'Age of barbarism': are we doing enough to protect young pop stars?

"I used to be in a boy band, that's why I'm so f***ed up."

According to reports, those were among the final words from former One Direction star, Liam Payne, before he died aged 31 after falling from the third floor of a hotel in Buenos Aires last week.

Speaking to the i news site, Dame Caroline Dinenage, the chair of the Commons Culture Select Committee, said Payne's death "re-opens the debate about how we protect people who have achieved incredible fame at a young age".

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Payne was 14 when he first auditioned for "The X Factor", and was catapulted into global fame when he returned aged 16 and became a member of One Direction, joining a long history of teen sensations including Britney Spears, Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez and Lindsay Lohan.

'Immeasurable toll'

Death at an early age is "not an unusual thing" in the music industry, Bruce Springsteen told The Telegraph in an interview last week, following Payne's death. Young music stars "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", the singer-songwriter said, eventually pushing many of them towards "drugs or alcohol".

"Plucked from obscurity as children" and "handed unrelenting global stardom on a plate, almost overnight", it's no wonder teenage stars struggle to cope, wrote Nikki Peach for Grazia. The dream that industry bosses "peddle" is of "fame, fortune, fans, girls queuing outside your hotel rooms for pictures, number one albums, stadium tours" and "access to pretty much anything you want whenever you want it". But they don't warn of "the immeasurable toll" all of this can take on "your mental wellbeing, your ability to make sensible decisions, your family, your friends, your private and public relationships, your sense of self, privacy and health".

Turning children into global stars, "putting them on the world stage and shining a spotlight on their every action, simultaneously sexualising them and infantilising them, telling them they are demigods but not letting them make decisions for themselves", is "dangerous", wrote Jennifer Weiner in the The New York Times. And "there’s a long line of damaged lives – of addictions, mental health struggles, flameouts, tragic deaths – to prove it."

'Age of barbarism'

"Will we one day look back on this era of teen pop stars" as "some unfathomable age of barbarism, and wonder what on earth we were thinking?", asked Martha Gill in The Observer. It surely wouldn't be "such an incalculable loss to the culture if producers had to shelter teen singers for a few more years before releasing them to the public", so perhaps it is time for a "law protecting children under 18 from the kind of work that leads to massive global fame".

The latest tragedy has "made me all the more certain that we don't need any more child stars", wrote Nicole Vassell for Metro. Payne's "tragic end" should be "as much reason as any to rethink putting people in the spotlight before they’ve had the chance to grow up".

Guy Chambers, one of the UK's leading songwriters and co-writer of Robbie Williams' hits "Angels" and "Let Me Entertain You", is backing the call for a shift in policy. "Putting a 16-year-old in an adult world" like pop is "potentially really damaging", and "Robbie experienced that, certainly", he told The Observer.

"I would suggest that people should not be in a boy band until they are 18, and the industry should stick to that, too."