The 27 Club

FIFTEEN YEARS SINCE THE LAST NEW MEMBER

Fifteen years ago this week, Amy Winehouse died. Ten years ago, I was asked to make a film for Netflix about the 27 Club. To begin with I wasn’t too keen. Amy had become its latest recruit; it seemed like a myth in poor taste. But when I did some research, I found there was more to it than I’d thought.

When a human being reaches their mid-twenties, something miraculous happens. The frontal lobe ⏤ the unhurried, bureaucratic portion of the brain responsible for foresight, restraint, and the ability to say no ⏤ finally starts to click into place.

Until then, we live in a world of impulse, at the mercy of hormones. But once the frontal lobe turns itself on, we develop a sense of cause and effect ⏤ the thing that stops us from, say, quitting university to tour with a band called Ping Pong Buddha, or signing a record contract with a man in the pub who’s thinking of launching a start-up.

Ancient Rome, recognising this tendency to late maturity, made the age of majority 25. The Masai tribe in East Africa prefer 27. Only at that age can a man make major life decisions, such as marrying, or fathering a child, or perhaps going to the big city to try their luck in the music business. Western civilisation long ago ignored this wisdom and instead gave the record industry to teenagers.

Psychiatrists have spent years explaining that the adolescent brain is essentially an unfinished project, with the impulse-control department still under construction. Around the age when the brain finally develops a sense of consequence, there have been several rock stars who spun out of control. Though it’s often classed as mythology, these are the members of the 27 Club: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse.

The music business insists it doesn’t exploit the young, it merely supports them ⏤ preferably while they’re still pliant, with feet not yet firmly on the ground. Seymour Stein once told me he considered twenty-one the perfect signing age. “They’ve still got stars in their eyes, but they’re old enough to get into the club for their launch party.”

There’s an unspoken arithmetic at work. The industry’s main consumers are under twenty-five and want idols who are roughly their own age. So the system feeds on youth ⏤ not maliciously, just efficiently. Youth, for its part, offers itself willingly. Hormones are nature’s PR department. Every teenage musician believes they’ll be the exception; the one who survives the label, the drugs and the lifestyle.

It’s a mutually beneficial delusion. The record company gets its contract signed with enthusiasm and the artist gets a chance to realise their dreams. Everyone’s happy until the frontal lobe ruins the party.

Neurologically speaking, around the age of twenty-six or seven, the brain begins to join the dots. Those unpaid advances, unrecouped debts, bad managers and unwise tattoos – suddenly they acquire meaning. For the first time the artist can see cause and effect in the same frame. And it’s unsettling.

In the golden age of rock, people thought that to be properly authentic an artist should be one missed overdose away from transcendence. Rolling Stone called rock culture “a compulsion toward the poetically dangerous lifestyle.” Critic Lester Bangs described it as offering young people “a night they can pretend is the rest of their lives.” But from their mid-twenties onwards, the brain tends to notice that night leads to morning. And then it’s all downhill ⏤ you’re just one more boring adult.

Teenage expectation has always been the industry’s most renewable resource. At eighteen, you can be persuaded that signing away your publishing rights is a privilege ⏤ that a seven-year deal is a sign of the record company’s belief in you. I once argued about this with Maurice Oberstein, the famously cantankerous boss of CBS London in the 1980s. “It’s not exploitation,” he said. “It’s symbiosis. Young artists have optimism; we have paperwork.”

The best young artists operate on faith and adrenaline. They believe they’ll live forever; they think stardom is a human right. They can be idealists too. At least, they could be thirty years ago. Kurt Cobain said, “The duty of youth is to challenge corruption.” Meanwhile, even today, record companies still bank on them not reading a contract past the third paragraph.

Yet in its own strange way, the music industry is generous. Where else can a teenager with a laptop and a few dodgy lyrics persuade a multinational corporation to spend millions promoting their feelings?

If they survive it, by thirty-five, most artists are OK. Their frontal lobes are paid-up members of the cognitive guild; they hire accountants, move to Wales, and talk about sustainability. But twenty-five to thirty are dangerous years. An artist can suddenly wake up and find that life is less carefree than they’d thought.

For most, this collision of cause and effect will be nothing worse than the end of innocence. But as Amy Winehouse showed us ⏤ for the unfortunate few it can be fatal.

On the plus side, they get membership to one of music’s most exclusive clubs.

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