WELFARE CHECK DOWNSTAGE RIGHT – NO LONGER MUSIC’S SECRET

“OBVIOUSLY HE HAS ISSUES … Umm, he’s sick He needs help. So let’s be good people and motivate him to that.”

In the comments on a recent story that mentioned some seemingly inexplicable behaviour from a touring musician with a long history of inexplicable and sometimes quite objectionable behaviour alongside absolutely brilliant music, there were the usual bits of abuse and complaint and mockery. Tickets had been wasted, time had been lost, respect had been cast aside – people were not happy.

But among these angry posts were ones from people seeking understanding for what they saw as something more than bad behaviour and into the realms of bad mental health. Not just understanding but sympathy. “Give the guy a break he’s going through some tough emotional, psychological and physical health issues, walk a mile in another man’s shoes,” said one. “He is a troubled soul. He needs help. Those around him need to step up. Let’s be kind,” said another.

Now, none of us have any real idea of what if any questions there may be about this artist’s inner workings, and our opinions on it are worth next to bugger all. But what was interesting – and not only because this was happening in October, Mental Health Month in Australia – was that whereas once the post-gig debate might have just been “he is a shit” vs “you are a shit for questioning him”, now there was language and concepts being offered in territory that was a little more nuanced and a little more thoughtful, and yes, in its own way as the musings of non-professionals, possibly a little bit problematic.

I suspect psychotherapist Tamsin Embleton might see this fractious online debate as, overall, a positive. As the editor of and contributor to Touring And Mental Health: The Music Industry Manual – which has chapters from specialist professionals, and feedback sourced from interviews with prominent and not so prominent artists – and co-founder of the Music Industry Therapist Collective, Embleton is keen to see the music industry take mental health seriously, with learning and action after the many words.

“The way the industry treats mental health, I think it was a trend that had a lot of interest for a while, and I certainly benefited from a bit of that interest, but in terms of actually doing the deeper work to make the environment safer, they are not [as interested],” she says, from her home in the UK. “Ultimately the industry doesn’t really like to change unless it has to, until it’s forced to.”

Having a background as a tour manager (including for Anna Calvi on the road with Nick Cave’s roistering side project Grinderman), festival and venue booker, alongside her medical expertise, Embleton writes early in the manual that the list of things that can complicate regular lives and relationships are long and universal – money, distance, drug/alcohol, childrearing, sexual issues, monogamy, power/fame imbalance, burnout – but entertainment industry people tend to suffer “most or all of them”, often simultaneously, especially those on the road. And of course they are often inter-related.

So, is this industry intrinsically different?

“I think that there are a lot of unwritten rules in music that you have to navigate. It’s an unregulated industry, there is a lot of change, and most people have come into music without formal training. Certainly on the crew side of things,” Embleton says. ”Sometimes artists go through formal training, and now we have some music business courses, and it’s less the Wild West than it used to be, but there is high pressure and high competition. You can be celebrated by moment and dropped the next, so it’s high risk/high reward.

“And it also, culturally, has lots of problems with excess. But if you are looking at statistics comparing industries, it is often really high up there. The industries that have high rates of suicide, like perhaps farming, working construction, then it’s usually the music business and the arts.”

As well as the myth of the tortured artist, there is the similarly mythic exciting life of the touring musician and indeed anyone involved with the touring life. It’s like running away to the circus, like living the dream. Therefore, to suggest that maybe things are less than ideal, and maybe even damaging, is to undermine that dream, and many people with vested interests – audiences, media, management, and artists themselves – don’t like this at all.

“Because it’s such a fantasy for so many people, as artist and as crew members you are given the message that this is an extraordinary opportunity and you should be grateful, and people need you to be grateful because they fantasise about doing your job,” explains Embleton. “And they don’t want to hear you say ‘God, it’s so boring sometimes’ or the days are long’. It is framed as you are being ungrateful, rather than actually things can get to breaking point, and they do.

“I’ve worked with a number of artists who have had very serious mental health events on the road, and crewmembers, because we neglect to think about them, and their days are even longer.”

The crew days are longer, the work is more physically demanding, and they don’t get that rush of adulation the artist gets on stage to balance it. Something which is mentioned throughout Embleton’s book is this notion of everyone in the touring party being part of a family, or what some will pretend is family, but it is hardly equal. Tours are geared around the headliner being happy and comfortable and performing, but there has traditionally been a lot less attention paid to the ones to make it all comfortable and happy and possible to perform. That’s something Embleton seeks to redress.

"We are not saying don’t have fun, but we are saying just be aware." Psychotherapist Tasmin Embleton

“For crew they have high job insecurity, and there is this sense of I must carry on, I must endure, which I think people mistake for resilience. And then of course there are all these physical problems that can come later. Talk to any crewmember and they will know somebody who has suicided, people who have had heart attacks and heart problems on the road that can be related to chronic stress exposure essentially. So there is this sense of we are a family, in one way, but not in the way that you can actually share how you are really doing, because that is too vulnerable making, too threatening, maybe there is a cultural pressure to crack on and keep going and bury things.”

But how do you learn if no one is teaching you what can go wrong or providing the resources to deal with it when it happens? You don’t know you don’t know until the situation hits you and anyway, people like tour managers, crew chiefs and personal managers, whose job it is to look after their artists and material, will have particular skills but those skills aren’t necessarily replicated in other areas of their work or their life.

Managing logistics won’t prepare you for dealing with someone breaking down in front of you because they are missing their child or terrified of failure or unsure who they are when they are not on stage or tour bus.

“Or what to do if someone has a heart attack and then other members of the crew go into shock,” adds Embleton. “These things aren’t always thought about but it’s those people skills – we call them soft skills don’t we, but they are so valuable – often fall to production assistants, production coordinators, typically female, who will act as a kind of tour mum people go to. They are often very skilled in a lot of these counselling areas, maybe unofficially, and really what we are doing is trying to help them manage the load and realise where their boundaries are, where does professional help need to come in.”

Remember how we used to hear of artists needing a break because of “exhaustion” when what they meant was rehab or complete physical and mental collapse? Or when what we recognise now as neurodiversity was just dismissed, or celebrated as rock’n’roll weirdness? Remember when no one would have dared go backstage on show day to talk to a therapist brought in to help anyone who needed it, which is something the Music Industry Therapist Collective now does?

Clearly generationally, changes have been forced on the industry as people have different expectations and different language and different willingness to use that language. Not to mention the same thing that is driving change in climate-related business even if political dinosaurs resist, insurance companies who see the risks and the repercussions they, and we, will pay for. So even in an industry as loose, relatively speaking, as music those old standards are no longer acceptable?

“A little bit, yeah,” Embleton says. “They also have more of a language to talk about things, so they are able to address in process things in a different way. But sometimes I’m seeing a bit of a clash.”

Grinderman on stage; gentlemen off.

Is there a danger that we have swung too hard from euphemisms to a too-ready use of terms that might be quite specific and medically based, and from not talking about them to not doing anything but talk about them? And indeed, are both of those extremes simply a way of doing the same thing, avoiding actually dealing with the truth?

“Yes, and I think sometimes particularly for artists, they are encouraged to disclose mental health problems as if it’s a unique selling point. As if it’s a marketable quality. It means that things that are private and not fully processed and understood and worked out are suddenly thrust into the public domain where anyone can comment on them, where it will always live and stay, and I find that really problematic,” Embleton says.

“It’s part of a broader problem where artists are expected to be fully available. This isn’t about you as a performer or a creative but you have to disclose your personal life, your relationship problems, or whatever people want. It’s like feed the beast and I just don’t think that is healthy and quite often that can set the work back.”

Saying it isn’t solving it. Maybe there’s a manual to help with that.

“We have just been approached by an artist, and it’s really rare for an artist to say this, who said ‘we want to take care of the crew. We are recognising that what we are about to do is going to be a lot and we are going to put them through some stress so what can we do to make sure they are well supported?’,” Embleton says. “So we are going to go into rehearsals, we’ll do workshops, but that’s the artist recognising that they are an employer and they have a duty of care towards the crew.”

Maybe in passing, given her experience with Grinderman – these mature, responsible and most likely healthy grown-ups, now of a certain age – she must be grateful she got them like this and not in their early Bad Seeds or even Birthday Party years.

“Many of them don’t drink now. So yes, it was very civilised and we had lovely dinners and that sort of thing. And lots of stories of the wild old days. I think it would have been a different kettle of fish,” Embleton says, though she’s keen to kill the idea of the professional killjoy. “Some of the antics that happen on the road can be fun and I think that some of the pushback to what we do is people feeling like we are sanitising things and they already think things have had to go that way. You don’t have promoters turning up with a suit full of cash anymore; it’s not like the '80s with the coke room, but I think there is nostalgia for that.

“But this is the thing, we are not saying don’t have fun, but we are saying just be aware and here are the warning signs that this is happening so we can get people help if they needed. I am not telling people how to live or I’m not telling people what to do or not to do, but if you are going to indulge in certain ways this is the safety net you need to put around you, and this is the impact.”

Touring And Mental Health: The Music Industry Manual is out now through Omnibus Press or via https://store.musicindustrytherapists.com/. 20 per cent of the price goes to the War Child charity.