Rock Stars and the 27 Club

By all accounts being a rock star is a pretty good gig. There’s the adulation from assorted willing fans, the freedom to do pretty much whatever you want to your hotel room, and license to wear hairstyles that would make anyone else a social pariah. The downside of rock stardom is that the lifestyle means you are likely to die young and specifically age 27 seems to be an age at which many rock stars die. At least that is a perception which has been tested in a recent study.

Age 27 does appear to be a pretty tough year for your average rock star. Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Brian Jones, Alan Wilson, Janis Joplin, Pete de Freitas, Mia Zapata, and Amy Winehouse are all high profile members of the “27 club”. The notion that more rock stars die at age 27 than any other age arose after the deaths in 1969-71 of Hendrix, Morrison, Jones, Wilson, and Joplin. Since that time many rock stars, and blues stars, pre and post that ’69—’71 era have been added to the club. The “27 club” has become accepted wisdom but is it statistically true?

To test the validity of the 27 Club researchers compared the mortality of famous musicians who had a number one album in the UK charts between 1956 and 2007 to the mortality of the general UK population.

Statistical analysis revealed that at age 27 there was no significant increase in death for musicians. However, rock stars in their 20s and 30s were two to three times more likely to die than the general population. There was also evidence of an increased death rate in musicians aged 20-40 in the 1970s and early 1980s. The researchers speculate that this may have been due to the music scene being more “pop” dominated in the ‘70s-‘80s (although why “pop” artists are more likely to die young remains unclear) combined with improvements in treatments for heroine overdose since that era.

Overall, the researchers concluded that the “27 club” is a myth. Nevertheless, there is an increased death risk in the 20s and 30s for rock stars, probably because of the general lifestyle they lead, but not due to any mystical properties of age 27.

While age 27 should not hold particular fears if you are planning a career as a rocker, perhaps you should bear in mind the truism that you might live hard, die young, and leave (considering the lifestyle) a not-so-good-looking corpse.