What happens to hitmakers when the music stops?

“Glory days,” Bruce Springsteen crooned, “well, they’ll pass you by.” The Boss wasn’t singing from experience: his star rose decades ago and never really descended. Other musicians, however, would recognise the sentiment. Stories of one-hit wonders and flashes-in-the-pan abound. “Anvil! The Story of Anvil” (2008) and “Bros: After the Screaming Stops” (2018), two hit documentaries, enthralled viewers with tales of bands whose best days were decades behind them, but who were still convinced the public would love them again—if only they were given the chance.

A new book, “Exit Stage Left: The Curious Afterlife of Pop Stars” by Nick Duerden, explores a similar subject. The writer tracked down scores of musicians to ask what happened to them when the hits stopped coming, and how they coped. Some went off and did completely different things while some carried on—just not as famously as before—coming to terms with the realisation that what they once did for glory had become an ordinary job. “It’s the lack of fame later on,” Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand, a Scottish rock band popular in the early 2000s, tells Mr Duerden. “That’s the difficult part.”

What happens to pop stars is brutal because it is public. One moment you are everywhere, the next you are forgotten. Perhaps such tales resonate because the same arc is experienced by lots of people, albeit in a less dramatic way. Many reach a point at which it becomes apparent they are not going any further in their careers. But they do so without the unforgiving metrics of falling chart positions and poor ticket sales to make them feel worse about it.

It’s surprising such a book hasn’t been written before, because this is something many musicians devote a great deal of thought to—you would, too, if you went from being cheered in arenas to collecting unemployment benefits (a transition that is an awful lot more common than you might think). Even former superstars who need never work again are haunted by what they left behind. “I miss being in R.E.M. [in the 1980s],” Peter Buck once told your correspondent. “Which is to say I miss being young and in the centre of my culture.”

Other performers have a moment of horrified clarity when faced with commercial demands. Colin Meloy of the Decemberists, an indie band from Portland, Oregon, which once topped the American album charts, spoke of the divide between wanting to make art and the reality of having to write songs so his bandmates could eat. That imposed such pressure that he had to put the band on hiatus in the early 2010s (and even then, he had to reconvene them for occasional shows so they could all pay the rent). As Martin Carr, once of the Boo Radleys, tells Mr Duerden, being a hitmaker means being a businessman, and lots of artists simply cannot deal with that.

“Exit Stage Left” is filled with such tales. The reader may wish the book had more material about how it feels when fame disappears, and a little less about the range of ordinary jobs the various interviewees have endured or enjoyed away from music. But then, admitting that the thing you have always craved has turned sour and rank is difficult, perhaps painful. A journalist may talk to a musician who had a brush with fame 40 years ago and still that first hit single, that first sold-out show, remains the high point of their life.

The entertainment industry has always known how to manufacture dreams. Sadly, it has never had the faintest idea how to deal with what happens when the dreamer wakes up. It was ever thus, and ever will be. Today’s stars might do well to read “Exit Stage Left” and plan for the second acts of their careers.

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