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 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.”