For years, a concert tour was seen as the ultimate expression of the “rock’n’roll lifestyle”: a months-long bacchanal during which bands would sniff and swig their way across a continent, often leaving a trail of wreckage behind them. Oasis famously once split up on the road after Noel Gallagher went awol, the rest of the band having been supposedly supplied crystal meth by the Brian Jonestown Massacre; Led Zeppelin rampaged through groupies and hotel rooms on their infamous world tours, while In Bed With Madonna, the star’s wild 1991 tour documentary, culminates with a game of truth or dare in which she fellates a bottle and goads a dancer to show his penis.
In recent years – as conversations around substance abuse, consent and mental health have forced those in the music industry to consider the damaging nature of a lot of accepted rock tradition – that kind of touring-life debauchery has supposedly gone further and further out of fashion, replaced by a safer, more enlightened music culture. Which made it all the more shocking when, this month, Lizzo was sued by former dancers who alleged that, among other toxic workplace practices, the American singer encouraged them to dance with and touch naked strippers at a club while on tour in Amsterdam. (Lizzo denies all the accusations.) So has the culture really changed? Or has an ever-PR-driven industry just found better ways to hide all the shagging, drinking and drug-taking that still goes on behind the scenes?
Best Coast singer Bethany Cosentino, who recently struck out as a solo artist under her own name, says that the election of Donald Trump in 2016, as well as the #MeToo movement, forced a lot of people she knew to “reckon with the idea that this machismo, toxic, masculine attitude has very much been applauded [in a way that let] men get away with anything”. When she first began touring with Best Coast at 23, she felt that touring culture was still very much geared towards the hard-partying lifestyle. “I’m from America, where our culture is very much like, you get wasted and you drink and you party,” she says. “There’s kind of a joke where people say like, ‘Every backstage is an open bar’, and it’s true – you get a rider and you get drink tickets and you can live this fantasy of what it would be like to be a quote-unquote rock star.”
She describes touring as “summer camp for adults”. “You play a show, and then you go out to bars and you hang out with fans and they buy you shots and you see where the night takes you, and then you wake up wildly hungover and do it all over again.” As she entered her early 30s, she began to take stock of the role drugs and alcohol had in her life, and realised that she didn’t really enjoy partying so hard any more. “I started to really acknowledge that maybe I did drink a little too much, maybe I was abusing my prescription medications – I wasn’t taking care of myself.”
In general, it would seem that sobriety is more common among touring musicians than it’s ever been, with indie stars such as Waxahatchee, Florence Welch and Cosentino herself all becoming drink and drug-free in the past few years. Lisa Larson, an American tour manager who works with bands such as Snail Mail, Bully and Boy Harsher, says that in the time she’s been touring she’s seen a lot of people “getting sober, going through some crazy shit in their lives that makes them rethink their choices and their nightlife behaviour”.
Larson says that since the pandemic, she’s seen far more bands trying to maintain sobriety on the road; Cosentino adds that the raging fentanyl crisis in America has turned drug-taking into “Russian roulette”. “I know people who have overdosed from going out one night, doing cocaine, and there just happened to be a literal grain-of-sand amount of fentanyl in it, and then they’re dead,” she says. “I think that people are starting to recognise that this is just not worth it.”
For a lot of indie bands, touring is also now wildly expensive, meaning that there’s less time and money than ever with which to actually party. Jess Eastwood and Guy Page are members of the Isle of Wight band Coach Party, and say that a need to tour well has dictated the way they behave on the road. “The Lizzo situation does feel very unique now, and the reaction to it online shows how much that lifestyle isn’t tolerated or idolised any more,” says Eastwood. “To perform the best, we all know we have to keep on top form, especially when people are paying actual money to come to our shows, not to mention how tiring it already is to do this lifestyle sober. There’s so many bands out there, you need to be on your best game to stand a chance of making it anywhere.”
Page says that Coach Party “don’t yet have the luxury of travelling with a team,” which means that “as soon as we’re off stage we’re trying to get to the merch stand, being shouted at to clear the stage and move the van, making sure we’ve shown our faces and been extra nice to the right people, all while knowing we have a 50-mile drive to the hotel.” He says that debaucherous touring tropes “haven’t died out,” but “people take it as less of a shock if you decline a beer,” noting that it is most often fans who expect their favourite bands to party hard.
Larson says that the desire to do a good job after so many years away from touring has given those in the touring industry a steelier focus. “I feel like during Covid, being stripped of our livelihoods made people calm down a bit. I think that translates into maintaining sanity on the road – you can’t really get too crazy any more,” she says. “I remember earlier years with bands I tour with now – people have grown up and seen some shit in the last several years, but there’s still some nights where I’m almost surprised, like ‘Oh, we’re back.’ But it’s nowhere near the same as partying every night after the show.”
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There’s also now the spectre of social media hanging over touring bands who know that bad behaviour can be captured online and spun into a scandal. Eastwood says that “a lot of people in big touring crews might have to sign an NDA, which would suggest that there’s going to be a lot of partying,” while Larson says she’s seen “a lot of folks are becoming a bit more private about what they share of that side of their life”.
Cosentino says that while she no longer sees a lot of the indie rock peers she came up with in the 2010s – “Part of my own growth was recognising that I don’t need to waste my life being around people that have bad energy or bad intentions” – she knows a lot of people who party as hard as they used to. “I can safely tell you that I’ve been in backstages within the last few years and seen people going as hard as they did in the early 2010s,” she says. Conversely, she feels she’s seen a lot of gen Z entertainers, such as Shawn Mendes and Lizzy McAlpine, prioritise their mental health while touring in a way she didn’t see when she first started. “You look at the Amy Winehouses of the world, people who were lost to addiction so young, [and realise] these systems don’t work.”
Larson says that after shows now, most of her bands just want to “get to the hotel and fucking go to bed”. “Maybe we’ll play some cards and watch a movie,” she says, “but on my last couple of tours, we’ve all just looked forward to getting a good night’s rest, because that’s sometimes the only way that you can get through the next day of being on the road.”
Cosentino says that “a lot of people’s idea of what it means to party has changed as well,” and that she knows many members of gen Z who don’t drink at all and never have. Touring with Green Day at 25, when Billy Joe Armstrong had just embraced sobriety, also made her realise that “maybe when you get older, you settle down and you actually take your health seriously”. Now, she says, “I go to a friend’s dinner party, have a glass of wine, then go home and go to sleep. That’s my idea of partying.”
