves in public to try to prove a point,
or to end up in court for inexplicably kicking a fan in the
face. "People who have some kind of mental illness, some of them do
end up being tremendously creative individuals and tremendously
inspirational figures. Then you get these people who go, 'Ah, that's
the way you do it', and start aping the way they go about things,"
says McNicholas.

The contrived tortured genius offers a whiff of the danger, but none
of the risk. Think of Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst, a 30-something
record company executive who claimed to be an "outcast"
with "somewhat of a nervous habit". He makes you wonder whether Mojo
isn't right after all: rock stars with psychiatric disorders -
that's the real thing