Rock Music Is Sure To Kill You - Watch Out, All You Stars Out There

I feel I should apologize in advance for starting this article by stating a universal truth, but there's good news - and good reason for that. Turns out, I can finally back up all the speculations I've made so far with some hard facts. And then no one will ever have the guts to throw me contemptuous looks whenever I write things like "Amy Winehouse may be dead any day now" or "Pete Doherty is going to kill himself if he keeps up with the crack intake".

It's official, ladies and gentlemen - rock'n'roll seriously damages your health and lowers your life expectancy. So, just in case you had any doubts about it, the whole "live fast, die young" thing is turning out to be not so much a statement of freedom, as a literal description of what the rock and roll lifestyle does to those foolish (or should I have written talented?) enough to take it up.

So what did scientists do? Well, they compared the life and - predictably - death patterns of the rock and pop elite to those of the general population and what came out was kind of unsettling - although by no means a surprise. The facts go like this: in the first five years after a singer reaches the top of the charts and is deemed "successful", the mortality rate shoots up to three times that of ordinary people.

Apparently, living the life of a star causes much more than just occasional trips to rehab clinics all over the world. Of the 100 performers who died early and who were used as samples for this study, the average age for dying was 42 for North Americans and (hold on to your pants, famous people) only 35 for European stars. And in case you still had any doubts about it, around a quarter of the researched deaths were directly caused by drugs or alcohol, meaning that they were caused by things such as alcoholic binges ending in comas or by drug overdoses.

And while it's definitely not a difficult conclusion to draw, scientists claim there is a lot of complicated maths behind the whole "pop and rock stars die young" saga. The notoriously agitated lifestyle associated by pop and rock stars with 'living the life" - being famous, that is, was bound to have a disastrous effect on most of them, particularly in an age when excess is perceived a distinctive virtue of sorts. But seeing it all put on paper makes it all much more real and shocking - though unfortunately I'm not too convinced that it's enough to make some party-loving crack lovers think twice.