being an up-and-coming rock star is harder than you think

this is an awesome little article. i've decided to post it here. because it's funny, but also upsettingly true. not sure they tell you this when you go to 'hey kids, let's start a band!' school.

and i love the kaiser chiefs even more after the 'wank off a tramp' comment.
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Rock whirl

After a year of promoting their debut album, Kaiser Chiefs have become a cautionary tale about how indie rock can damage your health

John Harris
Friday October 21, 2005
The Guardian

Kaiser Chiefs, those hyperactive Leeds scamps whose music remains pretty much ubiquitous, recently returned to the UK for a multi-band tour modestly billed as a "rock'n'roll riot" (and co-sponsored by those well-known seditionaries at 02). In that sense, they have their work cut out: you cannot welcome the audience to such an event and then sit on the drum riser. Instead, the gymnastic manoeuvre known as the "Ricky Wilson jump" is surely all but obligatory, and they are having to play with the kinetic lunacy of a group who have only just started out.

But just look at them. After almost a year promoting their inaugural album, they are a walking cautionary tale concerning the health-threatening effects of a career in indie-rock. The keyboard player known as Peanut is the most glaring example. Pictured on the cover of one music magazine this week, he seems to have strayed into the frame by accident, his trilby hat sliding off the back of his head, his face dappled with stubble, bags sitting under his eyes, and his face frozen into the blank look of someone who has just got back from a theatre of conflict. He does not appear to be a man who is about to play his part in a rock'n'roll riot. He looks like he wants his mum.

But what are they to do? Some months ago, Ricky Wilson poetically summed up his drive to succeed by claiming that he'd "wank off a tramp" to achieve his dreams. The trade-off, it seems, may be even more dreadful than that: pinballing across time zones and language barriers, regaled with an endless chain of highly inventive questions ("Why are you called Kaiser Chiefs?", "What is 'Leeds'?", "Why is Pete Doherty now fat man?"), he too looks as if he may soon need to spend time at one of those institutions people of my parents' generation used to call a health farm.

This, of course, is something that has been happening to all moderately successful groups since the dawn of rock itself, thanks in part to the music industry's innate refusal to ever learn the lessons of history. So what if the fate of Kurt Cobain, Syd Barrett, Ian Curtis and every other sacrificial victim of the rock whirl suggests that the talent of creative types might not be best served by endless graft? They rarely complain, do they? And so, to paraphrase Allen Ginsberg, we watch the best minds of successive generations destroyed by drum sound checks, in-store appearances, a surfeit of free drink, and the eventual hatred of their own art. When it comes to the Chiefs, this latter point is particularly important; given that their best songs archly decry the vacuity of modern living, and thereby walk the line between cleverness and outright annoyance, imagine what it's like playing them every night.

To cap it all, they recently supported U2 and were treated to the experience known as the "Bono talk", a supposedly mystic rite of passage whereby rock's most pompous man issues advice to those groups who may or may not be snapping at his heels. It probably goes something like this: "Well, good evening lads. I am very busy eating blinis with Condoleeza Rice, but I have this to say to you: when you are sitting in a truck stop near San Diego, crying at the emptiness of it all, consider that me and Dave "the Edge" Evans also had moments like that, but we worked like good lads and eventually became millionaires and also saved the developing world." There is one answer to that: "Yes, but you also made Rattle & Hum, as both an album and feature film. And on that evidence, we should return home now."

Eventually, like soldiers coming back from Waterloo, the Chiefs will wearily exit their 564th Nothing to Declare lane and find a grinning record company employee holding open the limousine door and saying, "Right, chaps. We're now going to a top-flight London recording facility to begin work on your second album." Their press officer must already be drafting the press release about a sudden onset of "nervous exhaustion". And if I were Mr and Mrs Peanut, I'd have the spare room ready.
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from the guardian uk online.