inxs Blog and Journals

THEY live fast and die young, believing that it's better to burn out than fade away.

Now, for the first time, medical scientists have found that rock stars live life in deadly fashion.

Adding weight to The Who's lyric "Hope I die before I get old", a study of more than 1000 US and British rock stars found they were up to three times more likely to die early than other people of the same age.

Researchers from Britain's Liverpool John Moores University found that 100 stars died prematurely between 1956 and 1999.

Drug and alcohol abuse accounted for more than one in four deaths, while car accidents, heart disease, suicide and violence were also big killers.

The average age of death for American rockers was 42 — the age Elvis was when he died of a heart attack — and 35 for European stars.

Published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, the study found a sharp decline in deaths after 1980, the year Australia lost AC/DC's Bon Scott to alcohol poisoning at the age of 33.

Ross Wilson, the lead singer of Daddy Cool, who began their climb to fame in the 1970s, said the first flush of success was a "pressure cooker" for young musicians.

"It's like the last temptation of Christ. All the things are laid out in front of you, and will you take them or will you remain a human being?" he said. "People are telling you non-stop that you're fabulous and in the back of your mind you're going, 'No I'm not, I'm just a normal guy.' There's this conflict in your brain and it can wear you down."

Australian rock stars who have struggled with fame include Grinspoon lead singer Phil Jamieson, who last month spoke about his battle with drug addiction, and Silverchair's Daniel Johns, who succumbed to anorexia before beating the slimmers' disease. The suicide of INXS singer, 37-year-old Michael Hutchence, shocked the world in 1997.

Wilson says young stars are vulnerable and open to exploitation. "The industry is constantly gobbling young people up and sometimes it's irresponsible and downright criminal. It's a high-risk business where you're encouraged to be bad," he said.

While some hard-living rock veterans such as Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, who recently joked that he had snorted his father's ashes, have defied the odds to survive fame's pitfalls, many famous lives have been cut tragically short. Grunge pioneer Kurt Cobain, Doors vocalist Jim Morrison and guitar legend Jimi Hendrix all died at the age of 27, as did Stones founder Brian Jones and Janis Joplin.

AC/DC biographer Murray Engleheart believes modern day musicians do not party as hard.

"It was nothing special to drink a bottle of Johnnie Walker every night back in the '70s, but these days you don't see bottles of Jack Daniel's and beer sitting on the top of amplifiers — you see bottles of mineral water."