In Payne: The Music Industry and Mental Health

Reflections on stardom, wanting, celebrity, and consumerism following the very sad death of singer Liam Payne

The very sad death of singer Liam Payne in October tragically illuminated the nature of the relationship between contemporary culture and mental wellbeing, and the importance of understanding social context in considering issues of individual mental distress.

As a number of commentators have suggested since his death, a damaging and often traumatising culture of fame, celebrity, and materialism drives the systemic prioritisation of wealth over concern for mental health in the industry, focusing on 'profits rather than people' as a former X Factor contestant put it, referring to music industry bosses. Payne himself was increasingly aware and vocal about the toxic nature of this culture and repeatedly spoke up about it. ‘There is no link between money and happiness’, he starkly declared in 2021. ‘It is a myth.’

What is needed in the light of his death, this piece suggests, is not simply better mental health support, or even new legislation to protect young people, desirable as both of those things are, but a much wider collective shift in our whole understanding of the underlying social and psychological drivers and determinants of both mental disorder and wellbeing.

Introduction: The Music Industry and Mental Health

The death of the singer Liam Payne last month, which attracted commentary and interest from around the world, has raised a number of disturbing questions about not only mental health and how we treat it in our society, but also the relationship between that society and mental health itself.

A number of commentators seemed to see both his untimely death, at the age of just 31, and the tragic manner of it - falling from a hotel balcony in Buenos Aires following reports of distressing and chaotic behaviour at the hotel - as somehow symbolic of a wider pattern of disturbance and dysfunction within the music industry. They point to the huge pressures and levels of anxiety and depression that so many musicians, and young people more generally, now face, and the lack of adequate support, or even understanding, of this among many professions and the wider public.

Some, like the former X Factor judge Sharon Osbourne, who worked closely with Payne and was therefore responsible in part for putting him forward into that industry, have observed that the whole industry failed him:

Liam, my heart aches. We all let you down. Where was this industry when you needed them? You were just a kid when you entered one of the toughest industries in the world. Who was in your corner? (‘Sharon Osbourne says music industry failed Liam Payne: ‘We all let you down’, Independent, 18.10.24)

Others in the so-called entertainment business are calling for new legislation to help prevent future instances of such a fate, recognising the systemic and institutional toxicity and pathology that young people have to face, and routinely encounter, in simply pursuing their dreams. ‘I’ve spoken for years about the exploitation and profiteering of young stars and the effects,’ remarked Rebecca Ferguson, a former X Factor runner-up, after Payne’s death; ‘many of us are still living with the aftermath and the PTSD’ (‘Rebecca Ferguson speaks out on “exploitation and profiteering of young stars” in Liam Payne tribute’, NME, 17.10.24).

And there was a whole slew of articles in the days following his death chronicling the multiple issues with mental health and addiction that Payne struggled with over the past decade – ever since, in turns out, the moment he was catapulted into fame and the coruscating heat of the ‘star maker machinery’, as Joni Mitchell aptly termed it, in 2010, at the age of just sixteen. The Telegraph led, on the day directly after his death, with ‘Partying, mental health and threatening legal troubles: Liam Payne’s final days before balcony fall’ (17.10.24), while the London Evening Standard focussed on ‘Liam Payne’s mental health struggles: His own comments on rehab, drugs and alcohol abuse’ (17.10.24). ‘Liam Payne's health battles revealed from struggles as a baby to difficulties with mental wellbeing’ were revealed by the Daily Mail on the same day, to which Metro added observations on ‘Liam Payne’s agoraphobia and mental health struggles after One Direction fame’ (17.10.24).

Yet nowhere in this flurry of sensational stories of drugs, alcohol, mental health struggles and celebrity, was much mention made of the culture and society that generated all of these things, made them easily available, offered them as solutions, or splashed their effects and excesses for profit over the same front covers.

Talk about Mental Health but Don’t Talk about the Social Context of Mental Health

The current popular emphasis on mental health is no doubt indicative in part of the new awareness around this subject, and the recent willingness of the media to explore the subject – how contemporary neoliberal society (including its own media) makes us sick, and seems to produce so much dysfunction and misery.

Liam Payne in 2014. Image: Wikimedia Commons

As Anna Leszkiewicz, the senior commissioning editor at the New Statesman, noted: ‘Liam Payne was dehumanised his entire life, by the music industry machine that made him famous, by tabloids, by social media, and even by his own fans; being idolised is just as depersonalising as being villainised.’ And at the end of her piece she strikingly and movingly confessed:

As someone who was complicit in every stage of the cycle that robbed Payne of his personhood – from teenage One Direction fan to journalist and morbidly curious onlooker – I felt sick reading the news of his death. How could we justify doing this to such young people – separating them from their families, their normality, and their sense of themselves – then laughing as they fumble their way through adulthood? How many victims does the pop music industry have to produce before something changes?’ (‘Liam Payne was a victim of the pop pin-up machine’, New Statesman, 17 October 2024).

Leszkiewicz at the New Statesman was almost unique amongst journalists in acknowledging their own role in this wider climate and culture, and its systemic and calculated dehumanisation of the subjects of its ‘news’.

Traditionally the discussion of how pathological our modern institutions have become, and the raft of mental distress and disorders that so many people are now consequently experiencing (the use of antidepressants doubled in the UK between 2205-15, and doubled again between 2015-2022 - to an astonishing 83.4m annual prescriptions), has not been an area which that society’s media especially wanted to consider or concentrate on, no doubt aware at some level of its own ‘complicity’, as Leszkiewicz acknowledges, in a relentless, lacerating, media tide of toxicity, shaming, greed, scandal, profiteering, excess, cruelty, misogyny, homophobia, and racism, that its pages both reported and promulgated.

Few legacy media outlets could resist not framing Payne’s death in its usual dehumanising, sensationalist, click-bait tropes and terms - luridly noting his misery, his drugs and alcohol use, his ‘mental health struggles’ (and they were always his struggles not society’s or theirs), illustrated with graphic pictures of drugs paraphernalia and smashed hotel bedrooms. They way they reported his death reflected and continued the way they reported his life: shallow, sensational, and utilitarian, a media angle exhibiting exactly the corrosive and dehumanising attitudes in fact that may have contributed to the difficulties of someone like Payne: a life seen primarily in terms of commodification, thoughtless objectification, and above all money-making – headline grabbing, eyeball catching, dopamine-driven click bait.

As his former partner Cheryl Tweedy was moved to write: ‘As I try to navigate this earth shattering event, and work through my own grief at this indescribably painful time, I'd like to kindly remind everyone that we have lost a human being. Liam was not only a pop star and celebrity, he was a son, a brother, an uncle, a dear friend and a father to our 7 year old son. A son that now has to face the reality of never seeing his father again’ (Mirror, 18.10.24).

An Abnormal Culture: How Society talks about its own sickness

The same deft institutional blindness and avoidance of the wider picture within which to locate Payne’s death, and indeed life, is apparent in the way the media has more generally found to finally discuss this problem: the tricky business of having to acknowledge the vast extent of mental distress under late capitalism and yet somehow distance itself from that sickness. As Gabor Maté compellingly suggests:

What we consider to be normal in this society is actually neither natural or healthy and in fact it’s a cause of much human pathology. And actually people’s pathologies - what we call abnormalities, whether it’s mental or physical illness - are actually normal responses to what is an abnormal culture.

‘What we call abnormalities are actually normal responses to what is an abnormal culture’ - Gabor Maté. Image: Wikimedia Commons

Maté is unusual in being one of the few leading figures in the contemporary mental health debate who is not afraid of pointing to the role of economics, and in particular consumer capitalism, in driving this catastrophic epidemic of pain:

Being left with an emptiness and insatiable craving creates addiction in the personal sense and capitalism in the social sense, and both these are taken to be coping mechanisms for the experience of trauma in a society that tells you that you’re not enough, that you’re not good enough, that you don’t look good enough, that you don’t have enough, that you don’t own enough, that you haven’t attained enough - creating this sense of emptiness is the fuel that runs the consumer society, where never is there enough, where you always have to have more and more, you have to attain more and more, obtain more and more.

So basically it’s a highly addictive culture that feeds off people’s addiction to drive its profits, and they do so quite deliberately.

But of course from the point of view of profit it works … as I say in the book [The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture, 2022], it’s not that they’re trying to kill you, they just don’t care if you die, because what really matters is profit. So this society runs on people’s sense of deficient emptiness, where more and more is what they think is needed to fill that hole inside themselves. (‘The Myth of Normal": Dr. Gabor Maté on Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture’, 2022)

‘You just wanted to be loved and to make people happy with your music’, Payne’s sister Ruth wrote in a moving post shortly after her brother’s death. ‘You never believed you were good enough’. This sense of never being good enough is exactly what Maté is pointing to, and what shows like the X Factor exploit and encourage so cleverly.

We shall return to both these important issues - the manufacture of ‘wants’ and artificial cravings in order to drive profits, and the wider ‘social cultural issues’ which are not being addressed in the present discussion of this mental health crisis. Liam Payne’s terribly sad and unnecessary death in 2024 was almost a literal acting out of Maté ‘s 2022 observations of how a mentally unbalanced and toxic culture ends up with children and young people ‘even trying to kill themselves’ (‘it’s not that they’re trying to kill you, they just don’t care if you die’) – but for now it’s important to consider why exactly we find it so hard, as a culture, to talk about, or to address, the underlying toxicity of who we have become.

Part of the way the media has found to handle this situation involves deftly admitting the issue of widespread mental distress and illness on the one hand whilst simultaneously obscuring and denying its actual drivers in society on the other, re-locating the crisis instead within the separate individuals themselves - a classic neoliberal strategy and belief, of course. The current discussion of ‘stigma’ is a striking instance of this.

The stigma around stigma

‘It's OK to have a bad day, Harry tells students’, the BBC reported in May 2024 (BBC, 10.5.24), covering the Duke of Sussex’s visit to children at a mental health summit in Nigeria. ‘The more you talk about it, the more you can kick it in the long grass’, he told the children. But it seems you have to talk about it in the right way – by accepting personal responsibility for it, through admitting that you’re having a ‘bad day’, and that it’s yours. The acceptance of this model – that mental health is like physical health, something that somehow just happens within your body, and can be fixed by the right combination of medicine, chemicals, therapy, and ‘expert’ intervention (or celebrities and millionaire philanthropists) – is key to this approach, and sometimes indeed, as with CBT, a condition of help being administered.

‘There is no space for an exploration of society or ideology in a CBT session,’ observes psychotherapist Malcolm Hanson, who was also a manager within the NHS from 2008-2017. ‘The CBT form of Socratic questioning coerces the client into accepting consensus because it limits the questioning to the basics of how a patient’s beliefs about anxiety and depression might be preventing the CBT from reducing symptoms’ (Hanson, 2018). The NHS’s preferred - indeed mandated - model of mental health support, IAPT (Improving Access to Psychological Therapy - now known as ‘The NHS Talking Therapies’), ‘educates the subject into seeing the problems as a matter of their subjective thought and behavior rather than as a result of the failures of the system itself. The antagonisms driving their upset remain concealed and once declared fit, they take their place back in the structure.’

The practical effect of these ideologies in state provisioned healthcare is that the individual is guided into overlooking the possibility that the causes of their distress might be rooted in the same system that is claiming ownership of that person’s wellbeing.

The CCGs [Clinical Commissioning Groups, aka ‘Primary Care Trusts’] are forced to collude in the deception because if they fail, they are punished by the withholding of funds from NHS England. (Hanson, 2018).

You can see the appeal of this approach to an ideological healthcare system that refuses to see itself as an ideology. And as Žižek’s definition of suggests, ‘an ideology of wellbeing encourages the distressed individual to believe that the social structure around them is not a factor to consider in the formulation of their problems and urges them to change their thinking rather than to critique their surroundings’ (ibid.).

It’s an approach that also characterises Oprah Winfrey's similarly toxic and vacuous brand of neoliberal self-help. As Nicole Aschoff observes, all such millionaire self-help gurus ‘promote market-based solutions to the problems of corporate power, technology, gender divides, environmental degradation, alienation and inequality’, with their persistent mantra of ‘external conditions don’t determine your life. You do. It’s all inside you, in your head, in your wishes and desires. Thoughts are destiny, so thinking positive thoughts will enable positive things to happen.’ (‘Oprah Winfrey: one of the world's best neoliberal capitalist thinkers’, The Guardian, 9.5.2015).

Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, with his brother Prince William, Duke of Cambridge and Prince of Wales, driving to work. Both have campaigned endlessly on the issue of mental health, including launching the campaign ‘Heads Together’ in 2016, whose aim was ‘to reduce stigma and encourage open conversations about mental health’ via ‘creating tools to help young people find mental health support online’, and using the hashtag ‘#OKtoSay’. In 2019 Harry and Meghan broke away from the Foundation, apparently due to internal disagreements, established their own new Foundation, the ‘Archewell Foundation’. Images: Wikimedia Commons

When bad things happen to us, so this magical thinking goes, it’s because we’re drawing them toward us with unhealthy thinking and behaviours. This is a fatuous and indeed harmful therapeutic approach which clinical psychologist David Smail (of whom more later) termed ‘magical voluntarism’:

Any guru, therapist, or celebrity who tells us we can do anything we want, overcome any obstacle, change ourselves from the inside out, is likely to get an attentive audience.

The great virtue of magical voluntarism is not its therapeutic value but its economic utility, as Mark Fisher has similarly noted. Defining it as ‘the belief that it is within every individual’s power to make themselves whatever they want to be’ he observes how this delusional belief system fits in perfectly with current neoliberal agendas and frameworks: ‘Magical voluntarism is the dominant ideology and unofficial religion of contemporary capitalist society … It’s a sign of both a successful neoliberal ideological project and the desperation of its victims,’ he notes - acutely seeing its parasitic relationship to the pervasive sense of helplessness and despair that so many young people are now experiencing.

Neoliberal politicians, and a media that shares their assumptions, relentlessly push the belief that everything, including the material universe itself, is subject to individual will. If you don’t succeed, it’s because you didn’t want it enough. Practically every form of reality TV – X Factor, Fairy Jobmother, Benefits Street – is governed by this idea.

But magical voluntarism is also an indication of desperation. The Deal or No Deal situation is a horrible example of a more general situation. We have as little control over our lives as contestants do over what is in that box. Magical voluntarism is the ideal ideological weapon: it offers an illusory solution to feelings of helplessness, and it reinforces that helplessness by distracting from structural causes of our diminished agency. (‘The Politics of Depression’, RS21, 27.4.2014)

His mention of X Factor in this context is eerie of course, if in another sense entirely obvious: television schedules by 2014 had already become saturated with this sort of ideological nonsense.

The alternative to this sort of magical, delusional thinking— pointing out that the world is unyielding to mere wishes, and must be worked upon in patient collaboration with others—is likely to get the thumbs down, notes Smail, ‘and proponents of “material realism” tend not to find themselves elevated to cult status at all quickly. For this is, in comparison, a somewhat bleak philosophy, recognising that even with blood, sweat, and tears a good outcome is not assured, and that damage once done may well be irreparable’ (Smail, in The Political Self, 2016).

The Political Self: Understanding the Social Context for Mental Illness (Karnac, 2016), containing David Smail’s chapter on ‘Understanding the social context of individual distress’

The X Factor, a fantasist and delusional spectacle which launched Payne onto the world and into the arms of the profiteering neoliberal music industry in 2010, is a striking example and manifestation of precisely this sort of ‘magical voluntarism’, with its ever-appealing mantra that the whole world is yielding to one person’s mere wishes. In reality, that world is driven by vast and very unmagical flows of entrenched power, hard economics, access to resources, and the organisational and financial capacity to control and manipulate both audiences and belief systems through the continuous manufacture of delusions which suggest the opposite.

‘How much more attractive,’ Smail continues, driving a clinical stake into the heart of this vampiric system of dream manufacture, ‘is the idea that a relatively brief association with a sorcerer, priest, astrologer, or therapist can heal the wounds of the past or unleash a golden future, than that the conditions of our existence are to a great extent the outcome of material forces far beyond our personal control, historically unchangeable, and with an uncertain future only amendable at best to the efforts of concerted, communal (political) effort’ (Smail, The Political Self, 2016).

The modern church of latter-day sorcerers and the golden gurus of transformational self-help wellbeing tend to be populated by billionaire philanthropists and former members of the aristocracy. ‘Oprah recognizes the pervasiveness of anxiety and alienation in our society’, notes sociologist Nicole Aschoff  in the Guardian. ‘But instead of examining the economic or political basis of these feelings, she advises us to turn our gaze inward and reconfigure ourselves to become more adaptable to the vagaries and stresses of the neoliberal moment’:

Oprah is appealing precisely because her stories hide the role of political, economic, and social structures. In doing so, they make the American Dream seem attainable. If we just fix ourselves, we can achieve our goals.

This is a fiction. The US, in a sample of 13 wealthy countries, ranks highest in inequality and lowest in intergenerational earnings mobility. Wealth isn’t earned fresh in each new generation by plucky go-getters. It is passed down, preserved, and expanded through generous tax laws and the assiduous transmission of social and cultural capital. (Aschoff, ‘Oprah Winfrey: one of the world's best neoliberal capitalist thinkers’, Guardian, 9.5.2015)

Oprah Winfrey giving neoliberalism the clap it so richly deserves.

Oprah Winfrey is an excellent example of Zizek’s concept of the function of ideology: according to Žižek (The Parallax View, 2006) ‘ideologies arise as part of an attempt by a social system to conceal its inherent antagonisms’ (Hanson, 2018).

Aschoff indeed observes that there is a storytelling elite who transmit a cultural message through media products such as the Oprah franchise, or the X Factor, which encourage people to change themselves to adapt to the world rather than change the conditions under which they live.

Oprah is one of a new group of elite storytellers who present practical solutions to society’s problems that can be found within the logic of existing profit-driven structures of production and consumption. (Guardian, 9.5.2015)

The idea that ‘telling yourself a different story’ is the solution to the systemic and structural problems that you might be faced with is not simply erroneous, suggests Smail, but psychotic:

This was the principal achievement of the founders of modern psychotherapy: to turn the relation of person to world inside out, such that the former becomes the creator of the latter. With many postmodernist approaches (e.g., ‘narrative therapy’) magical voluntarism reaches its apotheosis: the world is made of words, and if the story you find yourself in causes you distress, tell yourself another one. From any rational, scientific standpoint, this kind of view is completely incoherent—indeed it is psychotic. (The Political Self, 2016).

Why do so many television companies, so many news channels, so many corporate outlets, collude and collide in this deranged fantasy of what is actually driving ‘the pervasiveness of anxiety and alienation in our society’, or what its resolution might be?

Prince Harry’s and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s campaign for the removal of the ‘stigma’ of talking about mental health is largely a futile activity unless one also breaks down the stigma about what is actually driving mental distress. The stigma about not talking about that stigma is what we need to be talking about. And we know that one of the chief drivers of mental distress today is social inequality and the significant, glaring, disparities of economic wealth - drivers which are embodied spectacularly in the royal family itself, and yet they present themselves as the solutions rather than the aggravators of mental distress - compassionate listeners and benefactors to others’ stories of bad days, and as genuinely helping them with their particular, individual, socially isolated, inner struggles.

But as a recent Royal College of Psychiatrists​’ parliamentary report duly noted: ‘Inequality itself is a major determinant of mental illness: the greater the level of inequality, the worse the health outcomes. Children from the poorest households have a three-fold greater risk of mental ill health than children from the richest households’ (‘HC 1048-III Health Committee, Written evidence from the Royal College of Psychiatrists’, italics added). It’s not only the correlation between vastly disparate and unjust social inequality and mental ill health, bad though that is, it’s also the blocking up and diverting of necessary funds and access to resources that people desperately require to resolve or at last manage their wellbeing, and which this constant funnelling of wealth into private jets, polo horses, and the upkeep of palaces also necessitates.

‘Mental illness is largely caused by social crises’ reported the Telegraph strikingly in 2016, following research done by Peter Kinderman, Professor of Clinical Psychology, and Professor Richard Bentall at the University of Liverpool University: ‘It’s a tragedy actually’, Bentall observes. ‘The UK Medical Research Council is one of the biggest funders of medical research in the UK but if you look at the things that they fund, by far the majority are things like brain scanners or gene sequencing machines, almost none of it is going towards understanding psychological mechanisms or social circumstances by which these problems develop. It is impossible to get funding to look at these kind of things’ (‘Mental illness mostly caused by life events not genetics, argue psychologists’, Telegraph, 28.3.2016).

It seems like no one is interested in wanting to look at the actual drivers and determinants of the mental distress that so many people are suffering from today. And perhaps that word ‘interest’ contains the clue to all this - the key which unlocks the door of the stigma about talking about the stigma of what is actually causing so many mental disorders. As David Smail beautifully explains this manoeuvre, alluding equally to the bizarre ‘tell yourself a different story’ ideological mantras that hallmark Oprah and Harry, and the weird ideological narratives the NHS and UK Medical Research Council tell themselves in order to finance ideological rather than therapeutic systems and highly expensive genetic sequencing machines to find the social determinants of our distress and systemic unhappiness:

That such a preposterous notion [as ‘narrative therapy’, or an over-internalised model of psychotherapy] could be seriously put forward and maintained by people considered to be social scientists is inexplicable unless one introduces into the explanatory framework the notion of interest.

In other words, it cannot be that the proposition in question is true; it can only be that it is useful, i.e., that it suits the interests both of those who assert it and those who assent to it. As long as consideration of interest is repressed we are likely to remain utterly mystified about the causes and cures of our psychological ills, trying instead to find our way in a make-believe world while looking for guidance principally to the adepts of magical voluntarism. (Smail, in The Political Self, 2016).

Of course the whole entertainment industry might in a sense be seen as the institutionalisation, corporatisation, and formalisation of ‘a make-believe world’, a world of mass delusion and fantasy, and one that cynically and relentlessly transforms the young dreams and hopes of musicians such as Liam Payne into the psychotic landscape of a profit-driven but profit-concealed ‘success’.

The inevitable casualties of this concealment, common to so many industries, are then told to talk about how unhappy they are, post updates on it on Instagram and TikTok, or are put onto brief CBT courses or the cheap, digital ‘mental health support online’ platforms advocated by Harry and Meghan - the very neoliberal technological machinery, in other words, that is driving the distress. It’s rather like that image in Pink Floyd’s The Wall of the meat grinder, feeding the meat back into itself.

And it’s really that turn towards internalising this subject that was such a clever move within our institutions, allowing them to listen and support others without really looking into their own role in generating mass dysfunction - an approach slowly worked out over the last decade as this debate has grown in enormity and unavoidability. How to find a way to talk about mental health without actually talking about the drivers and causes of mental health. (One big clue to recognising the presence of this perverse ideological manoeuvre in current debates is to examine whether the speakers are including themselves or their profession in their discussion - as Anna Leszkiewicz at the New Statesman did so movingly and powerfully in relation to Payne’s death - as representatives of the wider system of social inequality, image, status, wanting, wealth and the denial and repression of the social. Because if they’re not, then they’re probably examples of the very social conditions and contexts that actually drive the distress they say they seek to alleviate and address.)

The therapy industry is itself not immune from this critique, as a number of therapists and clinical psychologists have themselves pointed out (e.g., Andrew Samuels, Nick Totton, David Smail, Joel Novel, James Hillman, Gabor Maté etc). And as cultural and social historian Frank Furedi suggests, the psychotherapy profession is actually particularly susceptible and serviceable to current economic and political interests, both by ‘distracting people from engaging with the wider social issues in favour of an inward turn to the self’, and also by ‘cultivating a sense of vulnerability, powerlessness and dependence’, through its promotion of the patient as a traumatised ‘victim’, or even as a ‘child’ (Furedi, Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age, 2004).

To encourage young people to internalise their social distress, present themselves as ‘vulnerable’ and a victim, confess their mental struggle sins, and accept the model for both diagnosis and treatment, has become the standard neoliberal framework now with which to view instances of personal distress. All of these developments and internalisations, and indeed their lack of success in really addressing the actual underlying causes of their unhappiness, are sadly also seen in the case of Liam Payne. Payne was an intelligent and eloquent exponent of both sides of this magic: from his early advocation and desperate need to believe in the X Factor mantra of highly personalised want, to the equally personalised and psychologised belief that the problems and challenges that he subsequently faced as a result of his immersion in the fame machine, were also his own. But, as we’ll now see, the mental dysfunction actually lay in a toxic and exploitative music industry itself, not him.

Liam Payne in the Music Industry

This sort of internalised and introjected approach of locating issues of distress and mental illness within oneself is something Liam Payne himself was both eloquent and concerned about, illustrating how deeply and how widespread these views regarding mental health and its causes have become. ‘I never want to come on these things and whine about stuff’, he diffidently told a 2021 podcast, ‘I made my  own choices in life, you know - being an alcoholic, doing whatever else - they were my choice’.

The mantras of storytelling, talking openly, addressing stigmas, accepting one is struggling and having ‘a bad day’, are something, sadly, that didn’t seem to help him very much when it came to it. In the same 2021 podcast he strikingly acknowledged that he’d experienced severe suicidal thoughts, but tellingly added: ‘there is some stuff that I have definitely never, never spoken about. It was really, really, really severe’ (‘Liam Payne Opens Up About His Darkest Moments, Failed Relationships & Entrepreneurship!’,  The Diary Of A CEO podcast, 2021).

This difficulty of speaking about actual, deep, depression is perhaps in keeping with the dreadful, debilitating, and isolating nature of the condition – but it is also in a sense surprising given the high profile that ‘talking about mental health’ has seemed to have had in the last decade, at least in the media and amongst influencers and wealthy philanthropists. One wonders how much of this ‘breaking down of stigma’ is actually getting though, or helping, away from the pages of the media and fund-raising events. And whether the suppression of an understanding of the social drivers and determinants of having ‘a bad day’ thereby actually contribute further to and amplify even more the dysfunction and disorders, and sense of personal failure, rather than alleviating them.

The multiple impacts of being in a highly demanding and exploitative music industry predicated on pleasing others, achieving sales, and constant self-image preoccupations, was recast by him as personal failings:

I just wasn't giving a very good version of me anymore, that I didn't appreciate and I didn't like being. I was worried how far my rock bottom was going to be … Where's rock bottom for me? I mean, I don’t even know if I’ve hit it yet, you know?… And you would never have seen it. I'm very good at hiding it. No one would ever have seen it ... I just needed to take a little bit of time out for myself, actually, because I kind of became somebody who I didn't really recognize anymore. (ibid.)

'They were cash cows, pure and simple’, a music industry source noted rather more directly, speaking earlier this year about Simon Cowell’s treatment of One Direction. ‘There seemed little care for the band's mental health though, and how it would affect them in the future’ (Music Times, 3.7.2024).

Putting the cash-cow into Cow-ell. ‘Simon was the boss, he wanted them out there. He wanted them performing. They were cash cows, pure and simple. There seemed little care for the band's mental health though, and how it would affect them in the future’ (Music Times)

Many of Liam Payne’s own difficulties seemed to originate or get amplified and hugely exasperated by his working conditions, for example, as indeed they are for so many other people. One Direction’s touring schedule was undoubtedly punishing, as well as isolating: the band were required to perform an average of one concert every two days during their 2013 tour, fulfilling 124 dates between February and November. Payne later connected this period as the start of his addictions, especially to alcohol, as a symptom or expression of the abnormal working environment they were suddenly in. ‘When we were in the band, the best way to secure us — because of how big it got — was just lock us in our rooms. And of course, what's in the room? Mini bar,’ he said during the podcast interview in 2021 (‘The Diary Of A CEO’).

One Direction’s management sought to ‘manage’ them by locking them into their hotel rooms, an unusual and questionable working practice in itself, where the only escape was via the mini bar, as Payne notes. The prospect of the enormous profits to be made by Sony, Syco, and Modest! (their record companies and management team) appeared to trump any sane perspective of how young human beings should be treated, instead seeming to herd them like cattle into a series of small cages and confined spaces, where not surprisingly self-destructive and addictive behaviour and patterns started to emerge, as Payne himself notes.

And it doesn’t perhaps particularly matter if your production line is in a factory or part of a record label rota, you’re still ultimately a product in this system, a replaceable ‘commodity’, as Payne’s co-X Factor participant Katie Waissel angrily noted after his death. ‘This industry has treated talent like commodities’, she observed, name-checking Simon Cowell and accusing music bosses more generally of focusing on 'profits rather than people': ‘There are those who had a responsibility to provide the care and support necessary for the well-being of young artists,’ she said, ‘but too often, the focus remained on profits rather than the people … and the negligence of duty of care has once again led to a heart-wrenching loss’ (Daily Mail, 17.10.2024). ‘His tragic passing not only leaves an irreplaceable void in the hearts of those who loved him but also serves as a painful reminder of the systemic neglect that persists in the industry’ (The Independent, 19.10.2024).

Understandably perhaps, given the culture that he was in, Payne tended to internalise and personalise this neglect and toxic institutional treatment. ‘I was [drunk] quite a lot of the time,’ he confessed to Men’s Health Australia in 2019, ‘because there was no other way to get your head around what was going on … I kind of became somebody who I didn't really recognize anymore’. And he talked repeatedly of his increasing agoraphobia over this decade (‘I would never leave the house’), his loneliness, social anxiety, stress, depression, addiction, mania, and at the far end of his mental health challenges, even ‘suicidal ideation’ - which had been, he said at times ’severe’ (bid.). It’s not quite the picture you expect to emerge from someone who seemed, as the cliché of fame and external success goes, to have had everything – and not the picture which I’m sure the young, 14-year old Liam Payne would have expected to emerge when he first auditioned for a television singing contest, as the solution to what he was looking for, to his sense that he was never, as his sister sadly remarked, ‘good enough’.

The Social Context for Mental Distress

An alternative approach to talking about mental distress, not in terms of ‘bad days’ or simple personal responsibility for one’s anxiety and depression, has been pioneered by the appropriately-named Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF), which shifts the question from 'what is wrong with you?' (the default framework of the DSM - the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, widely considered to be the bible for understanding and diagnosing mental illness) to 'what has happened to you?'.

By doing so it implicitly rejects the medical, pharmaceutical-centred, process of diagnosing 'disorders' in favour of a more social awareness of the role of power dynamics and systems in shaping who we are. As clinical psychologist Lucy Johnstone, one of its founders, notes:

To put it at its briefest, we’re evidencing, we hope, the idea that peoples’ distress is understandable in context, but we wanted to think about context in its broadest form.

One of the things we wanted to do was to really make very clear the link between personal distress and social context, social inequality, and social injustices. In other words, to put power on the map. Power is not only missing from psychiatric thinking, but it’s also missing from a lot of psychological thinking, and it’s missing from much psychotherapeutic thinking. (‘The Creation of a Conceptual Alternative to the DSM: An Interview with Dr. Lucy Johnstone’, Mad in America, 2019).

In Britain, the usual first port of call for anyone experiencing such ‘personal distress’, as we’ve even, is CBT (‘Cognitive Behavioural Therapy’ - an oxymoronic phrase which, as Smail notes, in ‘combining the “scientific rigour” of behavourism with the mentalism of, essentially, popular psychology, CBT is par excellence the product of professional interest’). And as psychotherapist Farhad Dalal argues in his illuminating critique of CBT, through its various ideological formulations ‘human distress is conceptualized as illness, through a CBT framework and, as such, the same cultural policies that contribute to distress are the ones that offer CBT as a solution. The fact is, CBT’s narrative about itself is a political narrative that masquerades as a scientific one’ (Dalal, CBT: The Cognitive Behavioural Tsunami: Politics, Power and the Corruptions of Science, 2018).

Dalal's thesis is also disturbing because it suggests how some of the current mental heath ‘awareness’ debates and campaigns are directly linked to this regressive, neoliberal, ideological platform: get some celebrity to break the ‘stigma’ about you admitting that you have a problem, and that you are unproductive (aka ‘distressed’ or ‘depressed’), and you can then be ‘treated’ by the system that is distressing you.

‘The central contention here is that, with perhaps the expert help of your therapist or counsellor, you can change the world you are in the last analysis responsible for, so that it no longer causes you distress’, observes Smail. ‘It is not that “selves” cannot or do not change’, he clarifies, ‘it is simply that significant change comes about as the result of shifts in the pattern of environmental influence, not because of the individual’s personal wishes or efforts. The notion of “responsibility” lies at the heart of what one might well call our suppression of the social’:

Just look at the politician who is voted from power or the pop star who falls out of the charts—victims of instant ordinariness! Here, before our very eyes, we observe what happens when social power ceases to flow through the embodied locus which constitutes our individuality.

In fact, as the cynical manipulators of the popular culture industries well recognise, the ‘unique star’ can be elevated from a very wide range of ordinary people, but, having been selected, it takes a rare and exceptionally balanced head for the manufactured celebrity not to believe in his or her own image. (The Political Self, 2016).

As Smail’s prescient comments about the implications of this for ‘the pop star who falls out of the charts’ suggest, this denial of the social - our systemic ‘suppression of the social’ - can have very tragic consequences, especially in the context of ‘the cynical manipulators of the popular culture industries’ that Smail draws out attention to, through their callous and deceptive manufacturing of the next ‘unique star’. The often ‘severe’ mental health struggles and issues that Payne believed were due to a personal inability to manage post-1D fame and adulation seem to be less personal failings than necessary symptoms and attributes of a predatory economic and cultural system which no longer had much use for it previous iteration. Power flow had moved on, as Smail infers, to its new incarnation (its new ‘embodied locus’), in a system predicated on disposability, use extraction, and exploitation. Seeing it as a psychological issue is in some sense a ‘category error’.

Popular psychology, orthodox psychotherapy, social scientists, narrative therapists, the UK Medical Research Council, the NHS-dominated CBT programs, the media, billionaire philanthropists and royal elites, all collude in this process and practice, consciously or unconsciously, of concealment and distraction. As the death of Liam Payne surely suggests, it’s time it should stop.

In Payne: The Story of My Life

One of One Direction’s most plaintive (and successful) songs was called ‘Story of My Life’ (2013), with its poignant, almost hopeless reiteration of ‘The story of, the story of’,’ - rather like Blake’s repeated use of the ‘I want, I want’ refrain that we’ll consider shortly. The words accompany the admission in the first line that ‘written in these walls are the stories that I can't explain’. All too often, the song seems to suggest, the stories live us, rather than vice versa … and sadly again in the case of Liam Payne, the familiar old story of rock ‘n’ roll - of apparent fame, status, wealth, and popular adulation leaving only a bigger hole than the one they were expected to fill and alleviate - seems a similar re-telling.

Bowie had already hauntingly sang of this repetitive aspect of the music industry as early as 1971 in his song ‘Life on Mars’, chronically the dreams of similar young lives trapped in an endless cycle of escapism, fantasy, delusion and ‘best selling shows’.

‘Fame - bully for you, chilly for me’. Image: Wikimedia Commons

As I suggested in my earlier piece exploring Bowie’s complex and highly ambiguous (but always self-aware) relationship with stardom and the machinations of the music industry, it’s precisely the mass social alienation (‘now she walks through her sunken dream’) that drives the industry - both the desperate hunger of the fans for the ‘star’, and of the star for the adulation of the ‘fans’. But it’s essentially illusory, Bowie observes. It is the absence of meaningful identity, relationships, futures, or social recognition, coupled with a sense of powerlessness and helplessness to alter the realities of one’s own life (what Smail terms ‘material realism’), which drive the entertainment industry, an industry fabricated on fantasy, and all the more addictive for that reason - for never being able to quite fulfil it’s own longings, but leaving people instead ‘hooked to the silver screen’:

The second verse focuses in particular on how media-driven and media-saturated America has become – people desperate for fame, for the latest Lennon records, for Mickey Mouse clubs … but he also draws our attention to other more everyday forms of junkie escapism: holidays in Ibiza, even in the Norfolk Broads – the whole middle-class dream of ‘getting away’ from it. 

And like a film, he notices, this process happens again and again and again and again. Ironically, the escapist characters that Bowie himself adopted both to inhabit and satirise this trend would themselves become simply another part in this media production line – elevated into a ‘star’, idolised for a while as useful distraction for the masses, inevitably imploding with excess and exhaustion, former star’s death, mass grief and posthumous resurrection, another star ‘rises’ … As he notes, ‘It’s about to be writ again.’ (Tweedy, ‘David Bowie: Alienation and Stardom’, 2016).

In this sunken dream, all figures are trapped in a form of repetitive compulsion, an addictive cycle (because something is not being addressed, so it gets acted out instead, again and again) - and one which is every bit as real and addictive as are the chemical substances that those seeking ways out of the dream are so often drawn or driven to - as was, very sadly, Liam Payne himself. ‘It seems to me that when I die, These words will be written on my stone’, Liam intensely sings at the end of the first verse of ‘Story of My Life’.  It’s a sense that the story will keep being replayed in a life, no matter what you do.

Part of the tragedy is precisely that we’ve heard this story before. The story that what we really want is to be famous, and rich, and the centre of attention; and the equally familiar story which accompanies this: that fame and fortune do not bring us the things we think they will.

And as for fortune, and as for fame
I never invited them in
Though it seemed to the world they were all I desired
They are illusions, they're not the solutions they promised to be …

(‘Don't Cry for Me Argentina’, 1976)

In the end, the solutions of such a fantasy-saturated system all turn out to be illusions.

Hopefully, young people are becoming increasingly aware of this ‘shadow’ side to the ‘dream’ that the system offers them. The very public, and eloquent, testaments of such figures as George Michael, David Bowie, Russell Brand, Jim Carrey and others will help draw attention to the reality of the con, exposing the dreadful hollowness of the ideology of commercial and material success that this empty, sick society dangles before us as the panacea for the emptiness it itself instils, as the ultimate (and often the only) way out of a call-centre or factory future.

‘For me,’ remarked Russell Brand, recollecting what first propelled him into the entertainment world, ‘fame was the answer’:

Speaking personally, the reason why I wanted to be famous was because I felt insufficient and inadequate as I was … For me [fame] was the answer, it was the answer to the feeling of inadequacy, it was the answer that my culture offered me, that’s what it offers you, that’s what it offers all of us … and the magnetism of our culture is that, if you come from where I come from - Grays, Essex - … if you don’t get yourself some power you’re going to get crushed - you’re going to a factory or a call centre … that’s’ what life has in store for you. (‘Russell Brand On Materialism and Fame’, 2023, italics added)

‘Fame’, he also acutely observed, ‘mimics deeper forms of greatness.’ That is to say, these are all ersatz - fake - versions of something that can really help and heal us - and it’s the job of contemporary (materialistic, neoliberal) society to prevent us from realising that - by offering us record contracts with Simon Cowell instead.

Russell Brand is a particularly interesting figure in this debate, because of the radical nature of his arc - from an ardent devotee of fame and fortune and everything our society tells us will make us happy if we can only achieve it - to an equally ardent advocate for the rejection of that entrapping fiction. He has talked frequently about the dreadful hollowness that lies at the stagnant heart of Hollywood, and the entertainment business more generally - and how the experience of finally gaining the things that his society told him would make him happy, made him the reverse, turned to ashes in his mouth. The idea that money, status, fame, can bring us what we lack, and indeed the preceding ideology that underwrites even that – which is that we are wanting beings, ‘inadequate’, and that consumer materialism is the solution to those wants - has come under much closer scrutiny in the last decade as the catastrophic consequences of that lie have become more evident.

Figure after figure - those who have actually gone through this process - have commented that not only did they did not find what they wanted at the end of this delusional rainbow, but that the things promised and offered - status, money, fame - delivered the exact opposite of what they promised, generating even greater wants, further addictions, bigger holes, larger voids, vaster precipices off which to drop. ‘I wish people could realise all their dreams and wealth and fame’, remarked Jim Carry, ‘so that they could see that it is not where you are going to find your sense of completion’. ‘It’s not what you have that makes you a star’, observed George Michael, looking around him, ‘it’s what you don’t have.’ And now, even more directly and poignantly, ‘There is no link between money and happiness. It is a myth’ - Liam Payne.

Payne’s growing realising of the absence of any real connection ‘between money and happiness’ – a key driver and ideological assumption of the X Factor and wider celebrity mythos – reflects a broader awakening in our culture I think, of what might euphemistically be called ‘the price of fame’, or more specifically the pathological, delusory and deceitful nature of one of our main cultural narratives. By now we can all surely see what the golden calf of this sort of phoney, plastic culture has done to those who seek to ride it: Amy Winehouse, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Whitney Houston, Liam Payne … and always about to be writ again. Because it’s systemic - structural - not personal.

One Less Star in the Atmosphere

The reiterative nature of the ‘always about to be writ again’ structure points to the essentially addictive aspect of it, for like all addictions we’ve been here before. ‘Change that channel that could have been me’, George Michael hauntingly sang in ‘White Light’ (2012), a testament to his own near-death experience in a hotel room the year before, and referencing the recent death of Whitney Houston, coming shortly after the deaths of Amy Winehouse and Michael Jackson in the preceding two years. All were in the music industry, all were the most ‘successful’ of their profession, and all were found dead with large amounts of drugs circulating in their bodies (for Jackson, lorazepam; for Houston cocaine, diphenhydramine, alprazolam, cannabis, and cyclobenzaprine; alcohol poisoning for Winehouse). 

And now Liam Payne. According to a toxicology report released to ABC News, traces of cocaine, benzodiazepine and crack were all found in his body, as well as possible signs of so-called ‘pink cocaine’, a drug cocktail that typically includes MDMA, ketamine (the drug that of course killed Matthew Perry the year before; ketamine is a dissociative anaesthetic), and meth (ABC News, 21.10.24). The police also found quantities of the singer's own medications in the hotel room, which included clonazepam - a powerful drug used to control panic attacks and also used to help control epilepsy and involuntary muscle spasms (‘Liam Payne's chaotic hotel room’, Daily Mail, 18.10.24), suggesting the depth and range of disturbance and pain that might have been involved here.

Drugs and alcohol have of course been a staple part of the music industry for decades, almost without question, in order presumably to make it bearable. They also seem to have been present in Payne’s system almost from day one of his fame. In July 2023 he publicly announced that he'd spent 100 days in a rehab facility in Louisiana for help with alcoholism, having previously explained that he'd used alcohol to cope with the massive success of One Direction.

‘When we were in the band, the best way to secure us — because of how big it got — was just lock us in our rooms. And of course, what's in the room? Mini bar,’ he said during a podcast interview in 2021. ‘So at a certain point, I thought, “Well I'm gonna have a party for one.” And that just seemed to carry on throughout many years of my life.’  (‘The Diary Of A CEO’ podcast, 2021). A party for one: probably not the dream he had in mind when he first auditioned for the X Factor aged 14, and quite a revealing indictment of what the industry actually delivers - the reality rather than the press releases, or the opening credits to that particular show. Shortly before his death, a hotel worker made a call to police saying that a guest was ‘breaking everything in his room’, and appeared to be ‘on drugs and alcohol’ (The Independent, 17.10.24). They stayed with him to the end, when few others did.

In the same 2021 podcast he confided that during the early days of One Direction he ‘didn't like myself very much’ and that life with the band was filled with ‘booze and pills’, as well as ‘moments of suicidal ideation’, referring to parts of the experience with the group as ‘toxic’. ‘The day the band ended, I was like, “Thank the Lord”,’ Payne said. ‘I know a lot of people are going to be mad at me for saying that, but I needed to stop or it would kill me.’

There's times where that level of loneliness and people getting into you every day every so often ... it's like, 'When will this end?'... that's almost nearly killed me a couple of times. I've been in a bad place, it's definitely been on the menu a couple of times in my life. (Sky News interview, 2019)

Suicidal ideation, a party for one, ‘it would kill me’ … it wasn't as if he didn’t leave clues, or explicit expressions of the submerged rage and despair that the dream had turned into. Are we so inured - so used to thinking of our lives, our industries, as being potentially suicidal - that such statements go largely unnoticed and un-acted upon?

And the hotel room itself is part of this landscape of hopelessness and isolation, as much as the Mini bar it contains and the deracinated world it represents: the anonymity, the soullessness, the absence of real attachments or relationships, the easy supply of drugs, luxuries, and other available services - it’s embodiment of the whole neoliberal lifestyle of everything on-demand but none of it somehow satisfying.

In fact it’s profoundly draining, depleting, and damaging, especially if you’re a young person ‘locked’ into a hotel room by your management team. ‘It’s tough touring’, Payne told the 2021 podcast. ‘There’s parts of it that really really fucked me up’. When asked ‘what fucked you up about touring?’ he shot back: ‘lonely hotel dreams, man - getting locked in that room is not fun’. George Michael similarly confessed that if he had to go through another hotel-based tour like the one he did to promote Faith in 1988, he’d go mad. ‘I hate touring.’ he told Blitz starkly that year. ‘I still have one foot in real life and I know that if I take this to another level I’ll lose my grip on that. I’ve had to fight very hard to keep what I have at home … Even now it’s pretty close to the point of no return … Touring is that scary glimpse, yeah.’

It’s why they called the song ‘Hotel California’, of course. As Don Henley, one of its writers, remarked: ‘It's not really about California; it's about America. It's about the dark underbelly of the American dream. It's about excess, it's about narcissism. It's about the music business’ (‘Now it's the Eagles vs. Hotel California in a federal court’, The Washington Post, 3.5.2017). As Rebecca Ferguson, another X Factor finalist, observed in her perceptive indictment of the industry following Paynes death: ‘It’s always a hotel room!’ How many musicians and rock stars have died or committed suicide in these boxes of isolation? Michael Hutchence committed suicide in a Sydney hotel room in 1997, Whitney Houston was found unconscious in Suite 434 at the Beverly Hilton, submerged in the bathtub. And now Liam Payne, in the Casa Sur Hotel in remote Buenos Aires.

Hotel Motel makes it clear
One more voice we will never hear again
But maybe he just wanted to be free

(‘White Light’, George Michael, 2012)

Perhaps smashing the hell out of the hotel room of the Casa Sur in Buenos Aires was oddly rational – a last desperate attempt by his unconscious to free himself from the ghastly gilded cage that had imprisoned Payne, with all its amusements and mini bars, and cocaine on demand, for the last 15 years. Staff at the hotel reported an explosion of apparently ‘aggressive’ behaviour shortly before Payne’s death, together with smashed laptops and TV screens – the very symbols of the addiction with image, fame, and media communication that had defined and fuelled his young life, and led him there (Daily Mail, 17.10.24). The Mail titled their piece ‘Inside tragic Liam Payne's hotel room: A smashed TV, white powder and aluminium foil are seen in photos published by Argentinian media of trashed suite after he fell to his death’, but perhaps what’s truly tragic is the Mail’s own desperate journalism, it’s text splashed with lurid photos of the supposedly ‘smashed up’ room. Do they really care about the hotel room or its occupant?

Surely this litany of misery - the endless trail of suicides, drug overdoses, smashed hotel rooms - all suggests that there is something deeply wrong with an industry that cannot survive without enormous and ubiquitous quantities of drugs, antidepressants, dissociative anaesthetics, anti-panic drugs, social anxiety medication, and a constant stream of uppers and downers - and of course fixers and drug dealers to supply them (a side industry within the industry) - to keep it going. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the path to fame seems filled with rock ’n’ roll suicides - a yellow brick road that turns into a long line, a very long line, of those eager wannabes and hopefuls who didn’t quite make it to the great and powerful Oz that they’d been promised at the beginning of their X Factor ‘journey’.

The Nature of the Music Industry

‘It’s a death cult’, Bruce Springsteen succinctly observed, speaking about the music industry in the week following Payne’s death. ‘That’s not an unusual thing in my business,’ he added. ‘It’s a normal thing. It’s a business that puts enormous pressures on young people. Young people don’t have the inner facility or the inner self yet to be able to protect themselves from a lot of the things that come with success and fame. So they get lost in a lot of the difficult and often pain-inducing [things] … whether it’s drugs or alcohol to take some of that pressure off. I understand that very well,’ he said. ‘I mean, I’ve had my own wrestling with different things’ (The Telegraph, 25.10.24). ‘It’s that old story’, he added. ‘Dying young – good for the record company, but what’s in it for you?’ (ibid).

It does seem an industry peculiarly marked by such ‘wrestlings’, ‘enormous pressures’, and indeed ‘death’. Springsteen earlier revealed his own ‘big black sea’ of depression in his 2016 autobiography Born to Run, and there are numerous other instances, as musicians increasingly confide their precarious mental health states. Brian May has talked openly about his experiences of depression, admitting that at times he experienced suicidal thoughts, that he just ‘didn’t want to live’; in 2017 Sinead O’Connor opened up about her devastating experiences with mental illness. ‘Mental illness is a bit like drugs. It doesn’t give a s–t who you are’, she observed. Lewis Capaldi recently announced he needed ‘a mental health break’ after playing Glastonbury last year, saying that his mental health issues were a ‘direct symptom’ of his job; Britney Spears, Justin Bieber, Adam Ant, Lady Gaga, Ed Sheeran, and many others have all talked about their mental health challenges and how they relate to their industry.

This relationship seems to be born out by the statistics. According to a report in the Guardian last year, ‘nearly a third of professional UK musicians report poor mental wellbeing’ (Guardian, 23.11.24); other recent research notes that those working in the music industry are more prone to mental health problems ‘and are up to three times more likely to suffer from clinical depression’ (‘The Music Industry’s Growing Mental Health Crisis’, ClashMusic, 10.10.23); a 2023 study by Swedish platform Record Union highlighted that 73% of independent musicians struggle with mental illness, which rises to 80% when considering only those between the ages of 18-25 (‘Mental Health Support for Musicians’, Musicians Union, 3.10.23). According to a study of musicians done by the University of Westminster and MusicTank, 68.5% said they’d experienced depression, and 71.1% said they’d experienced severe anxiety or panic attacks (‘The Music Industry Has a Mental Health Problem’, Backstage Pass, 2019). Joe Hastings, head of Music Minds Matter, reported a 200% increase in those seeking support over the past two years (ClashMusic, 10.10.23).

Being in pain seems to be a fairly standard aspect of life in the entertainment industry. ‘I still had my demons at 31,’ the singer Robbie Williams declared - Payne's age when he died. ‘I relapsed. I was in pain. I was in pain because I relapsed. I relapsed because of a multitude of painful reasons. I remember Heath Ledger passing and thinking “I'm next”. By the grace of God and/or dumb luck I'm still here’ (The Guardian, 18.10.24). His colleague Guy Chambers, who wrote many of his hits, has recently argued that under-18s should not be able to join pop bands, having seen what happened to Payne and Williams and to so many other young musicians in the industry. ‘I would suggest that people should not be in a boyband until they are 18, and the industry should stick to that, too’ (‘Don’t let under-18s join pop bands, says leading songwriter after Liam Payne’s death’, Guardian, 20.10.24).

‘Will we one day look back on this era of teen pop stars, child actors and tiny influencers as on some unfathomable age of barbarism, and wonder what on earth we were thinking?’ wondered Martha Gill in the Guardian (19.10.24), evoking an image of today’s teen or ‘tween’-exploited musicians as being in some senses the modern version of the socially accepted chimney sweeps of the Industrial Revolution, now sent up the blackening chimneys of Sony and Syco without adequate protection, legal advice, training or support, where they either get stuck and die or spend their lives trying get out of them to the other side. In a 2019 interview Payne said he was 'quite lucky to be here still' (Sky News interview, 2019):

‘Because we don’t have unions, we don’t have people to look after us - and I was a kid, you know, I was a child when this happened to me - and I’m very fortunate to still be here today to be able to tell this story, but for most people they feel abused … in some sense, so I just think that there needs to be a care system within these shows, because if they’re gonna move people through these shows and use them to make television, they can’t just like let them off afterwards.

And I could never watch X Factor because I was heartbroken because I’d been the guy who made it really far [in 2008] and then got let go and it ruined me, when I was fourteen … (‘The Diary Of A CEO’ podcast, 2021).

It’s perhaps no wonder that a petition set up by Payne’s fans following his untimely and avoidable death, calling for radical changes to be made to protect artists in the entertainment industry, now has over 135,000 signatures (just for comparison the recent petition to demand the Archbishop of Canterbury’s resignation over his protection of child abuse in the Church received 11,000 signatures - ten times fewer). The petition reads: ‘The entertainment industry, acclaimed for its glamour and stardom, is equally infamous for the enormous pressure it exerts on the mental health of artists. Resultant issues such as stress, anxiety, depression, substance misuse and even suicide are alarmingly high’ (Express, 20.20.24). ‘We seek to implore lawmakers to create legislation safeguarding the mental health of artists within the industry’, it continued, suggesting calling the potential new law 'Liam's Law' (Capital FM, 8.11.24).

‘I’ve spoken for years about the exploitation and profiteering of young stars and the effects’, Payne’s co-X Factor participant Rebecca Ferguson commented after his death. ‘Many of us are still living with the aftermath and the PTSD’, she added. Ferguson, now an MBE in recognition for her work in highlighting misogyny and discrimination in her profession, has been a vocal critic of the music industry in recent years, calling for parliamentary action to trigger an ‘overhaul’ of the business and the ‘bullying’ that she claimed was unfolding within it (‘Liam Payne's death prompts music industry soul searching’, BBC, 21.10.24). Another X Factor participant, Katie Waissel, believes that that the music industry is hiding 'awful human rights abuses', and has claimed that she also endured 'systematic misogyny and bullying' throughout her career (Daily Mail, 17.10.24).

Rebecca Ferguson MBE, runner-up in the seventh series of X Factor. ‘I’ve spoken for years about the exploitation and profiteering of young stars and the effects’

Greater support for musicians, and for all young people, with their mental health is clearly desirable, as is a greater awareness within multiple professions and industries of their duties of care and responsibility and the extent of the anxieties and pressures that so many people now experience today. But these still feel like responses, band-aids, rather than insights into the nature of what is actually underneath this all - why they should need such support in the first place.

Equally, the troubles in the contemporary music industry go deeper I think than simply anxiety and depression. Springsteen was closer to the truth of it in his reference to the industry as being a ‘death cult’. As he made the statement, Jon Landau (his long-time friend, manager, and producer) immediately referenced Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin as other examples – ‘and Kurt Cobain,’ Springsteen added. I’m particularly interested in the role of symbols in popular culture - what they are, where they pop up, and why - i.e., what they are doing, what their function is. One of the reasons I chose the picture of Liam Payne to illustrate this piece (other than that it being one of the few that are available in the public domain, thanks to Wikimedia Commons!) is that there are skulls on his jacket. I thought that was interesting. Also that he had tattoos of skulls tattooed into his skin in 2015, just before the end of One Direction, and again in 2017.

Psychotherapist Matthew Hanson has explored the medium of tattooing as the ‘interaction between body art, culture and the psyche’, and detects in modern tattoos the presence of Blake’s Urizen (the figure of dissociated rationalism), in his compelling study of the work of McGilchrist and Žižek.

Urizen’s influence in the art gallery extends onto human skin. There comes a point in body art where the disparateness of the themes begins to resemble McGilchrist’s examples of the left hemisphere’s perception of the world, in that fragments of information are isolated from their source and heavily abstracted from their original meaning.

Benson [in ‘Inscriptions of the Self’, in the edited collection Written on the Body, 2000] describes this interaction between body art, culture and the psyche: ‘The haphazard and incoherent nature of early twentieth-century tattoo reflects lives that were themselves often incoherent and fragmented, “one thing after another”: we should not be surprised by the absence of a master narrative of the self expressed upon the skin. (Hanson, 2018).

That is to say, tattoos often express what their wearers often feel they cannot explicitly say or address directly, and often in an appropriately disconnected or fragmented way. They are statements and revelations about the condition of the psyche of those who have them etched or symbolically branded onto themselves. As Karim observes, ‘our current society craves individuality and self expression. And now many people wear their artistic expression. We are having more trouble communicating with each other than ever before, as electronic communication will never replace face-to-face human contact. So, it’s not surprising that there’s a growing trend toward communication via body ink. We don’t have to talk, we just have to look. Our bodies have become the refrigerator magnets of quotes, sayings and reminders’ (Karim, ‘Tattoo Psychology: Art or Self Destruction? Modern-Day Social Branding’, 2013).

‘I am indicating the popularity of these designs as the footprints of Urizen,’ argues Hanson, ‘for the left hemisphere constructs its own self-image in spite of the facts’ (Hanson, 2018). These footprints of Urizen include an interest in the imagery of stars - as S. Foster Damon observes, ‘all stars are Urizen’s’ and the star is his primary emblem. In Blake’s work ‘the stars symbolize Reason’, he notes, the starry mills or ‘dark Satanic Mills’ that Blake believed were driving our culture now, with dangerous - indeed deadly - effect.

As I noted in The God of the Left Hemisphere (2013), referring to this identification:

As Damon said, all stars belong to Urizen: and all people who want to become ‘stars’ are his followers: from Hollywood to Wall Street, his people are to be found and his logo shines forth. What unites them is what also characterises Thomas Dolarhyde in Red Dragon: a need to ‘become’, a desire to manipulate everyone and everything in order to fulfil it.

It is called the music industry, but it is also called the corporate world. What drives this need seems to be a dreadful emptiness, and an obsession with death (not necessarily as a goal, but rather as an objective correlative to an inner state of profound devitalisation).

Liam’s tattoos were a striking manifestation of all these currents and issues, I think: a cry for help, in many ways: silent, embodied, and visible. And representing aspects of his mental health situation that he himself said he had ‘definitely never, never spoken about’ (interview, 2021). What he couldn't say, he showed.

Payne’s tattoos included symbols of the detached Single Eye, the skull, and the pentagram. These symbols might almost be seen as the basic operating system, or system code, for the music industry - indeed for contemporary Urizenic culture as a whole: the detached and detaching left hemisphere, death, and a profound sense of egoic wanting and void.

Hanson sees ‘body marking as an attempt to fix and control the sense of self, seeing the body as manifesting the subject’s will. In contemporary body marking, control is exercised through “the body as a thing to be bent to the will of the self” and tattooing gives “assertions of permanence to ideas of the body as property and possession”’ (ibid., citing Benson). These issues of self-image, desire for control, ownership, and an enforced sense of atomised individuality (the body being the last and sometimes only thing that the individual can feel they control, own, or through which they can now express themselves), certainly recur in Payne’s own testimony of his mental state during this period.

I think for me, my life’s been so controlled to a point - day sheets, security guards, you know - anything. And it’s all everybody else is dictating - ‘puppet master’ crap over the top of your life. Then you just get to a point where it’s like you have to take some control back yourself, and until I started to do that with my life, then I was living for everybody else. And I’m a compete people pleaser anyway, so it was like nothing in my life was about serving myself, which then that just put me in a bad place …

It's like, 'When will this end? ... that's almost nearly killed me a couple of times. … One thing you can control in that situation is you. 

You just get on with it, there will be another hurdle in a few weeks, a few months or maybe even the next day, you never really know. I know in my last video I mentioned I'd been diagnosed with a couple of conditions and I will not to go into too much detail, but one of them I have is, there's a lot of manic things in my life which you guys saw. (‘The Diary Of A CEO’ podcast; Sky News interview, italics added).

Payne’s former fiancée, Maya Henry, recently confided that Payne had repeatedly told her of his depressive and suicidal thinking. ‘He would always play with death,’ she said in a podcast just two days before his death, ‘and be like "Well I'm going to die, I'm not doing well". There was one time I tried to get him help, but he was not taking it,’ she told The Internet is Dead podcast’ (Daily Mail, 17.10.24). On the same day she started legal proceedings against Payne, accusing him of obsessively contact and 'weaponising' his fans against her. Earlier in the year, Henry had released her first book, a novel entitled Looking Forward, which chronicled ‘the tumultuous relationship between model Mallory and Oliver, a semi-washed up former member of five piece boyband 5Forward’ (ibid.).

These pressures and death-leaning impulses – symptoms of a sick industry and perverse culture as much of a distressed individual – only seem to have intensified in the final days and months of his young life. He’d gone into rehab the year before for addiction issues; his second album (which was due out in 2024) had been shelved due to poor performance of its lead single in March; a proposed UK tour had been axed, he’d reportedly split from his manager earlier this year, his former fiancée Maya Henry had the previous week posted a lengthy TikTok video accusing him of ‘disgusting’ behaviour, hinting that there are stories to come out, after issuing a cease-and-desist order to him.

On top of this were Payne’s own very real and serious struggles with who he was, his image, his lack of control over it, his periods of self-loathing. In his 2019 interview he compared going onstage with One Direction as being like ‘putting the Disney costume on’, suggesting fairly considerable feelings of derealisation, self-estrangement, false selves, and self-questioning. 'It's almost like putting the Disney costume on before you step up on stage, and underneath the Disney costume I was pissed quite a lot of the time because there was no other way to get your head around what was going on,' he told Men’s Health Australia  in 2019. ‘I kind of became somebody who I didn't really recognize anymore’, he told  The Diary Of A CEO podcast two years later.

This sense of not being able to control anything around you anymore (‘One thing you can control in that situation is you’), is I think key to understanding Payne’s state of mind in his last few weeks and month, and how desperate it had become. And it surely links back to those early feelings of inadequacy, of not thinking you’re good enough, that drove his career (as it did Russell Brand’s and does countless others), all attracted to the ideology of fame and materialism, like moths to the moon, as the answer to that desperate sense of powerlessness, as Brand observes. Being put into an assembled boyband (rather than recognised as a solo singer, for example) and then that boyband being told where to go, how to dress, what to play, night after night, no doubt aggravated that sense of being out of control, a puppet in a manufactured group (as American band NSYNC famously portrayed themselves in the video for ‘Bye Bye Bye’, 2000) - put into a ‘Disney costume’ and forced out on stage.

But the inability to personally control the world around him, or the music industry forces and material interests to which he was necessarily subject (and which saw him, as Sony saw George Michael in the 1990s, not as a recording artist but as a simple commodity, the efficient means by which people could buy their CD equipment and other downloading technology), was something that seemed only to intensify in the final months of Payne’s life, manifested in his apparent inability to prevent his fiancée from leaving him, his inability to prevent her launching legal action against him, his inability to control whether his management dropped him, his inability to control whether people liked or indeed bought his latest album …. despite all his wealth, his good looks, his fame, this ability to control material reality through wishing (the promise of the X Factor format, and of neoliberalism more widely) only seemed to retreat further over the horizon.

The other tattoo that Payne had notably tattooed over this body, along with the skull, was that of the pentagram or star. As I suggest in my book, The God of the Left Hemisphere, ‘the symbol of the star means want: and it triggers the psychological program of wanting to have, and wanting to want (which is why perhaps so many porn “stars” have it tattooed on their skin: it’s the perfect representation or ideogram of this state).’

This sense of wanting, and the link between this wanting, the star symbol, and death (the skull symbol) is I think key in unlocking the peculiar nature of the dysfunction that characterises so much of the music and wider entertainment industry, and why it can be seen as such a ‘death cult’, the arena of so many suicides, fatalities, and near-misses. As George Michael perceptively understood, it’s this lack, this dreadful aching hole in the soul, the need for external attention and validation, which drives, he suggested, the whole music industry.

Star people (star people)
Counting the cost of your desire to be seen

I said maybe your mama gave you up, boy
(It's the same old same old)
I said maybe your daddy didn't love you enough, girl
(How much is enough)

Star people (star people)
Never forget your secret's safe with me
Just look at all the wonderful people (star people, hey)
Trying to forget just who and what they have been

Oh (oh), it's a dream (it's a dream)
With a nightmare stuck in the middle (middle)
Yeah, are you serious? I'm just curious
Without all this attention, mm
You'd die, I'd die
We'd die

(George Michael, ‘Star People' ‘97’, 1997).

And as I also suggested in that book, alluding to this sense of absence and wanting which fuels modern culture:

As Longhurst has observed in his analysis of ‘star-text’ within contemporary culture, this kind of ‘lack’ is recognized by stars such as George Michael … and suggests how easily these aspiring wannabe-stars can be manipulated by the industry, and how useful they are as examples of how obedience, malleability, and a willingness to sell your soul to the devil (in the vernacular of that medium) can reinforce the underlying agendas within these systems. ( The God of the Left Hemisphere, 2013).

The symbol for this want is the ‘star’ itself – an image found on virtually every corporate media logo or entertainment platform these days, and the ideal to which we are all meant to aspire.

I want! I want!

Blake’s engraving of ‘I want! I want!’ for his series of designs For Children: The Gates of Paradise (1793). Note not only the moon, and the wanting, but the distant stars. Why do people want to go to the moon, or to Mars? Urizen.

Thinking and wanting, as a number of commentators have observed, go hand in hand. Indeed in Chinese, the terms ‘thought’ and ‘want’ are represented by the same pictogram, 想. ‘Wanting is a drive,’ McGilchrist notes, ‘such as the left hemisphere experiences, or possibly embodies’ (The Master and his Emissary). It is a peculiar feature of the left hemisphere rationalising ego that its identity is defined by what it does not have, rather than by anything which it possesses. As Tolle acutely observes, ‘the ego wants to want more than it wants to have’ (Tolle, A New Earth, 2005). This reinforces the profound sense of Urizenic void which constitutes the basis for the left-brain rationality: to compensate for this inner devitalisation, this inner absence, it seeks both to identify itself with (or latch itself onto) outside things and to consume them. That is the whole point of the word (and ideology) ‘consumer’, or ‘consumables’ (‘bought regularly because of being quickly used and needing to be replaced often’) or ‘consumerism’ – the delusion that by buying them we can internalise and ingest (or introject - ‘unconsciously adopt the ideas or attitudes of others’) something they signify.

And so this drive, this want, is also the engine for modern capitalism, as McGilchrist again observes: ‘modern consumers everywhere are in a “permanent state of unfulfilled desire”’ (ibid., McGilchrist is citing Clive Hamilton). Behind the unconscious contemporary compulsions of ownership and consumerism is an addictive drive ‘for more’. For the moon.

Urizen in this context is therefore the little rational ego, forever trying to fill and fulfil itself through identification with external objects (the moon, fame, money, fast cars etc). Behind all these supposedly rational wants and needs, which our society fills us with - or rather empties us with - is therefore a fundamental absence: the fear, based on a reality, that this wanting ‘ego’ or identity is actually nothing. The underlying emotion that governs all the activity of the ego’, notes Tolle, ‘is fear. The fear of being nobody, the fear of nonexistence, the fear of death. All its activities are ultimately designed to eliminate this fear’ (Tolle, A New Earth, 2005).

And so as Skye Sherwin notes in her touching commentary on this very poignant and memorable image of Blake’s, ‘the tiny figure who announces their desire to get to the moon with a child's cry, “I want! I want!”, has a similarly child-like solution when it comes to transport: a really big ladder’ (The Guardian, 23.12.2016). It’s the same child-like aspiration, and want, that’s exploited so cleverly and so cynically by the manufacturers of the X Factor, and countless other delusion spectacles, promising an equally distant and arduous, painstaking solution to everyone’s wants: 15 minutes of fame and a record contract with Syco - the apt name of Simon Cowell’s record label, which automatically hoovers up acts from his show: One Direction, Rebecca Ferguson, Little Mix, Alexandra Burke, Olly Murs etc. Liam Payne pointedly broke with the label in 2016, apparently ‘delighted to shed himself of Cowell’ (Mirror, 23.10.24).

Fly me to the moon: The Want Factor

The Ex Factor

It was therefore a remarkably appropriate choice of audition song that Liam Payne chose for his first X Factor appearance in 2008: Frank Sinatra’s ‘Fly Me to the Moon’. After a good audition, judge Simon Cowell informs him: ‘people will like you, but … there’s 20% missing for me at the moment.’ This sense of something ‘missing’ is exactly the core drive, the hard drive, of the wanting mechanism that the show exploits so relentlessly and effortlessly. It’s all about manipulating this ‘want’, this sense of lack, of something missing – Payne gets dropped at boot camp stage, and then – in TV drama gold, of the now-typical X Factor back-story variety – the judges change their mind and ‘give him a lifeline’, inviting him back for the next round, at the judge’s houses (before he will be dropped again, on national TV).

But not before saying, at the judge’s house: ‘I know how much I want this now – I want it so bad.’  I want, I want.  It’s all about awakening that want. Dangling it in front of you. Dermot O’Leary, the show’s presenter, asks him how it felt to be initially dropped at boot camp stage, ‘I felt rotten, I felt really bad … As you get further and further through the competition, you just think “I want this more” and “I want this more”, and “I want to get to that next stage”.’ That’s the formula of the show – its M.O., its central economic mechanism – the manufacture of want. Emotional labour. 

I got thrown out once at boot camp – that feeling after being thrown out. I was absolutely gutted. I don’t want that to happen again. (‘X Factor Season 7 Episode 1’, 2008).

All of his words, of course, have now an eerie and ghostly prescience, but were even then clear statements of the risks involved in such a dangerous, high-risk, soul-manipulation industry.  It was never really about a record contract. A moment later Simon tells him ‘It’s bad news.’ Cue heart-wrenching music. Demerol O’Leary asks him how he’s doing. ‘Gutted.’ A co-presenter asks Cowell about the decision – ‘he was the one you were teetering on the edge with, right?’ ‘Yeah, I was,’ he replies, eating a grape.

So what exactly IS the X factor? Liam asked this at his first audition, to his credit, when asked why he was there: ‘I don’t really know what the X factor is, and I believe that you guys do’. It was sadly a misplaced trust, but it already suggests a young intelligence - to even consider that question … what exactly is this thing, that’s being marketed, that they talk about …. does it exist? And if so, who actually has it? Can it be manufactured? But they were the wrong people to ask, not because he didn’t have the X factor – but because there isn’t an X factor not to have (so he could have just relaxed at age 14 and avoided a lot of grief) .

The Elohim

If one did want to come up with some definition of what the ‘X’ in X Factor might actually point to or stand for, it would probably be ‘saleable commodity’ –  being ‘on the money’, as Cowell tersely but frankly put it to him after his 2010 audition (‘absolutely on the money, on the money’). That’s what they saw in him. Of course that’s what they saw. And this estimate would be composed of a number of things – ability to shift product units primarily, which in an industry based on image, would be good-looks, likability, presentation skills, working hard and doing what you’re told, obedience, malleability, having enough of some skill – or able to train to get it – to produce the product required for that niche. It’s not an affirmation of who you are – who you actually are – but a signifier of your commercial exploitability.

'Liam and the boys couldn't go out and do what other boys of their age were doing,' said a music industry source. 'They were cash cows, pure and simple. There seemed little care for the band's mental health though, and how it would affect them in the future.' (Mirror, 23.10.24)

Having the X Factor is not therefore a particularly good thing, or attractive thing, to have, or to want to have – unless being a milkable cash cow for Simon Cowell is a dream to aim for.

Like aiming for the moon. The moon’s such a familiar image and trope in popular music – reflected in the myriad titles of songs which all point to this endless longing, or rather wanting: ‘Blue Moon’, ‘Moon River’, ‘To the Moon and Back’ …. not to mention of course Pink Floyd’s epic Dark Side of the Moon (1973), explicitly and brilliantly delving into the shadow side of this whole want industry, notably in relation to its deleterious effect on Syd Barrett, their gifted lead singer and songwriter, who was becoming increasingly mentally unstable as a result of his participation in that world.

But, as Bowie observed two years earlier, this downside or reverse side of the ‘star maker machinery’ would be a record that played again and again - the same process of rise and fall, dream and nightmare, want and want again. It’s after all an industry driven and fuelled by want: the pop star wants fame, the fans want the pop star, and the record companies want the fans - a constant stream or cycle of want, like Dante’s circle of hell, or the vinyl record themselves, a self-perpetuating enclosed cycle of lack, delusional fantasy, and frustrated desire and aspiration.

Where wanting too much gets you. Blake’s Illustrations to Dante's Inferno

In fact, monetising want could be the epitaph for modern consumer capitalism – turning fabricated and exaggerated desires into purchasable commodities. As Oscar said of smoking, ‘You must have a cigarette. A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?’ Want. Wants are addictive because they fail – because they leave one unsatisfied. That is the nature of want. Another name for cigarette is of course drug, or junk, William Burroughs’ term for the ‘the ultimate merchandise’ (i.e., opium and its derivates demerol and palfium), the essential or quintessential ‘ideal product’ – the x factor in modern capitalism. ‘Junk is the ideal product … No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy … The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client’ (William Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 1959).

Coda: Peace

I hope that Liam Payne has finally found peace, the peace that seemed to have eluded and evaded him so much in actual life. Shortly after his death, Rebecca Ferguson poignantly recalled: ‘We both met at Euston station and shared the taxi together to X Factor, young, innocent and unaffected by fame. I can’t help but think of that boy who was hopeful and looking forward to his bright future ahead. If he hadn’t jumped on that train and jumped in that taxi I believe he would be alive today’ (‘Rebecca Ferguson speaks out on “exploitation and profiteering of young stars” in Liam Payne tribute’, NME, 17.10.24).

Equally sad is the thought that if he hadn’t gone into the X Factor studios he might have had a much better chance at finding actual happiness, fulfilment, real relationship - at being at peace with himself, no longer having to please others or search for external things, to have to depend on someone like Simon Cowell to give him ‘one massive, fat, almighty yes’ in order to advance - in order to satisfy and fulfil him or make him feel whole, and not have ‘something missing’. Not that blaming one individual such as Cowell is either appropriate, helpful, or meaningful: Smail’s logic applies equally to ‘the cynical manipulators of the popular culture’, as he calls them, as to those on the receiving end of it. To accuse and judge the Simon Cowells of the world would be exactly to make the same mistake of blaming oneself for one’s own distress in a different form – to personalise what is a social flow, to internalise and atomise the issue. As Smail clarifies:

It is not that the individuals decide to act in accordance with interest (theirs or others’), but rather that, not least because interest is repressed, they find themselves caught up in a system in ways they cannot fully understand and would—if they could understand it—undoubtedly deplore. (Smail, in The Political Self, 2016).

Liam Payne’s real treasure and worth, as for all of us, already lay within him from the get-go. He didn’t need anything – neither the Massive Fat Almighty Yes from Simon Cowell, nor the audience approval, not the number of Instagram followers, nor the units of product sold, nor the cocaine, to tell him this. They were all, ultimately, movements away from that peace, not towards it.