Exit Stage Left: The curious afterlife of pop stars

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A former primetime television personality, his outdated style has seen him relegated to the scrapheap. In the Kevin Rowland chapter, the author concludes with the fact that Dexys have "reworked" their Too-Rye-Ay album for its 40th Anniversary. In these interviews, they went really deep and they were quite existential and philosophical and I had gotten the sense that it was a subject that they had given an awful lot of private thought to.

If you've lived and loved pop since the 80's (Guilty, as charged, M'Lud) then the trials and tribulations of Terence Trent D'Arby, Suzanne Vega, Robbie Williams, Kevin Rowlands and a whole host of other talents (Don McLean was, apparently a very VERY angry younger man) on fame's downhill slope is for you. As Hardwick begins to unravel the mystery, he quickly comes to realise that Charlie Sparks’s death throws up more peculiar questions than answers.

From Paul from S Club 7 and Robbie Williams to Shaun Ryder and Tim Burgess and everyone in between, Duerden leaves no stone unturned in unearthing what happens when the lights go down on a career in pop music.

While this is not just quote after quote from his interviews, each chapter does use a mixture of quotes and paraphrasing to convey the story. Exit Stage Left: The Curious Afterlife of Pop Stars by Nick Duerden is an entertaining look at what happens to pop stars after the hits stop coming. I found that I knew or at least had heard of 80% of the musicians in the book, and the book introduced me to a few new acts (hello Tenpole Tudor!

At the same time, more could of been made of this source material by not only describing the fates of various musicians, but also with some deeper thematic analysis and reflection. If you’re a musician whose career is on the slide, the advice “Exit Stage Left” provides on how to survive such a downward trajectory could probably be summarised as: keep away from heroin, employ an accountant who isn’t going to screw you over and run off with your career earnings, and have the foresight to have got on the property ladder in the South-East of England by the mid-1990s. This book explores something I’ve always pondered about popular musicians: what happens to them when they’re not “hot” anymore? Frank TurnerFeaturing brand new interviews with the likes of: Bob Geldof, Shaun Ryder, Robbie Williams, Roisin Murphy, Stewart Copeland, Billy Bragg, Wendy James, Alex Kapranos, Joan Armatrading, Leo Sayer, Gary Lightbody, Lisa Maffia, Tim Booth, Bill Drummond, Rufus Wainwright, David Gray, and Justin Hawkins. My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Mobius Books, Hachette Book Groups for an advanced copy of this musical study on fame and its after effects.