Liam Payne’s death last week has left the world reeling. At the age of 31, Payne fell from the third-floor balcony of his Buenos Aires hotel suite. The outpouring of grief from his friends, fans and loved ones has been dissected, splashed across headlines and read by millions.
It was, of course, a terrible, tragic event. But for music insiders, the tone feels slightly different: shock, certainly, but also a kind of sad resignation at an industry that chews up young talent and spits them out, broken, once their market value goes down.
There’s also anger. This week, Guy Chambers – one of Robbie Williams’ songwriters – called for the music industry to stop working with people under the age of 18.
“I do think putting a 16-year-old in an adult world like that is potentially really damaging. Robbie experienced that, certainly,” Chambers told the Observer.
“I know in Robbie's case, with Take That, there wasn't any proper protection set up to look after what were teenage boys. That was a long time ago, but I don't see much sign of change. There is not much more real care taken, that I have observed, from people involved in the big television talent shows.”
He isn’t wrong: becoming famous at a young age is an experience that often inflicts lasting harm on those who go through it. Billie Eilish spoke out recently about how she’s been finding it difficult to transition to being in her twenties: “I just didn’t ever think about how I wouldn’t be the youngest person in the room forever,” she told the Los Angeles Times.
"At the same time, fame really stunts you. So I find myself acting like a kid sometimes because I’m like, ‘Yeah, I got frozen in time.’ When I see other pop stars, I see that they’re still 16 a little bit. It’s kind of depressing… I’m a different person – I just didn’t really grow. I didn’t really become an adult."
Robbie Williams’ own struggles have been well-documented: thrust into the spotlight at an early age, he turned to cocaine and vodka to cope. By the time of his well-publicised mental breakdown, he’d graduated to a cocktail of speed, Oxycontin, Adderall, Vicodin and morphine.
“Nobody graduates from childhood fame well-balanced,” Williams said in the first episode of his 2023 Netflix documentary. “The years of finding yourself, maturing and growing up that everybody has are taken away from you.”
Depressingly, this is not an unusual story. Child musicians like Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus and Willow Smith have all talked about the impact fame had on their ability to see themselves as fully-fledged humans.
“There is an insane pressure and responsibility put on a child whose brain, emotions, frontal lobes aren’t developed yet,” Bieber wrote on Instagram in 2019. “You notice a lot of touring bands and people end up having a phase of drug abuse, and I believe it’s due to not being able to manage the huge ups and downs that come with being an entertainer.”
Looking at Payne’s death, it’s hard not to feel like history is repeating itself once more.
Payne was 14 when he first auditioned for the X Factor (tipping a cheeky wink at his future girlfriend Cheryl as he did so). Simon Cowell told him to come back in two years, and he did. Absorbed into new boyband One Direction, Payne found himself facing viral fame at the age of 16 – enough to turn anyone’s head.
Faced with an incredibly intense schedule of recording, promoting, touring, interviews and performing, he turned to alcohol to cope "because there was no other way to get your head around what was going on."
Payne spiralled, and once One Direction broke up in 2016 – when he was still only in his early twenties – he was left floundering, going through cycles of addiction and therapy. Despite attempting a solo career, his debut album, LP1, flopped, and he struggled to find a purpose in his life post-mega fame.
In the aftermath of his death, momentum seems to be building for change. Katie Waissel, one of Payne’s friends and a fellow X-Factor contestant, took aim at the “systemic neglect” in the music industry as part of her tribute to Payne. Among them was the band’s manager, Cowell, who recently told a Good Morning interview that he had no regrets about his time with the band – other than not owning their name outright.
“There are those who had a responsibility to provide the care and support necessary for the well-being of young artists, but too often, the focus remained on profits rather than the people,” she wrote on social media.
“This industry has treated talent like commodities, and the negligence of duty of care has once again led to a heart-wrenching loss… the real regret should be the failure to prioritize the emotional and physical welfare of the artists who put their trust in these institutions. Contracts, whether they are for television shows or record deals, come with a legal and moral duty of care that must be upheld.”
Part of that moral duty of care surely involves leaving young artists to develop into fully-rounded people before thrusting them into the spotlight too young. Both Waissel and Chambers are right: we have a duty of care to these young people, and so far, we’ve been failing them. It’s time for a change.
