Phil Selway on CBC

Phil Selway joins the psychotherapist Tamsin Embleton, whose book is about the mental health of touring musicians and crew. As soon as live music came back after the pandemic, Elamin Abdelmahmoud points out, artists began cancelling tours for their mental health, and he names several who had.

Embleton came to the subject while working as a venue and festival booker between jobs, when a friend asked her to tour manage an artist supporting a Nick Cave side project. The road corrected a romanticised view she had not known she held. At a post-show dinner in Germany the musicians, Cave among them, talked candidly about being in therapy and what they were getting from it, and she later saw that conversation as what set her retraining.

Selway talks about culture more than crisis. Under the old rule that the show must go on, as long as nobody is being an outright nightmare and the show is happening, everyone is judged to be doing their job. Trouble that is never dealt with goes underground and comes back as tension, cliques and gossip, which makes it a problem of the group, not of one person.