Yes, it’s true: A study undertaken by Liverpool John Moores University‘s center for public health has discovered that the mortality rate of performers jumps to nearly three times the normal rate of your everyday guy in the first five years after “chart success”:
Professor Bellis and his team analysed the careers of 1,064 artists who had made it into a catalogue of the 1,000 best albums of all time, as voted for by a poll of more than 200,000 people in 2000. Of these, 100 had died by 2005 – 9.6% of the men and 7.3% of the women. Accidents (16), drug/alcohol overdose (19) and the less rock’n'roll cancer (20) were the top three causes of death, with suicide (3), drug/alcohol related accidents (4) and violence (6) lower down the list. The mysterious “other” category (10) presumably included only truly original exits such as those of the ill-fated Spinal Tap drummers in the spoof rockumentary who variously vacated their stool after a bizarre gardening accident, on-stage spontaneous combustion and choking on someone else’s vomit.
The sample of rock and pop stars was compared with mortality rates in a sample of the general population in Europe and North America. The results suggest that the most dangerous time for a star is during their first flush of fame. Stars are over three times more likely to die than ordinary people in the first five years after chart success, and in the first 10 years they are still at more than two and a half times the risk. And right up to 25 years after launching a career in showbiz, rock and pop stars are still more likely to meet their maker than the rest of us. At this point US and European rockers diverge. On this side of the Atlantic, mortality rates for rock survivors return nearly to normal, while in the US they continue to die off faster than the rest of the population.
Professor Mark Bellis, who headed up the study, is hoping that these findings will make people sit up and realize that the rock-star mortality rate is a “public health issue,” a claim that was punctured by some former NME hack who claimed that the higher mortality rate was a good thing, given that “We have far too many middle-aged rock stars hanging around, clogging things up.” Classy! (If not kinda true–imagine how creative the music industry would have to get if it couldn’t rely on the dinosaur tours rolling around from town to town. But still, “clogging things up”?)
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